How surprised are you that this has lasted 18 years?
Matt Groening: “Well, as a cartoonist, this is beyond most cartoonists' dreams. People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. I'm talking about that's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher. I was just talking the other day with these guys. I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist and everybody felt sorry for me. ‘Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.’ Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something. And now the feeling of success, being asked to draw Bart and Homer is unbelievable after all these years. Look at the design of Homer. Very few lines in that face. There's no human iris. It's just a dot and a circle. All you have to do is change the shape of the circle slightly and he's the greatest actor of the 21st century.”
And voiced brilliantly.
Matt Groening: “Dan Castellanetta, yeah, let's talk about the voices. The voices of our cast are absolutely perfect. Dan Castellanetta as Homer and Krusty the Clown and Grandpa and all the rest is actually unbelievable. In fact, I think one of our favorite scenes in the movie is Homer trudging through the snow talking to himself, cajoling himself to keep going and as he often does, disagreeing with himself. It was an improvisation by Dan.”
After doing this process, are you thinking sequel?
Al Jean: “We started this movie because we had bought all the ownership rights to pink donuts. So we'd have to think of a similar concept for movie 2.”
James Brooks: “No, it would hubris I think. We just finished making it.”
But it wouldn't be another 18 years?
David Silverman: “I think 16.”
Mike Scully: “Ideas like pig crap don't come overnight.”
Can you talk about the structure of a Simpsons joke?
Mike Scully: “We do lots of different kinds of jokes. My particular favorite kind is when we set up something where we're deliberately leading the audience to what they think the joke is, like the reveal of Bart at the end of the skateboard sequence. The audience thinks the whole joke is how many different ways can we hide Bart, and then to give them the little extra. Or the hammer in the eye. Let them think we're doing to do this joke and do the other. That's one of my favorites, but we do all different kinds. I think that's part of the fun. If you just did the same style over and over again it'd get boring.”
James Brooks: “And it never stops. We got to talking the other day that it's driving me a little nuts because I felt we could have gone further with the cojones joke. There was something we could do with that super glue and I forget what I told you, you agreed with me, so that was tough.”
David Silverman: “I was going to say, the cojones joke, they actually added in more and we thought it was funny but then we realized, you know, less is more in this case. As funny as the additional stuff is, cut it back and leave people wanting more.”
Al Jean: “Also, things that happened to us like the To Be Continued was in the movie for a long time. Then when the Sopranos finale happened, we thought everyone's going to think we're making fun of that. If they do, good, but actually it was our idea first. They stole it.”
With a bigger screen did you feel pressure to put in more sight gags?
James Brooks: “I think we did, actually. I think we spent so long on this, but there was group of months where we were particularly feverish about the physical jokes. We'd be feverish about different aspects of the picture at different times.”
Al Jean: “One example would be when we were editing, there's a scene where they have nooses for the family and there's a noose with a pacifier on it for Maggie. We kept having different lines for Homer after that and then we realized nothing was probably as good as Maggie reacting and her mouth drops open and her pacifier falls out. A lot of it was just actually taking dialogue out. We were saying in the elevator, we actually wrote three movies and didn't give you the bad two. There's a lot of work that you don't see that led to what we have.”
David Silverman: “I think we were trying, too, we thought, ‘Oh, the big screen, we can put more physical details, movement in the background.’ You really can't because what it does is distracts. It upstages, especially more so with animation because animation being a caricature of life, any additional movements you had where it may be a background element in live action, feels like, ‘Oh, that's important for me to look what happened.’ So we tried that and it didn't really work.”
Al Jean: “There are really nice cool touches where you see the painting in the Alaska house is signed by Marge. By the way, it's a relief to be able to talk about the plot of the movie.”
Was it difficult to do a movie story, not just stretch a normal story?
Al Jean: “That was where it was great to work with Jim because he had done movies and David had directed, but in terms of story…”
Mike Scully: “I had seen a few.”
Al Jean: “Jim always said, ‘It's going to be funny but there has to be that point 20-30 minutes in where the audience realizes they're captivated by the story.’ That was why the church scene came in. There's a conscious effort in the writing to go from fast to slow, shift pace at different points and have emotional moments that you can only get when you're really involved in the story.”
David Silverman: “It was a great education watching how we evolved the second act to keep momentum going. We had other versions of the second act that essentially told the same story, but they're a little bit sort of meandering. It didn't quite work. And then we came up with some really great ideas that gave the audience a sense of purpose in which direction we're going to be going, and then kept it [going] and we could hang the jokes on better.”
