Interview (Written): Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof (“Tomorrowland”)

An excellent interview in Wired with Tomorrowland co-writer and director Brad Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof.

WIRED: So how did Tomorrowland come to be?

Lindelof: Well, I was obviously familiar with Brad’s history at Disney as an animator and his love for Walt, just having listened to a lot of his DVD commentaries on his movies. We talked a lot about Imagineering over a lunch on Ghost Protocol. I think that the word Imagineer has been reduced to somebody who makes theme park attractions. But they really created an experience — it was storytelling in every single phase of the design of an experience. And when I started talking about Tomorrowland I said I’d love to make a project that recaptured that idea of a positive and optimistic future, which has become completely and totally absent from the landscape of storytelling. I was interested in the idea of the way that the future was imagined back in the 1960s, which was not this incredibly great time to be alive. I mean, we were at the brink of nuclear destruction in a way that is much more profoundly real than it is now! So we kept talking, getting on our respective soapboxes about yeah, and what about jetpacks? And I could just see Brad start to light up. And that was the beginning of what would be a four-year journey together.

Bird: At one time the future was consistently presented as this bright thing where all these problems were going to be solved. I remember that feeling of wow, starvation will be solved and the air will be clean, weapons will be obsolete because we’ll understand that there are better places to put our energy. And gradually that vision has just been nibbled away at until it’s basically not there. And what’s in its place is this very dark, negative version that everyone seems to have accepted. Damon and I kept looking at each other and asking what changed it? And is it possible to get back to it?

WIRED: How clearly had you visualized the world of the movie when you jumped into writing it?

Bird: Well, Damon had been working with a guy named Jeff Jensen to craft this whole history.

Lindelof: We got to spend six months just building the world — that’s something you can’t do in TV. A lot of it was based on actual research that we were doing about the history of the Walt Disney Company, and in particular Walt’s futurism, and the 1964 World’s Fair. We started to wonder: what if there was something more to the World’s Fairs? What if they were actually stealth conventions for the most creative artists and inventors and scientists that the world had to offer? And what if they were all getting together in secret rooms at those fairs? What would those people build?

Bird: I loved that idea that the dreamers get together away from the politics that brought them together, and ask, what do we actually think? The movie would have been two days long if we tried to make it about all that stuff. But those conversations fueled the movie.

WIRED: In working on the script, did you worry about the cynicism of today’s audience, who think every future involves children battling to the death and zombies?

Bird: Well, you align yourself with the audience’s view the way you understand it, and then you take on the questions. And so one of our lead characters is a 17-year-old girl who is very bright and is confronted with negativity on all sides.

Lindelof: The movie has to acknowledge the dystopia that you’re talking about. And it also has to acknowledge that we love it. Brad and I don’t turn our noses up at any of that stuff, and in fact, I think you just inadvertently pitched the obvious next progression.

Bird: Can I pitch a title? The Hunger Brains.

Lindelof: Excuse me, I’ve got a call to make … Look, we could draw a straight line from Planet of the Apes, which I think was a watershed moment in genre moviemaking, where when you saw the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand you kind of went, oh, that makes sense, of course, we ruined it all. That makes more sense than jetpacks. And so there’s a straight line from that to Blade Runner to the Terminator films to the Matrix movies to The Road, to any post-apocalyptic fare, and even The Last Man on Earth. That imagery of we ruined it all, we blew it. It feels like most importantly, the future is something that happens to us, it’s not something that we make happen. And Brad and I wanted to have a character say, “I’m going to make the future happen, I’m not going to let the future happen to me.” And what would it take to inspire them?

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Lindelof: And so in Tomorrowland it was essentially how do we Trojan horse this big theme, this big rich theme about dreaming of a better tomorrow, how is that idea basically carried out through the characters? And ultimately we embedded each one of the characters with exactly the same ideal, yet there is conflict amongst them. George Clooney’s character was young and idealistic once but now he is bitter and jaded, and reigniting that flame became the journey of the movie. And our young character is, as Brad said, everywhere she looks a dystopia is threatening. She is a kid who is basically raised in Cape Canaveral, her dad is a NASA engineer, and they’re taking the platform down.

Bird: Yeah, and she grew up watching people going into space, kind of regularly doing what was, not very long before, considered impossible. And if she wants to pursue that dream she gets a shrug like, well, you missed it kid. Our hope is that we’re presenting a character whose flame is about to get snuffed out, you know. And fortunately she sees something that sort of corroborates what she always believed was possible.

There’s a lot of fascinating writing stuff going on in this interview from two of Hollywood’s top storytellers, but let’s zero in one thing Lindelof says: “How do we Trojan horse this big theme, this big rich theme about dreaming of a better tomorrow, how is that idea basically carried out through the characters?”

Trojan horse. What a great writing metaphor! One of the worst things a screenwriter can do is lay out a grand central theme in an on-the-nose and/or over-the-top way. I call them theme-heavy movies and they run afoul of the basic fact that movies have to be entertainment first, not a thematic polemic which can trample everything else in the narrative.

So the best way to handle big themes is the “Trojan horse” approach, craft them into the story so the script reader or moviegoer isn’t even aware of how they got into play in the narrative. And the best way to do that? Per Lindelof: Characters.

If the characters are imbued with complex backstories and personalities which put those themes into motion, then set those characters within the context of a plot which allows those themes to emerge organically and build along with the scope and shape of the narrative, the conscious experience of the moviegoer will be about character and plot, while their unconscious and/or psychological experience will tap into the themes as they weave throughout the story.

So if it’s “Carpe Diem” in Dead Poet’s Society, “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’” in The Shawshank Redemption,, “I was a better man as a woman than I was as a man” in Tootsie, or “There’s no place like home” in The Wizard of Oz, the filmmakers Trojan horse those themes by conveying them through characters, getting us connected to the characters first, then watching and listening as the themes emerge in the context of the unfolding plot.

Here is the most recent trailer for Tomorrowland which looks great:

By the way, The Wizard of Oz looks like an apt comparison to what we see in the trailer with Tomorrowland a more science fiction version of Oz and Casey a modern iteration of Dorothy. But as the Coen brothers say, “Every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

For the rest of the Wired interview, go here.