Written Interview: Dan Fogelman (“Tangled”)

One of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood today is Dan Fogelman. His writing credits include Cars, Fred Claus, Bolt, and Crazy, Stupid, Love, the latter which sold as a spec script as noted here. Fogelman also recently sold another spec script which he is slated to direct called “Imagine”.

In this interview, Fogelman talks about another movie he wrote, Tangled which has just been released this week. Here is a plot summary of the Disney animated movie:

The long-haired Princess Rapunzel has spent her entire life in a tower, but when she falls in love with a bandit who was passing by she must venture into the outside world for the first time to find him.

Some excerpts from the interview:

So tell me Tangled/Rapunzel, what did you think about the name change first of all?

Dan Fogelman: “You know, I want what everybody likes best.”

So politically correct.

Dan Fogelman: “No, I like the name change. You know, honestly, the reality is the movie is really as it turned out to play, it’s a really a two-hander of a movie. It’s really more than anything it’s about this love story at the center of the movie between the girl, Rapunzel, and the guy, Flynn. And so it really makes sense. It’s about these two characters who become interconnected. Even the way the story is told — it goes back and forth at the opening now. In the beginning of the movie it was very much more streamlined one way. So it really does fit and make sense.”

Were you the one that came up with the horse and the chameleon?

Dan Fogelman: “Sure.”

Or did Disney say to throw in some cute little sidekicks?

Dan Fogelman: “No, it was all me.”

 — — 

Which is more difficult to write — animation or live action?

Dan Fogelman: “It’s different. Animated is more of going to school. I had the pleasure of working for John Lasseter for a really long time, and it’s really you’re constantly putting the work up. I always say if it was live-action, if you get to imagine in live-action shooting your movie and then putting it up in front of audiences and going, ‘Okay, here are all the things that work. Here are all the things that don’t work. And now we’re going to wipe it out and start all over.’ And that’s kind of what you get a chance to do in animation, and that’s why it kind of is…the movies are often better and the movies are, really for a writer, a kind of training ground for figuring out how to break a story and how to write a movie.”

“We do all these screenings once every four to six months where we put it up in reels before it goes to animation, before you spend all the money on the animation, where you get to see how the story is working.”

For more of the interview, go here.