What I really like about this is that yes it’s fun, and it’s colorful, and it’s funny, but you guys are really making commentaries here. You mentioned Google headquarters and the constant over-caffeination to keep us going, will adults be crazy to sit and watch this movie with their kids and be like ‘that’s actually a great observation?’
Kris Pearn: We always try to walk the line. Certainly the first film had some social commentary in there, that bigger isn’t always better. We didn’t want to get preachy about it, because food politics is a touchy thing, but certainly they are asking the question ‘who owns food?’ in this film, in a very quiet way. It’s not like we’re trying to make it the headline, but there’s definitely the sense of once again, is bigger better? And, who owns creativity and how do you remain yourself and become part of a bigger system? Those are some of the questions that we’re asking, but we’re trying to keep it to a respectful place where is sorta sits under the film instead of becoming the message.
Was it easy to get all of the cast back on board, and how did you find the new people?
Cody Cameron: The new people were great. The only person who declined to return was Mr. T, and Terry Crews came in loving the first film. He and his kids went and saw the film at the premiere. His kids even said, ‘don’t mess it up,’ once they found out he was going to be Earl.
Kris Pearn: He got a phone call from Mr. T passing the torch. There was like a big ceremony, it was awesome [laughs].
Cody Cameron: And then, Will Forte was in the first film as Joe Towne.
Kris Pearn: He’s one of our favorite actors so we wanted to give him a bigger part. The idea of him being that kind of Jobsian, Bransonite.
Cody Cameron: And Kristen’s [Schaal] character fit right in to, she came to play.
When you’re casting initially these roles for voice actors, there’s kind of a little bit of a debate right now where big name actors are just put into films because it’s a big name and it’s a draw for the film. How do you go about finding big name actors who are also really talented voice actors?
Cody Cameron: Well, we go for comedians first. That was the big thing. We look for people who are funny and then hopefully they were great actors at the same time. With Will and Kristen, they are both funny and good actors. And they all come from that, they’re not all from SNL, but Kristen was on Flight of the Concords, and there’s that thing that comes from being on TV and sometimes improvised bits.
Kris Pearn: We like that energy. Certainly, we benefited from having the cast that was chosen for the first film.
There’s a bit of Jurassic Park in there, a little bit of King Kong. What else did you put in there?
Cody Cameron: A little bit of Lost World.
Kris Pearn: Some Goonies. We were always fairly careful in the first film to parody in a way that we weren’t directly pointing at the movie. So we kinda try to do the same thing here. There’s a couple of them that get a little close to being a direct parody, but if it makes people laugh.
The place seems very tropical, what did you base it off of?
Cody Cameron: It’s already an island, a fishing island, and what we wanted to do was when the machine lands back on the island it hits the water and starts to grow. We thought it’d be fun if what if all this plant life grew from basically the machine, like a seed, in something we called technoganic – where it’s like techno and organic – so even all the vines have little bits of electricity running through them.
And all these vines that are connected to the machine, birth out the food – so we thought, what if you went back to your town and it was completely overgrown and how Flint, almost like a Jack in the Beanstalk, when those houses gets crushed, what happens when the whole world is kinda flipped upside down? And then, to have this giant garden with these food creatures running around. It just seemed like it’d be a fun thing to do.
Kris Pearn: We brought back our same production designer that we had in the first one, Justin Thompson, and the idea that this is like Flint’s creativity – the meta idea that the island represents his creativity – sorta carries through a lot of our shape language. If you remember Flint’s lab, and all of those Tron lines, everything we designed was very colorful. And the lab is also a mood ring, so where Flint was, the lab would sorta respond color-wise.
So we wanted to take the Governor off of our island and see as Flint’s going through his emotional journey, it’s almost like the island is responding, so as we go into different parts of the emotional story, we have landscapes that sorts reflect that. Certainly we start off in a jungle that’s fairly jungle-y, and as we go off deeper into the film toward the center, it starts to become more abstract. And that was just a creative choice not to be limited by green jungle. We have a creative world, and it is Flint’s world, so we wanted it to reflect his personality.
Cody Cameron: In fact, most of time we stayed away from green and we tried to pick specific colors that were like reds, blues, purples, and really the only green comes in toward the middle. It’s the vines that come from the machine.
Kris Pearn: You’ll notice the Tron-line motif.
A big thank you to Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn for all their enthusiasm! Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 comes out in theaters on September 27! Be sure to check it out.