BoxOffice® Pro - October 2012

BIG PICTURE > WRECK IT RALPH
time ago, and he and the crew from his game
are living as homeless characters.
AND FOR Q*BERT, YOUR FILM EVEN
NEEDED TO COME UP WITH Q*BERT-ESE.
It was already written! We just had to translate
it.
YOU ONLY HAD TO SLAM YOUR FINGERS
ON THE KEYBOARD.
Just the punctuation keys.
WHERE IN YOUR BRAINSTORMING PRO-
CESS OF FIGURING OUT THIS WORLD DID
YOU HIT UPON THE IDEA OF GAME CEN-
TRAL STATION, WHICH ALLOWS RALPH
TO TRAVEL TO ALL THESE DIFFERENT
WORLDS?
We knew that we wanted to have a device in
which characters could go to different games.
And we kind of went back and forth about it:
“Okay, so if we’re doing this thing about video
games, should we make it about home games or
should it be in an arcade?” There’s one group of
people who would say, “It’s gotta be an arcade.
There’s something really nostalgic and great
about that, and visually it kind of sells it so
well.” Each cabinet is a different world. It’s like
a different character’s hometown, or their planet,
and they’re all plugged in to this big power
strip, which is a hub where they meet. Then
there was another school of thought that was
like, “Kids don’t really know what arcades are.
It should be in a home game, where the games
are all on a hard drive in someone’s house.”
As the director, I had to decide what tells the
story best. What’s interesting to see? And the
more we thought about making it a home game
that’s taking place in an Xbox or something,
just visually it didn’t seem as quick of a read
because if they all live on a computer chip,
how do you visualize that? And it’s starting to
sound like Tron, which
is little people living
on a game grid. I
went to my son,
who at the time
was about 15—I
wanted to go to
the source—
and I asked
him, “If it were
set in an arcade,
would people your
age know what that
even is? And he was like, “Of
course! How many birthday parties
have I been to at Chuck E.
Cheese?” And I realized, even if a
kid didn’t know the glory days of
the arcades, they still know what
they are. And my son, even at
15, he was so nostalgic for them
that it was kind of decided
then: let’s just go for it. Something feels right
about playing it in an arcade. So it was at that
point that we decided, okay, we’re going to
make this power strip as a hub.
At the time, Phil Johnston, the writer of the
movie, lived out in Brooklyn. He would come
to L.A. and we would work together and then
he would go back home. He was having a baby,
and so I’d also fly out there a lot and work
with Phil. We were thinking, “Okay, what is
this power strip area going to be like?” while
we were taking trains back and forth from
Manhattan to Brooklyn and literally walking
through Grand Central Station at the time. It
sounds so cheesy, but as we were standing in
Grand Central Station, Phil was like, “Well,
what about this? Why can’t it be like Grand
Central Station—just call it Game Central
Station?” The team was like, “Come on, it
can’t be this simple.” But we kept expanding
on it, and we really liked it, and it was stuck.
It would look cool, it’s “gettable,” and a power
strip could even look a little like the interior of
Grand Central Station.
IT SOUNDS LIKE A BIG “BINGO!” IDEA.
That’s kind of our process, that we make the
movie by remaking it and remaking it and
remaking it. We do seven internal screenings of
the movie in various stage of completion—that’s
over about two years that we do that—and these
versions of the movie are just simple kind of
black-and-white drawings, like a comic strip.
It’s called an animatic, where it’s a story reel of
little thumbnail sketches of all the action, all the
acting, the whole movie cut together, married
to like a rough soundtrack that’s usually a lot
of temp and scratch dialogue. It’s not the real
actors, but it becomes this kind of tool that
represents the whole movie, and then we sit
and talk about what we could do better next
time. What needs to be
scrapped, what needs
to be reworked. We
do that about six or
seven times in the
making of the movie.
I HEARD ONE
OF THE IDEAS
YOU GUYS HIT
UPON THAT
YOU ENDED UP
HAVING TO LEAVE OUT
WAS SENDING RALPH TO A
SIMS-STYLE VIDEO GAME?
Extreme Easy Living 2! I loved
that world. It was one of the
first ideas that we had. We
wanted at Ralph’s low point for
him to go to this place that was
kind of lawless and amoral. Like
Vegas and Daytona Beach—I
don’t want to insult any cities, but an eternal
spring break-type place where you get the
feeling that if Ralph stays here, he’s going to
die of alcohol poisoning. He’d be hopelessly
lost. It’s a very shallow game, think Sims mixed
with Grand Theft Auto, where it was a violent,
big party. And it had no right in being in an
arcade. There is no such arcade game like this,
but it was just so funny, so we came up with
this cabinet that was like a big leopard-print
recliner. Maybe three versions of this thing into
it, we came upon the moment where someone
said, “You know what? I think we have one video
game world too many in this movie. I think
bringing in Extreme Easy Living 2 at the end
of the second act is just a whole other world
the audience has to learn about—that may be
too much.” So after some debate, we kind of
all agreed that it had to go. But John Lasseter
and I both really liked it. When I broke the bad
news to him, he was like, “You know what? It’s
fine, because if this movie goes well, it’s just
like on Toy Story—we had so much material on
the first one that in Toy Story 3, we were using
ideas we had to scrap in the first because we
had too much stuff.” I’m really hoping we have
the good fortune to reexplore these worlds and
do another movie with these characters and to
be able to use Extreme Easy Living 2 because I
think people would love it. It’s a good world!
THIS MUST BE THE KIND OF PROJECT
WHERE EVERYBODY COMES UP TO YOU
WITH IDEAS BECAUSE EVERYBODY
LOVES VIDEO GAMES.
People have come up and said, “Is so-and-so
going to be in it? Are you gonna have this guy?”
Even at a Comic-Con, we’re doing a couple
of panels for it, and afterward folks in the
audience come up and say, “You gotta have soand-so!”
Well, I’ll definitely try. So you’re right,
it feels like it’s a subject matter that’s pretty dear
to a lot of people’s hearts, and I’m taking that
very seriously and trying to deliver what I hope
will succeed—and then some.
I ACTUALLY CAN’T THINK OF SOMETHING
ELSE THAT CUTS ACROSS SUCH A HUGE
SWATH OF AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS:
ALL AGES, ALL GENDERS. WELL, ALL
GENDERS—THERE’S TWO, OR THREE.
Five of ’em. All five genders and the two major
religions. It’s something that as we got deeper
into it we started to realize that this was something
multigenerational. That we had something
for guys and something for girls, for older people
and for younger people. Video games have been
around just long enough now that they have a
history to them. A person in their 60s knows
what they are, and a little kid knows what they
are. My son is a teenager, and his friends say,
“I can’t wait to see this movie because this is a
movie for us, man—this movie is for our generation.”
And then I see people in their 50s that say,
38 BOXOFFICE PRO OCTOBER 2012