Boxoffice Pro - September 2019

A Very Animated
Family Reunion
CONRAD VERNON AND GREG TIERNAN
BRING THE ADDAMS FAMILY
BACK TO ITS ROOTS
BY JESSE RIFKIN
Dum dum dum dum … snap snap. The iconic theme music from
ABC’s 1960s horror-comedy television show “The Addams Family”
has become a timeless and much-loved earworm, reprised in the
many Addams Family films, sequels, and specials—even the hit Broadway
musical. Inspired by the 1930s Charles Addams cartoons, the show
followed a family of mysterious and often morbid characters whose
names became part of the cultural lexicon. Paramount’s
1991 live-action adaptation helped keep the franchise
in the public imagination, becoming the seventh-highest
grossing film of that year.
The family is coming back to cinemas,
this time in animated form, through
United Artists’ The Addams Family, in
theaters October 11. The stellar voice
cast includes high-profile names
like Charlize Theron, Oscar
Isaac, Nick Kroll, and
Allison Janney.
Co-directors
Conrad Vernon
(Shrek 2, Monsters vs.
Aliens, Madagascar 3:
Europe’s Most Wanted)
and Greg Tiernan (Sausage
Party) spoke to Boxoffice
Pro about making the Addamses
an immigrant family, flipping Thing, the
disembodied hand, from righty to lefty,
and directing a family-friendly film after
their previous co-directorial effort was rated a
hard R.
Was it an extreme jolt going from Sausage Party to The Addams
Family?
Conrad Vernon: Well, we’d done [family-friendly] things before Sausage
Party. Craig did a preschool TV show [“Thomas & Friends”] while I’d worked
for DreamWorks for 20 years. But MGM did love that movie! They were
sausage admirers.
Greg Tiernan: But there are a few jokes for the adults in this one. The
Addamses, going back to the original cartoons in The New Yorker, it’s all
DOUBLE DIPPING Pugsley Addams is voiced by Finn Wolfhard, who’s on the other side of supernatural terror in It: Chapter 2, also featured in this issue
adult-based
material. Nick
Kroll, playing Uncle
Fester, just came up with
all sorts of stuff that wasn’t
in the script. When Wednesday
at the breakfast table says, “Uncle Fester can
go wherever he wants,” he came up with, “No, I
can’t go into a school.” But we had to take that one
out! There’s another line of Nick’s that we had to
take out where he said, “We should jump out of
those bushes and expose ourselves … emotionally.”
Those jokes were maybe just a smidge over the line
of family-friendly.
88 SEPTEMBER 2019