Interview with Tad Stones, the director of Hellboy: Sword of Storms
Original interview on 09/28/2006
Listen to the episode
Tad Stones: I actually started at Disney's training program about three days after I graduated college. But back then, the training program was just Eric Larson, one of the nine old men, and basically we'd sit in the room next to him and we'd work on a personal test, and he'd give you pointers in animation, and if you survived the first eight weeks you got another eight weeks, and if you succeeded in that, you began life as an in-betweener. And from then on it was just a matter of you doing a personal test in your spare time, and show up whenever you got it done, and the review board would look at it. The review board was composed of the remaining nine old men, plus Ken Anderson (head story person), and they'd throw in some other people depending on your specialty.
FC: Eventually, you found yourself working at Disney animation. How was it working there? Was it a good fit for you creatively?
TS: Certainly back then I did. I started off really wanting to be an animator, and as I was doing those personal tests, there was a time where (and I didn't realize it) they had kind of written me off. I would animate a personal test and get through it, and then think, 'Y'know what I should do...I should do this kind of thing...', and then before I'd finish that one, I would try something more ambitious. But it had never occurred to me that I was never showing them to the review board. And one day I was looking, and this was back in the days of film, I was actually looking at a moviola, and the manager of the department walked by, and I asked if he thought it was worth showing, because I was thinking of going in and finishing it up. And he said, 'oh wow, that's really good, we didn't know you were doing this...We kind of wrote you off as someone who showed a lot of promise but then just didn't keep up.' Close to a heart attack there. And that test got me to an animator. I think I animated one scene in the original 'Rescuers', Bernard Mouse walking across a desktop and looking back at the cuckoo clock. But I realized since I was constantly re-doing my test and coming up with new ideas, that my natural leaning was actually towards story, and I moved into the story side of things on 'The Fox and the Hound.'
FC: You've now worked in animation in a variety of roles, as a producer, director, and writer. Is there a role you enjoy most?
TS: If I only had to do one, if they said you can only do one, it would be writer, because at the heart of things I enjoy being the storyteller. I'd much rather have the control of guiding the visuals as well as the story, and having that overall producer-director role, but if you absolutely had to limit me, I would stick with story. 'Buzz Lightyear of Star Command' was a series I did at Disney, and I had always wanted to do a science-fiction comedy show since right after 'Darkwing Duck', but at that time I didn't really have anything to do with story. I had input on stories, I'd come up with premises, I think I wrote or co-wrote a couple scripts, but I was only doing the visual side of thinFC, the Producer side of thinFC, and it drove me nuts, because it was an area I always wanted to work in, and I wasn't in control of that side, and that's when I realized how much the storytelling meant to me.
FC: Which projects prior to your current one really stand out to you as turning points in your career? I know a lot of our listeners will probably remember your work on Darkwing Duck...
TS: Short answer: no (laughs). The one I enjoyed in many ways the most was 'Darkwing Duck' because that was an original character. So nobody was telling me, 'Oh no, we can't let Darkwing talk like that, he never used to talk like that', because it was all new. And that's why after that, I really was looking forward to now doing to science-fiction what we had done with comic superheroes. But that's when they wanted me on 'Aladdin', and that began a series of spin-offs of features, which are always a thankless task in that it was great when you were writing the earlier scripts because you saw the feature in your head. But when the animation came back, you realized 'No, I'm workin' on a TV show...'. Y'know, everybody wanted to see the feature, and you're getting TV quality back. So they were great shows, but they were never satisfying, because you couldn't put everything into it. In a lot of ways, though, I have to say that all that time at Disney feels like practice. I really feel in a strange way like I'm just beginning my career now.
FC: Well, on that note, moving onto your current projects, the Hellboy animated DVDs. This isn't your first time attempting to bring Hellboy to animation, is it? What steps did you take to try and make this project a reality in the past?
TS: Well, about eleven years ago, gettin' towards twelve, I actually pitched Hellboy at Disney, which as [Hellboy creator Mike Mignola] has said, 'I'd like to be a fly on the wall at that meeting...' (laughs) But at the time, Dean Valentine was the head of TV animation, he was also head of Disney television, and he wanted to try out something brand new in primetime. He was saying, 'C'mon guys, lets not do the same thing over and over, pitch me new thinFC.' And so I pitched him 'Hellboy'. It was at the time of 'X-Files', which was at its peak there. I'd been reading 'Hellboy' since the start, and so I put together with Adobe Premiere a little pan-and-scan sizzler piece, just to give a feel of how different this show could be. The meeting went well enough, although he said 'Yeah, I love the stuff, but...', which is a lot of Hollywood talk for 'nah, we're not gonna do this'. Because basically it came down to the fact that what they were looking for was the next 'Simpsons'. And 'Hellboy' wasn't quite that. 'He's red! I want yellow people!' (laughs)
FC: I know that Mike Mignola had done some design work on their animated 'Atlantis' feature - did that have any impact on their decision to possibly give the show a chance?
TS: You've gotta realize that people tend to look at Disney as one big organization and on a creative level, it's not; there are people all over trying to do their own thinFC, and the guys that were doing 'Atlantis' just loved Mike's work, and brought him in on that, and I got to work on that for a potential spin-off series. But the movie came out, it was disappointing, and they stopped production on the series (on Friday the 13th, as a matter of fact). I had to lay off like 80 people. At that point, though, we had started out with a great show that everybody was excited about, because it really was the PG adventure that the 'Atlantis' movie was, and it got a little darker. Basically, I figured, 'I'm never gonna get to do 'Hellboy', let me do those kinds of stories'. But as we started getting notes and more notes from the network, and from inside the studio, it was getting washed out to what a lot of people still considered a great series, but I looked at as 'this is not doing anything like I thought I had, this is now typical stuff'. Now, it probably wasn't, it was probably cooler than that, but I just felt like we could have done so much more. So three episodes of that got tied together as a DVD movie, but the coolest thing about that is I started working with Mike Mignola. Just as he worked on the feature, we used him on the series to come up with concepts and design monsters.
FC: What drew you to Mignola's work and convinced you his material would function for primetime programming?
TS: I love Hellboy! There was no specific thing about it, I think if you're a fan of the comic as I was, you just look at it and say, 'I can tell stories like this!' As far as, this is perfect for the medium of animation...I pitched it as an animated 'X-Files', but I thought it could be a lot more than that because what Mike had brought to it in terms of folklore and legend and Hellboy's growing story, I thought that was truly unique. So basically I felt like Mike's got a simplified style, we can use that like what we did with 'Atlantis', certainly we were exploring with a Mignola-esque style. So it seemed like there was really nothing keeping us from putting this on the screen. Except for all those people who owned networks and didn't want it.
FC: Ok, so flash forward to the release of Guillermo del Toro's live action 'Hellboy' movie in 2004. Was the success of the film what finally broke the barriers preventing this project from happening?
TS: Yes, but it was more than that. Guillermo is a huge fan of animation, and Mike told me that at one time during the long gestation of Hellboy as a feature film, they actually considered doing it in animation so that there would be no budget limitations, or at least not the limitations they had in live-action. That kind of got Guillermo thinking of doing animation, but ultimately he's a live-action director, and it's like no, he's gonna try keeping it as live-action. However, as soon as he started the movie, he was talking about doing it in animation. He would say anime, but that's just his word for animation in general, cause a lot of people thought he wanted the stereotypical anime look, and if you really know the material of anime, you realize how many varied styles are in it, and it's unfair to categorize it. But the point is Guillermo was really enthusiastic about turning it into animation. Because frankly, I don't think that Revolution could care less, at least back then, about putting it into animation, but they wanted to keep their director happy. I met Guillermo through the 'Hellboard', the forum on the movie website, I think a lot of us got to know him through that. I'd go to book signinFC where he was, and he learned of my background, and said that I would definitely be some part of any future animated thinFC. And the movie came out, and it was a big enough success that they said, 'Hey, this is something that is perfect for animation, look how well it did on DVD', and the licensing people got involved, and started putting together a team. A team of companies, I should say.
FC: Was it always your intention to retain the same voice cast from the live-action film?
TS: Certainly Ron Perlman. I hadn't really thought more than that about it, only because busy actors are hard to get, and when 'Hellboy' started out, the talk was that it would be a series, and that means people have to show up every week, and I was a little wary of that. But as soon as the people at Revolution said, 'We'd really like you to use more of the voice cast', I didn't have an objection to the idea, I thought everybody did a great job. So we've used Ron, and Selma Blair, and John Hurt. Jeffrey Tambor, it was just a matter of, we had a very small scene in the second movie for him...Basically, we couldn't work out a deal, which was too bad because that's the one character that I could see playing him closer to the movie character than the comic. Because in the comic, Manning is a pretty straight guy. In the movie, Jeffrey brought a very funny side to him.
FC: Fans will also notice this is their first chance to get a sneak preview of Doug Jones' vocal take on the character of Abe Sapien, who will also provide the character's voice in the forthcoming live action Hellboy sequel. How does his take on Abe vary from David Hyde Pierce's, who voiced Abe in the first Hellboy movie?
TS: Well I know Guillermo had talked about David Hyde-Pierce from day one for the original movie. We went to David Hyde-Pierce, and we thought we had him basically, we were going back and forth. At that time, the scripts barely had Abe in it at all. The first script had certainly less than 10 lines for Abe. In fact, the sequence I showed at San Diego Comicon, which is the opening of the picture, was basically the only time you saw Abe and Liz except for a phone call later on. It was really going to be just a Hellboy and Kate Corrigan adventure. We ended up short, we added a lot more material, and it became a bigger role, but when we gave it to David, it was basically 'Hey, do you wanna do these 10 lines?' And he's at a point in his career where he doesn't have to do any animated project, period. And certainly doesn't need to do it for the money, it's just whether the show is interesting or not. And at that point, I think there were two things going on. One, there was nothing really interesting in those few lines, because it was an action sequence, and a lot of it was 'Liz, come on!' And the second thing is, even when he did the movie, as I understand it, he felt like the performance was really Doug's. Because he was listening to Doug's voice, he was matching Doug's body movements, and I think that's why he didn't do the publicity for the first movie, he wanted to give the spot on the red carpet to Doug Jones. David pulled out at the last second...It was just bad timing and communication between parties, it's not like he was making this up or something. But it was short enough that when he pulled out, all we were thinking of was David Hyde-Pierce, so we got somebody doing a soundalike voice for David Hyde-Pierce. While we're doing that, Ron Perlman mentioned how good Doug was, and he said, 'While I was watching the movie, half of the time I couldn't tell whose voice they were using'. That was great to hear, because I felt like that's a great tie-in to the movie, and I was a little wary of doing a soundalike at all of David Hyde-Pierce, I'd rather have an actor do themselves. And when we brought in Doug Jones it was great, because he just did the character he had created on the set, and I liked the tone of his voice, it no longer had that put on quality, it was just, 'yeah, that's Abe Sapien'. So, the difference in qualities, which is actually what you asked...it's hard to say. It's kind of like describing the color of red to a blind man. I tend to think David's voice was a little more brittle. Doug's has a rounder tone to it, a lower tone, and it's not affected in any way. I'm very glad that things worked out as they did. For those who've seen the big first 5 minutes of the movie, the presentation at San Diego, it was on YouTube for a long time, most of that was not Doug Jones, that was actually the soundalike.
FC: A lot of Hellboy fans (and Mignola fans) will notice that the designs here are not direct adaptations of Mike Mignola's work, but that certain visual elements (layouts, proportions, etc) pay homage to his style. What brought about the decision to take the animation style in a new direction?
TS: Well, to begin with, Guillermo always assumed it was going to be taking the comic page and just making it move. I had slightly different feelinFC, having worked on Team Atlantis, not with the characters as much as the background style. Mike uses obviously a lot of black and his ink kind of flattens out the graphic design. I knew I wanted a lot of mystery and mood in these stories. And in Atlantis, they came up with a posterized look to the background, really simplifying the number of tones, if not the pallet itself. And to me it limited my options in that if you picked up a piece of gold, it's gonna be three colors, and it'll be a symbol for gold, as opposed to seeing something that glistens in the light. A foggy background would be a flat color as opposed to a fully rendered painting where I could make the trees dissolve into the distance. So I knew I wanted to do more detailed backgrounds to give me the atmosphere. And as far as working with Mike's style, Atlantis had that Disney influence to it, but my designer was constantly working on bringing more Mignola into it, and that's Greg Guler, who did a great job, and he did all sorts of things that got it closer and closer to Mike's work. When we got to the show, it turned out it was part of the deal that the show could not look like Mike's work. I thought, 'Sure, whatever you say...', and I intended on basically fudging it back towards Mike's work. Until I talked to Mike, and he said, 'No, I rather prefer it that way. When people see my work, I want it to be my work, I want it to be canon Hellboy.' The last thing he wanted were people trying to ape his style, trying to second guess how he uses shadows. When you look at his work, you think, 'Oh yeah, he uses a lot of black.' That's not all there is to it. He uses it in a very idiosyncratic way. Look at a page of Mike's comics and you'll see the light direction changes constantly, even within a panel, in that the shadows on whatever side of the face of the figure that makes the graphic statement he wants. This is all stuff I love in his comics, but does not translate well on screen. So once we were told we couldn't do his style, that really freed us up in the search for something else, and certainly I could use any background I wanted. And that's where I felt we really add a lot of quality to the show, just by doing so much with color.
FC: Are you happy with the animation you're getting back for the finished product?
TS: Yeah, very much so. We brought in several artists, who did their takes on Hellboy and Liz, and Mike picked Cheeks, Sean Galloway, who really does more with shapes. Fans of Sean Galloway's work will be disappointed as much as people who want Mike's style on screen. But what Sean did was, as a concept artist, gave us these huge shapes, sort of a caricature, a different feel to all these characters, and that's what we really wanted, because then was had to give it more solidity. And Greg Guler could really do the turnarounds and figure out, 'Well, you can't do that in animation, but wow, we can really use that size of a chest, or draw the hand like that,' or whatever it was, to come up with a unique style. But the one thing I would still like to work with on the style in the movies would be the background characters. Some seem very unique, and others are too close to a Warner Brothers' style. Not that I have a problem with Warner Brothers' style, or Glen Murkami's style or Bruce Timm's, I just hoped for something very different. I'm not settling for what we have, hopefully we can continue to fine-tune this stuff.
FC: As you mentioned earlier, you screened some of the footage from the first film at this year's San Diego Comic Con - how has the reaction been so far from the fans?
TS: Well, if people don't like it, those people aren't talking to me! I find myself doing that really sick thing, where you go through the internet and you do searches to see where they're talking, and whenever they say good stuff, it's like 'Yeahyeahyeah, they think it's awesome...', and I realized I was looking for the bad reviews. And I stopped, because it was like, 'You idiot! If people are liking it, then just go with it! Accept that!' But y'know, I don't take anything for granted. If somebody has a problem with it, I want to hear what they say, and then say, 'ok, that's nonsense', or 'oh we're gonna deal with that', or 'that's something we *need* to deal with in the future'.
FC: You keep a pretty extensive blog online, at hellboyanimated.typepad.com, keeping the fans updated with production stills and status reports. What was the impetus to keep such a comprehensive account of the process? Do you think the fans' input from the blog affects the final product in any way?
TS: Well, the start of it was just the company saying, 'We've got this kid's show called Wow Wow Wubsy, and they've got a little blog that they keep going as part of a marketing thing.' Well, Wubsy is aimed at 3 and 4 year olds, not a lot of them are on the internet (although it seems like it sometimes), so there wasn't a lot of commotion on that, it was just out there, it didn't upset any kind of marketing plan. Hellboy was the first project I've been involved with where there was anticipation for it. Where people are saying, 'Oh boy they're doing it, it's gonna be cool!', or, more likely, 'It better be cool...' So I always felt the pressure, but I liked the idea of inviting the fans in. So they actually had me start the blog, very few limitations, although I was constantly getting in trouble at the beginning because I was giving away too much, or because I refused to make it a bright and shiny puff piece, and they were upset that I insinuated that I said the wrong thing, or that there might be a problem in the production. Where that turned out to be a popular thing is that here's a real view of the production. Little things people seem to be interested in, 'This went wrong', or 'This is what a retake is', and people said, 'What's a retake, we've never heard about that', in all the 'Art of' books from Disney or whatnot. The sad thing about the blog is for so long I really couldn't show anything, because they were trying to come up with a marketing plan, they didn't want stuff out there too early, and because of that I couldn't make it a real day to day description of what was going on. But now once San Diego happened, I'm free to say anything, but my crew is gone, y'know, we're not doing the movie. So it's thinking back, and scanning in old stuff and talking about that. But I'm still trying to keep the thing updated with little glimpses of everything that goes into production that maybe hasn't been covered before.
FC: Is there a lot of work left to do on the first movie?
TS: Well, it's all in post now. So we've had some late color deliveries, but I've at least had most pencil tests on every scene in the film. Haven't had a chance to sit down and watch the film, but then, too late! What we're doing is that as the stuff comes in, we edit it per sequence, then we'll look at it all together once we've got everything running smoothly as far as all the small editing, and we'll decide if there's pacing changes we need to make, does that mean a slower opening or a faster opening. But pretty much in animation, you're stuck with what you've done. Unless you're a feature film, in which case you send it back into production and you do a whole new sequence, and we just don't have that ability. So about the time I enter my final mix on the first movie, I start getting footage from the second movie. And in fact, I'm starting to get questions on the second movie, my brain's in Japan and folklore and that, and I'm getting questions about ghosts and vampires.
FC: If these DVDs are successful, can we expect more animated Hellboy movies, or even perhaps an animated series?
TS: Yes, to the expecting more. I'm pushing to move ahead with more right now, because with the live-action movie in development coming out in 2008, my feeling is that we're gonna get all this cross-promotion, we're gonna get buzz, it's not a huge gamble to at least start the scripts of the next movie (or next three movies for that matter), and then we'll be ready to zoom into production if we've got an ok. Series wise? It sounds weird, I do not want this to go to series. We started development as a series, and Mike and I started coming up with stories, and that was fun because we did a lot of stories, kinda mapped out things and said, 'Ooh, let's have Lobster Johnson in this one! But no no, we should hint at him in this show, and then we'd do this with him, and then make this a flashback one...' It was exciting, and then that was when we got the word at the San Diego Comicon 2005 that no the series is not going, but we're going with the DVD movies. And at first that was a little weird, because we had all these stories, and they're not long enough for a feature...but it was gonna be neat! And then it was like, well, wait, we're getting to do a couple of feature films, so...it's not a sacrifice. Once I got into the stories, it was like, I realized, I can't do what I want in a series. In the second movie, there's a sequence where all the BPRD agents are throughout this house, setting up monitoring equipment; cameras, sound sensors or motion sensors. So they divide up, and each group or individual has an experience with the paranormal. You really got to play those out, not say 'Ooh, it's a scary house...', or 'Oh my Gosh, it's a ghost!', you got to play it out as you would expect to see in a live-action film, where something passes by the front of the camera out of focus, how we play the music, really letting things happen at a pace that builds suspense. On a series, you can't use up 4 to 5 minutes covering all of that. You can't take 5 minutes out of a 22 minute episode to really get spooky suspense. So it's like, that's what Mike does in his comics! He gives you mood, he gives you atmosphere. That's what I want to do, it's not about a big plot thing. So I think, at best, a series could be like a Samurai Jack, which has simpler stories and then takes certain elements of it, and plays them out. But you just can't get the impact you can with having that extra time with a feature length movie. And these things are, at minimum, 75 minutes. Hopefully they'll end up being a little longer than that.
FC: Could you talk briefly about the storylines and release dates of the two animated features?
TS: The first film is Hellboy: Sword of Storms. When we knew this stuff was gonna happen, I didn't read books on ghosts and monsters and things like that cause I've always had those, instead I read a lot of the material that Mike read that led to Hellboy; HP Lovecraft, William Hope HodFCon, all sorts of pulp authors, and was really enjoying it. Then I went to folklore and legends, so I bought a book on Norse mythology, and one on Japanese folklore. And as soon as I mention that to Mike when we got together, he instantly jumped on the Japanese stuff. He felt that he had done it in Heads, it was one of his favorite stories, it was one of my favorite stories. At one point, Guillermo had talked about using that as a story for the first feature film. It was just exotic enough. It was Hellboy; it dealt with folklore and legends, but it was nothing he had really done, as opposed to doing Baba Yaga or werewolves or something. So we jumped into the first movie of Japanese folklore. Sword of Storms is basically an Alice in Wonderland story in some ways. Kate Corrigan, a new character Russell Thorne (who's a psychic), and Hellboy go to Japan to investigate a psychic explosion that has happened, and he picks up a sword that's inscribed with writing, he examines it, looks up to get a translator, and realizes that he's no longer in that house, in fact there is no house, he's in the middle of a field, and it's in what would be feudal Japan. And there's a fox, which is what would be a spirit guide in Japan, and he follows it, and has a series of adventures, and Heads is one of those adventures. Meanwhile, we find out these demons that have been released are there to call forth their brothers The Dragons, which are not literal dragons as we would think of them, but they're giant Mignola monsters that are coming out from around the world, and Liz and Abe are dealing with one of those. So that's the first movie. The second movie is Hellboy: Blood and Iron, and that is the Hammer film they couldn't afford. It deals with vampires, a werewolf, about 100 murdered girls, and some surprises I'll leave to the people watching the movie! That one's interesting in that it lets us see Professor Bruttenholm as a young man, and the first time he went out into the field to face evil. It's kind of between the lines in the movie, but you get the sense that he's been to seances, he's done research, he's certainly well-read, but he's never gone out and faced the unknown. And this is when he does. And that vampire that he meets and evidently destroys is what becomes a problem in the present day to Hellboy and the rest of the BPRD. The second movie is very much like a Wake the Devil arc, in that guys sit around, they get a mission, they get briefed, and they head out for a paranormal adventure like you would see in an X-Files, or a Mission: Impossible. So it's a whole different vibe from the first one. And the third one will be completely different!
FC: So these are going to start on Cartoon Network and then debut on DVD afterwards?
TS: Sword of Storms debuts October 28th, the Saturday before Halloween. It comes out on DVD February 6th, and around that time is when the second one should premiere on Cartoon Network, and that would be out on DVD...we don't have a set date, I'm gonna guess sometime in May.
FC: Do you have anything else coming up on your schedule, or is it just pushing for as many of these Hellboy animated adventures as we can get?
TS: I've had conversations with other studios who saw Hellboy in San Diego and were really impressed, and there's superhero properties out there, spinoffs of really huge summer movies coming up. But if I am involved with that, I'd hopefully continue being involved in Hellboy, because Hellboy is what I'd really like to continue doing. We've just kind of gotten our feet wet in getting over 'Well, how do we do this, what's he gonna look like, what's the world gonna look like...' Well, we've got that now, so now we can really concentrate on content and cool stories.
FC: Sounds great, Tad! Thanks again for joining us, we're really looking forward to the movies!
TS: Alright, glad to do it! And good luck with your podcast!
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