THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3
Joanna Quinn & Les Mills
Animator & Producer, “Dreams and Desires: Family Ties” (2006)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 11/7/2006
Transcribed by: Taylor Jessen
Interviewees in Cardiff, Wales
Animation Show: For years now I’ve been convinced that if there’s a visual apotheosis to CGI, it’s gotta be Joanna Quinn’s line. So Joanna, tell me about the influences behind all those Beryl Productions shorts and that live-wire drawing style.
Joanna Quinn: We’ve actually just come back from Taiwan, where we gave a four-hour talk, and we were showing slides and talking about influences. I suppose my influences aren’t really animation influences. When I was little I used to like Tintin, the Hergé comic strip. It was quite realistic, the way it was drawn. It wasn’t total fantasy. I didn’t really get into comics that were fantasy, and would drift away into other worlds. I liked the reality of Tintin.
AS: All those adventure stories took place in the present day, so he was very naturalistic in how he depicted the world.
JQ: Another influence was Daumier. I love his line. It’s terribly loose. If animation was around when he was around, he’d have been an animator, absolutely. (laughs) And Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas…
Les Mills: I’d say later Goya, too.
JQ: What was interesting was showing slides of influences and putting them all together. It just made me realize that they’re all based on real life. Putting the line aside, the subject matter always deals with real human beings and grit. The grit of life. And they’ve all got movement in them. They’re obviously static drawings and paintings, but there’s so much movement and life in the line. I suppose that’s what I was attracted to.
AS: Were you both working together as early as Girls’ Night Out, or when did you hook up?
JQ: Les actually taught me drawing at college.
AS: Well, then, Les, you’ve got to talk to me about your influences, then.
JQ: Yes, Les. Your turn.
LM: Probably the same, I guess. The thing I used to say to Joanna about her drawing was to keep the line fluid. Keep the line dynamic, and feel. We used to do life drawing, and a lot of people got rid of the lines they searched with, and only left the line that they wanted people to see. And I thought, when you’re starting out in drawing, that you should leave all that, so that you can actually examine your progress within a drawing. I looked at Classical drawings by Leonardo, or Michelangelo – they did the same thing. They groped and searched for a definitive line, and they kept the exploration there. I tried to tell people I was teaching the same thing. At that stage in their lives, being very young, they couldn’t afford to settle on something permanent, because they were exploring their own lives, their own observations. So if anything, that was the thing that I concentrated on most. That and really acute observation. And we used to do lots of drawings with moving figures as well, five-second poses, so you couldn’t really get settled down. Even then she had that rhythm, that energy, which later on obviously went into the animation.
AS: Les, were you an animator when she was learning animation?
LM: No – my background was fine art. Originally I was a painter. But then I changed – I ended up a conceptual artist, really. (laughs) Which is very different. And then I got into film, and then I got into animation. It was a long journey.
JQ: You never drew animation.
LM: No, I didn’t. I mean, ironically, I ended up teaching animation, and I only used to do the bits and pieces that I thought were necessary. My big thing about animation was the concept, the ideas, and the lack of fear – trying to get students not to be afraid of exploring their ideas, and the graphic qualities that they all had. That was the thing I brought to the teaching of animation – I wasn’t an animator, really.
AS: So you’re going in multiple directions to find the solution to a drawing as you draw it, and all the paths you took are still there. You’re showing your work.
JQ: I hate re-drawing drawings, as well. That’s something that Les taught me – if you do an inspirational drawing, a quick doodle, that sums everything up. If you do that drawing in ten seconds, all of your thoughts are focused on that one little drawing. If you then try and copy it, it loses something. So for instance in Britannia, I had hardly any sheets of paper to throw away, so I used all my rough drawings. If they were a bit too rough, I’d rub them back and draw over them. But there were hardly any drawings that I threw away because I’d redrawn them. If I did a nice drawing, but it was in the wrong position, I’d just cut it out and bend it and make it fit. I like to try and keep those original drawings, especially if they’re key drawings. Normally they’re really mucky with fingerprints all over them and footprints and things. But it adds to the energy.
AS: A storyboard artist on The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie named Sherm Cohen told me that whenever there was a weird and wonderful drawing in the boards, they’d constantly be saying “Don’t kill it! Don’t kill it!” all the way through to the finished animation, and that if they ever lost that spark along the way the director would flag it and say “Go back to the board.”
JQ: We do the Charmin commercials, and obviously we have a team of people working on the commercials, with me as the director. I do all the storyboards, and I try to time myself so that I don’t spend forever doing them. I think that speed focuses you. I like to set myself a little deadline, and just blast through it – and then go over the drawings and tweak them, but still have the basic drawings there. Then the commercial can go off to the next stage. We do an animatic, but I’m always going back to the storyboards – what have we lost from the energy in the storyboard? And I try to keep that energy in the animatic. Then when the animation gets going, it’s so easy to forget what the original spark was, and what it was that the agency liked. They say, “Oh, I love that,” and what they’re looking at is one tiny little drawing that’s going to get lost in the animation… And normally it does get somewhat watered-down, because obviously there are more drawings, but there’s always that effort to reference back all the time to those ten initial drawings, and make sure that you haven’t lost what you were trying to do in the first place.
AS: The first Beryl short, Girls’ Night Out, sounds like it was recorded with all the actors performing together at the same time, which is incredibly rare. Were Body Beautiful and Dreams and Desires done the same way? How did you come to choose that recording method?
LM: I think initially it was that we didn’t have any money, (laughs) and we couldn’t afford real performers. So we improvised and used our own voices, and when we did that it was incredibly rough. We had no idea about the standard methods – you record separately and then you overlay, and you can fiddle around with them in the edit, and lower voices – we just did it in a room all together. When we got professional actors, we got into a technique which was to record them separately, but also to record them as an ensemble, like in a radio play. If you can remember radio drama, it’s basically a bunch of people on a soundstage reading from a script, acting together into microphones. So it was very crude, and any sound perspective wasn’t done by a sound engineer, it was done by positioning the performer away from or closer to the mike to get some kind of perspective into it. We did that on Body Beautiful, and we even improvised around crowd scenes. And it somehow came off. In the last one, I don’t think we did that, did we?
JQ: No.
LM: The way we work is, when we do the animatic, and when we try the script out, we act out all the parts, Jo and I. We do it back and forth, and then we do it separately. We spend a lot of time trying to get the nuances and the emphases right. That’s really important to us. Then we rehearse with the lead actors or actresses. I ended up doing it last time, didn’t I? On my own in a room, not with professional equipment but just with a digicam or an ordinary recorder, running through everything, and directing very closely back and forth, me taking one part and the actress taking the other. So it’s not a spontaneous thing where we suddenly all show up on the day, and we do it, and that’s it. There’s quite a lot of effort and time and rehearsal that goes into it before we do the finished voices. And what we’ve found is that sometimes in a recording studio, when you’ve got the technicians and the setup, you lose quite a lot of the intimacy. You can’t quite get that same resonance. But on the last film, we didn’t do any ensemble recording. Any layering of sound was done afterwards in the dub. But we still try to achieve an atmosphere that’s very rough and ready. It’s quite typical sometimes for a lot of people not to understand what’s going on, because there’s so many layers…
JQ: Including us. (laughs)
LM: Well, it’s just that even with the most skilled dubber, unless you spend weeks and weeks and huge amounts of money getting the right balance of voices, especially in the last film, because it moves so quickly… One of the things that we argued about, Jo and I, was losing some of the pauses that needed to be there, I thought, to enable the lines of dialogue to mean more, and the audience to absorb it more.
AS: Yes, I think you’re right. It’s really dense with dialogue, and moments of stasis really help. There’s a section where Beryl’s monologuing to the dog, and the camera movement and the action stop for ten seconds or so, and it’s a nice break, a chance to take a breath.
LM: Yeah, when Beryl’s at the reception… We’re very critical now when we look at the film. We say “Oh, we should have done this, and there should have been more of that,” and the fact is, you’ve got a deadline and you’ve got to make it. You’ve got to sacrifice things. At the end of it all, we both said it could have been at least three minutes longer, and it probably would have been a better film. But you win some, you lose some. And if you play it on DVD and listen to it, you can hear more of the lines than you can in the cinema, for some reason.
JQ: Well, it’s because in the cinema you’re relying on the balance of the speakers…
LM: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, like, for instance, if you remember when Beryl goes down to the church and records them arriving with her father, and it seems quite chaotic, there’s some dialogue going on before the father and the bride come through the door, and there’s a priest in the background… There’s all this stuff going on that you can’t really get into very much. But we know it’s there. Like I said, when you’ve got a deadline, you just have to compromise, and sometimes you lose certain qualities.
AS: Are Menna Trussler and Robert Brydon both doing Beryl and Vince for the second time in Dreams and Desires?
LM: No, Robert’s not in it. The story is this – in Body Beautiful, we auditioned a pile of guys who were terrible, and Robert came along and he was absolutely brilliant. He’s a stand-up comic, first of all, but now he’s everything, from a writer to a really good actor. And in Body Beautiful, he did every male voice, from the Japanese guy to Vince to Beryl’s husband. His range is absolutely stupendous, but he’s also a brilliant improviser. So when I came to write the next lot of Beryl scripts, I had him in mind, and he said he’d do it, and I wrote lines that I knew he would write himself as the character. But by the time we got the money together to make the film, Bob had got famous in the country. He took off big time. He’s in features now. Every time you pick up a magazine or put on the television, Rob is on it. I think he thought that going back to doing something that he’s done eight or ten years previous, would demean his status as a big-time star. And he pulled out. So we were really disappointed. But we found another guy, an Irish guy, Brendan Charleson, at the last minute. And he ended up doing all the voices, too.
AS: He gave you all the accents you needed?
LM: Well, in the script there was a Nigerian accent, there was a Welsh accent, there was an Italian or a Middle Eastern accent – the father was supposed to be Middle Eastern. But when Brendan came along, he hit us with a range of accents, and we thought “Oh, that would be great for this.” We changed some of the character voices according to what Brendan could do. And it actually liberated us, because in Body Beautiful we were stuck with mostly Welsh and south Welsh accents.
AS: How’d you hook up with Menna Trussler?
LM: We auditioned on Body Beautiful, and I was talking to a live-action director friend of ours one day and I said “Do you know anyone good to play this part of a middle-aged Welsh woman?” And he put Menna’s name forward, and we auditioned her, and we knew straight away.
JQ: She’s so fantastic to work with. She only started acting in her fifties, and she’s just absolutely wonderful, and everybody loves and adores her. She just puts so much into it. She’s got such a great range in her voice. It’s really low, and then it goes really high…
LM: When you talk to her about the character, she says “The thing about Beryl is that you’ve got to translate the weight of the character in the voice.” That’s what makes that voice really distinctive, and really makes it match the look. She doesn’t look physically like Beryl at all, really. I think she’s about seventy now. But there’s something about the way her voice is able to convey the sense of the occasion, the drama, the pathos and all that.
JQ: She doesn’t really look like Beryl, but she’s very like Beryl in her character. She’s incredibly warm and talented, but very modest and charming, and “Oh, no no no…” (laughs) Hides in the shadows, but she’s got this amazing talent. In the same way that I try and portray Beryl in the films. So they are quite alike.
LM: Jo did a poster once, and it was Menna in a one-woman theatre piece, a monologue. What was it called…?
JQ: Sleeping with Mickey Mouse.
LM: And we went to see it, and she just held the audience for nearly two hours on her own. We love her.
AS: Beryl’s worked in assembly lines in the past – what do you think her job is now?
LM: She’s still working in a factory, but the factory’s changed. She started off working in a bread and cake factory in Girls’ Night Out. Then some things happened for real in South Wales, and a whole pile of major Japanese factories moved in about twenty-five years ago – Sony, Panasonic – basically because they got subsidized to move here, to create employment. So in Body Beautiful Beryl ended up putting together television sets in a Sony factory. We went there and researched it, and did a lot of video-ing things in there. We knew the environment. In Dreams and Desires, she’s still in a factory, but they’re making satellite navigation things – you know, those things they stick in cars.
AS: GPS.
LM: So it follows, basically, the technological upgrade.
JQ: Not that you’d know that in the film. But you’ll know it in the next one.
LM: The next one is a continuation, because they’re episodes, and because she’s mentioned her sister, Beverly, at the beginning of the last one – because Beverly sent her the digicam as a present. That’s what started it all, really. At the end, Beverly’s on the phone saying “How’d the wedding go?” Beverly lives in L.A., right? So the next one is called Dreams and Desires: Beverly Thrills. The end of Family Ties is the beginning of the next one, really. It’s diaristic, so it’s in episodes – you have to leave clues to the next one, and we’ve done that. So Beverly’s at the end and the beginning of the last one. And she’s big time in the next one. There’s a lot of the history of Beverly’s family, especially growing up with her sister. The profile’s a lot more interesting in the next one.
AS: Have you got the money for it yet?
LM: We put up half the money for the last one, and we’ve got the bug again, now. Because it’d been such a long time since we made a film of our own that we just said “Oh, we’re not going to wait that long and that. Now we’ve got the bug.” And we’re up and running. We want to carry on with it really quickly.
AS: Have you already boarded it?
LM: We actually boarded it about three or four years ago.
JQ: We’ve got storyboards for the next four films – but very small, first-draft storyboards. They need to be expanded a lot.
LM: The scripts are done. The scripts I did, what, seven years ago. Got to keep updating them to move with the times.
AS: Where would you eventually like to see them all gathered in one place? On video or on TV?
LM: Well, the idea in the first place was that Channel Four, which was THE channel to put money into animation in Britain – which sadly is still there, but they don’t put money into animation anymore that way – the woman who was the commissioning editor, a woman called Claire Kitson – she liked the idea of this – there was a spot going which was just after the Channel Four News around 7:45 in the evening, which is a great time, and she was putting on these ten-minute shorts. She knew about our films and she knew what we wanted to do, and she thought it was a good idea if we made five of them. She could program one every night for five weekdays at a time. We thought that was a brilliant idea too. So that’s why I wrote them the way I did, so they could be episodes. But because they were diaries, you could show them as one complete thirty-minute film. So it would work both ways. That’s the way we conceived them, really. So the answer to your question is that they can be programmed in whatever way you want, as one film with five episodes, or as five separate short films. It doesn’t really matter. But it’ll be interesting to see if it’ll work as a big film.
AS: That’s nice how they’re modular. You can work out the presentation later.
LM: The thing I always said to everybody about the structure was – because it’s diaries, it’s eternal. It can go on forever. (laughs) It’s a writer’s dream, really. It just goes on and on.
AS: That’s something that’s rare in America, programming for a fifteen-minute slot. In general the shortest block of time the networks know how to program in this country is half an hour. Can you see Beryl carrying her own series in ten- or twelve-minute chunks, like Adult Swim series on Cartoon Network or Creature Comforts on ITV?
LM: I guess so. Anything’s possible. Sometimes with pre-school stuff, which can vary between three and five minutes, big 52-episode series seem to work. We have friends who make Peppa Pig – do you know Peppa Pig? It’s big everywhere now, even in the States. That’s very short. They’re like three minutes each. But I guess it’s to do with the attention span of that age of kid. Very suitable and appropriate I guess. Next week the Welsh-language version of Dreams and Desires is going out on television, and it’s going out with a wedding program. They’ve got this series about funky weddings, and they’re putting this out with it. And it’s going out pretty soon on Channel Four, which is where it was originally conceived to go. So again, it’s a scheduling and programming issue.
AS: There are cultural issues, too, at least with the more adult material. Is Dreams and Desires going to air with any cuts?
LM: It won’t be edited at all, no.
AS: I just have this vision of Dreams and Desires going out on American network TV and giving half of America a heart attack. It would be wonderful. But no network would dare show it. They’re terrified of being fined by the FCC.
LM: Really?
JQ: What would be so offensive about it, then?
AS: Americans can’t deal with nudity. We’re totally sexually retarded.
LM: I lived in the States for six years, in New York, and I always find it very strange – on one hand Americans could be incredibly gross and rude and up-front sexually, and then there’s this other side which is prudish, conservative… I mean, there are things that I used to see in New York in theatre and cinema that were incredibly gross – they weren’t offensive to me, but they certainly would have been to some people. And that huge sexual revolution that went on with Screw magazine and pornography and all that, was much more blatant and much more intense in the States than it ever was in Britain.
AS: TV is a little different here because there’s still this dichotomy between free TV and pay TV. There’s all the VHF/UHF broadcasting that you can pick up free out of the air, and that has to be all-ages-appropriate all day. And then cable is premium, but even that’s split – basic cable is going out to practically everybody, so you can’t say “shit” on Comedy Central, but HBO and Showtime charge another premium, so they can have The Sopranos and Sex and the City. The sky’s the limit.
LM: There must be a huge difference, then. Because we’ve got mainstream programs that go out at eight, nine o’clock in the evening, with huge audiences, and they’re the most rude and offensive – I mean, they’re great. Some of them are incredibly funny. There’s one series called Little Britain which is outrageous – I think a lot of Americans would be pretty outraged by it. And it’s got Rob Brydon in it! I mean, some of the things we’ve seen – what was that one – Tittybangbang. You wouldn’t believe how rude it is, and quite gross too, and very, very funny. There are lots of programs like that all the time here.
JQ: The irony is, Little Britain is chock full of nudity, and sexual innuendo – not even innuendo, it’s just in your face. And kids absolutely love it! It’s got this whole cult following of kids. Because it’s not offensive like pornography. You wouldn’t want to put your ten-year-old kid in front of a pornographic film. Ours also watches Little Britain.
LM: She’s eleven…
JQ: We try and put our hands over her eyes sometimes, but because it’s so funny and good-natured – it’s not aggressive, there’s a warmth about it. So kids love it. They all stay up late and watch it.
LM: And they all talk about it next day in school. They know more about it than we do. So there must be some cultural difference… I think there’s a prudishness about American society which has to do with the conservative right and all the rest of it, and that kind of Christian thing, that doesn’t exist here anymore. There are many more problems in this country now between the religions, in a sense, between the Muslim community and the Christian, which probably don’t exist in the States, because we’re a small country.
AS: This is definitely a nation of prudes. We’re descended from religious extremists – what did you expect?
LM: It’s funny, though, because in our film there’s nude bodies at the beginning, and Beryl’s nude, and there’s one shagging scene towards the end, with the dog in it, but there’s nothing really offensive about Beryl being in the nude. It’s the same kind of humor as the postcards they used to sell in Britain at the seaside in the thirties and forties. There’s nothing really sexual about it. They just happened to be nude, you know what I mean? And there’s this strange mixture of – Beryl’s climbing over naked bodies, and she’s in the nude, and there are a couple of nude cherubs.
AS: It’s classical nudity.
LM: I think it’s actually moving, in the sense that it articulates a kind of struggle and sadness which is not sexual. Even though I saw my dad last night, and he’s 95, and he hadn’t seen the film before. He said “Ooh, it’s a bit rude.” I said “What do you mean?” And he didn’t want to say. Mind you, he’s a Christian. (laughs) So far we haven’t had any bad feedback, apart from a Spanish bloke who was a bit offended when he saw the animatic of the cross falling down. But he’s a right-wing Catholic, and I guess he’s the only person I know who’s been uptight about anything in it. But I think we’d have expected that from him.
AS: Did you set about doing the Beryl shorts specifically as a chance to explore Welsh themes and subject matter? It’s an element that’s not really a part of your other shorts, Elles, or the episode of Canterbury Tales, or Britannia, or Famous Fred.
JQ: It’s only the Beryl films, really, because the other films like Britannia are really English.
LM: Britannia is pretty obviously about anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism by anybody, but particularly focused on Britain. But it could apply to Spain, Portugal, France – America now, I guess. The main line of it is exploitation by large nations of small nations, and colonization. And Elles is really about painting.
JQ: Elles came about because Didier Brunner, who was the producer of Belleville Rendezvous, was putting together – I’m not sure how many - probably five short animated films based on a piece of work by Toulouse-Lautrec. It would culminate in an exhibition in Paris in the Musee d’Orsay, and the films would have been shown alongside the works themselves. So I was asked to choose a painting and bring it to life. But that was very strange, because I was asked to work with a French scriptwriter. There really isn’t any dialogue in this at all – but that was really interesting working with a Frenchwoman, because her take on life was so French, and so completely different to mine. There’s a sequence in it where the two models are dancing around and one slaps the other one on the bottom. That’s something I would never dream of doing, because it’s all too frivolous. She said “Oh, let’s have them smacking each other on the bottom.” And I did it, and I quite enjoyed doing it, because it’s not something I would have done naturally. She was very free-thinking about sexuality. She was really free-thinking. I’m quite conservative.
LM: She wanted to slap you on the bottom.
JQ: And I think that’s as well why Les and I work quite well together, because I’m quite conservative and English, and Les is always saying “Come on, push it, try it, it doesn’t matter, go for it!” And I’m always going “Oh, but what if, what if…it wouldn’t look right…” So I’m always being stretched and pushed, and made to do things that perhaps I sometimes find a little uncomfortable. But then once I’m doing it, I think “Oh, great!” And it’s really exciting.
LM: But having said that, Joanna absolutely adores the human body. It’s pretty obvious, innit?
AS: Is there anything about the new short that no one’s asked you that you wish they had?
LM: Actually, a couple in Taiwan asked us “What is Beryl doing climbing over this mountain of naked men, and what’s she doing reaching out for these cherubs?” Nobody’s asked us that, and I would have thought – because this is the first thing in the movie, and because it’s quite strange, people would have said “Well, that’s really bizarre. That’s really weird. What’s going on here? What does that represent?” And only one person has asked us that so far.
AS: I assumed that was her dream, which was filled with, you know, desires.
LM: Well that’s a riposte that we could say quite easily, but there are other strands to it. But because we haven’t really presented it to audiences yet, and then asked for feedback afterwards, like we’ve done in the past, nobody’s had that opportunity yet to confront us with Q&A about what the hell’s going on in certain parts of it. Maybe they will.
AS: Have you been on the road with it a lot?
JQ: Yeah, we’ve been to Annecy, to Zagreb. We were in Taiwan last week. We won the Cartoon d’Or in Pau, in France, which is lovely. Unfortunately that clashed with Ottawa, and we really wanted to go to Ottawa, which was a shame. But I’ve been talking to Chris Robinson, and hopefully we can hook up and do something next year together at the festival. And we’ve been to Cork in Ireland, and that was at the same time as Sitges in Spain, so that clashed, which was a shame as well, because we won in Spain. Which was lovely, because our composer Tino Martinez Orts is Spanish, so at the last minute he was asked to go and get the prize and was put in some swish, swanky hotel, and I haven’t been able to get a hold of him since. He’s completely disappeared off the face of the earth with the award and the cheque, and we’ve got no idea where the hell he’s gone. I’m sure he’s having a good time. And I did some teaching in Madrid. I teach in Madrid at the college there, unfortunately called ARS. I have told them I should change it. The animation festival was going on there at the same time, so that was great, doing a bit of teaching and then watching the films at night.
AS: As someone who sees a lot of animated shorts on home video, it’ll be a pleasure to see Dreams and Desires in a theater. Watching at home is all right, but with a live audience, the laughs get bigger.
JQ: Yeah. Or it’s horrible when the laughs aren’t there.
AS: Or they can boo, yes. But it’s something. It’s a reaction. Whether they’re toasting you or burning the theater down.
JQ: The nice thing about being an animation filmmaker is that you sort of blend into the background after the screening. It’s not like being a proper actor, where they recognize you. You can just go, “God, that was rubbish!” (laughs)
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