Dragon Training

Dean DeBlois on Putting Story First and Making Good Use of 3D

You can tell just by looking at him How to Train Your Dragon co-writer/director Dean DeBlois is an incredibly nice guy. He just has that sort of demeanor, and the moment you walk into the room you just get the feeling he’s someone you’ve known for most of your life.

Hiccup (left) and his new friend in DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon

Pleasantries aside, as I sat down for a small roundtable interview with DeBlois to talk about his and fellow filmmaker Chris Sanders’ latest DreamWorks effort I couldn’t help but be a tiny bit excited. His first produced film since 2002’s Lilo & Stitch (which he also co-wrote and directed with Sanders), I really adored How to Train Your Dragon far more than I ever could have anticipated before walking into the theatre, so getting the opportunity to chat with one of the major brain trusts behind it was a thing I wasn’t going to take for granted.

Here are some of the highlights from that roundtable conversation at the Fairmont Olympic located in the heart of downtown Seattle:

Question: Well, this had to be a big commute for you today, being a Seattle resident and all.

Dean DeBlois: Well, sort of. I got a place here in 2008 so I had just sort of made my move [thinking] I was going to work from Seattle as I was doing a lot of writing for live action. I thought this would be my new home. Ironically, [DreamWorks] called and asked me to come work on this film and I had to be there day-in and day-out back in L.A. so it was a good thing I hadn’t gotten rid of my place there.

I knew this might someday be the case but I wanted to make a lifestyle change and I love the Pacific Northwest and I don’t like L.A. very much so I thought what I was doing at that point wasn’t an office job, that I could [write] from anywhere. I thought if any of these projects takeoff and I’m directing them then I’d have to go wherever that is so I knew I’d be going back and forth so I [kept] a place that didn’t require a lot of maintenance. It was a good thing I did.

Q: What drew you to this story?

DeBlois: It drew us. Chris Sanders, who was already working at DreamWorks at the time, called me on a weekend right after he’d gotten a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg saying [their current] movie was kind of in trouble. Most of these movies have about three or four years to percolate and get remade several times over before they’re released and [DreamWorks] had just run out of time. They had this deadline for the release date, it had to be March 2010, and this was October 2008 when I got the call, so there was just over a year to re-conceive the story, storyboard it, edit that together, animate it and get it done in time for it all to be lit, score put in place and prints made.

When we got called, I think it was because Jeffrey knew we worked well as a team on Lilo & Stitch and he liked our sensibilities and he thought we could bring it something fresh. So it came together very quickly. Jeffrey talked to Chris, Chris talked to me and then I had a ticket bought and I was in L.A. two days later ready to start having meetings where we should take the story.

Stitch, Lilo and Nani in Walt Disney Pictures' Lilo & Stitch

Q: What is that process like? Can you talk about how you shape a story, how you recognize when it’s in trouble and how you try to still remain faithful to the source material?

DeBlois: I can talk specifically about this one because this is pretty much the first adaptation… no, that’s not true. Mulan was a bit of an adaptation but it was more of a folk tale so it was really open to interpretation. In this case, they had spent the first couple of years at first trying to do a very faithful adaptation of the book. [DreamWorks] had acquired the book mostly on the promise of the premises which was Vikings and dragons in far off northern destination and all of the adventure that might yield.

But the story itself is very whimsically written but it’s [also] a little bit small. It’s a small story that has small stakes and it’s all about the relationship between Hiccup and his little runt dragon, in the book the dragon is about the size of an iguana. So the runt dragon is adopted by the runt Viking and together by simply being kind [Hiccup] gets it to do tricks that the other kids’ dragons can’t do. Then, at the end of the [earlier scripts], a big dragon ends up on their shores and it’s a problem they have to take care of.

Every version of that yielded a very young feeling film, and one thing Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks are allergic to is anything that feels juvenile. They’re [obviously] going for the broadest audience possible but the studio philosophy is whereas Disney makes movies for the child in every adult DreamWorks believes in make films for the adult in every child and talking up to them as opposed to down.

What thrown upon us was that we had this world largely constructed, these characters already designed and this title we had to keep but otherwise are objective was to expand upon this. How do you make a fantasy-adventure that has heightened stakes that feels bold and exciting and has epic elements to it, capitalizing on that world? So we jumped in without any real restrictions and the real freedom to veer away from the book.

Q: When you veer away from the book like that there is always the potential those that loved the source material, including the author, are going to be upset. Was that something you allowed yourself to worry about?

DeBlois: We knew the reckoning point was going to come where we were going to have to sit in front of [author] Cressida Cowell and face her based on what we’d done to her books. But it turned out to be surprisingly a non-issue in the sense that she showed up about halfway through the project and she read our script which was largely in place by that point and then she watched some of the sequences we had under way that were nearly finished. She just took the attitude that she A) loved it and B) was enough of an artist to recognize that other artists are always going to have different interpretations of the same material. She liked that it retained the spirit of the book but that it was another variation on her world and she was good with that. She’s been super supportive and really funny and she loves it so, yeah, it’s all good.

Q: Through this process what has been your favorite part?

DeBlois: This is for both Sanders and I our first CG animated movie so there were a lot of new tools that we suddenly had in the toolbox and it’s amazing what you can do with the camera and with the sophistication of the acting you can get. So that was a big part of it, just having these new tools available. There is a level caricature to the world and to that the characters that are rendered with a realism that makes the whole experience so believable, so I definitely appreciated that part of it.

The youthful secondary characters of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon

The music creation is always a favorite part, I think, watching a composer take what you’ve been working with and then giving it its own custom soundtrack and then being there when the 106-piece orchestra picks up the queues. That’s amazing.

I also have to say, one of the allures of live action filmmaking is getting the opportunity to work with some of my heroes and on this movie we got to meet some of them like Roger Deakins, who is just an amazing cinematographer. He was the consulting cinematographer on this film, so every frame of the movie has Roger Deakins all over it. The use of light, the choices of lenses and the camerawork and compositions, they all come from the guy who sot No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James [giving] the film a sophistication you don’t normally see in animated films. It has a look to it that is really different.

Q: So why do you make kids movies?

DeBlois: Part of it is because I came through animation so it’s just par for the course; I came to Hollywood as an animator so I’ve worked on family-friendly movies. But it’s also just a love for those kinds of movies. Growing up my favorite movies were always Escape from Witch Mountain or Watcher in the Woods. I loved Star Wars as well but anything that was kind of creepy and kid-centric was a little more appealing to me than some of the more adult material.

That said, I have written screenplays for thrillers and stuff like that, too, so I try not to get myself put into a box. I have interests in other genres but this is just one I have an affinity for.

Q: You talked a little bit about the look and the feel of the movie. A lot of DreamWorks animated movies rely a lot upon pop culture and they seem to be more quirk driven than story driven. While this one has a bit of quirk it is still a story driven film and it doesn’t rely upon pop culture. Was that a hard trend for you to escape while working for the studio? How did you not fall into that particular trap?

DeBlois: We definitely benefited from our situation because this has probably been the most hands-of production DreamWorks has ever generated. There was no time left for second guessing decisions. We were just given a lot of trust and pushed forward to make the best movie we could make within our personal sensibilities.

That said, there has been a lot of reaction within the studio about how there have been some unspoken rules that were broken. We don’t have a lot of pop culture references because that’s just not our brand of comedy, we like the comedy to come out of the situations. As such it isn’t a big knee-slapper of a movie. There is some comedy in it but it’s not a back-to-back comedy, it’s much more adventure driven. But that was the tone we were given. When we came on Jeffery said he wanted this to be more Harry Potter than Madagascar. He wanted us to go for the promise of that world.

So we had liberties in that sense, but the great thing about DreamWorks right now is that unlike Disney, and even Pixar to some degree, there is no house style and that opens up the possibility for all types of movies. They’ve definitely had success with the real broad comedies and the stylistic comedies, and that’s great, and certainly Shrek walks the line between the two, but I think this hopefully opens up a whole new direction for them as well in terms of doing something that’s more a mix of an Indiana Jones or a Star Wars brand of predominately adventure and less overt comedy. A world that’s true to itself, one that doesn’t need modern references.

Q: Do you feel any sort of added pressure now that animated films such as Up or Fantastic Mr. Fox have achieved such a high level of critical success in regards to awards and Oscar nominations?

DeBlois: No. I would say no and I think I speak for both Chris and I in that this is a very dangerous mindset to get into, aiming for any sort of accolades, because story is complicated enough that for us just making the decision of what you [yourself] would pay to go see, both the 10-year-old in you wants to see and the adult in you wants to see, and trying to balance it and broaden it enough so that it doesn’t feel age specific. If those decisions make for a movie that is popular, one that people like and one that people want to celebrate in other ways than great, but I think overall that’s just a bad – and dangerous – motivation.

I don’t think you could ever set out with that in mind, let’s make an Oscar nominated movie, and [while] you always hope to make it great anytime I found myself second guessing what parents might think or what others might it’s really kind of dangerous. The only deciding factor, the only filter we put it through, is our own.

Q: You said that, “Story is complicated enough.” Tell us about your creative process. What have you learned along the way about telling good stories?

DeBlois: It’s a mixed bag. The biggest education I’ve had from a story perspective came from Mulan that both Chris and I were on for five years – five punishing years – and going down so many different paths as to what a story could be. It all comes down to the main character, making that main character empathetic, so that everybody sees a little quality in the main character that is like themselves or like somebody they know. Making those characters flawed, so there is no black and white, that even your heroes can make bad decision or at least be capable of them. Then just learning structure, learning what movements need to happen and what times in the story. Not in the formulaic sense but in an intuitive sense.

A scene from Walt Disney Pictures' Mulan

It was a big eye-opener when I read a book called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder and what was interesting about that was that it took every lesson we’d ever learned the hard way on Mulan and outlined it in a chapter, and as the beats fall and the succession in which they fall is exactly what we ended up with, we just had to find it in an intuitive way. There is just a natural way in which we as human beings tell stories and that we like to hear stories and there are moments where you skip one of those moments we get restless or bored or unsatisfied. They’re all there for a reason, and it’s not to give [story] a template or a formula. But you have to discover it, and Chris and I believe there is a point where it is a struggle to find the [story’s] shape but once it’s found its shape it then tells you what it wants and will reject ideas that feel false or tagged on. It becomes very obvious. Story is king and it effects every decision as it relates to the movie.

In talking about How to Train Your Dragon we [asked], “What is this story about?” When we stripped it all away it’s really a story about a father and a son. Even though there is this kid and there is his dragon the ultimate story that yields it all is a father and son story. So we stripped it down and asked what [were] the basic beats and found that it was the external tensions as created by the conflicts between a father and a son. The son wants to live up to his father’s expectations but he’s ill-equipped to do so. He ends up creating a bond with the enemy – dragons – and thereby discovers a key to resolving the initial conflict except his deed is uncovered which destroys [the new] father-son bond and he’s rejected. Then, in spite of his father’s rejection, he returns to not only save the day but to also put his father in a place of humility where he can apologize.

Q: So why then the 3D? How do you use it as a tool to immerse the audience inside the world of the movie and not as needless trick not worth the extra price of admission?

DeBlois: I feel the same way. I’m not a giant fan of 3D as a technology and it gives me headaches, so going in we made a collective decision that we never going let it be the cart that leads the horse. We were going to make a film as best we could to stand alone and then we philosophically bring 3D in to accentuate moments to amplify moments that were organic to the story and never would we make a decision simply to get mileage out of the 3D.

I think we were a little nervous about it at the beginning but we went to see Coraline, a bunch of us together with Roger Deakins, and they did everything we thought we were told we were not allowed to do. Can’t have scenes set at night or in the dark with 3D because it doesn’t work, or you can’t have rapid cutting because you don’t have time to adjust to the depth. You can’t have shallow focus because 3D is about being able to see everything. There were [just] a bunch of these rules where we just felt we were getting our hands tied before we’ve even started, and then we go to see Coraline and we thought it violated every single one of them and it was fine and it worked.

We just went with the idea that this story actually organically had moments were it was going to benefit from the depth, there were going to be moments where it was going to be great to feel like you were on the back of a dragon with Hiccup diving towards the ocean. And those are great, and we reserved those for the best of our 3D moments and then know that there were going to be other parts of the movie where we were just going to let things flatten out.

Hiccup and friend take to the skies in DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon

What that actually did was that it places moments of rest for your eyes throughout the movie so that the 3D effect actually feels refreshed when it comes back on the screen. So it’s not overbearing, but you also don’t get used to as you do with some 3D movies so that 20 minutes into it you stop perceiving the effect of it because it’s constant.

So [the film] kind of breathes, it’s quite organic and it’s never gimmicky. That’s one thing that I actually hate. When you see 3D badly used it’s poking you and as an audience member in the theatre it’s pulling you out of the story. Everything we do is trying to lure you into the story, so it’s counterintuitive and we made a point of never doing that.