How to Be the Perfect Bad Guy

Matt Patches: Despicable Me - was this the first time you guys worked with Universal? I know you guys wrote the script for Hortan Hears a Who for FOX.

Cinco Paul: Yeah, this was our first thing for Universal.

Matt Patches: Was Hortan Hears a Who your first animated?

Cinco Paul: Yeah, I mean years ago I worked on a movie called Cats Don't Dance.

Matt Patches: Oh yeah, I'm very familiar with Cats Don't Dance...that came out kind of creepy. I have seen Cats Don't Dance.

Cinco Paul: Yeah, so I worked on that years ago, but Hortan Hears a Who was my first film as a team, that I worked on from start to finish.

Matt Patches: I know that screenwriting for animation can be a very different process...

Cinco Paul: Yeah it is. It certainly is a longer process because you're always able to make changes during the production of the movie. It's very different from a live action movie where you have your six or eight week shoot, and then its over. Here you can start shooting and continue to shoot for three years. You can literally change scenes that aren't working two to three years into the process. So it really is an ongoing thing that kind of keeps changing and evolving.

Ken Daurio: You can also change scenes that are working.

Cinco Paul: Yes, that happens often. For three years, through the process.

Matt Patches: You changed scenes that are working already?

Ken Daurio: Yeah. (Laughs) According to us.

Matt Patches: How does that work out? How do they figure that out? Is it through the process of animation?

Cinco Paul: Once it's into animation, you're pretty locked in. The idea is to catch all the mistakes, or things that aren't working, and see what needs to change before you go into animation. It's several viewing of scenes in story board mode. You're just trying to get the rhythm of the scene, trying to see what's funny and plain. That's where you can kind of rewrite and try a million different versions while looking at still drawings. It's just up there and really cheap.

Matt Patches: But it works. It gets the job done.

Cinco Paul: Yeah exactly, the same applies to live action. Something can work great on the page and you put it up on the story board and it doesn't work the way you thought it would.