Shane Acker Interview, 9

We sat down recently in Los Angeles to talk with visionary filmmaker Shane Acker about his new movie “9” which promises to launch a new era in animated storytelling. The action-packed adventure and animated fantasy epic is the feature-length expansion of Acker’s Academy Award-nominated 2004 short film of the same name.

Acker, who is a graduate of UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, tells us, “It’s a dream come true. I had fallen in love with the world and the characters, and my head was full of ideas of what I would want to do to show more of it, and more of them, as they discovered the world and themselves.” For Acker, the theatrical release of the feature film “9” on, appropriately enough, September 9th, 2009 caps a decade of exploring a world he created. Through the years, from short to feature, his core concepts have remained consistent while also inviting and encouraging creative collaboration and audience interaction.

While showcasing a stunning visual brilliance, “9” dynamically explores the will to live, the power of community, and how one soul can change the world. When #9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) first comes to life, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world. All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a community of other small beings like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the landscape intent on doing them harm. Despite being the neophyte of the group, #9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are ever to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they’ll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them. With their group so few, these “stitchpunk” creations must summon individual strengths well beyond their own proportions in order to outwit and fight against still-functioning machines, one of which is a marauding mechanized beast. In the darkness just before the dawn, #9 rallies everyone of his number to band together.

The story is by Acker who directs from a screenplay by Pamela Pettler (Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride,” “Monster House”). Directors Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov are among the feature version’s producers. The voice cast also includes John C. Reilly (#5), Jennifer Connelly (#7), Christopher Plummer (#1), Crispin Glover (#6), Martin Landau (#2), and Fred Tatasciore (#8).

Shane Acker is a highly original filmmaker and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about “9”:

Q: How was it to spend 4 years on a thesis film and then another 3 years on the feature?

SHANE ACKER: Oh, exhausting. (Laughs) There wasn’t a whole lot of down time in between the short film and then the feature.  I’ve been running a marathon for quite some years now.  It’s really great to have it out there, to have my work being seen, and people are responding pretty well to it. That’s really rewarding after spending so much time on it. It was a tough journey, but what a wonderful opportunity. Hopefully, it’s inspiring. I think it is. Young filmmakers come up to me and say, “Wow, you’re really living the dream and that’s something I want to do.” So, I think that’s great to know that it can be done. You can go from a short done in film school to a feature film.

Q: Did you have the back story in your mind when you did the short film and then brought that to the feature film?

SHANE ACKER: No, there was a lot of invention that happened. But, by the time the script writer came on, I had a lot of that stuff in my head. I thought about it at great length and so I just kind of vomited all those ideas out to her and she was like, “Oh, okay, okay. Let’s figure out the structure and how we can get all these bits and pieces back into the film.” I had some ideas behind the back story when I was making the short just because when you’re designing something and you’re creating a world, you should know the history of that world so that it becomes believable. So, I had loose ideas about who these characters were, where they came from and what their back story was. But it wasn’t until we started working on the feature that I really fine-tuned and refined all that.

Q: Were you concerned that they were doing a movie of the musical ‘9’ the same year?

SHANE ACKER: Well, when I started, I don’t think that was even on the radar. I think it was still on Broadway or it was reprised on Broadway. Maybe I’m getting the timeline wrong.

Q: Over the past year or last few months, have there been any plans made to distinguish the number 9 from the n-i-n-e nine?

SHANE ACKER: I think they’ve been marketing… I mean, we’re pretty separate entities and we were fortunate to get the 09-09-09 release date and I think they’re releasing that movie later on in the year so I think there’s a little bit of separation. But, people have been confused and people have talked about it, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing to have a little controversy that keeps people talking about this. I think they’re very different films though, so I don’t think people will be confused.

Q: You got a couple of iconic, amazing, visionary directors as producers on this movie. What impact did that have in terms of getting the film made?

SHANE ACKER: Well, Tim (Burton) was one of the first to come on. I met with Jim Lemly and he got the short and then my treatment in front of Tim and I pitched it to Tim and Tim said that he really loved it and wanted to be a part of it, so once he came on the team, that really started to get the ball rolling. I think once you have a director of that caliber and especially someone who’s cut a name for himself in animation and in pushing the animation medium, it seemed like it made it an easier sell.

Q: What is that like for you to go from starting a small film to all of a sudden having Tim Burton standing behind you? What was that like for you? That’s got to be a really cool moment.

SHANE ACKER: Of course, it was overwhelming and amazing. I was inexperienced enough not to be overwhelmed, you know. I was coming from a point of not knowing so I was like, “Oh cool! Wow! Setting up movies is kind of easy, isn’t it?!” Jim was like, after the first pitch, I guess he hadn’t smoked for years, he got a cigarette and he lit it up and said, “It never happens like this! It never happens like this!” I’m like, “Oh really? It seemed pretty easy when we pitched it to Tim. Now we got a movie going.” So, there was a little bit of that. But then, you know, reality set in that this was a high caliber project with high caliber filmmakers with a studio that’s known for making, I think, really quality movies, really independent, director-voiced movies. I knew that I’d probably bitten off more than I could chew so I was about to get to serious work. I think that fear of failure is what really propels me to try to do the best that I can in this circumstance.

Q: Did you ever feel any pressure to lighten things up or maybe contemporize the setting? You have this amalgamation of a post-World War II Stalinesque world that is dark. Was there any pressure from anyone saying, ‘We can’t make money off of something this dark”?

SHANE ACKER: No, that was never really an issue. You’re making a film with a group of other people so it really is a collective group of people making decisions. Working with the writer, I probably wanted to go into some darker areas than the writer wanted to, and I think maybe she was right about kind of pulling some of this stuff back. They were always pretty supportive about the book and the world and what we were doing. That wasn’t really an issue. Plus we were trying to do it for so cheap that we could take these kinds of risks. We were trying to do it with a modest budget because we knew it was something new for the animation genre at least in the marketplace here in the states and that we were going to go a little darker and push the edges and the boundary. They did approach me about doing it as a PG movie and I just told them I didn’t know whether the movie was going to land that way. I knew the movie I wanted to tell but I couldn’t guarantee that it was going to be a PG movie. They said, “Okay, we’ll agree to a PG-13 if that’s where it lands.” We didn’t do anything gratuitous that would give us a PG-13. I mean, there’s no nudity or swearing or blood or anything like that – but it’s intense. There are scary moments and it has this dark back drop, even though I think it’s a hopeful journey that these characters are on.

Q: What are some of the ideas that you couldn’t get into the film?

SHANE ACKER: That’s an interesting question. It’s all a process. You’re constantly trying things and throwing it out so we were always… There’s a lot that we threw out – not a lot of footage. We went through this really extensive storyboarding. We kept storyboarding the whole film so we’d throw things out.

Q: But in the writing stage?

SHANE ACKER: It’s all to try to pull more emotion out of the audience. I felt like one of the twins should die and the other twin would…

Q: Ohhhh!

SHANE ACKER: See? Yeah, terrible. Right? And then the other twin is there and seeing that their other counterpart is gone and that was the only one they could really communicate with. That’s really heavy, dramatic stuff. But then you always try to pay that off with something else somehow in the end, but that was my instinct, for good or for bad. We had to pull back on that one a little bit. That’s just one example.

Q: After 7 years, do you have any thoughts on a sequel?

SHANE ACKER: Yes, we actually had a couple of meetings and I think we’ve come up with some pretty fun ideas. It was fun -- Timur (Bekmambetov), Jim and I just spitballing stuff. It’s interesting because we sort of set up at the end of the movie maybe life will be returning to the planet. The next chapter might be how do they deal with that. If they’re sort of the eternal shepherds of this new world and life is coming back, what happens if that life starts to push in and encroach on them or threaten them? Do they step in and try to alter that and change the course of that? Or do they try to let that play out naturally and step back? Those could be interesting questions. And also, how will they be able to evolve themselves and replicate themselves? Do they still hold true to that human spirit inside them? Or do they recognize that they’re machines and try to evolve themselves as machines? And does that then become the slippery slope that slips them back into the trajectory that the machines were on? I mean, these are just interesting questions that we can begin to start to ask.

Q: Do you think you would want to stay in this world another 3 or 4 years?

SHANE ACKER: I’ve been working on other projects, which is fun. It’s fun to take my head out of it. It could be a really rewarding experience to get back into it.

Q: If you go back 10 years when it started, what was the first thought? How did it spark?

SHANE ACKER: It was actually 1999 when I started. It was like a “Wow, I’ve got to come up with something for this thesis film” (laughs) kind of an idea. And I really love the world of stop motion so I wanted to do a stop motion film. I love the texture and the quality and the way you can create. I wanted to express the armatures and the things that are within the characters like the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer and some of these other independent filmmakers. So, it kind of started there and then I imagined this post-human world, this world in which we’re gone and now there’s this new life form emerging out of what we left behind, but they still have this creative spirit, this intelligence, but there’s a legacy from the past that’s trying to smother that and take that from them and that was that beast so these are some of the ideas. Then also, how do you do just pure visual storytelling with no dialogue. I looked at a lot of graphic novelists like Mobius. He did this Arzac series which was just this character in this world and each one was like 3 or 4 pages of a visual story, but they were really rich and you really got a sense of who this character was and what this world was like from just those panels. Those were the kind of ideas that were the impetus for the short.

Q: If you go forward with the sequel, will you take the opportunity to explore some of the darker themes that you didn’t pursue in this film? Is that when the twin will get it?

SHANE ACKER: (Laughs) I don’t know. I think I’d like to deal with these larger moralistic questions, which are things that I’d like to focus on and think about. Again, the idea of man and machine and the separation of the two and then also this idea of the natural environment and how do we affect it and ill affect it and do we try to control it or do we let it play out. I mean, some of these issues, they’re not necessarily dark, but they could lead to dark territory.

Q: Was your original completely stop motion?

SHANE ACKER: It was CG animated but it looked stop motion. The big decision to do it in CG was because I wanted to be able to move the camera in ways that I couldn’t on a little tiny set at my school. I wanted to explore a much larger world, but I still wanted to have that quality. I wanted the audience to feel like they could reach in and touch these characters, that they were real.

Q: So you’re CGing something to make it look real rather than using CG to do things you couldn’t otherwise do?

SHANE ACKER: Back in 1999, it was a reaction to how clean and sterile and bright and cheery all the CG was. I don’t really connect with that. I wanted to make a world feel like it’s been lived in and there’s a history. It’s like Star Wars movies vs. 2001 where everything is so clean and pristine. In Star Wars, he trashed it all up and everything got dirty and it was falling apart and they were always fixing things. It made it feel like a real world, like there’s a history that grounded it somehow. And that’s what I wanted to do in that film.

Q: Would you be interested in doing something in stereoscopic 3D, like Coraline?

SHANE ACKER: I don’t know about stop motion. That’s just completely different. I think I like CG but stereoscopic…? That’s an interesting question. I think Coraline is a good example of what you can do with stereoscopic. I think there are poorer examples. I mean, we’ve got to get past the point of poking your eye out and find out how we can use this technology to help us better tell our stories. Otherwise, I think it will just be kind of a gimmick in some way. That’s kind of my take on it until I see really clear examples of how we can use it to help us narratively tell a story. It’s interesting that what I don’t like about it is that when I wear those glasses, somehow it helps to separate me from the motion picture rather than immerse me in the motion picture. It’s one or two stops darker and there’s this technological interface that’s bothersome to me. When they figure out a way to do away with that and really pull you in, maybe I’ll have more [interest].

Q: You’ve got the story of the film and then you’ve got the actual story within the film that starts with the blank slate of the character. What was the challenge of writing a blank slate character or was it liberating? And, then introducing him to this history which had existed long before him, and then hence a history past him, when did all that start coming together? Was it in the screenwriting?

SHANE ACKER: Yeah. The screenwriting is sort of the kickoff and then I think it’s storyboarding in animation where you really start to find your film. We had a really condensed storyboarding phase. We storyboarded the whole thing in 6 months. You just barely get it up and see it and then you realize the train wreck that it is and then it’s like, “Okay, kid, off to production.” So, that was a real challenge. The whole film we were stumbling over ourselves trying to keep reworking the story while we were in the middle of production which is really hard to do. At some point you start. “We’ve got to make the footage so let’s just make it.” And then in editorial, you just keep playing with it and try to move it around and try to find out what’s the best fit. The hard thing in animation is it’s not like you shoot a bunch of footage and then you have a lot to remake movies out of. It’s an inverted process. You kind of draw everything that you want and then you’ve got to go make that specific thing. So, we didn’t have a whole lot of material to do recuts with. It was really a challenge to be still working on story and producing everything and then not having a whole lot of opportunity to reshape the movie when it was done.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the paradigm of Japanese animation versus American? Was that one of the things you were hoping to invest an American audience in? For example, a Miyazaki film can be dark and adult and the only studio in America that really does that is Pixar, which can take an American adult audience and tie them into a kids story as opposed to Nickelodean where there’s a blue asparagus and a whale -- I mean, the Japanese idea that you can make an animated film for an adult audience which a lot of American companies haven’t done yet.

SHANE ACKER: Yeah, I think I’m inclined. I like the Miyazaki movies. I love anime. I love dramatic storytelling in this medium. I draw a lot of inspiration from live action filmmakers and I’m trying to bring that to the medium of animation whether it’s the cinematography or the subject matter. For me, again, it’s kind of like I’m too dumb to know what I’m doing. I was too young. I was just trying to make a movie that I wanted to make and not really thinking about the market and all that kind of stuff. I’m really thankful that Focus (Features) took a chance and believed in the vision and wanted to make a film like this, which is something new for the market. Nothing’s really been successful before with like PG-13 animated movies so it’ll be interesting to see how this movie does. There haven’t been that many of them. I think we’re all anxiously waiting to see whether this will bring a big audience or not. Hopefully it will and it will open the door for other filmmakers that want to make more adult animated films in the states.