Q: Can you talk about the cast?

HS: Dakota (Fanning) goes back to when this was supposed to be live action. And she was nine, and she read the script herself, and she decided she wanted to do it, and she’s a remarkable kid. She psoke as a child about what she liked, and why she wanted to do it, and it was great that she was reading her own scripts at that point. That didn’t happen, but we stayed in touch, and when it became animation, she was there, she was more of the age that she was supposed to be. Casting, because we had Dakota, she does a slight Midwest accent, because they move from the Midwest to Oregon of all places, so the next character, the mom, I read every actress from twenty-five to sixty, we just put them against Dakota, and what sounded great, and Teri Hatcher was one of the top three people that worked really well. There was a few others who were great too, but you build there. John Hodgman who plays Father and Other Father I became aware of him through The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and we hired him, and his voice sounded incredibly good, and then he’s in these commercials with PC vs. Macintosh, so he’s known, so he became a star. You look for good actors. But it’s the music of one voice against another, and you build on the center, which is Dakota. On Nightmare, the only voices I cast were The Evil Scientist, William Hickey, and Santa Claus, and it wasn’t really my will. I did get Chris Sarandon to Skellington’s speaking voice. In this particular case it seems like the way to. I’m a musician, so it’s about one sound against another, where’s the friction, where’s the flow. With Teri we get both, Teri does a really good job in this movie.

CJ: Nick Park works in this way. He chooses his own voices.

Q: We saw some footage, we saw some mud and rain, the more mundane elements that you can put in a film, but are exceptionally challenging for stop motion. Are you excited when you can do water?

HS: It’s more work, and it’s more expense and time. But what stop motion can’t do well is atmospheric effects, so I was insistent we do more. At some point there are wind and trees, and every one of those branches has a wire on it, and it’s on a spool, and someone is hand animating it. A lot of the rain out of the windows is actually being done practically with a beam splitter. I get involved, I say I want fire or smoke, and those sorts of elements, but you can’t do that so well in stop motion, so we do steam using cotton, which is pretty effective, and we went to old friends of mine who have an effects house, and asked about CGI, and the price was so shockingly high, we said “let’s try and do this in-house. So we got a guy Brian Van Hul, who was on Nightmare, and then worked with Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings, and he got sick of all the CGI, he wanted to do a combination, so we do a lot of stuff right on the stages, but Brian then does some computer stuff. There’s fog, I mean, we shoot our characters walking through a set, and then we art direct it, and then Brian manipulates that. It helps cross a line into a more believable fantasy, I think.

Q: Do you like that challenge, or do you feel you have to do it?

HS: I want it, it’s good for the movie, and I have to push pretty hard to get it. I learned that if you do it too much it has no value. There’s a couple of shots were it really makes a difference, and then sometimes the rain is just a sound effect in the background. I go back to stop motion when it was shot on table tops, you know, Pillsbury Dough Boy, and everything looks tiny, cameras don’t move, the camera’s flat, to what we’re doing now, which gives you a sense of space and atmosphere. I was really happy to hear Lenny Lipton, the 3-D guru say it was the most atmospheric animated film he’d ever seen. I think the atmosphere is a huge part of the story. It’s a spooky film. You can’t have a spooky film without rain, fog, all that.

Q: With so much going on all at once, where does your directing input come in?

HS: I’m primarily, I’m interactive with all the department, but I work mostly with the storyboards department, planning the shots, making the movie before the action is shooting, and then with the animators, and the main place we meet is in editorial. And we have stand-in puppets in there, and we have the cameraman, we pose, and then we do check-in, and we have back and forth, back in forth, back in forth. Again, I go out there often to encourage them, to nudge. And sometimes an animator will say “I don’t think this is working, should we keep going?” But by any means. I think Claire has some interesting things to say…

At this point, Henry had to bid us farewell.

Q: Watching the footage, who do you see the movie for?

CJ: It’s tweens and up. It’s very much for readers of the book, and a new audience, the book is aimed for 9 and up, and it’s on Harper Teen, and I think we’ve made the film representative of the book. I think it’s slightly older, possibly but not very much. But we don’t think it’s a film for super young children.

Q: Are there a core group of fans?

CJ: Definitely. The 12 year old age group seems very excited about it. It’s got that Nightmare before Christmas side of it as well, so I think that appeals to boys as well.

Q: you’ve worked with Nick Park, and now Henr, you’ve worked with the kings of Stop motion, how would you say that they are similar?

CJ: They both have a vision that is extremely clear, and won’t compromise on. It’s hard to work with people lie that because you need to make a schedule and a budget, but I get more satisfaction working like that. But the way they achieve that is very different. Henry is a lot more active in a lot of ways, like, vocally, he’s way more extroverted, while Nick is more introverted. But they’re both very determined to get what they want, and they both really inspire people to give their best, and that’s great to watch. When people have been animating for two or three years, and they can’t see the end, he can be very inspiration. Or frustrating, but more often than not it’s inspirational. The style of animation here demands more from animators. The levels of complexity.

Q: How do schedule something like this?

CJ: Well I wasn’t on in the beginning, but you schedule it like anything else. You figure out the style and the complexity of the animation, and try to figure how many seconds a week you can get, and the optimum sized team. The parameters are normal, it’s usually about an 18 month shoot, though this has gone on a bit longer, and about 30-35 units. The logic to it, the film has been shot almost sequentially. That’s not always the best way to do it, but it’s the easiest to control, you’re storyboarding at the same time you’re building and animated, it makes more sense. You tend to voice as go along.

Q: How many seconds would make you happy?

CJ: Where we are now, we need about 110 seconds a week. We’ve got about 50 sets, but that’s more than you would normally have.

And with that, my time at Laika was done.