With the Oscar-wining animated classic Rango celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, I recently conducted an extended interview with director Gore Verbinski about the making of his first animated film. If you haven’t seen this brilliant movie, Rango is a computer-animated Western about a pet chameleon who ends up becoming the sheriff of a town suffering from a draught, and tasked with playing “tough guy” despite the fact that he is very much not a tough guy. The film has an offbeat sense of humor and is loaded with colorful characters and wonderful visual and thematic references to the films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.

Rango was a fairly groundbreaking film, not only in its ambitious visuals, but in how it was made. And during my extended interview with Verbinski, the filmmaker went into great (and candid) detail about how Rango came together.

What you might not know is Rango originated at Art's Deli in Los Angeles with children’s book author David Shannon, producer John Carls, and Verbinski having breakfast and talking about making “an animated western with creatures of the desert.” They didn’t have financing. Or a studio. Or even any sort of idea where it would go. But Verbinski worked on the idea and eventually brought in producer Graham King for startup money, John Logan to work on the script, used his just-sold house as the location where everyone could work, and spent eighteen months crafting the film with several artists. At the end of it, he got Johnny Depp to be in the film, then asked Brad Grey, who was running Paramount at the time, to come to the house to watch the animatic and see all the drawings. Shortly thereafter, following over a year of independent work put into the project, Paramount agreed to make the movie and they were off to the races.

While this sounds like an adventure on its own, this doesn’t even cover how they shot the film with all the actors over 20 days. They used rudimentary props and fold-up tables, and the actors wore whatever they wanted and didn’t have to worry about their hair or how they looked. The only thing that was required of them was to know their lines and be available for the duration of the shoot. You can see some of it in the video below.

During my extended interview with Verbinski, he shares some amazing stories about the making of Rango, how the movie came together, how he worked with the actors, why ILM had to make some big changes to make the movie, how Roger Deakins contributed to the look of the film, and so much more. The conversation also veered into Verbinski’s career as a whole, as we talked about making his first three films at DreamWorks, if he ever thought about making a sequel to The Ring, what happened to Spaceless, how he made the transition from directing music videos and commercials to making movies, and more.

If you’re a fan of Gore Verbinski you will definitely enjoy hearing some great behind-the-scenes stories.

COLLIDER: I want to jump into Rango which is such a great movie.

GORE VERBINSKI: Thank you.

You won the Oscar for it, which was, I believe it's one of the rare times that it wasn't Pixar or Disney to win the animated Oscar. What did it mean to you at the time to win an Oscar for your animation?

VERBINSKI: Well, I mean, honestly, it felt great. I mean, Pixar, I think they had Cars 2 in the running that year. So we were lucky that we weren't up against Inside Out or something. It felt really good. I mean, that movie, when I think about that movie, I just think about the friends and the sort of... That movie was really homegrown. I mean, it was pitched after it was happening, if that makes any sense. I just felt like everybody who worked so hard on it... I don't know. It just felt like some sort of group of misfits that won a bike race or something.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

RELATED: ‘Bioshock’: Gore Verbinski on Why the Movie Was Cancelled and His Planned Ending

One of the things that I love about Rango is that you did not go to animation, you brought animation to Gore Verbinski. Like you took it and made it your own thing.

VERBINSKI: Well, animation is a methodology not a genre. The story telling part is fundamentally the same as live action but the process can be quite different. I’m not going to completely give up my way of working. There was nothing in my resume that said I know how to make an animated movie, and that’s makes it exciting. I have always thumbnailed all my shots. And I have certainly made live action movies with more computer generated shots in them than in Rango. I'm very comfortable making shots on a computer, why adopt a different methodology? Why not just go, "Okay. It's image, it's sound, it's story." You stay with what you know and confront the unknown of the narrative.

One of the things that's fascinating is that you developed this before you had a studio involved, I believe there was like twelve of you getting together and trying to figure it all out, which is amazing. Were you nervous about developing this before you had a studio? Because it could have all fallen apart.

VERBINSKI: Yeah. I think you just have to convince yourself. "We're going to make this. We're not asking for permission, we're going to make it," and the “do you want to be part of it” (write a check) that comes later.

So Rango really started at Art's Deli with David Shannon (children’s book author) and John Carls (producer) and myself having breakfast and talking about making “an animated western with creatures of the desert?" That was it. And I said, "Okay. Interesting...”

I took that core idea home and started typing up an outline, which is sort of my process. I need to see if there is enough there there before I can commit. So process is something like: okay, creatures of the desert…Western. Western….outsider. Guy comes into town, man with no name…from where? Different than creatures of the desert… Ok so, aquatic! Aquatic…chameleon. Chameleon, pretender. Pretender, Actor. This is a person who's pretending to be something he's not. And that’s gonna catch up to him. And then I kind of worked out this sort of water plot and this idea of blending in, like trying to act like you belong. And very quickly, it started coming back to that sort of thing that's weirdly, in most of my movies: this idea of a belief system collapsing.

In the case of Rango, it was the town, their belief that the water will come, and then ultimately their belief in Rango himself. And then when it all crashes down, what are you left with?

So I took that outline (15 pages by that point) to my friend, John Logan, who was dubious at first, “Animated Western?”…. I pitched him the whole story. And he was immediately, "Oh, this is an identity quest. I know how to write an identity quest. This is fantastic." And then I went to Graham King and I said, "John and I would like to work on this animated movie, and I need startup money. I want to build a story reel." And Graham's like, "What is it? Animated?" But we were convincing and he said, "Yes." And we got some start up moneys. And then I called my team…just amazing artists that I know and respect and enjoy working with: Crash McCreery, Jim Byrkit, Eugene Yelchin, and David Shannon. And I brought in Adam Cramer, who was a second unit line producer I worked with on Pirates, and said, "Hey, this is what I'm doing. Do you guys want to do this? And we've got a very little bit of money, but I got this empty house that I just moved out of. And we can barbecue in the backyard, and we can live here and make this thing." So we immediately started drawing. There wasn't really a script. We had the outline, and it just kept on throwing flesh on the bone. Then Logan would come by, and John and myself and Jim would grab a microphone, and start recording voices. I would thumbnail. Jim, who is a much better storyboard artist, would draw, and we just started making it. One shot at a time.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

RELATED: Exclusive: Gore Verbinski Is Working on Two New Animated Movies With Roger Deakins

Wyatt Jones, our editor, would put them together on a Mac in my son's old bedroom and we just basically recorded the voices, cut them to the thumbnail drawings, watched it back, threw it in the trash, and started over. Iterating really, really quickly. Not worried about anything except trying to keep it engaging. And knowing we had to get to the next beat on the outline.

Then simultaneously Eugene, Crash, Dave and Jim, would be working with a slightly different directive: “creatures of the desert, animated western, go." Okay, so the mayor should be like a turtle. We got to have a rabbit gunslinger guy who's cracking his knuckles. What about scale issues? Like, can a spider be the same size as a rabbit? Yes! Don't think literally about scale at all. Think about character. Who is the character? Then make’m a desert animal or insect. Because in a Leone or Peckinpah movie, it always feels like if the camera followed a tertiary character out the door, there's a whole other story behind that guy. It is important that our characters have a history. The bird with the arrow through his eyeball or the rabbit missing an ear, it makes you ask what happened? Like, oh, well, he wasn't just drawn for that scene. He came from someplace.

So simultaneous to developing the script was just a room full of characters. That was really fun. And we would then start to plug them in. That's where the mariachi owls came from.

Around that time, we took a trip to Real de Catorce, SLP to commune with our spiritual advisor Umberto Fernandez who was a dear friend I'd met on The Mexican. Humberto is connected to the Huichol nation…indigenous peoples of Mexico...Who have a very cool understanding of the universe. He marched us into the desert and we camped...and well..That is where the Cactus spirits came from.

Still no financing really, at that point. We started to bring on some additional story artists and just built the entire movie with pencil drawings and scratch voices. At the end of eighteen months we had an entire version of the movie that's pretty tight. Then I called Johnny Depp and we had a meeting and I pitched him, I pitched him the entire narrative and he was like, "You had me at lizard." So he was in halfway through the pitch, and then I brought Brad Gray and some guys from Paramount over to the house to show them the animatic.

I remember Brad Gray entering and saying, "Why am I here? What is this?" Just like, why I'm at this house with every wall covered with pins and paper, drawings, and notes and photographs…like literally the entire house looked like the inside of a serial killer’s brain. We had a barbecue going in the backyard, and we had a little microphone set up in the living room, and we showed him the animatic, and that's when we got the green light to make the movie.

Also by that point we had a bid from ILM, and I had already started talking to John Knoll and Hal Hickel, and the core team that I worked with on Davy Jones.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

The thing about Rango is there's drug references. There's a lot of adult stuff in it. When Paramount came on board, did you sort of say to them, "This is the movie we're making." How did like the note process go with them in terms of, did they want certain things cut or was it sort of like you're paying for the movie you see right here?

VERBINSKI: Well, the movie was done before we made it. I mean, the movie's truly unchanged from that original animatic. So, I played them animatic with scratch voices and said, "These will be replaced with real actors, and then I'm going to build the movie on a computer at ILM." This is the film… That was more of, are you in, or are you out discussion? There was a lot going on at that time that was beyond my control, DreamWorks Animation had just left Paramount. So, I think we probably benefited from some sort of, ‘we need an animated movie’ mentality.

Life is weird that way. I had an overall deal at Universal at that time, and they couldn't make an independent animated film with me because they'd just made a deal with Illumination. I mean, the business side of things that just plays out. It’s beyond me. But it does affect me.

So then we went right into the audio recording. We had to replace all of our scratch voices with the actors. I don't want to just put people in a room and record them individually. Because that's not what I do as a live action director. So that was the sort of, let's get everybody together for 20 days part of the equation. And try as much as possible to be off book. Record everything live and get some reference for the animators. Just so I'm not completely leaving what I know.

RELATED: Exclusive: Gore Verbinski to Direct Adaptation of George R.R. Martin's 'Sandkings' for Netflix

There's a lot of video online of those 20 days of you directing everyone and having Johnny and Isla and Harry Dean Stanton, all standing around, which I could spend an hour just talking about Harry Dean Stanton. But there's a lot of video of you directing this, and you can see Johnny's performance. It's literally you see him doing it, and then it's Rango. I think that's one of the reasons the movie is so good is because you have these performances from these actors.

VERBINSKI: So that came from two things. One, the comfort level of, I want to see it. I mean, in many ways we had to force a lot of performances into the animatic. We knew, it was like, you have to do that in 7.4 seconds. So we had a really good scratch, but we wanted to like, okay, well, we have this. Now it's about elevating it. So if you weren't available for those 20 days, you weren't going to be in the movie. Miraculously we got Ned Beatty, Ray Winstone, Harry Dean Stanton, everybody said yes, and everyone was available. Bill Nighey, Alfred Molina, Steven Root, Isla Fisher. It was joyous and bizarre. It was kind of like a high school play. Come in to this large carpeted room…there's no hair and makeup because none of it's used, but you can put on a hat or a gun belt.

We had a couple of rudimentary props and taped out sets on the floor and set up fold-up tables. I don't think people realized, like a lot of those guys had done animation and they were like, "Wait, you want us to be off book? You want us to know these lines?" That's a lot of pages a day. I was like, "Yeah, let's go."

30% of the final audio was used from what I called the big room, where line and overlap, physical comedy…everything's encouraged.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

Then I would go into the smaller little curtained off area and work one actor at a time. Now that you've played the scene, let’s focus on just your audio. Because it's like you're building a radio play first and foremost. That soundtrack is your camera negative. So we have the performance reference and then I'm like, I need something specific and melodic. So we would kind of break that down as well. Working one on one .

The visual reference was also critical to my process because there was so much of what we had learned from creating Davy Jones that I wanted to preserve. Working with Hal Hickel and the animators at ILM, I would be able to say, "Look what he's doing. He's got a little spasm under his eye at frame 76, let's preserve that. Look what he's doing right here when he's lying. Let’s study that tell and animate it into our subject?"

The big change at ILM was working with the animators and getting everyone to stop thinking about this in terms of “shots” and to start thinking in terms of a whole film. Typically, when you work at a visual effects house, you are operating with a shot based mentality. Rarely, you might get some context, three shots around the one you are creating at most, but I was having conversations with animators about the emotional state of a character. Where is she coming from and going to. That was beautiful, to see them kind of go, "Whoa, wait. Okay. I got to think about...the whole story " I was like, "Yeah, we're not making shots. We're making a whole fucking movie!”

Did you show all the animators the animatic that you had created?

VERBINSKI: Oh, yeah. There's nobody who worked on the movie who didn't fully understand the entire movie. I mean, it took a while to change their methodology but they were so excited by the opportunity. And you can feel that on screen. Endless discussions about -- Where are we? We know we're approaching a low point. Let's get squeeze the lemon and get a little more juice here, so the drop is bigger when it comes…OK Let's rise now. We're rising in terms of how things are accruing internally for the protagonist. For all intents and purposes, these animators are your actors at that point. So that team, we became very tight.

I ate a lot of pretzels on Southwest. I mean, I was flying up there every week and spending days at ILM, at the campus. We would go to the bar after work. It was like a family. This is an adventure. And that spirit that, started happening back at the house, "Okay, we're not going to stop that. People who are working on this film have to love the story, the whole story." As soon as you smell like, oh, this person, they're not going to die for this movie. It's kind of a gig for them. Well…no harm, no foul, but you shouldn't really be on the show. I'd rather have half as many warriors who are passionate.

When I think of Rango, that's it. It's a small group of people who equally contributed. I mean, it's their film as much as it's mine, because everybody who worked on it was at that same, we don't know how to do this. We’re all in the ‘let's figure it out’ stage. That produces a completely different energy than, oh, we're going to do the same thing we did on that other movie. That creates a sort of artery hardening creative stasis, where you could do it in your sleep. But the energy of the unknown? There's no replacement for it.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

Roger Deakins worked on Rango. Can talk a little bit about his contributions?

VERBINSKI: Oh where to start. He’s a genius. I mean It’s fundamentally a different relationship on an animated film. I can’t hold Roger for 3 years..so when he comes on most of the compositional work is done and we really focus on lighting. It is a consulting cinematographer relationship, as opposed to your live action cinematographer where you are attached at the hip, setting out to battle.. making a movie together.

I think the key factor for me was making this world feel photographic. Not necessarily photo real, but making it feel like there is a camera present in this world. And to do that the lighting has to obey some real world logic.

On the computer you can put a light anywhere. It can be in shot. Literally. There are an infinite number of ways to illuminate things. So limiting that to real world choices…that’s basically asking Roger what would you do? If this were real.

And Roger he went beyond. We would send him scenes, he would send pictures, photographic references, lighting references, and then working with Tim, the bar interior scene would be a classic example, he would iterate and give notes that made the entire scene start to live. We would employ the same techniques you would do in a live action movie. We put some white sheets on the bar just out of frame to create a bounce..

Tim, Alexander, and Roger would iterate tirelessly in shot production.

Roger and his wife are such great people.

VERBINSKI: They're so amazing. I mean, the amount of time they gave us on Rango was way beyond. Tim, was like, "I have Roger Deacons at the end of the fucking phone for every shot. I'm going to use that." And Roger responded and would send a visual reference. Just make it look like this, and then describing in detail how to achieve that from a practical standpoint. He was like my first call on these two animated movies I'm making now. So he's going to be coming back and helping us out. Again, really in the shot production part of it. He's busy. He's very busy. But we got him!

Timothy Oliphant plays the spirit of the West. Did you ever try to go for Clint Eastwood or was it always going to be Timothy?

VERBINSKI: Well that’s a parody, intentionally. So, Always Timothy. He’s a pleasure to work with. I am dying to do something with him again.

rango movie image
Image via Paramount

RELATED: Gore Verbinski Reveals How Close He Actually Came to Directing the ‘Gambit’ Movie

What amount of money do I need to pay you to see the three-hour cut of A Cure for Wellness?

VERBINSKI: The three-hour cut? I don't think there's a.... There's not a three-hour cut.

I've read something that you've had a longer cut of that movie.

VERBINSKI: Sure. Every movie has a longer cut.

Not like an assembly that decides everything in it. When I was researching, I read that you had a longer cut of the movie that you were happy with, but maybe I got that wrong.

VERBINSKI: Yeah. I mean, I think I was happy with it, but it was problematic. It had a little bit more of, it was longer in the period before his final turn. The period where he's accepting living there, he's become part of the place…where he believes he's not well, and he's looking forward to the cure and has been fully assimilated. I think all of that got whacked and there was some good stuff there. And in particular, there was one scene that really character-wise, let him breathe a little bit more before he had to suddenly ping pong back into, okay, now I'm awake again. But no, it wasn't three hours. It was probably 9 minutes total.

Whatever happened with your movie Clue?

VERBINSKI: That was just a meeting. I don't know. That's one of those. Somebody pitched something as part of the Universal deal, never even met a writer to discuss it.

Whatever happened to Spaceless?

VERBINSKI: I loved Vintar's script. I read that script 20 years ago. I still love that project. I don't know what's happening with it. It was at Fox, then it was at Universal, and then it was at Paramount. I still love it, but I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen with it. It’s hard to shoot a sci-fi on a shoestring.

gore-verbinski-new-animated-movies-social

One of the things about your career that I admire is the fact that you've been able to jump from genre to genre. You've made a horror movie. You've done animation. You’ve made big-budget Hollywood movies. Was it difficult to be able to do this wide variety of films? At the beginning after the success of The Ring, were you just being offered horror scripts?

VERBINSKI: Well, The Ring was my third movie. The first part of that question I would say... Everything's a learning opportunity. Or at least that’s the way I look at it. Ultimately, I loved everybody that I worked with on Pirates, but after three of them, I was like, "I'm not learning anything else now." Once you become comfortable, I think it's time to move on.

So I suppose jumping genres is just a way of saying, "Sure, I don't know how to do that! Let’s go." I mean, like fundamentally trying to find that spirit or curiosity. My father was a nuclear physicist, and he was really a tinkerer more than anything. He was like a lab nuclear physicist. He would work physically in the lab with radioactive isotopes. And then he would get data points and then he would rework. So that sort of tinkering mentality is I think ingrained, and these stories... There's like a really nice place immediately adjacent to disaster that is kind of the ideal place to be. It's the sweet spot. Because you’re not sure if it will explode but your trying desperately to create a singular reaction.

So how does that answer your second part of your question? My first movie was Mouse House, which was kind of just like, "Okay, yeah. Sure." I think they saw my Budweiser Frogs commercial and said get that guy. That was a sort of Hollywood briss or some sort of right of passage: you jump in and you get hurt, they take a piece of you, and you learn. I thought I was making a movie about brothers and string an absurd relationship, but the studio was always making a movie about a mouse. So that was sort of …educational.

Then the second movie was The Mexican, which did kind of go off the rails and is also educational, but probably the most fun. Real de Catorce is a very magical place. The experience of making that movie was joyous. Joe Wyman's script was always shaggy, and I guess that's why I really... I thought it was making Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia as a romantic comedy or something. It was definitely a collision of genres. And my first time working with big name actors.

And then The Ring was actually the least ‘fun’ to make. Horrendous schedule in the Seattle rain. But it is where I learned to embrace the genre. Rather than try to turn it on its head.

Because all of the great horror films movies are fundamentally pulp concepts at their core. The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorscist, the premise is always a bit ‘B” movie? The videotape that's going to kill you is a ridiculous notion. So it really becomes about an exercise and execution. Not so much reinvention. Sound is incredibly important. And trying to create a feeling that there's some invisible force pulling you down the corridor. So that was really a completely different learning experience. I had actually just started shooting Pirates 1 when that was released. I was late to the premiere.

I was very lucky to have three smaller films under my belt before Pirates. Spielberg had seen my commercial reel, and all three of my first movies are made at DreamWorks right when they were starting up. I feel blessed to have been given three at bats, which… the other two didn't lose money, but they certainly weren't hits. And The Ring was sort of the first one that took off. That studio was very supportive. They were filmmakers. It was run by storytellers, it wasn't purely a business. So at the end of the day, when you're having a battle, it would always finish with, "But you're the director, so it's up to you." Which was kind of a beautiful thing. Like, "We really think you should change this consider that and do this thing. But it's your film. You're the director, it's your film." You don't hear that anymore, really. You don't at all.

So Steven was truly ... an early believer. He was super respectful. And very, very supportive.

the-ring-gore-verbinski-naomi-watts
Image via DreamWorks Pictures

Because of the success of The Ring, did you ever have an idea for a sequel? Did you ever develop anything?

VERBINSKI: No. I mean, I kind of felt like the cat was out of the bag on that one. Walter and Lory, the producers they made, I think one or two sequels. There wasn't anything left for me to tell, to be honest. And it was an interesting thing because I do think that that movie has this sort of... We were filming at the time 9/11 happened. And then when the movie came out, there was... That movie is really a study of the sort of ‘transferrable nature of hatred’, you make a copy, you pass it on. It's like a chain mail. And I think people were struggling post 9/11 and trying to understand how these folks deserved this? Like not understanding how hatred can be transferred to somebody else: "You do this to me, so I justify doing that to them."

And I think there was something in the zeitgeist of the moment, that film has a very strange box office trajectory. I think the first weekend the studio was like, "Well, it's doing okay." And then the second weekend was bigger than the first weekend. And the third weekend was like the first weekend again. And they were like, "We don't know what's happening... This is weird." It took a while for them to sense that it was successful. It had strange legs.

I see the drum set behind you, which gets to my next question, which is you used to play in rock bands in Los Angeles. Did you consider yourself really good, good, or great? What happened?

VERBINSKI: I've always played music since junior high school. I suppose it was a way of not being a... It was sort of the afterschool activity. I mean, it's like it's either that or, I don't know, be on the football team or something. Although I did pole vault for a while just because that was the one you could do in 15 minutes and then go to band practice. Like you didn't have to do jumping jacks on the field for four hours after school every day.

So, just because of the amount of time I've been doing it for, I suppose ‘good’. I was gigging while I was in film school at UCLA...and while I was making music videos, saving up money, shooting Super 8 vids on the side with bands that I knew and that I played with. I did some recording with Brett Gurewitz, Stiv Bators, and I was shooting videos for L-7 and Bad Religion. I graduated and worked as a PA for a company called Limelight that did a lot of music videos, but I was not a director, I was just a runner. So I would just go to friend's bands and say, "Hey, do you want to shoot a video this weekend?" And I would get my Super 8 camera and we'd shoot something. No budget, just I would save up some money, and it was an opportunity to learn. Then Julien Temple saw some of my vids and gave me an opportunity direct at his company Nitrate Films.

As you mentioned, you did music videos and you did commercials, you won the Clio award, you won the Silver Lion, you were very successful. Can you talk about when you were making commercials, how much were the firms asking you for what you wanted to do, and how much were the firms presenting you with the idea and then you were incorporating or taking their idea? What is that dynamic like?

VERBINSKI: To me, commercials were always a means to an end. They were like ‘design films’, a way of communicating something in 30 seconds. So more often than not, you would get a pitch from an agency that would be a kind of... You could see what they were struggling to communicate. I would usually rewrite them. I think it's different now. I cut all my own commercials and finished them through post. I don't think directors do that very often anymore. I mean, ultimately I didn't have commercial final cut, but I would always say, "I'll deliver you the cut that I think is best." And for the most part, those stayed. So I would see them through post and I would usually kind of reconceive the core idea.

KEEP READING: Exclusive: Gore Verbinski Reflects on His ‘Pirates’ Trilogy and the Intense Production of the Sequels: “It Was Survival Mode”