With The Sea Beast now streaming on Netflix, I recently spoke to director Chris Williams (Moana, Big Hero 6) about making the fantastic, animated film. The Sea Beast is set in a time when fearsome monsters freely roamed the seas, and monster hunters were considered heroes. The film follows one such group of monster hunters, under the leadership of Captain Crow (voiced by Jared Harris), as they hunt their most dangerous monster yet, known as The Bluster. But when an orphan girl (voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator) obsessed with monster hunters gets discovered on the ship, she starts to see how the tales she’s read in books might not be the whole truth, and that maybe these sea monsters aren’t actually monsters at all. The Sea Beast also features the voices of Karl Urban, Mariann Jean-Baptiste, Dan Stevens and Kathy Burke.

During the interview, Williams revealed why he left Disney to make a film at Netflix, all the various challenges about making an animated movie that takes place on the ocean, how George Miller influenced the story, the big change that happened after the first screening, what Sony Imageworks invented to help tell the story, and a lot more.

If you’re curious how The Sea Beast was made, you’ll learn a lot by either watching the interview in the plyer above or reading the conversation below.

Finally, while I know you have a lot of choices in what to watch, I strongly recommend The Sea Beast. It’s one of the best films Netflix has made.

COLLIDER: I'm going to start with congratulations on the movie. You guys did such a great job with

CHRIS WILLIAMS: Thanks, that that means a lot. It was a pretty ambitious undertaking and it took a lot out of us. And of course we had the pandemic to deal with as well. That really kind of was a bit of a monkey wrench in the middle of the process, but to hear how people are responding to it has been incredibly emotional and really gratifying, so thank you.

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Jumping back to the beginning of this thing, how did this project end up at Netflix? Was it one of these things you've been thinking about for a while?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. This was a very long road because it really does... You probably get a sense from watching the movie that it goes all the way back to my childhood loves. Certainly, Raiders of the Lost Ark, those kind of like rollicking adventure stories, King Kong was a big thing for me. I love the (Ray) Harryhausen and stop motion films, the Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, those kind of things were really important to me as a kid.

I think they really motivated me to want to make stories, even things like Road Warrior was a big thing for me. I just love big action spectacle, and action adventure to me is a genre that I love. So it's always been in me.

And I've been lucky to be at Disney for almost 25 years and I've worked on movies that I'm really proud of, but there was a genre that I really wanted to take on that was just a little bit outside of what Disney would do. And this itch that I wanted to scratch really coincided with a moment in my life where I was kind of taking stock, because I had been at Disney for almost 25 years and that was half my life at that point. There was a moment there where if I stayed any longer, I was going to become a Disney lifer. And that is not a bad thing, but I wanted it to be a choice; if that was going to be the case, I wanted it to be a choice.

I'd moved from Canada to work at Disney at a young age. And I just put my head down and did the work. I wanted to kind of educate myself as to what else was out there. So, I met with lots of different studios. As I did, I just found myself, I found this compulsion as an artist: I wanted to make myself uncomfortable. I was very comfortable and treated very well at Disney, but I wanted change for its own sake. I wanted as an artist to challenge myself and throw myself into a very different situation.

Netflix, in some ways, is the antithesis. Disney is this eternal company that's been around forever. And you come along and you're part caretaker of the legacy, and then you hand it off. Netflix was this brand new thing that is still coming into being right. And there was something about it that made me feel like this, this feels like a big, big change. And that's exactly what I was looking for.

And they were open to something tonally that was a little bit outside of what I probably could have done at Disney. So, I talked about this big rocking adventure story, and they were excited by it. And I was like, "You know this is pretty ambitious. This is going to be a big one." And they knew, they understood. And they have been incredibly supportive throughout. And here we are, we made a movie.

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Animating any movie is a difficult challenge, but animating something with water is another level. Maybe people don't really realize that. Can you sort of explain to people when you tell an animator that there's going to be a lot of water in a movie, the look that hits their face?

WILLIAMS: I don't recommend it, because it's the animators but it's also the camera operators. And it's technologically it's a challenge. If I go back to Big Hero 6, we were really limited as far as how much water interaction we could have. Even Moana, which obviously takes place out in the water, there was a finite number of times we could have the characters go in and out of the water on screen. There's a cost to those things. They're very complicated.

I obviously didn't learn my lesson because now so much of the movie takes place out at sea. There's a lot of characters. They're all in these boats and ships and things. And there is an added challenge in animation because not only are you trying to express a performance as an actor, as an animator you're an actor, and that's primarily your job, but there's also the physics and the physicality.

If the thing you're on is moving on a surface that is moving, that creates its own added challenges. And so, yeah, that accounts for probably that glazed look. They did help on the technology front where if there was minor movement of a ship there was a thing that they had implemented that had naturally the characters compensating with their body weight to that. But you've seen the movie so you know, a lot of times it wasn't gentle. And so, they had to account for some really challenging physics and physicality because of the fact that it was on water.

Even the opening of the movie though, the opening sequence, you have someone in the water, you have a fire, you have the boat, the ship, and the opening sequence I'm like, "Oh, this looks amazing." Right from the opening scene I was like wow.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. I definitely went pretty big. As far as my ambition goes, I wanted to go all the way, you know what I mean? You know who I love is George Miller. When you look at Road Warrior and you look at Fury Road, you see someone who is insanely ambitious and asks a lot of the crew. You know he wants to go really, really far. And the Road Warrior was a huge moment for me, seeing that movie and has stayed with me. I really wanted to create moments of great spectacle in this movie. And that's easy for me to say. It's easy for me to say, "I want it to be big and spectacular." It's the hundreds of artists that have to execute it.

And so, I can, in a way, myself look at it and feel like, "This looks impossible. You actually did what I wanted you to do. How's that even possible? How are you capable of that?" And I think it's just there's a character to this small community of people who work in animation, where they really love a challenge, that if they hear something's hard, if they hear something's going to be... If we're trying something new, they don't shy away from that. They want it. And as the director in animation, you benefit from that strength of character and that curiosity, that people who work in animation have.

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Image via Netflix

The movie is about two hours, give or take, and every minute of animation costs real money. Was there ever any pressure to bring it down closer to 90 minutes or an hour and 40 minutes?

WILLIAMS: No, I was very supported through the whole process. I think some of it is I was very open from the beginning about what my ambitions were, and the script was no secret. They knew what they were getting into. But they responded to the story and they wanted to serve the story. And the people that I work for, they're passionate about movies too. When they saw what this needed to be, they were incredibly supportive.

I really appreciated not having to have those battles. I think as a director, you're always a little bit at war with yourself because you want to be responsible. You don't want to waste people's time and waste money unnecessarily, but you want the movie to be great, and you don't want anything to get in the way of making the movie better. And so, you're always trying to push for more and more and more, and maybe like, "Oh, can I have one more crack at that beat? I think I can make that better."

I feel like I was very lucky with the crew that made the movie, but also with the executives that I answered to; everyone really rallied around this movie and, I think, saw the potential that it had.

What did you learn from any early friends and family screenings? With COVID, I don't know if you did any test screenings, but what did you learn from those early screenings that impacted the finished film?

WILLIAMS: Well, that's a good question because it's a two-parter. We only had one typical animation screening where we screen for our crew in a theater, because after that COVID struck. So we had one screening, our first screening, and even in the anticipation of it, there was something about it that felt off to me because the Maisie Brumble character was not in the first iteration of the movie. There was a very different story where Captain Crow had stolen a baby from his mother.

And I could feel as we were building towards that screening, that it wasn't working. The story wasn't working fundamentally, which is nothing new for me. Every movie I've ever worked on or been around has evolved massively in the course of the development of the story. And usually that's a good thing. Usually that means that people are searching for the better version. It's if a movie gets sort of locked and plateaus early on, that's when I start to get more nervous, because it means that people aren't really challenging their assumptions.

So there was a huge change plot-wise, story-wise based on our very first screening. Then we brought in the Maisie character, things started to click. The story really started to feel good to me. And after that we unfortunately weren't able to have in-person screenings, but we would send links out to people and they would watch it.

We only had one sort of general audience preview screening. We were feeling good about the story, and really primarily it was to see how younger audience members would react to this movie, because there's a bit more of a sense of peril and danger, maybe a little scarier than other movies that I've worked on, and just to sort of see how is this going to play with that segment of the audience?

And it was so cool because we had, and I never think of any movies I've worked on as being for kids. If you work at Disney, certainly you have to be cognizant of the fact that it has to be acceptable for kids to watch it. But the main audience is me and my story team; that's who we're trying to make a great movie for.

And this one, certainly as we were making The Sea Beast, we never thought, "This is a movie for kids." We thought, "This is a movie for audiences who love adventure stories." But still there's this curiosity how it'll play with younger kids?

So, they had a moderated meeting, a Zoom meeting afterwards, where they had a bunch of kids who were probably between eight and 10 who'd seen the film. And they asked them, "Was there anything that was scary?" And they cited the character that they referred to as the witch. They kept saying, "Oh, the witch was scary. The witch was scary." And, and the moderator was like, "Oh, so you would like less of the witch?" And they all said, "No, we want more of the witch."

And that was a very telling moment, you know what I mean? Because kids do like to be a little scared at times. They want to find that threshold that feels right for them. And it definitely put people's minds at ease as far as how approachable this movie would be for younger audiences,

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Image via Netflix

Making every animated movie, you invent new tools, new software to help you make the movie, which can help you in future endeavors. What were some of the tool’s you guys invented on this that will help you on a future project?

WILLIAMS: Well, I will start by saying, I am not an expert when it comes to technology and I can barely work my phone, but I know from conversations with the crew that one of the things they knew was that ropes were going to be a challenge. Ropes are notoriously challenging in animation because there's no give to them, there's no flexibility to them. And I know firsthand from Moana that the ropes on Moana's boat almost sank the whole movie. And there was only 10 ropes on her boat. Now you go to these tall ships, there's literally hundreds of ropes. The good thing is the folks at Sony Imageworks, they knew that was going to be a challenge. And so, they attacked it early on, and it was never really that much of a thing.

But I know the thing that kind of blindsided us as far as a technical challenge was the sails themselves and how they filled with wind, because we wanted to get that right. We always knew the wind direction in all of our scenes. And we always wanted the maneuvering of the ship to be accurate. And the sails had to behave accordingly. That was one of those ones where they hadn't done that kind of thing before. And so, that was a new challenge and took a long time before we were able to look at a ship where the sails filled with wind where it looked right. And that was the touchiest thing for us, where we just couldn't get these sails to work.

It was relatively late in the game where we finally did. And then it was this big hallelujah moment. There was a wide shot of the ship that you see fairly early on in the first, in the opening battle scene where the ship was... You could see the complete ship, wide shot, sails filled with wind, and it was a party. It was a celebration, "Hallelujah. We can do it." Of course, in the course of the story, it just kind of breezes on by and the audience may not take note of it, but it was meaningful for us. And so, now for the folks at Sony, they would be able to fill sails of wind all day long.

On that note, I need to stop. I'm just going to say congrats on making a great film. And I really hope it's a huge hit for you guys.

WILLIAMS: Thank you so much. Thank you for your support. It means a lot.