Pandas, Kung Fu and A Man Called Black: The Making of a Hit  

“Kung Fu Panda” is an unlikely champion to tower over the box office, eclipsing the likes of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” but star Jack Black and directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson have managed it.

By: Karl Rozemeyer *

 

The titular panda is the portly Po (voice of Black), whose father is certain that his son will take over the family noodle shop, but Po has bigger dreams. Specifically, he wants to join the Fabulous Five, a crackerjack team of kung-fu fighters. Po’s greatest desire becomes a reality by accident and, through intense training with the grumpy Master Shifu (voice of Dustin Hoffman), Po is forced to face his own fears, as well as a very scary snow leopard named Tai Lung (voice of Ian McShane) who threatens to wreck their peaceful home.

QUESTION: Jack Black said at Cannes, “I am Po and Po is I.” Who came first? Was it Jack or was it Po?
MARK OSBORNE: It’s a little zigzag. There was a little bit of Po, a little more of Jack, a little bit of Po, a little more of Jack. But really the character didn’t exist until Jack was cast. Before that Po could have been many things.
JOHN STEVENSON: He was always going to be a panda.
OSBORNE: But as a personality, it was defined by Jack ... The potential for that character came from what was possible with Jack. Dustin described just getting to know Jack a little bit and that it is like the essence of Jack as a human being. That character is a metaphor for Jack.
STEVENSON: We both love Jack. We are unapologetic about wanting it to be a star vehicle for Jack and about it being a love letter to Jack ...
There really wasn’t a backup plan if Jack had said no. We just imagined Po being Jack and, if he had turned us down, I don’t know if there would have been a movie. Really, because we couldn’t have imagined anyone else being Po in terms of our desire.

Q: Jack Black and Angelina Jolie don’t “do voices” for this film, they use their own voices. In a way their characters are personifications of themselves.
OSBORNE: (Voice actors) always think that they have to do a cartoony voice.
STEVENSON: You have already got an incredible level of stylization and abstraction because you are dealing with animals or creatures. Obviously it is not live action. It is a different look and feel in animation, whether it is 2-D or 3-D.
You don’t need any more abstraction on top of that. People do, but it doesn’t work very well. It works much better when you have the most organic and natural read, and the best way you get that is to ask for a real performance.
You test actors by asking them to be a certain way. We don’t want you to do it in a voice that is unnatural to you, so you are thinking about your voice and you are not thinking about your performance. We just say, “Forget all about it. Just be comfortable and then find the most interesting way of saying your lines.”
OSBORNE: The only exception to that in our movie is Dustin. Part of his process is finding a way to use his voice. He can train his voice to do lots of different things. It is not so much that he puts on a lisp -- it is not a gimmicky thing -- it is really just finding the way for him to imagine that he is that character.
He could just call up voices that he did (in previous movies). He could just do “Tootsie” (1982) like that. His vocal chords have a memory. It was quite incredible to see that.
So we asked him early on, “Just be yourself.” And it wasn’t quite a good fit until he heard us use the word “timeless,” as in “We are trying to tell a timeless story.” And he just deleted the New Yorker in his voice and went a little gruffer with it, and he actually found the Shifu voice that you hear in the movie. It was a great moment.

Q: Did you select Ian McShane to voice Tai Lung because a British voice is the complete opposite of Jack Black’s laid-back voice?
STEVENSON: Obviously we knew that Tai Lung had to have a very powerful voice. Ian is just an amazing actor to watch. He can be completely terrifying instantaneously, but he is the nicest guy. He came into the studio, and (said), “’Allo, luvs, what you wants? Oh, Tai Lung. What’s this? OK, I’ve got it ... ROOOOAR!”
Just straight away, and the hairs will stand on the back of your head. He is a very, very smart actor.

Q: John, you worked on “Shrek” (2001) as a story artist. How do you think the industry has changed? “Kung Fu Panda” took you five years to complete, so things have obviously altered in that period of time.
STEVENSON: Techniques are always getting better. Things from last year are already obsolete. Ipods are twice as small. There are always giant technological advantages happening all the time, and you obviously try to make the best use of the technology. It is always going to get better.
But it is always in the service of storytelling. It is always going to be that way around. The story is always going to be the driver, and then whatever technology you have at your disposal is your tool kit to tell that story.
No one is saying, “Oh, we’ve found a brand-new way to do hair. We should do a hair movie!” We don’t think that way. You think of a story that you want to tell, and then you look at the technical challenges.
OSBORNE: Not even thinking about the technology that has changed since then, I think that what has changed more is the climate. There are so many animated films out right now that any animated movie really needs to stand out and cut through the clutter ... Dreamworks recognized the fact that we have to be diverse and try to do something different, so the idea of setting a movie in ancient China and doing a kung-fu film ... No one has done that before.

Q: When you are working on a project this huge and you have a story line that is moving forward but is not set in stone, how difficult is the process of narrowing it down to the concept that you want to pursue?
STEVENSON: We probably made the movie 20 times or more in terms of the amount of material we discarded.
Our process is to try out our ideas as simply and affordably as possible, which means that we draw them as comic-book panels and then we film those things. We put sound effects and temporary music and we do the voices, so we can then get an approximation of how the scene is going to play. And we build the whole film that way.
So for a long time we look at the film just as a series of drawings, just as our voices. But you can tell from that whether or not an idea has validity and, if it does, you refine it and eventually bring the actors in, and then you animate it and make it real.
Or you can tell if it is going to suck. And then you just go, “Well, that scene is not working, it’s terrible. Or let’s do it in a different way.” And then you flush that work.
But you are not flushing animation. That is the purpose of the storyboarding part. The key storytelling tool of the film is designed to be disposable. It is designed to be the most flexible way you can try out an idea and make adjustments to it or abandon it before you get into the complex and very expensive process of actual animation.
OSBORNE: But a lot of times we are reworking the same general ideas. We have a sequence, we have done many versions of that sequence and we have tried it in different locations with different action. But the point is always the same, or the story need is always somewhat clear.
And then there is the ridiculous stuff that would never fit in the movie. Like one of the tests in his training where Po had to jump on a rock that was being hurled up in the air by spewing lava from a volcano, and he had to grab an ice cube off a hanging glacier that was upside down.
There is a lot of blue-sky thinking where we try to figure, what is the tone of our action or what is the tone of our comedy?

* Karl Rozemeyer is the international editor for Premiere.com