Interview: John A. Davis

The bearded, friendly and casually nerdy John A. Davis graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1984 with a BFA in film production, and received an award for outstanding graduating senior in film. He later wrote and directed the Christmas television special Santa vs. the Snowman (1997) and served as animation director on a second holiday special, Olive, the Other Reindeer (1999). In 2001, he made his first feature film, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001), which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature and spawned a TV series. The Ant Bully, which opens wide this week, is his second feature film, starring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Bruce Campbell, Meryl Streep, Regina King, Ricardo Montalban, Cheri Oteri, Lily Tomlin and Zach Tyler.

Jeffrey M. Anderson: Let's start by talking about one of my favorite people: Bruce Campbell, who is very good in this.

John A. Davis: He's light on his feet. I've always been a fan of his.

JMA: We're a small group.

JAD: Yeah. Small, but dedicated. Ever since the Evil Dead movies, and even on into "Xena." He just makes me laugh. He's such a great "hero" and that translates into the Fugax character, that kind of swagger and flirtatiousness. We went to record him in Medford, Oregon one time. And it was during a really hectic part of the production. I was in L.A. and we were trying to get him to come to L.A. to record, but he had just flown in from production someplace and he was, 'Come up here. Come up here.' I ended up flying up there, and I was really tired. And I just had the best time. He was in his element. We're in a friend of his' home studio. He took us out to eat, took us out to his ranch. We went for a walk in the woods, and that's when I was like, 'This is so cool! I'm walking through the woods with Ash!' He does a lot of looping up there. It worked out really well.

JMA: Just to get the course of events right, you record all these guys, but they don't really see each other. Is that right?

JAD: For the most part. Most of the big celebrities, they're so busy -- it's hard enough to get them by themselves much less them with somebody else. Nick and Julia, I really wanted to get them together and they really wanted to read together, but it just couldn't happen. They were never in the same place. That's really typical with most animated films. It just means you have to get a really broad spectrum of performance. I know what I want in my head, but I also have to cover my bases and leave myself an out. It becomes very different when you hear the next actor read, and you go, 'I love that. But I can't use that unless I have this.' It's really part of the way it works, it's like Frankensteining this stuff together.

JMA: This is the first step, after the script, then. There's no animation?

JAD: No. They're just in a booth, behind a mike. They can't see the other actors, they can't see the set they're on. So they're acting kinda blind. I've got to really paint a picture for them, of where they are in space and what the set is, and where their heads are at, but also the staging. If Nick is in his lab, he's getting frustrated and he's just about to trash everything and suddenly Hova walks in, and she's 20 feet away and he has to project loudly to her. And then she comes closer, and so they're more intimate. You have to paint that whole idea so they can kind of imagine the staging.

JMA: When Zoc is banging the rocks together, does Nick do that too?

JAD: Yeah. Nick is very animated behind the mike. He really gestures a lot. We bring in a video recorder and tape all the performances, not to mimic them. The animators will look for certain things that they habitually do and try to weave that into some of the performances. [He does a Nick Cage: 'Hova, what are you doing?'] Some of the stuff he does with his hands.

JMA: That was a pretty good Nick Cage.

JAD: [Laughs.] But it is very tricky. There are some voices that I can record together. Like Rob Paulsen, S. Scott Bullock and Mark DeCarlo, who were the beetle, fly and glow worm. There are guys that I've used before. I used them on Neutron. They're schedules were flexible enough where we could get them in together and put them all up on the mikes at once. And they can go wild and improv and bounce off each other, and it's really funny.

JMA: Now, if you have, say Nick on tape, and Julia Roberts comes in, can you play his track so that she has something to act off of?

JAD: No, I haven't really done that because it's too hard to choreograph. You spend a lot of your time monkeying around with the technology to get the playback just right. And it locks her in to responding a certain way, and I'd rather let her play with the material and not be so worried about what he did. Because, depending on what she does, I may change his line anyway. But if she's only responding to him, she's only going to give it to me one way.

JMA: How did you wind up with this cast?

JAD: Well, having Tom Hanks [as producer] on the project certainly helped, plus they've always wanted to do a John Davis picture. They talk about it all the time. [Laughs] No. But it was pretty astounding to see it happen. I wasn't thinking, necessarily, 'Let's get Julia Roberts for Hova! What a ridiculous notion!' But then when we started thinking about it. 'Well, why not? We might as well ask!' And then everything started falling into place.

JMA: Did you have a kind of visual scheme, some sort of unifying idea that you wanted the movie to look like?

JAD: Well, one of the things was that we just came off of Jimmy Neutron and I knew I didn't want it to look like Jimmy Neutron because that film was designed specifically for the story and the world; we wanted it to be simple, colorful, kind of like a Puppetoon.

JMA: Kind of old-fashioned?

JAD: Exactly. But with this, the story -- at least the way it was playing in my mind -- was such that I wanted the world Lucas goes into (as he leaves his normal world and goes into this ant world) I wanted there to be this big difference. And a heightened texture and a lushness to the environment. So that it's more of an impact and more meaningful. When he's fighting wasps, it's just more visceral impact. You can almost taste the texture. So because of that, we had to redo our pipeline to them, and re-outfit ourselves and our tools, enabling us to pull off some of the rendering we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So that the design of the ant world, all the tunnels and dirt and stuff, it needed to have a real tactile sense of reality to it. But the look of the ants, and the overall idea of the world, is a sort of alien civilization that we know nothing about. So when you go down there, you don't see human stuff, like it's not ants sitting at a bar: 'Sit down, kid! What can I get ya?'

JMA: You do have a watch face and stuff, but they're using it as something else...

JAD: Right. It's for scale. You see some human things, some found objects that for the ants would have some kind of significance, almost like religious significance. But they don't know what it is. It also reminds you of the size we are. I just wanted them to have their own culture and beliefs and even religion. The idea that that exists out in your front yard, this whole alien world.

JMA: The ant world is more organic, with more roundness and more bendy lines, whereas the human world is more straight and angular.

JAD: Right. That was definitely on purpose. For a while we had it more exaggerated than that and then we bent the rules. But the idea was we had a lot of flat space in the human world and deep space in the ant world. And controlling our palates too: The chroma values are kept back in the human world, so that when we go to the ant world, we pull out all the stops. We get very colorful, very saturated.

JMA: Now, were you concerned at all with the Antz and A Bug's Life factor? Those movies came out a long time ago, but...

JAD: Yeah. That was definitely something that changed the whole movie in general. 'Ants. There have been two CG movies with ants in them.' But the thing was to focus on the story. This story is so dramatically different.

JMA: Yeah, the others don't have humans in them.

JAD: The themes are very different, the looks are very different and the places they go. It felt very different. It's just like there are a lot of movies with cowboys in them!

JMA: But there's only one with dinosaurs! [The Valley of Gwangi (1969)]

JAD: For one thing, A Bug's Life looked completely different; they were bipedal. And it was a whole generation of kids ago. But it was a concern, and I tried to not even look at those films at all, but there were times when I was writing where I would go, 'Wait... did they do that?' And then I'd go back and scan through and check. I did the same thing with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids too. I was trying to think of some cool set-piece ideas. Like, it would be kind of cool if he was in his yard and a giant lawnmower came over. And I scanned through Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and 'Aww. Rats!' That happened a couple times.

JMA: Are you an animation junkie? Do you like other cartoons?

JAD: Not really. I was raised watching Warner Brothers cartoons. Occasionally at night, I'll flip by and I may watch some again. I've seen them all 40 million times, but they're great. But current animation? I don't really watch much animation. I'll go to the movies and see some of the current stuff from Pixar and other places. I really like Miyazaki quite a bit. He's my favorite. He's my favorite living animator, I think. But aside from that, I don't watch much animation on TV.

JMA: It's faster or something, the stuff made today. It's all short-attention-span.

JAD: Yeah. To me, I don't really get into that. I like stories and I like plot. Even a lot of feature-length animation, I grow a little weary of because I want more story. And even things that are well done, I go, 'Well that's cute.' But I just like plot and story. I want it to take me somewhere.

JMA: I like having a moment to breathe and a moment to look around.

JAD: That's important too because you can't keep it in any one place too long or else it becomes static. I tried to pace it so we had some intense action and a moment to catch our breath, and some action, so it's got some hills and valleys. But sometimes filmmakers make the mistake of saying, 'Well, if I just keep it all up here, with a manic pace, then I'll never let 'em go. I'll have them the whole time.' But it has the opposite effect. It just starts to wash over you. You can't hold them that long. That's why I get bored. And people go, 'How do you get bored? It's so action-packed!' Yeah, but it just stays action-packed. It doesn't really build. Half the fun is building toward something. And that's why looking at some of the films, like some of the Matrix sequels.

JMA: Don't get me started on the Matrix sequels.

JAD: I don't even know what the action sequence is about. There's no question being answered. The thing that cracked me up, is the point where he fights 4000 Mr. Smiths and then he just flies away. Well, why didn't he just fly away to begin with?

JMA: OK, since this is a family movie, you have to have a moral for the kids. And this one is about cooperation. Was that in the book?

JAD: There are some things that are in it that aren't in the book. The book was more a lesson of 'don't be a bully.' The book is really simple. There's only like 2000 words in it. It's a picture book for kids. It was definitely a situation where I had to invent a lot of things. There's no exterminator, there's no frog; there's no Fugax or Kreela or even a Zoc or a Hova. It's very simple.

JMA: I do love how you solve the bully problem at the end, having his toadies team up.

JAD: And that was a departure. We tried a few different endings. At first I kinda liked the idea that when Lucas returns to normal, he keeps some of his ant abilities. It was cool because he was not combating Steve the bully, but he was demonstrating his abilities. But it had the wrong effect; he started to become a bully himself.

JMA: But he's also trying to fit in and that's gonna make him stand out.

JAD: Yeah. So eventually it came down to: Lucas has to display the lesson he's learned about teamwork and community to rally the toadies.

JMA: Isn't that a great word, 'the toadies'?

JAD: Yeah! Right! But there are other themes in there about walking in someone else's shoes. I was researching when kids get picked on, when they get bullied. Typically what they do is that they withdraw. It's kind of embarrassing and they don't want to talk to their parents about it so they withdraw. And so outside appearances, they look like they're self-absorbed and not social, but they're just dealing with this conflict. So that's how I dialed into Lucas at the beginning.

JMA: Here's a question, and I don't mean to offend, but in so many kids movies, there seems to be a requisite number of intestinal distress jokes.

JAD: But mine were organic to the story! [Laughs]

JMA: I do have to admit, yours were quite a bit more subtle than normal...

JAD: I'm not a big fan of poop jokes and fart jokes and burp jokes because they tend to be overused, but kids love them.

JMA: They do, but I'm convinced they're funnier in real life than in the movies.

JAD: The reason that I felt comfortable with what we had in The Ant Bully, is that I was looking for a device to get Lucas out of the frog belly. He's eaten by a frog; how do I get him out of the frog belly? We need a potion that makes the frog burp!