Brad Bird Takes 'Ray Gunn' to Skydance: Adult Animation 'Shouldn't Be a Controversial Decision'

Brad Bird's "Ray Gunn," an animated noir detective caper three decades in the making, will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10 and reach Netflix on Dec. 18 — as a Skydance Animation production, not a Pixar one.

Bird, the director of "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles," said he never even pitched the project to his longtime studio. "I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn't in Pixar's wheelhouse exactly," he told Variety in an interview a day before the premiere. "If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, 'Oh well, it's meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,' and inevitably some of them would go, 'Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.'"

Why Skydance and not Pixar?

Bird argues the industry makes "10 billion animated films" for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, despite adults comprising the majority of the movie-going audience. Making animated films for them "shouldn't be a controversial decision," Bird said, "and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation [at Pixar]."

Skydance saw it differently. "My thought when [they] got involved was that they'll go with me on this slightly different audience tangent," Bird said. "And here it is." The film also reunited him with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, now head of Skydance Animation. Skydance CEO David Ellison, a producer on the film, "was more involved in the earlier days," Bird noted, before his plate filled up — an oblique reference to Ellison's battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Bird declined to speculate on whether Ellison will honor his pledge of at least 30 theatrical films a year: "All that stuff is beyond my pay grade."

Where did 'Ray Gunn' come from?

Bird first conceived the idea after hearing The B-52s' song "Planet Claire," which struck him as a mash-up of the 1960s detective series theme "Peter Gunn" and "a '50s monster sci-fi movie." "I went, 'This is not "Peter Gunn." What is this?' And then I went, 'It's Ray-Gun.' And then I went, 'Ray Gunn: It's a guy's name. He's a detective, but it's in the future,'" Bird recalled.

The idea got shelved while Bird made "Ratatouille," "The Incredibles 2," "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol" and "Tomorrowland," and it fell through at other studios including Warner Bros. Bird, who describes his mind as a "big shop floor," returned to "tinker" with it over the years. His successful turn on "Mission: Impossible" — Skydance's second film — opened the door to the pitch.

Who made the music?

At Abbey Road Studios in London last April, a 74-piece orchestra recorded the score in Studio One under Bird's longtime collaborator Michael Giacchino, who won an Oscar for Pixar's "Up" in 2010. "Ray Gunn" is the pair's sixth project since "The Incredibles" in 2004. "We talked about this movie during 'The Incredibles,'" Giacchino said. "I've known about this for a very long time."

For Giacchino, the challenge was withholding clues from the audience: "making sure everything was always in alignment thematically, so that I didn't give the audience something that they shouldn't be thinking about." The toughest cue, he said, was an intimate scene between the detective Gunn (voiced by Sam Rockwell) and superstar singer Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), which "needed to really hit every single emotional beat in this perfect way."

Bird says the screenplay changed "less than you'd think" from its late-1990s first draft, and its themes of art, technology and corporate greed have only grown more timely. "People are people and greed is greed and the flaws of people make good subject material for films," he said. "If that's what's driving the story, then the story's not going to age because it's about eternal things rather than things that were in the news last week."

Bird's next project returns him to Pixar: a third "Incredibles" movie.