EXCLUSIVE: Despicable Me Interview with Producer Chris Meledandri

Truthfully, as I was going into the press preview for Despicable Me I didn't know what to expect. I had heard that it was about a supervillain voiced by Steve Carell, but the first couple teasers gave us no indication what the movie was going to be about, and it wasn't until the last trailer (after I had already seen the movie) that we get a little more detail showing villainous Gru and the girls that he adopts. So, I went into the theater somewhat oblivious, but came out pleasantly surprised.

"It's about supervillain who is in the midst of trying to pull off the greatest heist in the history of civilization--which is to steal the moon, and cement his position as the world's greatest supervillain, when he unexpectedly crosses paths with three extremely willful little girls who view him in an entirely different light than anybody else has ever seen him, and his life begins to unexpectedly transform. He is a character who delights in the wicked, and we've taken the notion of an anti-hero and made the antagonist into the protagonist. It is also, at its core, about the battle of wills and the discovery that he makes that what is really missing in his life is love. That really fills this hole that he discovers he has, but he fights it the whole way."

"The development process is a very intensive process, and only allows us to develop a very few projects at one time. And it really happens two ways. It's frequently the genesis of an idea driven by internal development. Such as Ice Age, where I had a small team at Fox, and that team was charged with exploring ideas that could lend themselves to becoming an animated film. That core team started with the notion of a setting, a story that takes place with a backdrop in the Ice Age, and it started from there. Or, in the case of Despicable Me, a very fine Spanish animator named Sergio Pablos who had worked at Disney for years had created the core story, and he had drawn 15-20 images of his version of Gru, and had the idea of this guy who delighted in the wicked, and this guy who was trying to pull off these villainous acts--including stealing the moon. And Sergio had, really in those 15-20 images, had really defined the core narrative and essense of the film. So, occasionally somebody can bring a story that comes from the character standpoint. That is what I look at first. Is there a core character that I find compelling, that audiences, and not just american audiences but international audiences, are going to find interesting, appealing, compelling, and if you have a great idea for a character and you think that character can translate to a distinctive visual expression, and we were fortunate to have Carter Goodrich come on and desing the characters, then the story comes next. But in this case Sergio had brought me the core idea of the character (Gru) as well as the core idea for the beginning, middle and end of the story. Then the story evolved and our writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio took it in many new directions, but that core foundation came from Sergio."

"I think that it will last, but I think there will be a distinction made by the audience between movies that are truly produced with a deliberate artistic 3D expression that is organic to the filmmakers vision--The storytelling, verses films that are obviously trying to cash in on a craze. I don't know when the audience will start making that decision, but you can feel it percolating already. All CG animation really lends itself organically to this creative extention of a 3D version because artists are creating these movies in dimensional digital space, so when you bring the 3d team into it its a very fluid creative extension of the process that is already occuring. That is not to say that somebody won't do a brilliant post production conversion, but Jim Cameron has set the bar extremely high and a lot of filmmakers are very aware of and very protective of the introduction of 3D that is a truly organic part of the process, as opposed to just converting a film because there's some short term box office benefit to it.