Chatting with Gore Verbinski about ‘Rango’

You may be familiar with a guy named Gore Verbinski.

Besides having a really cool name, he’s the director who’s responsible for the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies (he’s opted out of the fourth one — you’ll see why in the interview below), cinematic fare like The Ring and is working on bringing The Lone Ranger to the big screen.

With his newest venture, Rango (in theaters Friday, March 4), Verbinski tackles something new to him: the world of animation.

Under the umbrella of Paramount Pictures, Verbinski worked with the folks from Industrial Light & Magic to release an animated film — a first for both. The movie follows a quirky and earnest little chameleon in a Hawaiian shirt (voiced by Johnny Depp) who stumbles into a Western town plagued by a water shortage and tries his darndest to play the role of a hero. In essence, he just wants to have a sense of belonging.

“It’s an identity quest,” says Verbinski. “(He’s) a character trying to figure out who he is.”

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Verbinski more about his foray into the animation world.

How did the story of Rango come about?

We created the story from scratch. It was myself and five artists. We were all in a house in Pasedena for 16 months basically drawing every frame and recording voices in a story reel — which is basically the equivalent of a screenplay in animation. In 2003, I had a rough outline of the narrative — basically a Western with creatures in the desert and an outsider with an identity crisis. I went off to do some Pirates films and it incubated over time. After the third Pirates film, I wanted to focus on it.

Considering this is your first time working in the film of this nature, what were the pros and cons of working in animation versus live-action film?

Nothing is intuitive — nothing happens in real time. It takes months before you see a shot rendered and you’re just doing endless iterations. It’s difficulty to respond intuitively. Everything is conceived. There’s a tremendous capacity for things to get clinical or homogenized in the process. We tried to keep it as raw as possible when we recorded the actors — or any time we had the opportunity to do something we could intuitively respond to. The pros are that there is no pre-production, production, post-production — it’s really the whole thing. You’re in the edit room constantly working on the narrative — if you feel like you need a close-up, you create one.

That’s interesting — so it was kind of like you’re playing God?

Yeah (laughs) — when you’re orchestrating live-action, you’re able to witness something and capture it. In this case, we were trying to get to a place where you would feel like there was a 5 foot 8 lizard talking to a tortoise and I had a camera and I was capturing that. We had to create that feeling from scratch.

You acted out the movie with the actors like a play — how was it like doing that?

It was something we do in live-action, so why abandon that technique? You have a lot of actors and it seems absurd not to have them act and react to one another. When I heard that in animation that they are in a booth reading lines, I thought that was really strange.

The movie has a cast of characters that are — how should I put this — not so cuddly.

Not cute…

Yeah — there are a lot of vermin and rodents in there. How do you think this works in the movie’s favor?

We talked early on about not pursuing a photo reality but more of an emotional reality. That meant pursuing a tremendous amount of detail so you don’t end up with the “12 expressions:” happy, sad, worried, doubtful — you kind of (have) expressions in animation that characterize emotions. We wanted a muscle spasm under the eye to show that they are nervous. Things like hair follicles and translucency of skin — the real detail to have a complex emotional language instead of the basic expressions.

So that explains the non-cuteness…

I don’t get any history from “cute” — it feels very boring to me. Asymmetry is so much more interesting. I am a fan of the Western genre where maybe a peripheral character pulls the boots off a dead guy, I feel like there’s a whole movie behind that character. I mean, we got a rabbit with a missing ear and you ask, “why?” He wasn’t created just for this movie. Before he entered this story, he had his own story. It gives you a sense of depth behind all the characters.

So where do you think the characters would be 10 years after the movie ended?

In an institution. (laughs). It’s funny — with our posse, we tried to model them around One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — in the spirit that each of them own a different piece of the pie. Sometimes in an animated film, you come across a town and everybody is a pig. With this, every individual creature is different. If you have an hour, I can tell you where each one is…

Let’s just focus on Rango…

With Rango, I think he’s settled in. He’s had his epiphany. He created something false, built a suit he didn’t fit into and now he wears it.

Overall, how was the whole process of directing your first animated feature?

It’s nice to try things that you’re not sure you can do — it’s a basis of my decision-making process. I didn’t make a fourth Pirates film because it doesn’t scare me anymore. You kind of start to get too comfortable. You’re no longer growing. You need to keep trying new things.