Epic Chris Wedge Interview

(dramatic music) - Hi Chris, how are you? - Good, how are you? - I'm good. I'm Penny McLean with FlickDirect and I wanna tell you I love your movie. - Oh, thank you. - I actually, I was just fascinated of how colorful and imaginative and the details are just amazing. - Keep going. - And I think that I need to see it again and again. - Yeah, I'd say so.

- And I'm telling everyone about it and I'm so proud that you made it. Tell me about it. - Well, Epic is, it's a story that takes place in the forest and the forest looks to us the way it normally does, but in our movie, Superimposed, on our world is another one. And it's a world where life and decay are always in conflict and fighting for life, and there's a lot of little characters that are called leaf men that are about two inches tall and they're like little samurai warriors that ride around on hummingbirds and shoot through the forest and they fight off bad guys, we call them Bagans, and they ride on bats and things like that.

So that's just the setting for a story where we introduce dozens of characters that have storylines that interweave, including a human who thinks that maybe they're out there and trouble not seeming crazy to everybody in his family, including his daughter who's in the movie who comes home to try to form a relationship with this guy that should see how crazy he is and ends up getting pulled into the world.

- Tell me about the characters. You have such an eclectic cast from a lot of musicians that are in there. And how did you go about picking out your cast? - Well, you always go character by character and try to think of the best voice for that character. And each one's a separate, a whole separate journey. For some of these characters, I wanted tried and true screen actors that I knew I could get emotional range from some of the characters I knew I wanted comedic voices.

So Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd, Jason Sudeikis. For the dramatic actors, Colin Farrell and Amanda Seyfried and Josh Hutcherson, Christoph Waltz. - Love them. - And then for some of the other ones, in the middle of the movie, there's a larger than life kind of Bonnevente character that, you know, Stephen Tyler's voice was great for. - Amazing. - There's a great fun little, there's a kind of a frog character that's kind of a small town kind of racketeer, I guess.

And Pitbull's voice sounded great on him. And then we have a very magical queen of the forest. She's the life of the forest. And I wanted a contemporary, iconic personality for that one. And I thought, oh, maybe Beyonce, let's go get her. - Now, how did you, for directing and writing, you're such, you're great at both. So what drove you to making "Epic" in the beginning?

What was the first thoughts of this new magical world? - The first thought was the world. The first thought was going to this place. And I just thought it would be fun to go and live in there, you know, be this tall and see what the world looks like in the forest. It would look like another planet, maybe. I just loved that notion. There's so much animation out there, so many stories and so many movies that it's hard these days to come up with a new world to go to, one that we haven't been to, one that doesn't cross over other movies.

And so I thought long and hard of it, long and hard on it. And I've been around for a while, so I did think for a long time about it. And, you know, this is what we came up with. It's what we started with. - Did you draw on anything from when you were younger? Like when you were a little boy laying on the grass, looking up or looking down and seeing anything that you took from your past?

- You know, I love that perspective that when we're adults, we just don't get anymore, and that's just lying in the grass. I mean, you know how everything on Earth smells. You know how grass smells. You know some pretty weird things smell. (laughing) It was 'cause you were on your hands and knees as a kid, you know, exploring the world and getting up really close to it.

And I think it's inspiring to think about that. And I'm sure that, you know, there were experiences when I was younger that I'm drawing on, because part of all of this is, you know, we put magic in our movie, but there's magic out there in the forest. There's magic in nature. When you just walk out there and you just stop for a minute, just the breeze and the leaves and the trees and the bird that was sitting here just decides to go over there.

And all this is happening without us thinking about it, but it's always happening. - Well, you made a beautiful film, and where should we go to check out "Epic" through FlickDirect? Where should we count down? - You should count down at Movie Clock. - Awesome, well, thank you. - It's been coming down for a year. We're almost there. - That's right. Well, I wish you the best, and I can't wait to see what's more coming in the future for you.

- Thank you. - I appreciate that. - Thanks for coming. - Thank you.