Brad Bird Explains Why He Didn’t Pitch ‘Ray Gunn’ to Pixar

Cinematic history is filled with famous auteurs’ white whales, the dream projects they spent years trying to manifest on screen. Some of these, like Guillermo del Toro’s “At the Mountain of Madness,” never come to fruition. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” arrive in theaters as weird curiosities or admirable failures audiences don’t quite know how to respond to. As Brad Bird prepares for the release of his long-awaited passion project, animated sci-fi noir “Ray Gunn,” he’s well-aware of the precedent other decades-in-the-making movies have set — but he’s still confident people will love his.

“There is a weird history with people that have dream projects, and the track record is not particularly good,” Bird told IndieWire ahead of the June 23 Annecy Film Festival showcase of “Ray Gunn,” which premieres on Netflix in December. “So people are like, ‘Ugh, a dream project.’ The truth of the matter is there are great ideas that don’t get made for one reason or another. It can have to do with timing, chemistry. It’s about the blend of ingredients. I’ve never seen this particular blend of ingredients before.”

Bird’s blend of ingredients is, on the surface, of a familiar flavor to anyone who has seen his previous work, from “The Iron Giant” and “The Incredibles” to his 2015 live action feature “Tomorrowland.” Set in a retro-futuristic world that pulls heavily from art deco aesthetics, the CG animated “Ray Gunn” doesn’t look dissimilar to his Pixar films, but Bird is pulling from a different set of sources than the superhero stories that inspired “The Incredibles.”

Sam Rockwell voices the title character, Ray Gunn, a small-time private eye in a city inhabited by humans and aliens alike, as he and his sidekick Eyera (Tom Waits) get roped into a job that puts him in the orbit of the mysterious Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a world famous pop star with scandals waiting to be uncovered. It’s a mix of “The Maltese Falcon” and “Buck Rogers,” and it’s a film that Bird describes adamantly as a crowd-pleaser, something meant to go with “popcorn and Coca-Cola.”

“When people were like ‘I don’t get it,’ All I can say is, ‘You and I probably shouldn’t go to a movie together,'” Bird said of his experiences pitching the film. “Clearly, we’re gonna have a different experience. If you don’t see that’s good popcorn stuff, I got no help for you.”

‘Ray Gunn’Skydance Animation/Netflix

As Bird tells it, the genesis for “Ray Gunn” began when he saw a trailer for the 1989 TV movie “Peter Gunn,” a reboot of a private eye series that aired on CBS and ABC from 1958 to 1961. From the title, he came up with the pun “Ray Gunn,” and started envisioning a film that married the noir detective stories of the ’30s and ’40s with a vision of the future — or at least, what people of the ’30s and ’40s thought the future would look like. He wrote a script for the film in the ’90s with Matthew Robbins, and spent the next 30 years, on-and-off, looking to get the film made, even as he went on to direct “The Iron Giant” and “The Incredibles.”

So why did this idea have such a hold on Bird through the years? As he admits himself, it appeals to his inner child, the one who loved classic film noir — with its mid-century fashion, sullen leads, and snappy comebacks — and retro sci-fi. He drew plenty from his favorite movies while making the film: one villain is as a an alien take on Peter Lorre’s menacing Joel Cairo from “The Maltese Falcon” — a movie he calls “extreme in the best way” — and other classics like “Out of the Past,” “The Big Sleep” (“I can’t tell you completely what’s going on, but it’s a blast”) for inspiration while shaping the story. The most recent film he looked to was “Chinatown,” even asking late screenwriter Robert Towne questions about writing a mystery film for some advice.

“It’s just fun for me. How can that not be a blast? I’m sounding like a two-year-old when I saw that but that’s kind of how I feel about it,” Bird said. “Movies are a place for mechanized dreams. The technology you use to make them is quirky and complicated, but what you’re doing is very much in the spirit of an inquisitive child. You’re speaking dream language.”

When Bird finally got the greenlight to make “Ray Gunn” in 2021, he did so not at Pixar, where he had his biggest hit with “The Incredibles,” but at Skydance Animation. It was a move that saw him re-team with former Pixar head John Lasseter, and he brought plenty of people who worked on “The Iron Giant” and “The Incredibles” — composer Michael Giacchino, editor Darren T. Holmes, and storyboard artist Jeffrey Lynch among them — on to his team. A self-admitted believer in “the old fashioned notion of eye contact” and “one of those lousy guys that would prefer to get everyone under one roof,” Bird also made an effort to minimize remote work for his first post-pandemic film, scheduling the majority of production at Cinesite Studio in Montreal and getting several key people to the film to work in-house.

Despite the shared DNA “Ray Gunn” has with his Pixar films in terms of the creative team, Bird never pitched the film to the studio. With its noir sensibilities and elder protagonists, “Ray Gunn” is viewed by Bird, who is still involved at Pixar in writing the script for the third “Incredibles” film, as a chance to appeal to an audience slightly beyond the children Pixar appeals to, and avoid compromising on his vision for the project.

“I wanted it to go to a slightly different audience, and I wanted there to be a huge amount of overlap, obviously. The Pixar audience is wide, and I love that, and I love working with Pixar,” Bird said. “I wanted to make this a little bit different flavor wise, and that’s why I didn’t pitch it at Pixar. Because they have their lane, and I can get down with that lane, but I don’t see this movie going down that lane. I wanted to aim it a little older. Not majorly older, teenager is fine. But make something a little more adult and major.”

“I think it’s maybe gonna change some people’s minds about animation,” he added. “It can do nuanced, complicated things in a fun fashion.”

‘Ray Gunn’Skydance Animation

With the release for “Ray Gunn,” Bird is achieving his dream to make the movie he wants with few compromises. One of the few, though, is the size of the screen the majority of audiences will see the Netflix release on. (This interview was conducted before The Wrap reported that there was a failed bid for “Ray Gunn” to receive the IMAX window Netflix’s upcoming “Narnia” film left vacant after a delay.) As of now, no official theatrical run for “Ray Gunn” has been announced, but Bird is well aware the film will mostly be watched by people at home on the streamer. And while he encourages audiences to watch it on “whatever size screen you can manage, get it as big as you can and turn that sound up,” he also said that it’s a compromise that sometimes needs to get made for original ideas to make it beyond dreams and into reality.

“It’s a challenge to get original ideas backed. We live in a time where for whatever reason, repeating yourself is rewarded and doing something new is not,” Bird said. “Everyone seems to forget that all the stuff you were repeating, at one time, was new and maybe you need to do more new things.”

“I have nothing but warm feelings towards Netflix because they backed this film, they took a chance on it, and they gave me tremendous resources. If they say, ‘You know, we’d like to experiment with theatrical,’ I’d be the first one to go, ‘Can I volunteer to be your guinea pig?'” he added. “They’ve accepted me in my theatrical ways, and I would hope that as many people as possible could see this film on a giant screen. It really rewards it.”

Netflix will release “Ray Gunn” on December 18.