- Hello, and welcome to a special
Q and A recording of Wolfwalkers.
One of the 50 official selection titles
at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.
My name is Kiva Reardon and I'm
the lead programmer of contemporary world cinema.
And I'm thrilled to be here with directors,
Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart.
Tomm was born in County Down, Northern Ireland
and raised in Kilkenny, Ireland.
He studied classical animation
at Ballyfermot college in Dublin
and co-founded the animation studio Cartoon Saloon.
His films include The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea,
the omnibus feature, the Prophet,
all of which screened at the festival.
And Ross is an Irish painter illustrator and animator,
his collaborations with Tomm and Cartoon Saloon
include work as art director on The Secret of Kells,
concept artist on Song of the Sea
and co-director on a segment of The Prophet
and he was also a concept artist for ParaNorman.
Wolfwalkers is his feature directorial debut.
I would also like to thank you,
our audiences for joining us here today
as an organization still impacted by COVID,
we need the support of our audiences so that we can continue
to present films to future generations.
And of course the most important part,
this film is eligible for the People's Choice Award,
and you can vote for your favorite films at tiff.net/vote.
Tomm, Ross thank you so much for joining us.
I love your setup.
It is by far the sleekest one of any of these
that I've done so far.
You know, as I mentioned in your bios there
you're familiar with TIFF.
- Oh yeah.
- You know, Cartoon Saloon work as I think,
you know, shown multiple times.
So thank you for being back, I know it's in a weird form.
- Yeah, we usually like to visit in person.
The last time I was there was for Breadwinner,
Nora's feature that I showed there a few years ago.
So maybe in the future when the virus gets under control.
But I just wanted to give a shout out,
you complimented our setup,
but we're in young Irish Filmmakers,
which was kind of our alma mater too,
we both were members of Young Irish Filmmakers as teenagers,
and they've very kindly accommodated us for this.
So just want to give them a shout out too.
- Oh, that's great and that was very kind
and it's these nice moments of generosity
that I think are carrying us through this pandemic.
I heard that there was a,
a piece on IndieWire a couple months back,
right when COVID started
that was talking about how finishing the film
had been really impacted by COVID.
Can you talk a bit about a bit about that and that process?
- Well, when the lockdown happened in Ireland,
we were just in compositing.
We were just finishing up in the other departments
and luckily enough compositing allowed us
to review everything online.
People were working from home and yeah,
it was kind of lucky that the lockdown didn't happen
in pre-production and when we needed
to be working as teams and, you know, in the studio.
So it, we just got away with it really.
- It was really right down to the wire,
we recorded the music the week before the lockdown happened
and we'd done the orchestra just before,
so we worked with the Irish band Kila,
here in Ireland, just a week before the lockdown.
And then the last bit that we did,
which was kind of interesting,
it was also a little bit of a pity,
was Aurora (indistinct) sings a song in the movie,
and she was supposed to come to Dublin
the week that the lockdown happened.
So we had to record her and she was in Bergen
in Norway and she recorded like this and it actually worked
out great, but I would have,
would have liked to have been there to hear in person,
but it was, it worked out fine.
- Can you talk a little bit more about the music as well?
I think I, I'm a big fan of,
your films and especially the animation style,
which I really wanna talk about, but I was really, yeah,
really moved by the songs and the score
in this film, can you talk a bit about
creating that musical world.
- Well, we'd worked with Bruno Coulais
on Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea,
and in both those movies, the collaboration with Kila,
which are like a traditional Irish music band,
but they kind of mix up world music and everything.
So that collaboration was really good.
So that was a natural continuation because
the movie is supposed to feel like a continuation
from those movies in terms of style visually,
and also in terms of music.
But then the idea to have the song
as a kind of, from Aurora as a kind of centerpiece
in the movie as a kind of pause point,
kinda came during story boarding.
And we kind of decided to have a little moment
where we could just see Robyn,
the main character enjoying being a wolf,
enjoying her new experience and something that was only
a half a page in the script became a kind of tent pole
for the movie and that sequence kind of became
the main sequence that we kind of worked around.
There's before the song and after the song,
in terms of how the movie and kind of plays out, I guess.
- And the way that Bruno and Kila work
is really beautiful to see, Bruno is, you know,
as an overview for the whole film
and composes everything and works with the orchestra.
But then at the end gets Kila involved
and it's much more organic,
it's more like a big jamming session.
And they come up with ideas on the spot and it's a really,
really flowing and organic and I think that's
where you got a lot of the energy, you know,
and really spontaneous creative moments in the music
in that live record at the end.
- What's really special in Wolfwalkers is we finally,
we had so many crowds,
which is quite daunting in terms of animation,
but we were able to put lots of cameos in,
so there's caricatures of Ross and myself
but also at one point in the early part of the movie,
there was a load of buskers playing on the street
and they're actually all members of Kila.
So most of Kila are represented in animation form
on screen if you watch out for it.
- Is that the first time that you've done that
in any of your films?
- Yeah, they've never shown up
in any of the films, in the previous films
we had little guest stars here
and there in the background.
- Yeah.
Sometimes we caricature some members of the crew
and they end up in the background,
our friends who helped out and stuff.
But this was the first time we had an opportunity
to basically put everyone in
'cause there's so many crowds and it's pretty
hard work to animate so many crowds,
but it's more fun if you add in
a few friends and families and so forth.
- I was gonna ask you a bit about the, I guess,
the visual style of the animation,
which I was reading an interview
and it was described as a pre-celtic megalithic art,
and then, you know, mashed with like studio Ghibli.
And I just love that combination
and yeah, I just would love to hear
more about that world and the continuation
as you were saying through to this one.
- Well, I'd say,
I'd say the visual style is probably
like Tomm was saying that this is like a,
a truly third of film in a trilogy
and the visual style in Secret of Kells
and the visual style in Song of the Sea
are kind of in the same ballpark
and then Wolfwalkers would be a continuation of that.
So a lot of the ideas that we would have formed in the first
two films is carried on in this,
but I think what we really wanted to explore
in Wolfwalkers was
the two contrasting styles,
you know, like Robyn and the town is a very austere
kind of like woodblock, you know, hard-edged, angular
in style and then everything connected
with the forest and Mebh
it's very sketchy and organic and loose and curved.
And so there's a huge contrast there and that was,
I think the big challenge in this one
compared to the others.
- And it was also an opportunity to do a lot of stuff
that we wanted to do in previous films
that we weren't able to do for different reasons
and now we had such an experienced crew and we had a couple
of the movies under our belt,
we just wanted to try, throw everything at it
and make a big triple decker sandwich of all the
visual language that we'd played with before,
so I hope people who enjoyed the first two movies,
will recognize that we've really gone to town on this one.
But being able to use the different ways of drawing
the characters or drawing the backgrounds
as part of the storytelling was something that first
came to us as an idea when we saw
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.
I actually saw it in TIFF
and at the time I was doing interviews like this,
telling everyone that I thought hand drawn animation
had a language that was expressive and could communicate
something that computer generated animation couldn't.
And then I saw Kaguya and I kind of was knocked backwards
and realized, oh, this guy like Takahata,
had gone even further than I'd even imagined.
And so we took that as a starting point that we wanted to be
as expressive and as sketchy and to use everything
that hand drawn animation could do to help tell the story.
So hopefully we got close to Ghibli level.
- I personally think you did.
In terms of the story, when did you,
when did you land on this, I mean, as you said,
the dichotomy of Kilkenny where you both grew up
and the world of the wolves and Mebh's world,
can you just talk a bit about that process
and how this story came to be?
- Well, Tomm and myself came up with the basic bones
of the story years ago,
six or seven years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago,
a long time ago, anyway.
And even in the initial concepts,
there was this contrast of two worlds that Robyn comes
from this quite austere world of rules where, you know,
she's oppressed and she's forced into a position
that doesn't allow her much freedom and then meets Mebh
along the journey and is exposed to this natural world
where you follow your instincts,
you're allowed to be here, you want to be and be free.
And so it made sense for the visual style
to follow those two worlds, you know,
to reinforce the fact that in the town,
it looks like a cage, there's lots of bars
and lots of things trapping her
and then out in the forest, you know, she can
it's got energy, it's got instinct, it's loose.
So the story evolved
in the same kind of path and at the same process of
as the visual style, you know.
- I think what was interesting for me was that
we kind of had the idea to treat the puritans
and the English people coming over in a more geometric way
and a looser kind of more,
let's say Kaguya approach to the wolves
and the wolfwalkers.
But it was only during research that we saw that in 1645,
around the time the movie was set
that the kind of propaganda that was being pumped out
was these woodblock prints, they were like these, you know,
it was the fake news of the day, right,
kind of like journalism.
And so it was kind of cool to take some inspiration
from those pamphlets, those woodblock pamphlets.
And so we even went as far as having it that, you know,
if you do a print and then it moves a little bit,
the colors can be a little bit offset,
so we even have the characters sometimes
have the color a little bit outside the lines and stuff
to make it look like it's a very cheap,
quick, woodblock print effect, you know,
so we were able to push our original idea
even further based on our research.
- That's incredible, I know exactly what you mean
by those woodblocks too.
- Yeah.
- And now that you've said that can see
it in the film as well, yeah.
- Yeah.
Yeah, so the town is all kind of a geometric
and as if it's been printed over and over again,
so there's a kind of, a little bit
of a fade in the texture and stuff.
So that's why I hope people get to see it on the big screen
as much as possible because we put so much
love into. - Yeah.
- Well, if you watch it on a good screen at home,
you'll be all right.
- Yeah, oh yeah, maybe everyone can be investing in,
you know, at home projectors and the like.
- Yeah, I have a projector at home
now and it's pretty good,
yeah, they're getting better.
- And in terms of casting,
I mean the two young girls are so incredible and I also just
really loved their friendship as well,
it's such an unlikely one, but becomes so, so beautiful.
And then of course you just with
the star power is that you, you know, Sean Bean
as the Hunter, as Robyn's father,
can you talk a bit about casting and finding those,
finding those, the right voices really?
- Sean Bean was easy, 'cause we were doing his voice
as we were drawing him.
Like we were sitting there doing our terrible Sean Bean
Game of Thrones impersonation as we.
- Could you maybe do that for us right now?
- I really, I don't think I could live with myself.
- It would be insulting to Sean Bean.
- Yeah, we would say things like, one does not simply ask
Sean Bean to be the main character
in your character and stuff.
- But he's got a great accent.
- Yeah.
- And it fitted the character of Bill perfectly
'cause they come from the North of England over
so it kind of had to be Sean Bean or I dunno who we would
have gotten if we couldn't have gotten Sean Bean.
- Someone doing a Sean Bean impersonation.
But then Honor is from Cambridge,
so she's kind of got a South of England accent naturally,
but she did her audition tape with a Northern English accent
and blew us away, we were so surprised
that she wasn't actually from somewhere up north.
But some things.
- That was good. That was good.
- Yeah, I was impressed by it.
- Yeah (mumbles).
- But then Sean would say things sometimes
to help her when we were recording, which was nice.
'Cause she's an amazing young actor, I mean she's already
been in so many things
and she does a pretty good accent,
but a few things, she was getting wrong,
so he would kind of coach her on the accent,
which was amazing.
And we were really lucky with Honor,
but that she was available because she's in so much demand.
But the real kind of discovery for us is Eva,
who hadn't actually acted before.
- Oh wow.
- I remember Ross first heard her, yeah.
Ross first heard her audition and was just like, this is it.
- Yeah, she has this amazing energy
and her voice has this kind of huskiness
as if she's been roaring all her life.
So yeah, she just jumped out in the casting tapes
as just having the right energy and she does
an amazing growl and then what we were really surprised in,
in the actual recording was that she was able to reach these
depths where she was crying, you know
over the loss of her mother and it just.
- Yeah, so talented.
- It had hairs standing up in the back of your neck,
she was really talented, yeah. - She was only like
eight years old, which always blows me away
whenever we cast kids,
because think about how long it takes
to produce an animation,
but when we first had the first idea
and we were first writing it, she was a baby.
And so she was just at the right age,
at the right time to record the voice.
And of course, by now she must be 11 or 12
because it takes so long to make the movie,
but she was just so talented
and it was great to work with her.
And then Simon McBurney as Oliver Cromwell
as Lord Protector was, yeah, I think that was
a kind of a glitzy story, how we met him,
he was at the premiere of The Breadwinner,
he was a guest of Angelina Jolie and they'd been in a movie
together or Brad Pitt and him had been in a movie together
and Nora met him at the premiere,
I wasn't even there in London
and she came back saying, oh, I found your Lord Protector,
this guy is gonna be perfect.
And of course we realized that he was a kind of character
actor who specialized in evil, British baddies,
so yeah he will be perfect.
- He really got to play one of the biggest
evil British baddies.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
- Well, it's been this,
I guess now it's been over a decade since, well,
at least The Secret of the Kells premiere in 2009.
- Yeah.
- And now this is, as you were saying, kind of the final,
the final triptych. - Triptych, yeah.
- Or the final piece of the,
of the triptych, what's that like,
what's this, you know, journey been like,
and now that we're here?
- It would be more satisfying if it was,
if we were in Toronto and really,
it would be so nice to have had that kind of circles,
but I feel good, I feel like we put a lot
into this to really sign off on a good note
and I'm sure lots of echoes of the stuff
we discovered and evolved in terms of style and themes
from these movies will continue into what we do next.
But I think I feel pretty happy with it.
- Yeah and then to watch,
to look at the three films in succession,
you can see the evolution of style.
- Yeah.
- And everything for ourselves too.
I think, it's just, maybe it's just a pity
that animated films take so long because you know,
The Secret of Kells started when we were.
- In our early twenties.
- Yeah.
- So yeah,
- It seems like (indistinct).
- It feels like our entire career has been these movies,
but we've done things in between.
- Yeah.
- But I also feel like our personal style
and the themes that we wanted to explore
have matured over the movies.
So one of the things we had to be careful of actually was
not getting too sympathetic to the Sean Bean character
as we became middle-aged men.
So to try and remember it was a movie
for kids about kids.
- Yeah, considering our scriptwriter,
Will Collins is also.
- Our age, yeah.
- A middle aged man too,
so you have three middle aged men
and naturally, we're going to totally,
oh what would Bill do?
- Yeah, we were totally sympathetic to the dad character.
- And then we're, this is not about Bill.
- But thankfully there's plenty of young nieces and nephews
and people like that to keep us on track.
- Oh, well, I really wish that you could be here as well.
Yeah, it's been a lovely thing that TIFF
has been able to be a,
you know, a small part of so many of.
- Oh, a small part, yeah.
- Of the films.
- So yeah, thank you so much for being here
and for taking the time.
Yeah, Tomm, Ross, we really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you so much.
- I want to say hi to my Canadian friends and family
who might be watching this,
it's a pity I'm not there with you,
but if you can see this online, hi.