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Q&A with Michael Morris, Andrea Riseborough, Marc Maron, and Andre Royo

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of To Leslie.

Inspired by true events, this script was written by Ryan Binaco as a love letter to his mother. Michael, how did the script find its way to you?

Michael Morris: Ryan wrote this script and had been brought up by a version of Leslie. But it’s important to note that Leslie, as embodied by Andrea [Riseborough] in the film, is not Ryan’s mother. This is very much a film and a character that was built by Andrea in every beat of the film. Ryan wrote this script to try and understand his mother, and the pain she dealt with, often by herself, and to work through the pain he had growing up without his mother for much of his young life. It came to me through Arlie [Day], our producer and casting director. What I like to think she saw it in for me was that the great subject of the film was empathy. It’s about how to look at other people’s lives and experiences uncolored by any sense of judgment. I wanted to make a film that explores that before you even get into the story and the relationships. That was the guiding principle. Here’s a woman with agency to make things and destroy things, like we all have. The film is not going to judge her for making choices.

The film is not going to judge her for making choices

Andrea, I read that you were in character for the entire time. What is it like to live something like that?

Andrea Riseborough: One of the greatest gifts about this sort of work is to get as specific as possible with someone’s life. Moment to moment, point to point, in “Leslie’s” life, I knew where she was born, I knew where she went to school, the textures that she saw, the feelings that she had. Texas is such a vast state and it’s interesting that this story didn’t spring from Texas, but it really lends itself to being from Texas. I think the power of the story is that so many of us have been touched by alcoholism in some way. Texas is elusive in the sense that it’s different from place to place. Massively. And it’s huge. It was really interesting to learn about the places that Michael and I decided our Leslie would be from. I had a great advantage since I had worked in Texas a few times before. We shot in the height of the pandemic, while things were alienatingly grim. It was a difficult time for all of us, because despite being surrounded by people on set we were divorced from any real intimacy. That was sort of perfect for me while I was playing Leslie, because it reflected her life. She was surrounded by people in a bar, and those people are so close but she’s unable to engage with the consistency and intimacy that closer relationships bring. I wasn’t able to go back to Texas during that time. I generally map out a life by being there geographically for some time. Often we shoot things that aren’t real. I think the production designer and the whole team did such an amazing job with the shoot and I’ve spoken to journalists in Texas about this. They did such an authentic job of realizing this vast, vast state in some of its loneliest parts.

Marc, we know you more from your comedic work. How did you approach this role? You beautifully balance out Leslie in your scenes together.

Marc Maron: When I was first asked to do this, I thought Michael had misdialed on the phone. I couldn’t understand how he saw me as this guy, Sweeney. But he was pretty persistent, and he had Chelsea Handler call me, which is scary. She said he really wants you to do this, and when I finally asked him why, he said he liked my work on my television show. I think the last season of that show particularly resonated with him, where I played a guy who relapses on drugs. Although I’m a comic, I’m a pretty hypersensitive, aggravated, serious guy, as a lot of us are. I was also very threatened by the accent. I told Michael that I can’t do that, and he said don’t worry about the accent. But of course, if I’m going to act at all, I should learn the accent. I worked with a coach, and it was a Lubbock accent. Apparently, some people believe there are no accents in Texas. I grew up in New Mexico—I know there are Texan accents. Lubbock seemed manageable. And it was very odd because the coach directed me to watch YouTube videos of Mac Davis, the singer and songwriter from the 70s. So I put that in place. But in terms of the role, and balancing out Leslie… I have a certain history with sobriety, with co-dependency and caring about people in trouble. There’s a certain zone emotionally where you either get drawn in and destroyed by people who are destructive or you balance it out with your empathy and own personal boundaries. And you can handle whatever emotional struggle they’re in because it’s not specifically yours and you care about them. So that dynamic was familiar to me. And because Andrea is so specific in those behaviors, I felt like I knew these people. There was a way for me to stay open in the empathy for her and have love for her despite the problems she was going through. Not all of it was healthy co-dependency. I’m not sure how a story like theirs unfolds in the long term. But in the period of the movie, I was emotionally invested in trying to take care of Leslie in the very specific way that I was able. I was not going to save her, but I could give her a job, I could be emotionally supportive. I don’t think my character— who had his own beat-up history—thought that he could necessarily save her, but he could do what he could do.

Andre, you have limited scenes in the film but you make such an impact with your time on screen. How did see Royal?

Andre Royo: With Covid, my memories are all a big blur. I don’t know when I got the script, but I do remember being scared about being creative again. I couldn’t go outside to hang out, or to work. I read the script. I love storytelling, and I love the human experience. I didn’t think I was right for the part, at all. I remember writing Michael and I just took a shot in the dark and told him how much I liked the script. I thought the script showed no judgment and it was honest. I knew Andrea was going to play the lead and I’m a fan. I figured at least she’d do her thing and try to get it right! The whole script is about trying, about giving it your best shot even if you don’t know if it’s going to work. Growing up in New York, I got blinded so I didn’t see people except those that were going to benefit me or were in my circle. Then as I got older, I learned how important it is just to look at someone and to let them know that they are being seen. And I wanted Royal to always look at Leslie and see her. To say, I see you, I see your choices, I see what you’re doing. I can be here for you if you want, or not. But I’m always going to be here for you as a person. You deserve that, no matter what. You deserve to be looked at as a human being. That’s the only way I can help you out, because everything else you need to do on your own. I’m doing Hare Krishna, I’m dancing in my underwear, I’m doing what I can do for myself to feel good. And if it’s the bottle with Leslie, then no judgment. I want you to know that I’m going to stay out of your way but I will look at you and acknowledge you as a human being.

Those are all really thoughtful reflections on your characters.

Michael Morris: I think you saw in those three answers just how much these guys bring to the table. There is almost no exposition in the film. This is done very deliberately. We wanted history to come in the scenes. I didn’t want someone explaining all the things that happened. You find out later that Royal owns the place, you find out later than Sweeney had his own relationship with addiction, but in the moment, the history exists in these characters trying to figure each other out. And with these three characters, they’re really the only relationship in the film that doesn’t have history with each other the way the rest of the town does. Royal sort of knows of Leslie from back in the day, but Sweeney is really trying to figure her out for the first time. That’s a really important flavor in the movie because everyone else has specific memories of times Leslie has screwed them over. But we never say that. I wanted to point out that as a director, and as a huge admirer of the script Ryan wrote, that these actors bring that history. Marc answered your question about how he played this with an answer about his life. Andre answered the same way. Andrea and I talked about friends of hers that grew up in the north of England, friends who meant something to her relationship to this role. All of which is to say, an actor isn’t someone who says lines and stands in a certain place. An actor is someone who brings their entire history and experiences to a role and is somehow able to harness them into a specific moment.

Andrea Riseborough: I think one of the great gifts I’ve come away with from playing Leslie is thinking there but for the grace of God go I. To spend such an extraordinary amount of time in that spiritual emptiness and carrying that spiritual emptiness and having in my own life watched it in others while desperately wanting to fill that hole for them and being entirely unable. Michael was probably in this process for three years, and I had been in it for quite some time, so Leslie had been subconsciously brewing with me for years. But when it came to that 6-8 week stretch we had towards the end of 2020, this huge catharsis of committing all these characters to screen, I came out of the end of it feeling like I had swum twenty miles and reached a rock. And I felt gratitude for the rock. And I felt gratitude for stepping back into the remnants of my own psychology. And for the respect that I had for what Leslie had been through. It was a great gift in that I felt like I understand a lot of people far more thoroughly in my life having played Leslie.

Q&A with Pierre Perifel, Luc Desmarchelier and Marc Maron

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Bad Guys.

Marc, what was it like watching the finished product after doing the voice of Snake?

Marc Maron: I had no idea what the story was. When I saw the movie, it was like “oh, this is the movie?” I knew that I was with these other characters, and I have a hard time with scripts anyway, but when I saw the whole thing, there were twists and turns in the movie that I was a part of! I realized that’s what was going on. It was crazy.

Pierre Perifel: It’s funny Marc, in animation we usually don’t share the script. In live-action, when you arrive on a shoot, your script needs to be totally locked. You can’t really change anything unless you want to do pickups later. But with animation, it’s a work in progress all the time. You craft things, redo it, rewrite it, so we usually don’t share that script because we know it’s going to evolve so much.

MM: Right, it’s fluid. So it wasn’t like me just being weird and old? You never showed me a script is what you’re saying. Just little chunks of scenes and there was no way for me to actually put them together in my head. It wasn’t my fault. You did it.

PP: I did it. It’s really fluid, and at some point, the movie kind of takes its own life and you just go with it. It’s a very different process than what you would see in live action films.

with animation, it’s a work in progress all the time

Luc, how do you production design an animated film, especially considering it’s changing all the time?

Luc Desmarchelier: In animation, the production designer is in charge of all the visual components in the picture, everything. Creating the characters from the ground up, every set and every object within the sets, the textures, the colors, the composition, the lighting. All of that is in the general purview of the designers and of course, working in conjunction with all the other departments involved. It is a job that requires a lot of preparation and a solid concept to start with. A large part of the job is developing the visuals in pre-production. That’s where you try to solidify the ideas that underline the rules you want to set up for the world, and how it’s going to look. For instance, in color, we came up with this idea that was rooted in our references and influences. Like, we’re going to use only one color for the bad guys, and we’re going to use cool colors for the antagonist. That worked well because you can apply that to the police, who are going to be red and blue and black and white, and the villain was going to be cool colors in cool environments, while the bad guys were always the warm colors. This was the theory that we applied throughout the movie. It’s a simple rule that everyone on the team can understand and follow through in the spheres of their individual departments. If you come up with clear principles early on, you can apply them everywhere. After that it becomes like a marathon, ensuring these principles translate on the screen and making sure all the departments apply this visual consistency to the movie.

In a narrative film, a character might have some piece of wardrobe or a prop that helps them inform the character. How did you work together to develop the voice of Snake?  

MM: When we first got there, they showed me the sketches for the character but I think they were still trying to figure out how to get him to move. They definitely had a look for the guy and it definitely informed my voice of him, seeing that he was wearing this Hawaiian shirt and the sunglasses. They showed me several different sketches and even his face influenced how I approached the voice.

PP: It’s funny because if you take it from Marc’s point of view, he’s first exposed to one sketch. I can pitch him the overall world in which the story is going to happen… the animals, the heist film, the action sequences, and just a couple sketches of Snake because Marc came in so early. First we do an animatic with storyboards and try to translate the script into film form. Usually this is recorded with scratch voices, temp actors. Then we bring Marc in and he does his thing, but he just sees lines and a sketch of Snake. Then the next time he comes in, we’ve started rigging and modeling the character and now he can see it with volume, and then maybe the next time he comes in, he can see it with animation. Slowly, we’re pulling back the veil on the production as Marc begins to discover the film. Luc and I, as well as the production team, are well ahead of our actors because we can visualize it all. But from an outside perspective, it can be overwhelming when you’re thrown into that bath. A lot of my work with Marc was crappily doing line reads with him while trying to pitch him what the scene was about!

MM: That was actually really helpful. You didn’t read them crappy, it was just always you for all the characters. You had to set the scene. So you’d be like “let’s do another read of this because he’s coming in from here, and this just happened, they’re driving in a car so don’t yell, or, you need to yell here.” That was essential.

PP: Because at this point, you still don’t have animation. The fundamental difference between animation and live-action is that we do all the editing of the movie up front. We don’t edit footage that has been shot. We don’t have six or eight hours of dailies to chop down to a two-hour movie. We produce very precisely only the stuff that ends up on screen. You cut and write at the same time, so that is where the fluidity comes from. Throughout the production, you can do snippets and try things out. Part of the movie might be in production far down the line while other parts are still being worked on and chopped up.

The first shot of the film is incredible, and the longest shot in Dreamworks animation history, almost two and a half minutes. It’s does a beautiful job of setting the space for the audience and putting us in a Tarantino-like movie.  

PP: The movie used to start more like an Out of Sight werewolf would walk into the bank and super nicely rob the bank, like a gentleman thief. Then it would break out into the crazy car chase. We slowly realized the film was really a Snake/Wolf story. That’s also such a testament to how much things can change. Early on it was more of an ensemble story, and then we realized that the main two voices are Snake and Wolf. We needed to set them up early on. We discussed doing a flashback but I didn’t want to do a flashback, it felt cheesy forcing it into the movie. So we decided to start it with a casual conversation between two best friends. Then we decided to do a homage to Pulp Fiction in the diner and then you have the robbery and it sets up all these elements. Then we thought, what if we set it up as a one-shot? It’s so great visually and thematically. Later on, the Snake birthday idea came up because we really needed to bond those characters as a family, a dysfunctional family but one with a lot of love. I really wanted Tarantino-style dialogue where you just jump into the middle of a conversation between two guys that’s completely mundane. Marc and Sam [Rockwell] actually recorded this scene together.

MM: Once they realized a lot was hinging on the emotional connection between me and Sam, it was essential we had that connection. I think that was one of the scenes where we kept it loose and got to improv a bit. There’s a way that the two voices go together. My voice is, I think broader than Sam’s. He’s cool and I’m aggravated and I’m always operating at a pitch of crankiness. In that scene we had to figure out how these two voices moved together with humor and emotional connection and a bit of tension. It established a lot about the movie, those two characters, and where we’re going.

What were the key challenges for you, Luc? It must have been fun being able to pay homage to a classic scene while still making it your own.

LD: Yeah, it’s a classic. It’s a standard for any gangster film in LA, you’ve got to throw in a diner. The fun and the difficulty of it was to see how long we could make it last. If you want to do a really long take, in live-action or animation, you’re going to run into technical difficulties as well as staging issues. You have to plan the shot to make it seamless. In animation, the length of the shot within a single scene is a challenge for animators. There’s all kinds of problems. I think it was less a challenge for production design than it was for layout and animation. But the fun of it was figuring out when that cut was really going to land. You want to take the scene and draw it out and draw it out and cut at the point where it really makes a statement and vibrates.