Lauren Macmullan Interview
She's
quickly becoming one of the most talented directors in the animation industry,
and her uniquely appealing visual sense has earned her a rank among Simpsons
fans as "simply the best". Lauren Macmullan, whose profile includes "The
Simpsons", "King of the Hill", "Mission Hill", "The Critic", and now "Avatar: the Last Airbender"
is perhaps best noted for her distinguishable artistic complexity, enhancing
both the emotional power and humour of her work. Serving as a director on
"The Simpsons" for seasons 13-16, Macmullan's extraordinary perspective was
identified by both her counterparts and fans alike, and unsurprisingly, she is
currently breaking new ground in cartoon choreography with the martial-arts
cartoon adventure "Avatar: the Last Airbender". Macmullan discusses her
time on "Mission Hill" and "The Simpsons", insight behind her success, and
the possibility that many Simpsons fans will hope for - a return to Springfield.
I'm going to waffle here, and say both have distinct advantages. Learning to draw in someone else's style tends to really push you as an artist. It makes you confront trying to draw things you might otherwise try to duck--like an elaborate architectural background, or a very specific emotion on a character's face that you try like hell not to experience yourself.
'Mission Hill', on the other hand, was an exhilarating, and exhausting, experience. Bill and Josh and I all admired the look of underground comix of the late '80's through mid '90's, and because it was appropriate to the characters on the show themselves, that seemed to be our mutual starting point. (uh, for those interested, this is also covered in detail on the commentary tracks on the newly available Mission Hill dvd) Thus the 'misregistered', printing process-like color behind the line art of the backgrounds, and even the very beginning of the title sequence, where the colors are all printed on, one by one, forming the Mission Hill neighborhood. I've also always loved a weighted, inked outline, and the thirties 'rubber hose' style of animation, and tried to combine the two (with limited success given television budgets and communication with overseas studios.) Of particular inspiration was the MAD magazine work of Will Elder--he'd take these loose, expressive layout style sketches of Harvey Kurtzman's, and ink them beautifully, give them weight and detail without losing the hilarious posture underneath. (Please see 'Heap'--a Swamp Thing parody.) I thought the way it was done could be applied to animation pretty easily--everyone on the crew wished we'd had a second season to try to really hit it right.
And that's one great thing about established shows, really--you don't have to worry that people are actually going to get to see them. After Mission Hill had been pulled, pushed, and then finally cancelled by the WB, I went to work on the Simpsons. Jim Reardon basically greeted me at the door, walked me down the hallway to show me to my office, and said, "Lauren, whatever else might happen, I guarantee that the shows you direct here will actually wind up on the air."
(And working on a very established and well-known show such as the Simpsons means even more--it once got me out of some serious potential trouble with a drug-sniffing dog named Gretchen (as in "Find the drugs, find the drugs, Gretchen!") after crossing the Mexican border back into the US with some dog kibble sprinkled accidentally around in the trunk of my car. This dog was seriously going crazy. When the guard finally found out that I worked on the Simpsons, after a hair-raising half hour of angry questioning, he immediately waved me through, saying, "you can be on your way, m'am". And such is the power of the Simpsons.)
How were you contacted by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein for the position of supervising director?
I'd known them both for some years, but our respective animation careers never really overlapped until Mission Hill. I'd worked for Al Jean and Mike Reiss on the Critic, and Greg Daniels on KOTH--all people they knew from the Simpsons--and I assume they must have had nice things to say about me as a director. Bill and Josh called me up when they had the pilot script ready, and we spent a couple of months coming up with main character designs, then pitched to the network as a package. It was a huge amount of fun. (The background design look wasn't really finalized until the show was a month or two into production, and a very talented designer, Joseph Holt, did some great work.)
Simpsons fans will often anticipate an episode based on the credited writer, but rarely (up until recently) based on the director. You may be the first and only director where fans note your name attached to an episode and think "even if the story is weak, there will at least be some superb directing". (just so you don't think we're flattering you, we've cited some of the more noticeable. (examples here) As the director, what do you see in your episodes or perhaps what do you do differently in directing that would cause fans to make this distinction?
Honestly, I have never really understood this. The Simpsons has seen so many talented directors--Rich Moore, Wes Archer, David Silverman, Suzy Deiter, Jim Reardon--I don't know why people just started paying attention to the direction recently. Those guys were all making it up for the first time, too. Mostly, I just came along later, panicked, and tried to imitate some of the cool things I saw in some earlier episodes.
Possibly, it's just hard to figure out how things work with animation directing. It's so easy, for example, to think of animated characters purely as themselves, far less connected to the actor that does the voice than in live action, at least partially because the viewer isn't actually seeing that actor. And of course, when animation really succeeds, you just want to think of the characters as being somehow entirely of their own creation, not the product of 100 hands. How could that be, when you feel you know them as well as Homer?
One directing difference may simply spring from a personal preference to try to storyboard some of each episode (something there is often no time for in the 'official' director's schedule)--of your notable examples, interestingly, I think I boarded half. For me, storyboards are the filmmaking heart of each episode, and the most fun to be had. Coming up with a creative shot/transition/effect that visually underscores and represents one particular moment of a show makes me feel like I'm helping to complete visually what's already there in the script, even if it's sometimes just an implied character relationship...
This type of moment is always easier for me to figure out at the storyboard stage, rather than later in the animation process, when the work gets split up amongst many people. In 'Moe Baby Blues', probably my favorite Simpsons script, I storyboarded most of Act 2. From the moment I read the final draft, I knew wanted to transition from Maggie's room to the Godfather story using the happy little elves on her wall animating into the mobsters. Because, really, when are you ever going to get to see that again in your lifetime. Also, I remember choosing to have Moe tell the Godfather story in a later section using the toys in her room as props ("Bam! Mo Green gets it in the eye!") --it seemed to help us see Maggie's point of view (as no more violent than someone she likes throwing her dolls around in her room), as well as Moe's. To me that's the fun stuff.
What are the particular challenges of working on "The Simpsons", as opposed to other animated works?
It's vast, lengthy history for one. A single episode of the Simpsons takes one director about four months, from storyboard through shipping to Korea (for some animation, inbetweening, line cleanup, and coloring and camera work). If you've got to spend that much time with an episode, it's easier if you can believe (for me anyway) that this is the very first time Lisa has become disenchanted with the second grade.
"The Simpsons" directing staff is comprised of some of the most talented directors in the industry, many of whom have left "The Simpsons" to direct motion pictures (for example, Brad Bird). How has working with well-known and respected directors like David Silverman, Mark Kirkland, and Jim Reardon influenced your work?
To me, their greatest influence lies in their body of work. Think about it: the Simpsons was the first animated show to 'quote' live action style shots--to use them for the purposes of parody in furthering the story--particularly starting, say, in the third season. Like a sudden dramatic 'upshot', accompanied by a musical sting, for dramatic purposes, but also simultaneously funny because of its reference to actually dramatic live action films. You get the humor and the drama, combined. This seems to work even better somehow when the animation and look of the show is your basic, relatively small, television budget (compared to the swoopy, almost pointlessly luscious, animation of the Disney features of that time--almost the only animation competitor then, and rarely actually funny). The directors of that era are responsible for that particular innovation, I believe, which the writers were quick to applaud and incorporate into later scripts. It's easy to forget that tv, and even live action movies, weren't generally like that until the Simpsons came along. They really weren't. So many of the visual things I've tried to do in various episodes are just things I've seen in earlier ones, adapted to whatever story is at hand.
They all have their particular talents: David Silverman, a master of animation and expressive acting; Wes Archer, a greatly overlooked contributor to the Simpsons beginning, able to make a motionless dog and a motionless cat looking at each other somehow absolutely hilarious...could go on forever about this...
I've mostly only worked with these directors after they became supervising directors, and usually on other shows, so...
Brad Bird (as a consultant on The Critic): "Pick your moments." Meaning, you've got a tv budget, a finite schedule--go over or personally draw only the stuff that you can do in the time allotted, and that is vitally important to the script at hand, or a purely visual achievement that only you as director could pull off. (Also inspiringly good at breaking his own rules.)
Rich Moore, supervising director on The Critic (and later Futurama): taught me how to storyboard, the importance of beat timing, basically everything about being a primetime animation director. When I first arrived in LA, he invited me to come and sit in on his first edit pass of 'Cape Feare', and it was clear to me instantly how much I had to learn. Which he then proceeded to pretty much show me.
Jim Reardon, supervising director on the Simpsons during the seasons I was there. (He left for Pixar at the end of the 16th season.) He was always invaluable at the storyboard stage, particularly in judging a joke from the script, and how it should be handled. And he was always, always right. Very quiet and low key, so when he did say something in was pretty much the final word. An excellent director--could make the simplest of sequences funny just through how the shots cut together. (In animation, we call shots 'scenes' (as in 'scene 372'), and scenes, 'sequences'. There's probably an average of, say, 372 scenes per show--an action-heavy show can occasionally push the count, as in Bob Andersen's hockey show ["Lisa on Ice"], upwards of 500 scenes. There's usually a lot of moaning and groaning when this happens, even though the shorter shots usually require less poses.)
Writers of "The Simpsons" will often explain that a script is a group-effort and as such, the writer credited for a particular effort may have only contributed 50% of the final product. Is this similar to the directors side of the production process or is the episode's finalized look specific to the credited director alone?
In general, most of the 'look' of the show was finalized long ago, and a lot of effort is expended in keeping it consistent. Matt Groening still reviews every single design. And the directors don't really collaborate with each other--too busy working on their own episodes. However, every show is the combined effort of a large crew working under the director, and several key departments like storyboarding, design, color key, etc. Because it's been on the air so long, the Simpsons has provided perhaps the most stable employment in the animation industry. There's not a huge turnover rate, especially at the director level, so many of the folks there are tremendously experienced (I think Mark Kirkland has directed well over 50 episodes), in addition to being very talented.
Often a fine moment in a show can be created by someone who is not necessarily the director, nor even the writer--for example, the very end of 'Bye, Bye Nerdie', where Francine charges the camera (having detected all the nerds in the viewing audience), was added by Chris Roman, one of the storyboard guys--a nice grace note to a difficult third act. My assistant director on all episodes, Raymond Persi (directing some great episodes now), added Nelson's mom's panty drop to 'Sleeping with the Enemy', which made one of the writers laugh louder than I thought (until then) it was possible for him to laugh. The layout crew also make substantial contributions to the acting and the rough animation of the characters; for example, Jordan Young animated Ralph rolling down the hill (in 'Lisa in the Big Ten') so well that we decided to have all the other kids do it, including Nelson. Lisa didn't, of course, because in that episode she would have felt it was well beneath her. Plus it was effective, metaphorically and story-wise, to leave her all alone at the top of the hill.
Occasionally, even a Korean animator will 'clean up' or tie down the character's line in a way that makes the expression odder or even ugly--but also somehow hilarious, so it stays. Funny trumps good-looking almost always on the Simpsons, and good directors will roll with that, even if it doesn't make them look that good personally.
The director rarely does a huge amount of drawings for an episode--mostly, they revise, guide, suggest, and let talented people do what they do well. (Though each director works differently.) The schedule is tight, and the bell is going to ring soon enough. Occasionally, I would layout (that is, do the rough poses for) a section that I thought was subtly critical on a character level, like Lisa v. Francine at the lockers, Bart and Gina starting to like each other in a quiet moment at the rock, or a shot that was difficult to explain to others technically (Moe leaning over to show Maggie her 'nose'), but for the most part the crew drew the characters better than I could.
It also helps to be able to explain a joke specifically, because there's so many ways to blow it. In 'Moe Baby Blues', my favorite one-line joke from the script was Homer's "I'll get our little passports" at the end of the scene outside the house, when Moe and the family discovers that they're going to have to travel to the 'Little Italy' section of Springfield to get Maggie back. Yes, it's possibly corny, but I really liked it, so I set up the whole sequence so the Homer would 'happen' to be in the background right after Moe's line, so it could play almost as a throwaway, without the undue emphasis of cutting to Homer.
If provided the opportunity, would you like to remain as a director for "The Simpsons" until it has completed its run on television?
Umm, well, I have actually left, as of last season. I'm currently working on 'Avatar: the Last Airbender' at Nickelodeon, created by several people I worked with on 'Mission Hill'. It's very likely I will return to the Simpsons in some capacity before it leaves the air, hope so anyway.
In any case, I will always miss the truly amazing voice actors, and the matchless scripts.
Many of your episodes have been hallmarked by exquisite shadowing and lighting. How much extra work is needed to perfect such detailed drawings?
Just one extra level of paper, usually--but it mounts up, in terms of work. Especially for Korea. The Simpsons is one of the few shows where the backgrounds were designed to be painted with cel vinyl--i.e., the backgrounds were painted in the same method as the characters--thus, it's easy for a scene, or shot, to look overly flat, or lacking in depth, because it's painted just like the background. And when the show switched to digital ink and paint, because the slight shadows that lay between the cell levels were missing, it became even easier for a scene to flatten out. (Though there's an increased flexibility to the color palette and the camera work in digital that more than makes up for this.)
So mostly, I just overcompensated out of paranoia. As a late arrival to the Simpsons, this potential flatness always kinda freaked me out. And I'm apparently just one of those people who thinks in terms of light and shadow, or arcane camera movements that added foreground/background depth. The camera department took to calling me 'Lauren McMultiplane' at some point, because of the difficult multi-level camera movements I was always asking them to try. I was weirdly delighted when I got the chance in 'Sleeping with the Enemy' to portray Lisa backed by the cold, unforgiving light of the refrigerator. That's why almost every shot in that sequence actually faces the refrigerator, so we could see how it lit up the room. Menacing, yet eternally tempting.
Since around season 12 or 13, direction as a whole has seemed to be continually improving. Having been with "The Simpsons" from season 12-present, have you noticed these improvements or after being on staff for nearly 100 episodes do subtle changes become difficult to distinguish?
I'm glad you think so! Certainly everyone's ability to draw the characters has become enormously more refined over the years (when I first arrived on staff, it took me a while to even figure out when a drawing was 'off-model'). Experience helps greatly in this regard--for the two Korean studios that do the overseas work, to boot.
Personally I'd have to say, though, that I miss a little of the expressionistic looseness of the earlier seasons, and the more varying use of color. It wasn't quite as much of a franchise then, I think, and the directors had a little more leeway to interpret the scripts with a looser, more creative approach--even if an experiment failed, even if the drawings themselves were a little more crudely drawn. It may not have looked as smooth or good, but I bet it made the characters and the scripts work better. And that's the director's real job.
Many of your episodes feature a "spotlight effect" (examples here). Do you make a conscious effort to include this effect? Is it a difficult look to properly choreograph?
(See the stuff above about lighting.)
It's just slightly more difficult to do than a simple shadow--in addition to the actual shaft of light, you have to add a matching shadow to the area around it, to mimic what happens as your eye adjusts as it looks directly at a light source. (That is, everything else seems to dim down.) That's the big trick. Spotlights also help with the aforementioned 'flatness'--also great to help pinpoint a character in a nervous or romantic moment. Or both combined, as is usual on the Simpsons--that is, a romantic moment is often a nervous one as well, or becomes one soon enough.
In 'I, D'oh Bot', there were so many spotlights in the battlebot sections that we sat down with the entire layout crew for that episode to show them how to add them, notate them for Korea, etc... It was very tiring for everyone I'm sure, but it looked cool in the end. (Though there was some internal debate among the production staff, just as on the internet, that that episode looked too different from other Simpsons episodes. I wanted the battle scenes to seem especially grey, harsh and real, so we'd feel more for Homer trapped in this world of metal, but it's very possible the look went too far. It was an interesting experiment though.)
Along with your modern look for "The Simpsons", some of your direction utilizes methods from earlier seasons. (example here). Are these similarities merely a coincidence? Having followed such a large group of talented directors, do you ever look back at their older episodes for new ideas or even to reuse a forgotten style?
Absolutely, as I've said above. In a show that's been around as long as the Simpsons, there's such a plethora of creative ways to approach the animation that it's actually hard to ignore the past. Hell, for a lot of us, the visual approach to the earlier seasons was imbedded in us before we ever thought we'd wind up working on the show. Or even entered high school.
(As for your specific example though, I'd have to say that one was coincidence. I was just searching for a shot that made Lisa seem extra crazy, after the lights in the kitchen were on and her sins with the cake were exposed. Sort of hellish, like the very end shot of 'Taxi Driver'. That cruel down shot with all the blood spatters and dead bodies. Not sure what episode that other example was from, but hey, I'm sure they used it for a particular creative reason.)
How are episodes assigned to different directors? Are there certain episodes that directors want more than others because of the direction possibilities in the script, or conversely episodes that directors avoid based on the work needed for a more extravagant storyline? (for example a travel episode with unique setting or an episode featuring many crowd shots)
We don't really have any ability to pick and choose. The scripts just land on the desk, pretty much. Since the directors spend so long a period on each episode, their schedule is drawn up far in advance of when anyone on the animation side knows anything about the script order. (Not that there's not some kvetching when a script featuring, say, Tokyo, winds up as yours--or a script containing the dreaded words, "the crowd riots.")
The writers and Al Jean know the director order, however, and I think they make sure that special episodes, like Halloween shows, season premieres and finales wind up in the hands of more experienced directors. And as the more experienced directors generally do more episodes per year, this usually happens naturally with the beginning and end-of-season episodes. If there's any politicking done, it's from the writer's end--they may play to our individual strengths and weaknesses more than I know. Sometimes I suspect the women directors wind up with more of the Lisa/cameo girl characters, but there's no real evidence one way or another, unless you'd all care to calculate...
With such a large universe in Springfield already established when you arrived on staff, has it been difficult to maintain continuity so that both landscape and character designs remain constant? Do you find it difficult to keep the balance in creating and improving on the look of a character while keeping the visual continuity with accepted character designs?
The crack design department usually keeps more of a handle on that, as they have been doing it so long and well. (And Matt Groening, too.) Usually the struggle at first, for everyone, is mainly the proportions, esp. head-to-body ratios, as that usually differs greatly from animated show to animated show. Sometimes it's very difficult to design a well-known celebrity into the Simpsons world--translating the things about them that are instantly recognizable in the real world into Simpsons iconography. After my fourth season of the Simpsons, I would average at least one dream per night in the Simpsons proportions and design style, where people I knew would be transformed, Simpsons-style. It was a little disturbing, frankly.
Is there an effort made to keep the general map of Springfield consistent?
Less than you would think. There have been maps made over the years, but unless it's starkly, clearly wrong, it will be thrown out the window for a single joke. The area where the family lives has now become very consistent, however, due to the sheer amount of episodes dwelling on that street. It has sort of become a neighborhood by consensus. All hail the elasticity of animation!
Which of your episodes was the hardest to direct. Why?
It's easy to estimate the length of an audio track, which is what the directors receive shortly into the storyboard process. Action scenes are more difficult to gauge, as they are sometimes just loosely described in the script (as opposed to very precise dialogue). And sometimes the process just gets out of control, with the episode ultimately exceeding the length of air time by large amounts. Sometimes whole sequences will have to be dropped prior to airing, just to get the show down to 22 minutes. (And this is animation--even a minute of extra footage represents a lot of work for the whole crew.) One of Al Jean's great strengths as an executive producer is that he shepherds scripts through the writing process with great attention to completeness and length, that is, they are usually in very good shape for the particular stage that they are going through--there won't have to be any wholesale rewrites late in the game. But every so often, one will slip through that's just waaay too long...
For me, this was 'I, D'oh Bot." There was a point when it seemed about a whole act too long--for instance, in the original script, there were about twenty little cat gravestones in the backyard by the time the Lisa b-plot wrapped up. Plus a lot of extra episode time went to the robot action sequences, probably more than expected, which were pretty difficult technically for the crew and ate up a lot of our schedule (all those spotlights!). To put it simply, a longer episode just means more drawings, which take longer to draw. ( 20,000 to 25,000 per episode, once the Koreans are done...) But the schedule stays the same--and on that episode, we really hit the wall. I think I shipped my dog back home for a few months then, just so someone would be around to take him for a walk.
"Moe Baby Blues" was also difficult, simply because I loved that script so very much. I desperately wanted to do it justice. And a convincing Moe/Maggie relationship is deeply tricky--so easy to slip into borderline perversion. There was a single line in a rewrite, as I recall, that so frustrated me in my singleminded effort to 'do right' by the script that it triggered a ten minute crying jag on my part (when none of the regular crew was around to see it). It worked out fine in the end, though--please forget I ever mentioned it.
Do you have a character you particularly like to draw?
Probably Lisa, just because I feel closest to her as a character. (Only Lisa would delight in being graded on every single episode by the internet community, right? Which I thank you guys for. Seriously.) Plus I learned how to draw her first. Among the general crew, she's considered to be rather difficult, due to those hard-to-track points of hair all around her head.
Francine ('Bye Bye Nerdie') was fun, too--I enjoyed trying to get that little hint of Frankenstein into the silhouette of a little girl.
If "The Simpsons" were to end this season, what area of directing would you want to pursue? Would you rather join an established cartoon or take the "Mission Hill" approach where an entire fictional community could be created at your disposal? Or instead, would you consider crossing over into live-action directing?
As mentioned above, I've actually left already, to go to another show starting up at Nickelodeon. In the end, it's mostly enjoyable simply working with other talented people, no matter what roles everyone is taking at the time. When an animated production takes so large a staff, and such a ridiculous amount of time, you wind up just enjoying productions not only for what you may be able to add to them, but for what all the other people around you surprise you with, as well. Live action seems a bit, well, lonely and political, in comparison. As much as I love the movies. Perhaps 'Mission Hill' has left me a bit gunshy, I don't know.
As for the future, no idea....maybe a comic book, or a series of large oil portraits of my dog dressed in various foppy Renaissance costumes, looking indignant.
But it seems unlikely that the Simpsons will end this season. It's been a pleasure to have been involved with it, and a pleasure to get to answer such specific questions about animation directing. Usually the question lately has been: "How much do computers do your job for you, these days?" When the truth is, even a relatively limited-in-animation show like the Simpsons is an entirely created universe, meaning someone sat down at a desk and drew every little bit of it. Sure, they're revising, getting notes, referring to pre-existing drawings, following an exacting script and usually, a great voice track--but in the end, it's a wholly visually made up world, using pencils, paper, lots of erasers, and yes, occasionally computers. But, honestly, would you have it any other way?
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