Directors Speak

The L.A. Times holds a directors round table.

Peter, your movie [The Good Dinosaur] does a lot without dialogue too. How did you guys approach that?

Peter Sohn: Part of this movie is a survival story and taking a dinosaur out in the wilderness; there's a lot of moments where he's needing to figure out what to do on his own. And so there's just inherently not a lot of dialogue with that. But then one of the original conceits to the story was the idea of a boy-and-dog story, but flipping it and making the traditional "boy" the dinosaur and the "dog" this little human boy; and then sticking true to that, where the dinosaur has evolved to speak a language but the little animal, the human boy, has no language whatsoever. ...

More and more, animation directors and live-action directors are doing the same jobs.

On a big live-action movie, digital pre-viz is de riguer. Storyboard happen with both. The difference of course, is that live-action has those actors on a set, but if the director wants to hide behind his bank of video screens, he/she can do that.

One way or the other, there's much higher traffic between formats than there used to be. (James Cameron can say he's not the director of animated features, but he really is.)