When Tom McGrath came to Seattle recently for a publicity tour, it was a homecoming. The co-director of “Madagascar” grew up in Lynnwood and graduated from Meadowdale High School.
I asked McGrath about his road to Hollywood, and how he came to not only direct the film but also voice the role of a take-charge penguin.
Question: Did you get interested in movies during your childhood up here?
Answer: My family lived behind the Sno-King Drive-In, so we could watch movies from our deck and sometimes we’d sneak in – there’s a dirt back road that we’d go in. I remember one night when I was about 10 or something, my brother and I snuck into “The Exorcist,” and there’s probably like five cars, all up front, and we arrived in the movie when she was already possessed on her bed, and you could hear all that coming out of the speakers that weren’t being used. I think I probably saw like three seconds of it. And I ran home so fast.
Seattle was – movies were an important part of it, at least when I was growing up. I don’t know if it’s a weather thing or what. My brother and I, when we were really young – we didn’t tell our parents, but Lynnwood’s quite a ways from Seattle – we would ride our bikes down to Seattle to see movies at the UA 150 or the Cinerama … at least for me, movies were a big part of my life.
Q: What led you from that to actually making movies?
A: My brother got this Super-8 camera when we were really young … we just started making movies, and parodies of movies, with neighborhood kids, and include animation in it. And it was fun, that’s what we’d do in the summer, just make movies. But I never thought you could do it for a living.
I used to draw all the time. I never took art in high school, I took drafting. I was paying for college by designing carpet-cleaning equipment for this company in Lynnwood. And I thought, “I should pursue drafting,” and I went to the University of Washington to study industrial design. … Someone at the UW said, “You know, there’s a school for animation called Cal Arts, it’s in California.” And I went down there for a friend’s wedding, did some drawings in the car, and stopped by and met with the director of the department. … They actually called me on my birthday that summer, and said, “Hey, we’ve accepted you to Cal Arts.” And I said, “But I can’t go.” My parents couldn’t afford it, it was an expensive school. And they said, “Just get down here and we’ll help you out.” So I packed my bags and drove down there … and applied for every student loan I could, and Disney actually gave me a scholarship to stay.
Q: How does casting the voice actors affect the development of the characters in a movie like this?
A: The character types we had developed – we knew we wanted a rock star lion who’s kind of full of himself but also vulnerable in his own way. And we wanted a zebra who’s having a midlife crisis, but not a downer, someone with energy. A hypochondriac giraffe would be good. Then we listen to actors we think might be interesting. We don’t look at them, we listen to their voices. We wanted to cast comedians that not only had good voices for animation but we would get their sensibility, too. We don’t just have a script and say, “Do the script.” We work with Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer developing these characters – they have ideas, and those ideas inspire new ideas. We improvise, they improvise. … It compares with workshopping a play.
Q: Animation is such a long process. How do you decide what idea you want to spend X number of years working on?
A: First of all, in animation, you want to tell a story that can only be told in animation. Things that you could do in live action don’t really appeal to me – why do it in animation? But this right off was a funny idea. Everyone’s been to a zoo, you know – what are the animals thinking? … It’s such a great little parable about a lion and a zebra, who shouldn’t be friends but are, and when they get into the wild all these conflicts emerge and finally they just have to realize it’s not where you are but who you’re with that’s really important. So that felt like a familiar theme and one worth pursuing. You gotta have that spine that carries you through the story.
Q: So how did you end up casting yourself?
A: I didn’t really cast myself – you know, we do temporary voices when we storyboard the movie in drawings. That’s how we do it, we just put up all the drawings and it’s like performance art, to see how a scene is playing. So you often just throw in a voice to pitch the scene … so I just did it (the main penguin), and it was trying to be like this Robert Stack or Charlton Heston – you know, “Rico! Kowalski!” And I was just thinking, Robert Stack would be great, we’ll get Robert Stack – and he died. And we were thinking, “Who else can we get?” but finally we just said, “Well, why not?” I think we got used to hearing me, and Eric was like, “Yeah, you be Skipper.” And I was accessible, I was easy, I could just run down there and do lines. That was kinda fun.
Q: Does your job still involve old-fashioned drawing?
A: Drawings really help communicate. It’s kind of the way to communicate on an animated movie. Most everyone draws, you know. Even though it’s computer (animation), it’s still a lot of pencil on paper – it’s still more that than what the computer does. I think people think, “Oh yeah, you just hit some buttons and the characters move around,” but the characters are designed on paper, the whole film is drawn out on paper – there’s like 20,000 drawings in a story reel that communicate the film. … So there still is a lot of art. Being an animator isn’t just your drawing ability, it’s your sense of motion and timing and delivery and performance. So the computer is really just another medium to deliver that, besides the drawing. So it’s not as different as people may think.
Tom McGrath and his alter-ego, Skipper the penguin (far right), with the other penguins in “Madagascar.”
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