Animation veteran Brad Bird flies to new challenge

By Debra Kaufman

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Animation veteran Brad Bird, who co-wrote and co-directed the Pixar summer hit "Ratatouille," is now working on his first-live action movie, a secret project called "1906," rumored to be about the San Francisco earthquake. It is slated for release in 2009.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: YOU'RE WORKING ON YOUR FIRST

LIVE-ACTION FEATURE, WARNER BROS.' "1906." HOW IS THE WORK

GOING?

Brad Bird: I'm not in a position to talk about it more than that except to say that I'm excited about it and it's a big project. A lot of people don't realize that in all my years wandering through development hell wasteland, half of what I wanted to make were live-action films and half were animated. The animated ones were the first I got to make, which led to other animation. My ideal career would be to bounce from genre to genre, from musicals to Westerns to political comedies. And also to go between live-action and animation. I don't consider animation a genre -- it's a medium that can do any genre.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: BUT COMPUTER ANIMATION DOES SEEM TO

HAVE CAPTURED YOUR PARTICULAR CREATIVE TALENTS. IS IT THE FORM

OF ANIMATION YOU PREFER TO WORK IN?

Bird: Film is the most wonderful medium invented. It's recorded dreaming. And I think people need to recognize that the language of film -- using angles and shots and color and music and performance -- is essentially the same from medium to medium. I'm not one of those people who believe that CG (computer-generated imagery) is superior to every other form of animation. It's not. It's simply another tool that you can use to express yourself.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: BY THE TIME YOU TOOK OVER

"RATATOUILLE" FROM THE PREVIOUS DIRECTOR, JAN PINKAVA, YOU ONLY

HAD A YEAR AND A HALF TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER FOR ITS ORIGINAL

RELEASE DATE. WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?

Bird: There was a wonderful basis to start with. It was a magnificent idea, and the looks that had been developed were all wonderful, but the story had proven to be a tricky one to get to work. I had to very quickly get under the hood and try to make it work. It was a very scary thing for me. I joked to the crew that it was like the "Wallace & Gromit" film where Gromit is slapping down track in front of the moving train. In a strange way, TV proved to be the best education I could have possibly gotten. Working on (Fox's) "The Simpsons," I wasn't only around brilliant writers, but we had pretty ambitious stories. And the decisions had to be made immediately because another show was coming down the conveyer belt. I saw some amazing saves where the episodes were done, didn't work and one night of brilliant restructuring turned it into a brilliant episode. It absolutely saved me on (1999's) "The Iron Giant" and this film, both films that were done pretty quickly.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: ARGUABLY, IT'S RISKY TO MAKE A