An interview with Disney's Big Hero 6 Directors Don Hall and Chris Williams

Have you seen Big Hero 6 yet? Admittedly, I didn't catch it in theaters, but that wasn't because I didn't want to. My little guy is just 2.5 years old and although I knew he'd love the film and animation, I couldn't imagine him actually sitting through the film in theaters. If you have a toddler, you know their attention span can range from 5 minutes to 2 hours and you never know which one you're going to get on any given day. I thought it was best to wait for the in-home release. Little did I know at the time, Disney would not only be sending me the Blu-ray Combo Pack in advance of its in-home release,  they'd also be flying me out to Los Angeles to meet with filmmakers and the cast! You can probably imagine how excited I was to get that news!

Big Hero 6, from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is an action-packed comedy-adventure about the special bond that develops between a young prodigy named Hiro Hamada (voice of Ryan Potter), and a plus-sized inflatable robot named Baymax (voice of Scott Adsit). After a devastating tragedy in their city of San Fransokyo (a futuristic world marrying San Francisco and Tokyo), Hiro turns to Baymax and his four closest friends to uncover the truth behind the tragedy and as a result, they form a band of high-tech heroes called "Big Hero 6". This film was inspired by the Marvel comics of the same name and came to fruition because of directors Don Hall (“Winnie the Pooh”) and Chris Williams(“Bolt”) and producer Roy Conli. The film was released in theaters on November 7th, 2014 and the in-home release is scheduled for February 24th, 2015.

Don Hall and Chris Williams, image courtesy of Kayvon Esmaili

We got to sit down with Directors Don Hall and Chris Williams to get the exclusive scoop on the making of Big Hero 6. I absolutely LOVE this side of being a blogger and finding out the behind the scenes details that make our favorite films become that much more special. (Sidenote - I can't wait to share a feature about the Disney short "Feast" that premiered before Big Hero 6 - it was such a fascinating experience to hear about how it was made. Keep an eye out for that on 2/19/15).

The first thing we asked Don Hall and Chris Williams was, How did you get on this project?

Don Hall replied:  I was finishing up "Winnie the Pooh" and started thinking about my next project and John Lassiter - you know, he always asks the directors to start with, "What are you passionate about?". And I started thinking about it and as a kid, I loved Disney Animation. Obviously... that's what brought me here, but I also loved Marvel Comics and it's really where I learned to draw and tell stories and. And, I'm not unique by the way - I mean, the entire Studio pretty much has that same story. I just happened to be the guy who brought it to the forefront. I pitched John that idea and he got super excited and said, "Go find something". It was that simple. It was a 5-minute conversation. So I just made lists of stuff that I thought would be cool and I came across "Big Hero 6" having never read the Comic, I just thought it, I liked the title. I saw it on their website and I researched it further and it was a Japanese Super Hero team. I thought that that was cool. And then I read the comics and thought the tone was appropriate - it was light-hearted, the characters are fun, they had goofy names... and you could tell the creators just loved Japanese Pop Culture, and that's what they were trying to infuse into the Super Hero story. Which we did too... we love Japanese Pop Culture as well, but not only that, you could see that there could be a really emotional story about this 14-year-old super genius who loses his brother and this robot who becomes his surrogate big brother. So, I pitched it along with about 5 or 6 other ideas to John and this is one he gravitated towards and said, "Go".

Chris Williams added:  I remember so vividly the day that Don first pitched Big Hero 6 to myself and the other directors at Disney and when he talked about this, and at that stage you're not pitching the whole story. You're pitching just a seed of an idea, and when he talked about this main character, who was gonna lose his brother, was gonna be left with his creation, this surrogate older brother, it was so powerful, and I thought, 'Man, that's great'. I really hoped that John would respond to and Greenlight it. And he did, because for John - emotion is everything. It has to be funny, it has to be exciting, and you have to have thrilling action scenes. But, if it doesn't have that core emotion, then you've failed.... So I was then thrilled when a year or so later, Don asked me to join him.

Big Hero 6 is set in the futuristic world of San Fransokyo and I think once you see it, you'll love it. It's just familiar enough, but so fresh and exciting at the same time. We asked the directors to tell us a little about San Fransokyo.

Don Hall started: So that decision kind of happened right after John picked "Big Hero 6" and I had a meeting with the Marvel guys and communicated that to them and they were super thrilled but they said, "Don't worry about setting this in the Marvel Universe. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about "Iron Man" - we just want to see what you do with it and create your own world." It was really encouraging for us, so, we wanted to keep the Japanese aesthetic from the comic book because essentially, it's a Japanese super hero team and the Marvel Universe is the real world... New York is New York and Tokyo is Tokyo. So I wanted to keep the Japanese aesthetic from the Marvel comic but mash it up with a city that would be very recognizable like San Francisco because of all the, the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars. I think we created something really cool and new and just like the movie is a mash up of Disney and Marvel, I thought this city could be a mash up of Eastern and Western kind of things. I thought that they would play well together and create something familiar, but sort of new as well.

Photos courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Chris Williams then added: For our Boss John Lassiter, world building is really important. Part of the experience for the audience is being told a great story, but another part is being taken to a world where you've never been, and it's been a big part of Disney history as well. So we love that idea of creating a world that is unique, that the audience would love to go to and I think, I hope we achieved it with San Fransokyo.

Next, we asked, Did you ever expect the response of success of "Big Hero 6?

Don Hall laughed and joked: We did! Then he got more serious and said: No. we're very fortunate because we're always the first audience, and so we were won over by, Baymax as a character and the film... And so, you always feel like, "OK if I'm not that different from everybody else and if we like it, and our Studio likes it, hopefully, everybody will". Then, once we started rolling it out and sat in the audience and listened to them laugh and gasp and cry, then it started to hit us that, "OK, it seems to be resonating with people". And, Baymax as a character, that is something you can't predict. That is, that a character will, blow up that big. (we all laughed at that pun!). But you know, that a character will just resonate like that with people worldwide - it's just resounding. It's pretty cool, because he'll outlive all of us, and to have contributed a character like that to sort of the Disney Legacy is pretty cool.

Chris Williams then added: And that legacy is something we think about a lot. We got into animation because we fell in love with Disney when we were kids and I loved the Baymax character. That was definitely my "in" to the film, and I'm really proud of the dynamic between Hiro and Baymax and the lineage from Baymax all the way back to Bambi and Dumbo and Pinocchio and these kinds of characters that have this purity and this sweetness to them. I always respond to those kinds of characters, and they're a big part of the Disney heritage. So yeah, and it is an overwhelming idea sometimes, for us that we are part of this group that's helping to carry that legacy forward. But here we are. We're very proud of the movie.

In case you haven't seen the movie, Hiro - the 14-year-old prodigy at the center of the story - endures the tragic loss of his older brother (and his parents had died years before). A robot named Baymax, his brother's last creation, becomes a trusted companion for Hiro and although he's a robot, he seeks to understand the grief that Hiro is going through. Heavy stuff, right? Disney brought in a Clinical Psychologist to help create Hiro's character. I thought this was fascinating and once you start hearing about how these stories are made you get more and more of the details behind the scenes. Disney truly leaves no stone unturned when researching their characters, their mannerisms, their movements - it's amazing.

We then asked, How important was the Clinical Psychologist that you brought in to mold Hero's Character?

Director Don Hall replied: It was hugely important, on a couple of different levels. We always start with our personal story, especially when you're dealing with something as personal as loss, so the conversations in the story room would always be personal stories... you always start there because that's your only experience. I did some reading very early on loss and grief and watched "Ordinary People",  but when we did bring in the Clinical Psychologist, and Child Psychologist later, it did two things: It gave us a new insight into specifically teen loss, but it also reinforced that we're on the right track because a lot of things she talked about and her Social Worker friends talked about, we were already doing in the film. So in a sense, it kind of validated our approach, and also gave us some new insight.

Chris Williams added:  It is amazing in our story room how generous and open people are, and how vulnerable they allow themselves to be. The story room for us is a really sacred space. We come in there, we close the door, and then people are very open and respectful. People will talk about, some of the most difficult moments of their lives, and we were telling a story about the character who's dealing with loss and we wanted to be true to that experience. One of the things I'm most struck by is - we don't want to be driven. We want to talk about our own experiences and that's certainly helped us a lot with this film.

As you may know, Big Hero 6 is up for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. Pretty impressive and I'm sure overwhelming to the makers of the film. So, we asked them how does that feel and how has working on this been different from anything else you've ever worked on, to come to this point?

Don Hall answered:  Well for me, it just reaches back into those childhood loves, and it sounds trite, but it is sort of a dream come true, to be able to do a movie like this... and then to have it be recognized by people. I mean, that's sort of the icing on the cake. Yeah, we're thrilled,  especially considering the field of other nominees. I mean, there's a lot of animated films this year and they're all really, really good. So it's just an incredible feeling.

Chris Williams replied: We have both worked at Disney Animation for about 20 years and I've worked on a lot of movies and every story is hard. You know, it's just the way it is. They're meant to be. If you're gonna do something original, then it's gonna be hard. This one, I think we would agree, was the most challenging story we've ever worked on. I think there's a lot of disparate elements that we brought together and had to make sense together. It was just really ambitious. I think the size of the number of characters, the size of the world, technically, it was incredibly challenging. But I think there was also a choice made form the very beginning that we were gonna attempt to reach a depth of emotion with this film that was going to be pretty deep. We knew that and that was the bar we were aiming for, and we had to achieve that or we wouldn't have done our jobs. I think that we managed it, and again, it's not just our process - it's not Don and I and a crew that works with us. We work with hundreds of really talented Aartists who are so invested and they give everything they have, and they give years of their creative lives to this one thing. And so we achieved it with them and I'm really proud of what ultimately came.

Finally, we wanted to know, whose idea was it to get Stan Lee into the movie?

Don Hall started: We had a desire to do that. I have to say though, we kind of back-burnered it. We pushed this about as far as you could push it - right up to the deadline.... We both went to go see "Guardians of the Galaxy" and I think it was August when it came out. And by this point, the film [Big Hero 6] was animated and we're finishing it up,and we both had a very similar reaction when we came in on Monday morning.... and it was sort of panic, cause it was like "Oh my God, nobody left the Theatre. We stayed for the entire "Guardians of the Galaxy" and everybody stayed through the credits for the Howard the Duck scene". And we weren't doing that. We didn't have one. And so we both came in on Monday morning a little panicked, and so we just had a quick conversation and I think we always thought that it would be funny to do something with Fred and his dad... that felt like kind of areas that we hadn't explored yet. So Chris went away and storyboarded and wrote that little tag, and came up with the underwear call back. We pulled our Producer in, and at this point I don't think there were any animators left on the show, and it was, "Hey, we need a little money for this... so can you finagle something?" So, he had a couple of car washes and we grabbed some people and the most amazing thing about this sequence is, we kept it from the crew .We took just essential personnel, a team of maybe 20 people sworn to secrecy. We all had code names and it was on its own server so that people couldn't snoop around and find it. We actually managed to pull that off and keep it a secret from the crew until the wrap party. They didn't know and it was awesome.

Chris Williams said: You know, we always had Stan Lee in the painting that was passed by. That was a given. That was gonna be in there. But, it wasn't until very late in the game that we decided we needed to do more. It was really great and it meant that we, if ever so briefly, got to meet and work with Stan Lee.

Don Hall : Bask in the glory.

Chris Williams: That was pretty awesome. I had kind of written this thing and I knew he was 90.

Don Hall chimed in: He was 91 at the time and now he's 92.

Chris Williams: I'd never met him so I didn't know what to expect when we finally met him, but because we were trying to keep it a secret, we didn't record him in our building. We recorded him in another lot, and they had actually booked him on a second story sound stage.

Don Hall added: With no Elevator by the way.

Chris Williams continued: No Elevator. We were walking a flight of stairs. So we had a whole plan. We were gonna walk behind him and catch him if he fell because we didn't want to be responsible. We would be marked men. But fortunately, we were waiting up front and he rolls up and he springs out of the car and he was everything you want him to be - you know, the energy, the persona, the voice, the gusto. Very self-effacing and he was awesome, and he took those stairs like a champion, and he was really, really great. He nailed the part. It was the part he was born to play.

Big Hero 6 will be released on Blu-ray combo pack on 2/24/15!
Check out a trailer here: