Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1120864
D E PA R T M E N T 41 KEYFRAME SPRING 2019 41 left: The memorable scene where the Iron Giant and Hogarth talk about the meaning of a soul SUMMER 2019 41 JEFFREY LYNCH HEAD OF STORY Lynch first met Bird on The Simpsons, where he worked on several of his shows and they directed an episode together. After seven seasons, he joined Bird at Turner to work on a noir sci/fi project called Ray Gunn. "Unfortunately, it got shelved when Turner was taken over by Warner Bros.," says Lynch. "I went off and worked on another picture for three months, when Brad gave me a call for something called The Iron Giant." In the beginning he offered me the head of the story department. I had never done it before so I told him, "Give me a few months, let's see how I do." Luckily, I managed to pull it off. The story really spoke to me: It came from a time of Cold War paranoia that permeated my childhood. I remember doing the duck- and-cover drills when I was in first grade, then marching to the "safety" of the gymnasium. Brad was writing pages, and once I had received them I would look at my crew and say, okay, who's best suited for this material? Who's going to really make it shine? If it's got more action, then obviously Mark Andrews. If it's all about acting, it's going to go to Viki Anderson, who really had a spirit with characters. Sometimes there were things that I knew weren't working and I would assign someone on the side to try to come up with a solution. I wanted to see if we could crack it before pitching it to Brad. He welcomed that interaction; I felt like we had a lot more freedom. Brad did some great pages on Dean and Annie [Hogarth's mom] dating. It was an earlier version, which is not in the final film. The stuff was hilarious and we were boarding it, but I had to go in and say, "This is a story about a boy and his robot, and we're starting to spend a lot of screen time on a love story." Dean Wellins has a great story sense. He's a big guy. He stands like six and a half feet, and one day I felt his looming presence in my doorway. I looked over and he had this very unhappy look. He had been working on a lot of material about the trials and tribulations of how the boy would prevent the town from discovering the giant. We spent so much time on it that the giant had become a burden. Wellins said: "If I was a little kid and I had a giant robot, I'd be having some fun." It's one of those things that's staring you in the face and it becomes painfully obvious after someone mentions it. The scenes with Hogarth and the giant playing "flying car," and jumping in the lake, for example, came out of that conversation. At the same time, it gave us a vehicle to start weaving Dean, Hogarth and the giant together emotionally. One scene that stuck with me was the death of the deer in the forest, where the Iron Giant learns about the concept of life and death. I can't recall if we got pages or whether it was something Brad pitched to us, but I do remember that it was Dean Wellins who boarded it. It was a really difficult pivotal moment to deliver. The scene starts very fun, then turns into something serious and profound. That leads into my second favorite scene, which is later that evening at the junkyard. The giant is pondering what has happened that day and Hogarth talks with him about: what is life, what is death, what is a soul? At the end of that second scene was one of my favorite storyboard sequences, also done by Kevin O'Brien, that wasn't in the original film—a dream sequence broadcast from the giant's mind that Dean actually sees on his television. It scares Dean half to death because, essentially, we see a glimpse of the Iron Giant's original purpose—as a planet killer. It was very stylized and cool. Unfortunately, it wasn't included in the original release because the picture ran out of time and money. We were on a really compressed schedule and just trying to get it done was really tough. We were all young and we were all hungry. We wanted to work on something that would make a difference. We didn't want to talk about the good old days, we wanted to blaze new territory, and Brad has this fire in him that challenged us to push ourselves to higher levels. When I saw it at the premiere, I knew it was great. But leading up to it I was immersed on For the Love of the Game. I hadn't seen any billboards, hadn't seen anything in the paper, hadn't heard any press and I'm thinking, what's going on? So it was pretty disappointing to realize that this incredible film had been made and no one knew about it. "We were all young and we were all hungry. We wanted to work on something that would make a difference. We didn't want to talk about the good old days, we wanted to blaze new territory."