The Bad Guys 2 Director on Making Themes Universal, Incredible Lucha Fight | Interview
ComingSoon spoke with The Bad Guys 2 director Pierre Perifel to learn more about the film’s themes and how it was made. Perifel spoke about the film’s standout lucha fight, its themes of forgiveness, and more. The Dreamworks animated sequel is now available to watch at home digitally and will also arrive on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 7.
“In the new action-packed chapter from DreamWorks Animation’s acclaimed comedy smash about a crackerjack crew of animal outlaws, our now-reformed Bad Guys are trying (very, very hard) to be good, but instead find themselves hijacked into a high-stakes, globe-trotting heist, masterminded by a new team of criminals they never saw coming: The Bad Girls,” reads the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Congrats on The Bad Guys 2. I really enjoyed the sequel. I was curious, since this was your second go around, what was the advantage of not having to introduce the main characters since everybody is already familiar with them? How does that kind of free you up creatively to tell a whole new story and move those characters forward?
Pierre Perifel: It’s part of any sequel, I guess the trick is to not introduce them, but still introduce them a little bit for people who haven’t seen the first movie [laughs], which was tricky. Because at first I was like, hang on, if you’re not gonna go watch the sequel, if you haven’t seen the first film, and the studio is like, “No, no, no, it doesn’t work like this. Just make sure that people can follow.”
By the way, the studio is totally right. It’s like, no, you wanna be able to just make a movie that holds by itself. You don’t necessarily need your audience to watch the first thing to understand that second one. So we kind of do a little bit of a mini introduction to who they are, but we keep it very, very simple, which is basically tapping into their skillset.
We have the hacker, and we have Wolf, who is a driver guy and the mastermind, and we have Piranha, Shark is the master of disguise. We reintroduce them very briefly and simply, and then we just quickly say what happened to them in the first film, and that they went good and now they’re struggling. So hopefully people in the audience who haven’t seen the first film can understand the follow-up, what’s going on. I’ve asked a few who have not seen the first one and saw the second one if they were lost, and they were like, “We totally got it,” which is great.
Making a sequel when you don’t have to do the full introduction is fantastic because those characters, you have to understand that at this point, it’s been six years that I spent with them, we are like close friends. I know them so well. They’re part of me. But like the entire team, we’ve been spending so much time with them, so we know them so well and really wanna play with them more. I mean, they’re so fun to be with.
So, a sequel really is an opportunity to deepen who they are, understand more what they want and where their evolution can lead them to who they used to be and how they react. How they interact with each other. And I think that’s the appeal of like, long-running TV shows. You really can dive into your characters and really can explore all their facets, you know? And that’s what I found in this one is like, “Oh my God, I can really just tap into this side of this character or that side of that character,” and I think that was incredibly fun.
I thought it was so interesting in the film how you touch on the hard times of the whole group trying to reintegrate into society. It’s a very heavy topic, and we see this a lot about convicts who get out of prison and are trying to get a new start. But it shows that not everybody’s gonna forgive you just because you’ve decided to make amends. How is it tackling that subject matter? Because there’s a lot of depth to that, but this is still a very fun, very high-energy family movie.
Pierre Perifel: Yeah. I mean, like, you’re literally putting your fingers on it. It is the story of a reinsertion. It is a reinsertion story. Having a second chance at how they are those second chances. I think in a way it’s very universal. It doesn’t just talk to ex-convicts. It also talks to any kid who has maybe made a mistake at some point at school, at home, whatever, and gets a little punished for that mistake. Just finding in themselves the little bit of the “Can I have a second chance? How do I look at that myself? Am I a bad guy or am I a good guy?”
It really is like distilling those doubts and just, “No, no, no. Deep down, you’re obviously a good guy.” Because you made a mistake at some point in your life, or last week, whatever, that now that action that you made is dictating the rest of your entire life.
That’s what it is about — reinsertion. It’s like you paid for it. If you’re honest with yourself and you really wanna change, you deep down will be a changed person, and you’re gonna reinsert into society, and you’re sure it’s very tricky because not everybody sees you this way. Everyone still is a little afraid of who you are and what you’ve done before.
So we worked closely with a consultant called Sam Lewis, who would help us. He was an ex-con himself and created that association to help ex-convicts insert themselves into society through psychological support, meetings between them, just networking, and all that stuff, and guide them through that reinsertion.
He helped us pinpoint a little bit of the different steps that ex-convicts face when they’re coming out of jail. Self-doubt, the feeling of being an imposter. The feeling of never belonging to any part of this society anymore. The feeling of being still on the fringe of society and all of that stuff that our characters go through.
It was incredibly exciting, incredibly profound, you know, just to be able to speak with him and just to relate to the difficulties that these people face, you know, when they’re living in prison. Fortunately, we have the benefits of playing with cute animals and very cute visuals, which makes that theme much easier to grasp for any kind of audience. Obviously, we’re not taking ourselves very seriously, but nonetheless, we’re just pushing the right buttons there.
I think that’s why this, this theme and this question becomes a bit more universal for kind of everyone. Everyone finds a little bit of something for themselves, you know?
My favorite scene was the lucha fight. It’s a real standout. How was it really making that fight look visually unique? Because it kind of reminded me of the last Puss and Boots movie a bit, which also had some super highly stylized fight scenes. How was it getting that look for the lucha fight?
Pierre Perifel: Yeah, I mean, from the beginning, I wanted it to be a very intense moment because it was the end of the first act of the movie. And that was the event that would propel the bad guys into the rest of the story, where they would be just after this, they would be on the lam public enemies, number one again.
The idea was to make something so chaotic and so intense that even then would be like, “what just happened?” And I think that’s what I wanted, even for the audience. The audience would be like, “oh my God, this is so much until like, big release.” And then our characters are like now, you know, probably in the minimum one on the lam, just like with all the cops chasing them.
I wanted the audience to feel like a little breath of life through it. So for that, the idea was just to make deep use of lighting and very, very strong color changes within the sequence. And also referencing a lot, I’ve been like pushing my team to reference a lot like anime sequences where the ring, for instance, would just stretch and with change shape and like deform.
So, that’s how I launched the story artist, first of all, when we started that to really push things and really get influenced by that. Then from the storyboards, going into our previous team, so to keep pushing. I think that sequence turned out to be really fun to watch really over the top and totally silly for, you know, six to eight minutes […] It just builds, builds, builds, then releases, and I think from the beginning of the reference, we were pretty clear on what we wanted to do.
It’s an incredible scene. I saw it in 3D, it was almost like visually overwhelming. It was such an experience.
I saw it recently as well. I hadn’t seen it. It works so well in 3D. I’m very, very pleased with it.
Thanks to Pierre Perifel for taking the time to talk about The Bad Guys 2.
Source: Comingsoon.net