Co-Director Galen Tan Chu talks Ice Age: Collision Course at the Footage Presentation in London | The Fan Carpet Ltd • The Fan Carpet: The RED Carpet for FANS • The Fan Carpet: Fansites Network • The Fan Carpet: Slate • The Fan Carpet: Theatre Spotlight • The Fan Carpet: Arena • The Fan Carpet: International

Co-Director Galen Tan Chu talks Ice Age: Collision Course at the Footage Presentation in London


Ice Age: Collision Course

Scrat’s epic pursuit of the elusive acorn catapults him into the universe where he accidentally sets off a series of cosmic events that transform and threaten the Ice Age World. To save themselves, Sid, Manny, Diego, and the rest of the herd must leave their home and embark on a quest full of comedy and adventure, travelling to exotic new lands and encountering a host of colourful new characters.

The Fan Carpet’s Jessen Aroonachellum in association with Acting Hour was in attendance at the Special footage presentation of Ice Age: Collision Course attended by Co-Director Galen Tan Chu…

 

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It must be tremendous working on a project like this?

Yes, it really is, we have over five hundred and fifty artists working on it at Blue Sky. Michael (Thurmeier, Director) and I have been working on it for three years. It’s a lot of late nights but very gratifying, we love what we do, we are very passionate about it, it’s all worth it in the end.

 

There are so many characters in this film that the family can relate to which one could you relate to?

Oh, man, I find those questions hard to answer too. I feel so close to Scrat, As filmmakers and animators you like working on characters that get reactions so like Sid, Scrat and Buck. So those are my three favourite characters to work with.

 

Jessie J’s character is such a great character, how did you make her fit in the group?

Yeah, Her name came up and she has such a great voice and what we do when we have an idea for casting is we grab some clips, we put towards the artwork and listen to them and see how they fit in the ensemble.

How it would feel with the group and when we decide to go with Jessie we weren’t quite sure what to expect because I don’t think she’s done anything like this before; we knew she had a great voice but didn’t know how comfortable she would be acting.

When She came in, she was so brave and courage. She was herself and comfortable. Not sure if you heard but she sang some lines in the end. We really liked that and we said do more of that. A bit of a spoiler, she wanted to sing a song, so she sang a song at the end of the film.

 

Simon Pegg is really good at singing as well.

Yeah, we are really surprised. In fact the composer was really floored by Simon’s singing voice, he’s got such a big voice too. I can’t say enough good things about Simon. Every line he does is so juicy, we have a hard time choosing which take to use, he’s just that good.

 

Are there any more ideas beyond this movie as it could be seen as the last one?

We approach each film as the film, it was not considered as the final one. It has been mention it is the defining chapter. And the way I would answer that is, that it is a defining chapter in their lives, a lot happens in this film, with Manny and Peaches is about to get married, so we wanted to leave ourselves a back door open and see how well this film does. We certainly have more ideas that we can still work on.

 

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How do you and Michael split the job between you and Michael regarding directing the film?

Definitely different roles. Mike is the director. We like to be together for the critical parts which is mostly the script writing, storyboarding and editorial. But for the other ones, we like to divide and conquer, there is a lot of traveling involved, because a lot of the Actors live in LA and we are based in New York so I go there and record their voices and Mike will look after one crew or vice versa or I’ll go look over the design and Mike will do lighting, it’s just more efficient that way for us. So it really helped us on this one as we always feel our schedules are getting shorter and shorter.

 

Out of one to ten how do you like to torture Scrat?

12! That’s the fun thing about it. The more pain we can put him through, the better. With this one, I really think we push ourselves. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the other films but not as extreme or as cartoony as this one. Mike and I really wanted to approach this one bringing something new to the franchise, in terms of sensibility, so we went further with the physical humour.

 

With the cultural reference, like the Star Trek Vulcan Sign or Albert Einstein or the Scream painting, is that something in the script or some during the process making the film?

That’s a really good question. Sometimes it is but a lot of the time it happens organically and what I mean by that is that we get the script, then we show it to the story artist and they bring them ideas. Sometimes, the animators come up with they own ideas and so does the voice actors. So, it really a collative process. As, film makers you really have to be open to new ideas. Even the editors may have an idea and then we talk to the actors to get them to say the lines a different way. When we record the actors we multi-sessions. We take it back to Blue Sky, work on it and bring it back, then speak to the actors and ask what they do to tweak it or add to it. They, even, might change they voice. Sometimes, the actor would ad lib and bring something new to the table.

 

Was the contrast between Julian and Manny what you wanted?

Yes, for Julian (Adam Devine) we really wanted to make him a counterpoint to Manny; the stubborn, head of the herd that we have known throughout the franchise. Julian is a perfectly nice guy for Peaches except, as a father he feels that no one is good enough for his daughter, so we wanted to create a character who was adventurous, spontaneous, everything that Manny isn’t, that’s what we start with and then Adam brought his own flavour to the character.

 

How did make sure everyone had a story arch?

Yeah, the main focus is Manny and everything spins off from that. In this case it’s Manny (Ray Romano), Peaches (Keke Palmer) and Ellie (Queen Latifah). Then we develop Sid’s (John Leguizamo) story as an arch, Diego (Denis Leary) and Shira (Jennifer Lopez) don’t have much of story arch in this one, but we created a small one for them as well. So the ensemble is growing and growing, and balancing the story ache’s is challenging but we wanted to make sure the main storyline was the anchor of the film.

 

Would you say this is the most ambitious one to date?

Yes, this is the most ambitious, each movie is bigger than the last and we feel this is the biggest yet, and in terms of the elements that we’ve got, we’ve got a volcano, an asteroid, water is notoriously hard, Brooke has long hair and that’s hard to do, it’s definitely the most complicated movie we have done.

 

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