They called it Rancho Rango.
A modest ranch house in the hills of La Cañada, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, it was where Gore Verbinski and a loose band of confederates and conspirators began fleshing out an idea they’d hatched over breakfast back in 2003 at a San Fernando Valley deli: an animated Sergio Leone-style Western populated with creatures of the desert, including a lizard with an identity crisis as the lead character.
Also read: Fear and Loathing in ... 'Rango'?
The ideas were crazy, the challenges formidable and the odds of success slim, not least because nobody involved had ever made an animated movie before.
But along the way, Verbinski and his motley crew (with the help of some heavyweights at ILM, who themselves were wading into new waters) made the year’s weirdest and best animated film, an absurdist yarn that now stands a pretty good chance of taking the journey that began at Rancho Rango and ending it in a moment of triumph on the stage of the Kodak Theater.
“I think everybody embraced that feeling of ‘we’ve never done this before, but maybe that’s what’s gonna make this different,’” said the film’s production designer, Mark “Crash” McCreery. “We thought, ‘We’re not confined by any constraints or preconceived ideas. We’re just going to do whatever the hell we want to do, make it the coolest we can make it, and be proud of it.’”
Also read: 'Rango' Rules at VES Awards
"Rango" began as ideas kicked around during that deli breakfast. Verbinski wrote a 12-page outline, then went off to make a couple of "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. (One upside: He told the story to his "Pirates" star Johnny Depp, who said, “You had me at lizard.”)
He showed the outline to playwright/screenwriter John Logan ("The Aviator"). Logan came on board as the most linear member of the crew of artists, designers and dreamers who assembled around 2007 and spent more than a year hashing out the movie at Verbinski’s La Canada house.
“It was Crash McCreery and Jim Byrkit and Gore and these insane artists who were doing maquettes and drawings and illustrations,” remembered Logan. “It was like the Dirty Dozen that Gore assembled. And then I would come in, practically with a tweed smoking jacket on, and say, ‘Now let’s talk about narrative structure.’”
But the idea, Logan admitted, was more about fun than structure.
“All the way along, the process of Rango was the process of doing something that we thought was wildly entertaining,” he said. “So you could have Hunter S. Thompson jokes and Shakespeare jokes and Sergio Leone jokes. And we could play the Western tropes honestly and fully. We never cut down the edge of the piece trying to fit into some mythical four-quadrant ‘family market.’ We just had to be true to the story.”
The story, Verbinski said, developed seamlessly.
