When Jeremy Spears set out to direct an animated short film with longtime friend Nathan Engelhardt, the co-directors thought it would take them about a year — not six — to make their Oscar-nominated passion project, “Forevergreen.”
“Our wives were about ready to kill us, but God bless them, they loved us through it all,” Spears told TheWrap’s Drew Taylor during TheWrap’s Animated Film Showcase on Monday. “The more that we went with the film, we had more and more friends from the industry join us on this endeavor. So 200 artists and technicians joined us on this film, and they did it all in their generosity.”
Sitting at Spears’ side was Steph Gortz, a longtime production coordinator and production supervisor of Disney animation who is a “Forevergreen” producer. “I enjoy the challenge of corralling,” she said. “It’s why I work on the production side and not the creative side. Somebody has to herd the cats. I enjoy it.”
Joining Spears and Gortz on the animation panel (that was part of TheWrap’s Screening Series) were fellow short filmmakers Chris Lavis (“The Girl Who Cried Pearls”) and Konstantin Bronzit (“The Three Sisters”), as well Ugo Bienvenu, who wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated animated feature “Arco.”
Lavis and co-director Maciek Szczerbowski, a longtime friend, first started thinking about “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” 15 years ago, drawing from just two images smashed together.
“We write all the time, and we work all the time, and we go for beers all the time, and we’re just always open for things,” Lavis said. “We started working together as collage artists, actually, and with collage, you find images, and you look for things, and you collide them, and you piece them together. … With this movie, it was that same kind of process, where this image of a girl crying and this image of pearls lying on the ground were like two pieces of a collage, and it felt like there was a story there.”
While “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” stems from collages, “The Three Sisters” evokes the feeling of a pop-up book, which Bronzit called necessary for the story he was telling.
“I was taught that story dictates the design and the style, so I didn’t have a choice,” Bronzit said via video conference, translated from Russian by an interpreter. “It was inevitable.”
In 2019, when Bienvenu started working on “Arco,” which follows a young boy who inadvertently travels from the utopian 2900s back to the 2070s, he started feeling like “we were beginning to live in a really bad science fiction movie.” He wanted to create a promising future in response.
“Since the golden age of science fiction spread bad ideas in the future and they are happening right now, maybe it’s our responsibility right now as science-fiction writers to spread better things in the future,” he said. “If we want the best to happen, we have to imagine it.”
To get his feature across the finish line, Bienvenu needed help from a big-name producer. He found one in Natalie Portman, with whom he shares an agent. After showing the Oscar-winning actress 45 minutes of animatics from the middle of the film, she was hooked.
“She was really moved and like, ‘What do you need from me?’ I said, ‘I need you to protect the movie — the movie I wanted to make in the very beginning, because nobody trusts it,’” Bienvenu said. “‘And we need you to put the rest of the money to do the animatic so we can show everybody the exact movie we want to do.’”
Bronzit, meanwhile, initially didn’t want his name involved with “The Three Sisters” at all. The Russian filmmaker — who had been nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the Oscars twice before this year — used an alias, Timur Kognov, when submitting his film to festivals “just to see if I could do it without using my name.
“The first people who actually knew who I was were actually the selection committee of the Santa Barbara Festival,” he said. “When they learned, when I won the prize, that I am not Timur Kognov but I’m actually Konstantin Bronzit, they were amazed. They thought it’s just an outstanding adventure, and they thanked me for letting them be part of it.”
For the full Screening Series conversation, click here.
