Directed
by: Henry Selick
Written by: Sam Hamm (based on
Kaja Blackley's Dark Town comic book)
Music by: Anne Dudley
Production Started On: April 1999; the live-action filming began
in LA on June 1st, 1999 and wrapped later in the year
Released on: originally scheduled for
May
12, 2000 then pushed back to November 3, 2000 to
be finally released on February 23, 2001
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Running Time: 92 minutes
Budget: $70 million
U.S. Opening Weekend: $2.685 million over
1,722 screens
Box-Office: $4.4 million in the U.S.,
$ million worldwide
Stu Milley... Brendan Fraser
Monkeybone... Paul Reubens (aka Pee-Wee Herman)
Death... Whoopi Goldberg
Julie McElroy... Bridget Fonda
Organ Donor Stu... Chris Kattan
Kitty... Rose McGowan
Stu's Agent... Dave Foley
Hypnos, the God of Nightmares... Giancarlo Esposito
Lulu LaRue... Mary Pierce
The Grim Reaper... Christopher Franciosa
Lucky... Harry Knowles
Stu
Miley (Brendan Fraser) is a successful, mild-mannered cartoonist who is
about to marry the girl of his dreams (Bridget Fonda). When he is put into
a deep coma following a car accident, he finds himself waking up in the
world he created in his comic book, "Dark Town". He has 12 hours to escape
this spooky dream world of his own creation before Death (Whoopy Goldberg)
claims him. He teams up with his own creation and alter ego, Monkeybone,
who is everything he isn't (lewd, lascivious, immoral, greedy and unethical),
in an effort to return to the real world...
MonkeyBone combines
state-of-the-art stop motion animation within a live action format.
Henry Selick (The
Nightmare Before Christmas, James
and the Giant Peach) has been working on this film ever since he
left Disney back in 1996. He received the support from producers
Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone), Michael Barnathan
(Stepmom) and Mark Radcliffe (Mrs.Doubtfire, Home Alone
2) for this project.
Ben Stiller, fresh from the international hit There's Something about
Mary (1998), dropped out of Monkey Bone a couple of months before
production started, in order to star in Mystery Men (1999).
His role was picked up in February 1999 by Brendan Fraser.
The working title for
Monkeybone
was Dark Town, the comic book series on which it was based. Selick
changed the name in August 1998 in order to provide relevance to the comic
book company, Mad Monkey Press, who publishes "Dark Town" the comic.
The
name of Harry Knowles might sound familiar to you -he is the talented Webmaster
of the movie site Ain't it cool
news. Harry landed cameos in a few big movies over the past
years, including 1998's The Faculty. His character in Monkeybone
was ironically named Lucky!
Scribe Sam Hamm
revealed in November 2000 that the now departed Bill Mechanic was championing
the film, but the new management is unsure what to do with it as despite
getting good responses during test screenings, many attendees think the
movie "is too wierd for their friends to enjoy" and thus wouldn't recommend
it - ie. the word of mouth would be poor. As
a result FOX has pushed it back to an April 11, 2001 release slot.
Monkeybone has
been referred to in the press as "the first official disaster of 2001".
This phone interview was conducted by About.com
the day before Monkeybone's release.
How long have you been waiting to do a more adult movie?
I can't really say. You look at stuff I did in college and it's more adult. Animation, my home base, just has traditionally been, when it gets out to the public, more family and kids . This being primarily live action gave me an opportunity to stretch in other directions.
How does directing live action compare to animation for you?
You
carefully plan it just like you do animation and then the actors have their
own thing they add to it, their own personalities, especially with someone
like Chris Kattan (pictured below). He's very unusual in that I felt like
I was working with the best animated character I've ever worked with. He
literally would take chances and do things physically that no one else
I've ever worked with would do. So, working with him was the closest to
working with an animated character, although it's all happening right in
front of you and he's breaking windows he's not supposed to and knocking
irreplaceable props off of tables and breaking those too. You mark it out
and there's more choreography, not just making it up as you go but there's
also that too. Being an animator, I plan everything way too carefully and
in the live action world I often have to just let that go and invent it
on the spot or the day before.
What made you decide this would be your next movie?
I just thought it had a very easily understood concept. It was very imaginative. It had a feeling of a great myth. It's not the same as Orpheus but it's kind of related to that. If someone's in a coma you wonder if they have an inner life. Are they dreaming? What's happening to them? I ended up actually interviewing someone who was in a coma for more than a year and I was completely convinced that there was a whole inner world. It's very frightening. She was speaking with her grandfather. Her feet were nailed to the ground. She couldn't move between life and death. She wanted to go to heaven. She got to be friends with Gloria Swanson who she'd never been exposed to in her life, in the movies. It was totally convincing so that meeting really kind of galvanized it.
So did any of the dreams in the movie come from real sources?
Not really. There is a case of Stu's big dream when Julie tries to scare him awake with that drug. That painting was story driven. He had a fear of winding up in a hospital and being turned into a vegetable. That was derived from story. [When a dog dreams,] what does a dog fear most and how do you make it funny? Julie's dream of the wedding that then turns into the ending of Stu's life, again was part of the story. So no real-life dreams.
Were you influenced at all by movies like Labyrinth and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I've never
seen Labyrinth. Who Framed Roger Rabbit I'm very familiar
with and there was a book about how they did some of the interaction. They
did far more interactive moments than we did. Roger Rabbit is almost an
entire film [of interaction] unlike Monkeybone, which is really just the
first third and the final last part. As far as figuring out how to do some
interactive moments we learned from Roger Rabbit. Roger Rabbit had a period
feel, kind of Tex Avery and Warner
Brothers look and tone. There's no specific films we looked at for
style. There is a really cool movie that for tone we looked at, although
I don't think you'll see that much. It was a super low budget cult film
called Carnival of Souls by Herk Harvey. It's great. That was something
that seeped into our early thoughts.
Why did the three months of Stu's coma go by so quickly?
There's a lot of deleted material . Some of my favorite scenes are deleted. There are forces beyond my own dictated that we had to get out of Downtown and into the next part of the film, so there's some key things that are gone for pacing. It's not as if there are three months of material. It was just a little bit more to give you more of a sense of time passing.
Did Rose McGowan get to keep her cat suit?
I don't know if she got to. She certainly deserved to.
Did Brendan Fraser actually kiss the monkey in the lab?
Oh yeah. Brendan is surprising. You think there might be a barrier,
somewhere he wouldn't go, but no. He'll always surprise you and go the
whole way. Yes, he kissed the monkey.
Did the actors get to have any fun working with the complicated
special effects?
Yeah, I think people really enjoyed themselves. Actors thrive on what's
around them. In the past when I've done only animated films when you're
doing just voice, a lot of actors have a really hard time because there's
not enough visual stimulation to help them get into their part. Here's
a case where there's as much visual stimulation as you could want. Bridget
Fonda loved coming to visit us when we were doing the Downtown shoot. She
even wanted to have a cameo wearing the pig head. So, despite all the difficulties,
I think people had fun. Giancarlo Esposito who played Hypnos (pictured
at left, in the middle) had a very tough job physically. He was basically
walking on his knees with these little legs that moved ,and shift his weight
forward, had to do all this yoga, so he had an incredible hard physical
challenge. Some of the unseen characters inside of prosthetics also had
very difficult jobs. It was pretty good spirits on set most all the time.
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