Disney have this weekend continued their unprecedented run of success with their latest animated film, Moana, storming to the top of the US charts with $81.1 million over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Now the film is bound for the UK this Friday and to celebrate the release, Flickering Myth’s Scott J. Davis sat down with the film’s directors Ron Clements and John Musker to discuss the film, Dwayne Johnson’s singing and their thoughts on the Aladdin live-action remake.
The film sees our heroine Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) set sail through the vast oceans of to search for the precious heart of Te Fiti which was stolen many years ago by demigod Maui, voiced by Dwayne Johnson. The film is in part about explorations and journeys and the director’s said that they both had some aspirations in their youth about being explorers.
“I read the novels of Joseph Conrad” said Musker “Even though I’m not any sort of sailor there was something about the islands that appealed to me – there was something very vivid about them. But I was an armchair explorer!”
For his co-director Clements, it was a very different kind of voyage that he loved growing up, saying: “When I was a kid I was a big fan of Star Trek and there’s a parallel with the two. We are kind of in a dormant period in terms of our exploring but hopefully we’ll start up again”
The directors have been partners in crime at Disney since 1986’s Basil The Great Mouse Detective but Moana marks their first film together since 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. They haven’t been dormant on purpose however, with some other projects falling away through the seven-year gap. Musker explains “It was after The Princess and the Frog. We had spent a few years working on a few other things including a Terry Pratchett project that couldn’t get off the ground. Then we had to come with a new idea so this really didn’t get generated until five years ago, it wasn’t like it was sitting in the bank.”
John Lasseter, who returned to Disney in 2006 to oversee animation both there and at Pixar, asked the duo to direct The Princess and the Frog and is executive producer of Moana. But the film wasn’t the duo’s first idea and they went through a long process of finding the right project as Clements recalls:
“The way things work at Disney – most of the pitches (to Lasseter) come from the directors. He doesn’t hear a lot of outside pitches so he likes to hear about three ideas and this was one of the three that we pitched to him about five years ago and he liked it.”
Musker continues that they spent a lot of time on different islands and locations in the South Pacific (including Fiji and Tahiti) to help them find the story, saying: “We did start with the world on this one just because many of them are set in a “world” of some kind and I just thought it was cool and inviting and very visual.”
Once they had settled on the story, which saw them change the dynamics a little away from Maui and more towards Moana and Mau together, they had the challenge of casting the lead role. Musker recounts that it was a very long process as they had lots of different attributes to find.
“For Moana there were over 600 young women who auditioned and we had trouble finding exactly what we were looking for – we wanted a young girl about the right age who was from that region, if possible someone who was a good actress and a good singer, a lot of things that make it tough. We talked about breaking up what we wanted and have someone else sing and it is true that Auli’i was the very last person to audition. She did not put herself up but in Hawaii the casting agent there had seen her on a tape of her auditioning for something else – she’s not a professional singer or actor but she had a quality so we called her in and she sang and read and we were impressed so we flew her to Los Angeles with her Mum and had her audition and work with our musical director.”
Then, of course, there is the world’s biggest movie star, Dwayne Johnson, who has a ball as Maui in the film. The duo say he was the one and only choice for the role, with Clements saying ““It was very hard to find Moana but very easy to find Maui!”
He continues: “Dwayne Johnson we thought of very early for Maui he has Samoan roots and very close to them and he has lots of tattoos that tell stories so it didn’t seem that much of a stretch to think of him as a Demigod as he already is kind of one for real! We never actually thought of anyone else seriously at all.”
One element of Johnson’s performance that surprises in the film is his singing voice, which many (us included) unaware of his new talents, but Musker says they knew all along he could pull it off, even from his early “The Rock” wrestling days, saying:
“Actually as a wrestler he would sing sometimes. In fact I think he was a bad guy when he first started and he would come along and sing something that dissed whatever town there were in, like “I can’t wait to get out of Sacramento” and could actually carry a tune. His range was not huge but he really practiced and delivered it. He sang on Saturday Night Live as well I think.”
Out of all of the films that Musker and Clements have directed together, it’s Aladdin and The Little Mermaid that many have the biggest affection for. So what does the duo think of Disney’s decision to remake a lot of their classics in live-action. Musker seems optimistic about them so far, saying: “I liked Maleficent as it was a little bit of a different take on that. Kenneth Branagh did a good job on Cinderella. I guess they shouldn’t just try to duplicate the original version, they should maybe take it to a different place.”
Clements added: “Any time that a movie you’ve done is kind of re-imagined in another form it’s a little like a grandchild in a way that you can enjoy it to some degree but you don’t have to work as hard and be as responsible.”
With the new Aladdin looking like being the first of the two out of the gate (Guy Ritchie is set to direct), both Musker and Clements agreed that it’s perhaps finding someone to go up against the late Robin Williams’ legendary performance as The Genie that could prove the hardest task. Musker said: “Yeah it’s a challenge! For the film, I don’t who they’re going to cast but Robin is so unique. Howard Ashman’s (Aladdin lyricist) original conception of the Genie was that he was African-American.”
Clements concludes that it was their idea back in 1992 to have Williams in the role, saying: “We were the ones that actually brought Robin into it as it seemed like such a great animation hook that it was something you could only do in animation and not in live-action.”
Moana opens in UK cinemas on December 2nd.
Many thanks to Ron Clements and Jon Musker for taking the time for this interview.
Scott J. Davis
