1906 - Disney/ Pixar / Warner live action co-production

[jpanimation]

I think Brad Bird is totally in his comfort zone making a disaster movie. His current lineup of movies deal with mature themes and realistic relationships. They feel very adult in those terms. I also read of many instances where he wanted to make the action scenes more intense then the studios would allow him to. As I see it, he's finally taking the restraints off.

[Sotiris]

Q: Any updates on “1906?”

Brad Bird: No. I remain interested and maybe somebody will be interested in doing it the way I want to do it. There was talk about doing it as a TV series exclusively and that’s sort of intriguing to me but I so love the big screen that I want that to play a part in it. So to be continued…

Source: https://theplaylist.net/brad-bird-incre ... 0180614/2/

Bird revealed that the issue with 1906 is that it’s too big for a movie, but he’s convinced the earthquake has to be seen on the big screen.

“It wants to be a longer story. It’s a really fascinating moment in history. Prior to the earthquake, San Francisco is this really happening city that’s somewhere between the Old West and the 20th Century. I mean, they still had bars where people were getting Shanghai’d—getting slipped Mickey Finns and you would wake up on a boat and if you didn’t work the boat, you’d be thrown overboard. So that was still happening and the people who owned those kinds of bars were in the California legislature. In other words, it was somewhere between the Wild West and the sophisticated city San Francisco would like to see itself as, and was in many ways. So it’s this fascinating moment in history where gaslight and electric light were co-existing, and cars and horses were co-existing. Getting it in a movie-sized box, it’s too big a story for. If you do it for TV you’re missing the scale of motion pictures, so I keep trying to get it to kind of straddle these two worlds.”

Bird says Warner Bros. is keen on making a film out of the earthquake portion of the story, and it sounds like the filmmaker has at least been in some kind of discussions about a TV aspect of the story that would precede the earthquake movie.

“I love the movie experience and I would want the earthquake to be on a movie screen and yet I recognize that the story’s too [big], so I’m kind of trying to get it done as an amalgam and people are kind of intrigued by it. Warners wants to do the earthquake part of it as a movie, and we just can’t get it all under one roof. But I’m still fascinated by the story. To be continued. I’m still interested in it but I want it to be done in a way that embraces all the possibilities and yet somehow stays near or part of it or something on the big screen, so we’ll see what happens.”

Source: http://collider.com/1906-update-brad-bird/

Q: Let's remind those that are listening James D'Alessandro's 1906. What drew you to the book? Tell us about it.

Brad Bird: I was friends with guy named Jeff Levine. At that time he was a neighbor of mine. So we knew each other and we both worked in the film industry and he was visiting up north after I moved up to work at Pixar. He was visiting us and I asked what projects he was involved with, and he was working with Paula Weinstein at the time, and he started mentioning this story about the corruption that was going on in San Francisco at a really rare moment in time between that 18th century and the 19th century where they literally had horses and cars co-existing, gas lights and electric lights co-existing, stage and the beginning of movies co-existing. It's this super interesting time where a lot was going on in San Francisco in particular. Then of course, this earthquake and fire happens on top of it but there was this huge corruption scandal and Roosevelt had sent a guy in to kind of get in and figure out what's going on and...Anyway, it endlessly fascinating and that's what got me into it. And then I read a treatment that, I can't remember their names at this moment, but a couple of guys had written a treatment of the general idea of 1906. James D'Alessandro had pitched the idea of a film about what preceded the earthquake and then it goes through the earthquake. These guys went a different direction. He pitched that at Warner Brothers, they said that would be a hell of a movie and they allowed him to write a book of it. But it was a movie idea before it was a book. The treatment that I read went in a different direction but had the cool world that James was first interested in. I, of course, started researching it and I got interested in a lot of other things that were different from the treatment but focusing on what was going on in the city preceding the earthquake and then taking it through that. So, it's a mixture of fictional things and real things and...

Q: Not a disaster film.

Brad Bird: I always thought if you do it right people will forget about the earthquake. And then suddenly the earthquake happens and throws everything upside down. And because so much was happening you could forget. My ideal version of it would be that the audience would not remember that there's an earthquake. And of course they're going to know, it's going to be in the advertising, but the direction of it, the writing of it, the building of it should be as if there's no earthquake.

Q: And Pixar was going to do a co-production with Warner?

Brad Bird: Well, it was kind of a weird foggy thing where that's what I was working on and they came to me with the idea of Ratatouille. 1906 was going to be next after Incredibles and I kind of said 'Well, if I do this, will you help me get this other thing going?' and Warners had already owned it but they didn't mind kind of doing a co- thing. It didn't end up working out that way though. I didn't crack the story. The story is too big for one movie and doing a series of movies is probably...you know? For something that's not known...I don't know.

Q: Is it still on your mind? Does it still live with you?

Brad Bird: Sure. I still think it would be amazing if it could be cracked. I couldn't crack it at that time though. Every time I got it down to a movie size I was throwing so much. [...] It's so massively fascinating, it probably should be a TV show but then you're selling the earthquake short by having it on a tiny screen. So, that's the conundrum with it. I have a weird kind of hybrid version that I'm trying to get people interested in but status quo is always kind of king and you have to overcome...obstacles.

Q: Is that next maybe for you?

Brad Bird: No.

Source: https://deadline.com/2018/12/pixar-brad ... 202519826/