Exclusive: Inside Brad Bird’s 30-Year Quest to Hard-boil the Future in Ray Gunn

7 min readBrad Bird knew Ray Gunn would draw its power from a fusion reaction: The animated adventure from the Incredibles and Iron Giant filmmaker is a detective-noir mystery that unfolds in the shadows of a sunny science-fiction utopia. He became obsessed with bringing two disparate genres into one story, with old-school private eyes, gangsters, and femme fatales clashing in a glossy world of aliens and space-age technology. The problem was … nobody believed his vision of the future.Bird has been trying to make Ray Gunn for more than 30 years, and it only exists now, debuting on Netflix on December 18, because he could not let go. Various studios ranging from Warner Bros. to Disney flirted with the concept before shelving it. “For me, it was an unscratched itch. There was something about animation doing film noir but also having more comedy in it and more action,” Bird tells me. “I always thought it was weird that people were resistant. I thought, Really? How is this not good popcorn stuff?”Finally, Skydance Animation gave him the green light, but so much time had passed that the present day kept threatening to catch up to Bird’s world of tomorrow. We still don’t have skies full of flying cars or particle-blasting pistols yet, but the all-consuming AI surveillance that becomes a key plot point for this private-eye tale is one aspect that seems like it’s happening already.Netflix/SkydanceIn Ray Gunn, Sam Rockwell’s private eye and his alien sidekick (voiced by Tom Waits) ride through the skyline of futuristic Metropia.Other aspects of Ray Gunn’s story remain timeless: scandal, betrayal, desperation … even murder. If those don’t sound like the tropes of a kids movie, you might have a clue about why some animation companies were hesitant. Parents should know it is safely PG-rated, but Bird was determined to make something that didn’t talk down to little ones.Actually, the filmmaker puts it even more bluntly than that. “Quite honestly, I don’t think about kids at all,” he says. “Too much animation thinks exclusively about kids to the point where [filmmakers] would not see the movie that they’re making for someone else. That, to me, seems incredibly patronizing. You better be in the audience that you’re making it for, or everything you do will be insincere.“If you try to think about appealing to this group or that group, you’ll fail miserably—guaranteed. And any kid that’s smart will smell you out in one second,” he adds. “The only way to have a good chance at making something good is to say, ‘What do I want to see?’ and then hope that other people will share that point of view.”With that perspective in mind, let’s venture into the retro-futuristic realm of Ray Gunn, where the only assurance is that safety is not guaranteed…Ray Gunn is the name of the main character, and like all gumshoes in noir stories, he makes his living on the edge of society, delving into secrets that some people would rather keep hidden away. He’s voiced by Sam Rockwell, who Bird said brought a live-wire intensity to the cynical hero.“He’s just casual in a way that is really good for animation. It sounds spontaneous, even though it’s a written line. His reading of it makes it sound like he’s uttering it the first time,” Bird says. “And he tried a lot of things. He’d shuck, he’d jive a little, he’d throw you here, throw you there. You’d find all these jewels in his readings.”Netflix/SkydanceCan a private eye get a little privacy? Scarlett Johansson’s Venus Nova and Sam Rockwell’s Ray Gunn receive a visitor.Ray would be lost without his loyal alien sidekick Eye-ra, a skinny green guy with one big ocular orb at the top of his head. Eye-ra’s voice sounds like a few miles of rough road, supplied by singer and actor Tom Waits. “The first person that we signed was Tom Waits, and he knew we were looking for our Ray,” Bird says. “We were getting a first recording session, and he goes, ‘You know who you ought to look at? He’d be perfect for Ray—Sam Rockwell.’ ”The pair acted in Martin McDonagh’s 2012 film Seven Psychopaths and are also both in McDonagh’s upcoming Wild Horse Nine. Bird already had Rockwell in mind, he said. “That just made it [clear] it’s in the air. It was just serendipity.”Beyond the voices, otherworldly sonic texture was supplied to the film by Ben Burtt, the Oscar-winning sound designer of Star Wars, who crafted the audio effects for this film. Bird himself is known to take the occasional voice role, like Edna Mode in The Incredibles, and this time plays two parts: a pair of alien henchmen who work for a big spongelike gangster nicknamed Slugsy (voiced by What We Do in the Shadows’s Matt Berry.)One of Bird’s squat thugs looks a lot like squirrelly film-noir mainstay Peter Lorre, while Slugsy calls to mind the imposing 1940s character actor Sydney Greenstreet, right down to the fez he wears atop his globular head.Netflix/SkydanceThe mob boss Francis “Slugsy” Xavier (voiced by Matt Berry) and his henchmen Gunsel and Musker, both voiced by Brad Bird himself.So is Ray Gunn happening in the 1940s or the year 2525? Try to imagine both. The world of Ray Gunn is largely a utopia, but there’s a lot being swept under the rug. Inequality runs rampant, and in this version of Earth, various aliens like Eye-ra are the oppressed underclass being exploited by humanity.There’s also no shortage of backstabbing happening person-to-person, as Ray discovers when he is recruited to spy on an intergalactically famous singer named Venus Nova. Veronica Lake provided inspiration for the look, while Scarlett Johansson supplied the femme-fatale smokiness of her voice.“The movie is bouncing between the heights of show business and the lowest gangsters,” Bird says. “It’s basically taking from what happens to any society when a new group enters. They’re suspected at first, they’re marginalized, and then they gradually get integrated.”The person hiring Gunn for this sleazy spy job on Venus is the singer’s own gold-digging husband, performed by Bobby Cannavale. Meanwhile, her studio managers also have an interest in knowing what their prized starlet is up to when she’s out of their sight. Gunn needs the work, but he soon learns this job has some unforeseen twists that could cost him his life as well as his morals.Ray Gunn may be set against the backdrop of a great big beautiful tomorrow, but there’s still darkness at the edge of town.Netflix/SkydanceGumshoe meets femme fatale as Sam Rockwell’s Ray Gunn gets acquainted with Scarlett Johansson’s Venus Nova.That shadowy side is what gives the movie more edge than your average animated feature. “There was something about the Buck Rogers world and then introducing flawed characters into it and still having desperation,” Bird says. “It’s always going to be there as long as human beings are in charge, because they’re not always going to choose from the good column.”Ray Gunn’s lead character was partially inspired by a different hero in a loose tie and long coat from the actual 1940s: Will Eisner’s masked crime fighter the Spirit. The character captivated Bird when he was a young animator working on movies like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron at Disney back in the early 1980s. He wasn’t crazy about the work he was doing—and his employers weren’t thrilled with him either. “When I got fired from Disney, I thought, Where do I go from here? I thought, I’ll give it one last shot. I’ll do the kind of movie I want and see if anyone will back it. I’ll do a little test reel. It was hand-drawn animation of the Spirit.”Bird and some other colleagues secured Gary Kurtz, best known for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, as a producer for their venture but still found no takers. Animated musicals were dominating the business at that point. “We just couldn’t get anybody interested in anything other than Broadway tunes,” Bird says.Netflix/SkydanceRay Gunn has a sit-down with the high-powered showbiz exec Barry Vogel (voiced by Alan Tudyk).Ironically, it was a song that pushed his notion of a hardscrabble hero into the distant future. “I heard ‘Planet Claire’ for the first time from the B-52’s,” Bird says, as he immediately begins humming the hard-charging bass line. The band borrowed that from Henry Mancini’s jazz theme to the ’60s spy TV show Peter Gunn and combined it with sci-fi-coded beeps and soaring organ crescendos.“The way it starts out, I thought, Oh, this is a cool new version of Peter Gunn, but it’s got this weird kind of ’50s monster-movie sound in it,” Bird says. That got his imagination turning, and he came up with the name Ray Gunn, an obvious play on words between the retro spy and laser weapons.He kept thinking about the world such a man would inhabit. “It’s the future as seen from 1939,” Bird says. “There’s aliens and there’s gangsters and there’s tough women. It suddenly excited me, and I kept building up the world.”Bird kept pitching Ray Gunn over the years but to no avail. “Ray went into a filing cabinet, where it stayed for a long, long time,” he says.Netflix/SkydanceOn the back lot with studio fixer Sam (voiced by Michael Chernus).Now, after several false starts, he has finally brought it to the screen just as he pictured it all those decades ago—with one curveball. Johansson’s songstress Venus croons six jazzy numbers by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Kimbra, who might be best known for her contribution to Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know.”Combined with composer Michael Giacchino’s swinging score, Ray Gunn turned out to be pretty close to a musical after all. It turns out the future really does have a funny way of circling back.