Henry Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas and Wendell & Wild, is ready to get his due

Henry Selick is the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, James And The Giant Peach, Coraline, and the new Netflix film Wendell & Wild, but he’s often been overshadowed by the likes of Tim Burton, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, and Jordan Peele. Not that Selick’s contributions have been minimized, but other folks often receive the lion’s share of the credit for the success of Selick’s films, which all share a feverish imagination, inventive visuals, and a mischievous sense of humor leavened with earnest emotion.

The A.V. Club recently sat down with Selick at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where he spoke with an uncommon honesty about his past and present work, and the folks who worked with him. In addition to talking about his collaboration with Burton on the breakthrough Nightmare Before Christmas, Selick reflected on changes in the field of animation, corrected the record about what tools he does and doesn’t use, and offered some ideas for inventions that he thinks could become the way of the future—if only he’d get the credit he deserves.

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Henry Selick: [Walking into the room] I just have to find a piece of paper to spit out my gum here. I have this idea of recycling gum. Because it’s such a mess. It’s illegal in Singapore. So I just figure you have it like a little capsule. You have your fresh gum, and then everywhere along the street, there’s little receptacles. You put your capsule of already chewed gum and get your fresh, and then they take that and clean it and re-sugar it. That’s a $1 billion idea. It’s just like, over all these years, I’ve always tried to convince the crew that we should wear uniforms, like jumpsuits—you get three changes a week and locker rooms and all that. But creative people do not want to wear uniforms! But I keep trying.

The A.V. Club: You have such a strong voice in your animated work, and yet so much of the credit goes to other people. There are people who think that Tim Burton directed The Nightmare Before Christmas.

HS: Yeah, I’ve won many a bar bet.

AVC: Is there an impulse for you to defer to that, or do you feel the collaboration necessitates it in some way?

HS: No, that was a little unfair because it wasn’t called Tim Burton’s Nightmare until three weeks before the film came out. And I would have been fine with that, if that’s what I signed up for. But Tim was in L.A. making two features while I directed that film, and I mean, Tim is a genius—or he certainly was in his most creative years. I always thought his story was perfect, and he designed the main characters. But it was really me and my team of people who brought that to life. Now, of course, if you ask Danny Elfman, well, that’s his movie [Laughs]. When we finished the film, it was so funny because he came up to me and shook my hand. “Henry, you’ve done a wonderful job illustrating my songs!” And he was serious, and I loved it! Fine. But my thing was I’m going to hang in there long enough to where people actually say, “Oh, that guy Henry, he does stuff.” And so in the long run, especially with Coraline and this film, I mean, Coraline is based on a really good book by Neil Gaiman. That didn’t hurt. On this, my collaborator is Jordan Peele—and that is the reason we were able to set this up. So I really, truly like to collaborate. But I’m the one leading the team to make the movie.

AVC: To your point, although you directed Wendell & Wild, the characters look like Key and Peele. The work you’ve done has an amazing look that’s very inventive, and slightly mischievous—how much of that comes from you and how much are you amplifying what is coming from somebody like Jordan Peele?

HS: Quite a lot of it comes from me. The original story was mine from 20 years ago. It was inspired by my grown sons. When they were little and acting badly, I drew them as demons. I wrote a seven-page story, and the movie that was grown from that with huge input from Jordan is still based on that. I’m actually really good at visual gags, coming up with visual humor, and it’s something we in animation are kind of known for. But I’m wide open to what the rest of the input is. I chose to make the demons look like Key and Peele. I felt like, in a way, it would be like back on the show. Key and Peele were able to play any gender, any age, any situation, totally transform themselves. And I felt like, well, this will be an even bigger transformation.

When I said I wanted to do caricatures of them, they didn’t want to do that at first. And then I said, “No, no, no, it’s not going to be dumb.” I had this artist, Pablo Lobato, who’s probably the most artistic caricature artist in the world, and I had him do some work of them, and then they were both on board. And certainly they bring a lot of magic in the recording studio. There’s always a script, and then they improvise, and I’d say a lot of the funniest lines from them are the little extra thing they said after the main line. I mean, honestly, we worked on this together and then he went off to do Get Out. He was really worried it would bomb, and that we’d better go out and set up Wendell & Wild. And I said, no, you can’t worry about it. I’d read the script. I knew it was good. Then the world changed. It’s an incredibly good film, Get Out, and does incredibly well. All that did was help us set up to make Wendell & Wild the way we wanted to make it.

AVC: In this medium, it seems like there’s very little room for improvisation. How do you incorporate that very intuitive creativity into a necessarily rigid process of execution?

HS: On the first recording session with them, they hadn’t worked together in a little while. The series had ended and they’d both gone off to do all the things they do, including Jordan’s film, because we weren’t recording till we set up the film. And you give them plenty of room to play to find the characters, because they have 100 different approaches—and you boil it down to like 20 and then five and sometimes they just take a line and they can riff on the reading of one line forever and it’s always funny. So it’s mainly about giving them the room to find the characters that we can agree on and that gives them something to hold on to. You always play it again, five months later, time for another session. You’ve got to play them what they did before to get back in tune with themselves. But then also from that time I can rewrite and rework dialog to be more in tune with the characters that they helped create. I’d say after that, it was always about a little zinger they would add.

And also I record ‘alts.’ Often I’ll have four different ways to say something, because I don’t know til I hear it what the best way is. So we’ll record all the alts and we’ll go back and forth, and then one of them’s always going to come up with something. It’s not funny outside of the movie, but Kat’s complaining about the deal that was made between the demons and they’re supposed to raise her parents, and Wild says, “That’s not how we do it anymore.” It’s obviously him just riffing, trying to not do what they agreed to do. And there’s lots of those throughout. Just a single bit here or there that makes it better, makes it funnier.

AVC: Your art form is so wonderfully anachronistic, which I think is why your work endures. How much have you wanted to incorporate contemporary tools like CGI to amplify the process?

HS: After Coraline, all these years later, I did have another project, but it got shut down. I worked really hard to go backwards to make it feel and be more handmade, to really show off the fact that it’s animators touching those puppets and reposing them. There’s no computers in between. There’s no assistant animators because what’s the point of doing this if it looks like CG? Or if we use CG, we use as little as possible. We’re basically using the same techniques that Ray Harryhausen used at the heart and center of bringing the characters to life. But that’s not to say I don’t use modern technology. We shoot digitally. We can store the whole shot and play it back. We can fly a character or make them jump, and put them on a metal rig that we can control and then paint it out in post. We comped in a lot of backgrounds, cloud motions, fire, a lot of atmospherics are done in CG.

But 95 percent of all the animation is no CG, not at all. And then the one scene that is, we worked very hard to make it be based on 2D animation: there’s the redemption chamber where Kat has to face all these bad memories, the shadows of these things, the shadow monster. And we experimented with how to best do that. In the end, we used CG, but we broke the rigs. We didn’t use regular CG rigs. I wanted to honor the design and make it feel like that, more than regular, fully rounded CG characters. I love CG films, some of them. I love hand-drawn. I love almost all types of animation, if it’s really good. But I felt it was important in this to not rely on it. We’re not going to do a crowd scene using CG. Like going back to Coraline—we had 150 Scottie dogs in a theater. I had a whole jumping-mouse circus playing instruments and moving. None of that’s CG. Because I knew that it’ll just be mediocre CG. But if it’s stop motion, I found ways to cheat it where the jumping mice are all replacement animation. So each mouse, there’s six versions of them as they’re blowing the trombone and leaping up and down, and we could cycle them again and again as they move around. And with the dogs, there’s only the ones that are featured that have any big animation abilities, but they could all at least nod their heads.

AVC: You talked about the genius of Tim Burton, and you’ve worked with Wes Anderson and Jordan Peele. Are there partners who have been especially good collaborators?

HS: I’ll just go through it again. Tim Burton had very little to do with the making of Nightmare Before Christmas. But it was his idea. It was his character designs. But he entrusted me because he knew me and the head of storyboards, Joe Ranft. But it was my crew up in San Francisco that made that. He showed up at the end with an editor and trimmed out some stuff to tighten up the film. On James And The Giant Peach, Tim was a producer, but he wasn’t really there. And I had a battle with a horrible Disney executive, this guy David Vogel, may he rot in hell, who sucked so much juice out of the movie because of his ego that it hurt the film. Now, with Wes [on The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou], I was hired to create CG characters. I designed them. I put together a small crew, and it was wonderful. He loved what I did. And so we storyboarded and basically we were doing that in California. He was shooting in Italy. I got to go to Italy and hang out. But again, I was a hired hand because he liked what I did, so there wasn’t much back and forth at all.

Coraline, that’s all me. I wrote the screenplay. I found a distributor for the movie. I mean, I had a lot on my shoulders. And with Jordan, it’s 90 percent me and 10 percent him at the most. But he was instrumental at the beginning on helping shape the world and the characters, and then with his success, helping us set up the movie at Netflix. So they’re not equal relationships. These are my movies and other people have contributed, in some cases more than a similar person on something else.

AVC: This kind of animation is becoming more rare. Who do you think has the spirit to continue doing stop-motion animation?

HS: Stop-motion for feature films, it’s been coming and going ever since Nightmare. Nightmare was this kind of breakout new thing, it was a gift to Tim Burton to get him to come back and do big blockbusters for Disney, done on the cheap, made its money and seemed to just disappear. And then it took on this monstrous afterlife forever and ever. But in the middle of James And The Giant Peach, Toy Story came out, and I was told by the Disney people, we don’t think this is a viable way to make movies anymore. So we kind of didn’t get any support or anything. And Toy Story is incredible! It’s such a breakthrough. But their attitude was, it’s the CG that makes it. So it’s come and it’s gone. I got to do Coraline, and then there was about three stop-motion films and none of them were as successful as Coraline—including Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie. It was the least successful. So it’s like I get blamed again—oh, it’s that stop motion. No, my film was successful. It’s just, where does the money want to go? It always wants to bank on the safest thing.

Right now is actually a great time. My film’s coming out on Netflix, and so far we’ve gotten a great critical response, and the screenings I’ve been at, the crowd seems to eat it up. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is coming out, and it’s gorgeous and powerful. There’ll be another Aardman animation film coming out in a few months. I think things could be different because of streaming. I think that these films have more time to find their audience. And people have had decades of hyper slick CG animation and special effects. They don’t necessarily need that. It’s just what was decided that’s what we have to give them. But at the end of the day, I think people are interested in anything that’s good, with something innovative in the story and characters, which we totally have with Wendell & Wild. So I’m optimistic right now.

Now, Laika is a unique situation. Travis Knight, who happens to be one of the best stop-motion animators who ever lived, I mean whatever you could say for or against him, he has a god-like gift as an animator, and loves stop motion. He’s going to keep it going for a good long while. But I think there’ll be more stop-motion films. By February, I think we’ll get a sense of more to come. First, passing the torch, there’s so many young people doing it, you think, are they crazy? There’s no future. But they love doing it. Kids that are in eighth grade, college kids, they bring these puppets or characters or aluminum foil or clay, they can bring it to life. And the technology’s so cheap and easy that I think that the people will always be there, and they’re coming up. But there’s certainly younger directors. If I do happen to do another project, maybe I’ll be a supervising director or just supervising producer. There’s a couple of people I think are ready to do it. I know that there’s already some young people that could direct. So I’m happy I got to make this film. It could possibly be my last, but I’d also be happy to get another one going. Because the crew I work with wants me to. On this last one in particular, we really bonded. It was tough, tough, tough. The pandemic shut us down. But coming out the other end, virtually everyone said this is the best work experience of their lives. And I haven’t heard that since Nightmare Before Christmas.

AVC: But not well enough to get them to wear uniforms, I guess.

HS: No! They’re never going to do that [Laughs].