Chris Williams, co-director of Big Hero 6. courtesy Walt Disney Animation Studios
Disney’s new hit film Big Hero 6 , loosely based on the Marvel comic of the same name, features a charming post-credits appearance by none other than Stan Lee. The film’s directors Don Hall and Chris Williams had long discussed creating such a “button” for their movie, but weren’t sure they could spare the time or resources to produce one. The notion took on greater urgency, however, when the pair attended opening-night screenings of Guardians of the Galaxy , and saw how the audience remained glued to their seats during the credits, waiting for that final scene.
“That Monday morning we basically ran toward each other and we were like, ‘We’ve got a problem,'” says Williams in Episode 128 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because yes, it’s a Disney film, but everyone knows there’s a Marvel connection. So what if people sit and wait through the credits, and there’s nothing?”
Williams hastily storyboarded the button, and together he and Hall recruited a small team within Disney who could produce the scene without alerting the rest of the crew, whom they were hoping to surprise. This involved secret meetings, secret knocks, and secret folders on the company network. It also meant recording Stan Lee’s lines at an off-site studio. But Hall and Williams discovered to their dismay that the studio could only be reached by climbing a long staircase, a task they were reluctant to inflict upon the 91-year-old Lee.
“We said, ‘We cannot be responsible for killing Stan Lee,'” says Williams. “Because then we would be marked men.”
Fortunately the ebullient Lee proved to have more than enough energy to climb the stairs and record his lines. The resulting button was added to the film just in time for the movie’s wrap party, where the finished product was screened for the crew for the first time. As the credits ended people began to stand, only to sit back down, whispering with excitement, as the final scene began to play.
“I knew we’d actually kept the secret,” says Williams. “And that was one of the most thrilling moments of the entire production.”
Listen to our complete interview with Chris Williams in Episode 128 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Chris Williams on the origins of Baymax:
“Don [Hall] had gone off to Carnegie Mellon, I believe, and done a bunch of research. He’d gone to a lot of different robotics schools and things, but he had a real epiphany there where he was introduced to the idea of inflatable robotics. And they did say that it’s something that would have practical applications in the medical field, because, you know, they are what they are, they’re soft and they can’t hurt people, and also they’re not intimidating-looking like robots can sometimes be, and so people are very comfortable with them. And so really a lightbulb went off for Don at that point, and when he came back from that research trip he talked about this idea of an inflatable robot, and for us that was a real ‘hallelujah’ moment, because if you work at Disney animation—and certainly if you work for John Lasseter—and you embark to tell a story that features a robot, he’s going to ask you to put up an image of every iconic robot that’s ever existed in movies or TV shows or anything, and then say, ‘Give me something new.’ … And when Don came back from that trip and he had these sketches and these ideas, we all realized that we’d found a very special version of a robot, and once we had that character, design got resolved pretty quickly.”
Chris Williams on San Fransokyo:
“It came about because the original source material, Big Hero 6, was a Japanese superhero team, and so that’s why that was in our heads. And at the same time, one of the things that we love to do is create new worlds, and so we wanted to be not on our Earth as we know it. And so that got the creative juices flowing, and I think it was Don Hall, the other director, who first conceived of this idea of San Fransokyo—this hybrid, this blending of East and West, of San Francisco and Tokyo—and everyone got really excited about it. It’s cool, it’s different, but one of the things I like most about it is it’s a visual indicator of something that’s very important in the movie, which is this idea of synthesis, of a coming together of things. Because we knew that this movie was going to be a blending of what Disney is and what Marvel is and what the superhero genre is, and this coming together of East and West. And one of the things that I was very mindful of was that even genre-wise we had a melding of two things. We had a superhero origin story but we also had a ‘boy and his dog’ or a ‘boy and his robot’ story, and we had to tell these stories without telling one at the expense of the other—they needed to come together. And so I like that San Fransokyo seems to sort of fit with those other ideas.”
Chris Williams on making nerds cool:
“Working at Disney animation, this is sort of a mecca of nerddom in its own right, and a lot of us grew up spending a lot of time in our bedrooms writing stories and drawing pictures and sort of lost in our own heads, and so I definitely consider myself a nerd, and among nerds. And so the idea of celebrating nerddom certainly comes naturally, I guess. We started from a point where we wanted to have Hiro and his brother both be really intelligent, and we knew that Baymax was going to be designed and built by Hiro’s older brother Tadashi, so we knew we were going to be dealing with really smart characters. So it just naturally made the college setting right for us. And we knew that we wanted to have our heroes not be powered by superpowers or magic or anything like that, it was going to be something that was using technology. … One of the things that is most satisfying is when I hear people say that they saw the movie with their kids, and their kids were excited and inspired, and told their parents they want to go to college, and making that cool, making being smart and curious cool. If we can contribute to that, that’s great.”
Chris Williams on iterating the story:
“There was a scene where Hiro and Baymax fly through the city together. We call that scene ‘First Flight.’ And it’s really dynamic and cinematic, and that’s really let a lot of our departments really show their stuff in that scene—the lighting and layout and everything is just fantastic. And then after that in the movie there’s a very quiet scene between Hiro and Baymax. Initially in the reels that scene didn’t just have Hiro and Baymax on top of the wind turbine, it had the entire team, all six of the Big Hero 6. And it was more of a comedic beat, you know, we wanted to get the team more involved in that part of the movie. And I was convinced that was the right thing to do. I felt we needed to hear the team’s voices again and get them more engaged, and structurally it seemed very sound to me, but when we put the whole movie up, you just felt that there was something missing from Hiro and Baymax’s relationship, and so at that point we looked at that scene again and realized it would be much stronger and serve the movie much better if it was a much quieter and sweeter scene just between Hiro and Baymax. And that was a pretty late change in our schedule, and it ended up being huge. I think it paid huge dividends.”
Chris Williams on Fred’s underwear:
“Because we spend years on these things, we debate everything, and we go into the minutiae, and that line and his exact methodology actually did evolve. I can’t remember what it was, there was a different order of events, for his front-back-inside out and all that. I think we had written a few different versions of it. At one point T.J. Miller, who plays Fred—he’s a master ad libber and he’d come up with some of his own versions of it. I remember at one point even John Lasseter, who goes from being engaged on a macro level to a very micro level at times, gave his point of view on what he thought the line should be. So it did evolve quite a bit. And so I can’t remember exactly when we landed it, but it certainly went through some growing pains.”
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