| By Keith Carradine Keith Carradine: Why do you have to make disgusting adult films with sex and violence? Why can't you make nice films for children? [Laughs]
Bill Plympton: Actually, I do occasionally make films for kids. But it's an interesting question, because sex and violence have been staples of Hollywood films since the beginning of the industry. It's just that a lot of people feel that cartoons are for children and shouldn't be offensive. Well, I grew up loving cartoons, and, even though I'm an adult now, I still love cartoons and I want to see adult themes in my animation. America has been much slower than Europe or Asia in realizing that the magic of animation is a perfect art form for sex and violence. Carradine: How do you get your ideas?
Plympton: The idea for Hair High came from a dream. And usually I don't use my dreams for film ideas, but this one was exceptionally engaging. It was a car at the bottom of a lake, with two skeletons sitting in it, with their hair billowing in the current. Suddenly, the headlights came on, the fish scattered and the car slowly lurched forward in the mud and the muck. It then drove up on the shore and entered some small town, driving past the soda shop and drive-in movie park, and it went to the high-school prom - and that's when I woke up. I thought, "Wow, there's something there!" So, I went back to my high-school yearbook and started to bring back little anecdotes, memories and urban legends, and after about a year I had a script. Carradine: Why did you hire all of these movie stars for voices when in the past you never had celebrity voices?
Plympton: I was drinking in a bar with [cousin] Martha [Plympton], and I told her about my trouble getting good distribution for my feature films. She offered to contact her friends to see if they wanted to help me. I never had such great and talented voices in my films before. It was so easy; I just let them go with little direction. At one point we had Matthew Perry as the lead, and he was very excited. He wanted to get together, talk about the character and do rehearsals. But a day before the recording session, his agent called and said he couldn't allow Matt to do the part because the film was too small and independent. That's OK, because we replaced him with Dermot Mulroney, who did a great job. Carradine: Who is my character, JoJo, the diner owner, based on?
Plympton: Many of the characters were based on people I knew in high school. Mr. Snerz, the biology teacher, who chain-smoked in class and coughed up all his innards on the biology lab table (and who was voiced by your brother David), was based on my real-life math teacher, Mr. Sawyer, who was also a coughing, smoking machine. But your character, JoJo, was a figment of my imagination - a literary construct. I needed a storyteller to recount the legend of Spud and Cherri, the high-school lovers who return as zombies to seek revenge at the school prom. Hair High opens in Los Angeles in April. Read the full story in Moivng Pictures Magazine April/May 2007 issue, on sale now at newsstands. |
