'Sinbad, Legend of the Seven Seas', Director, Tim Johnson

0:09Tim JohnsonWe meet again.

0:11Jawad MirWe meet again. How are you, Tim?

0:13Tim JohnsonI'm good. I'm really sorry that the, West Coast trip didn't, line up for us to get together, but the LA sprawl can be completely unbeatable when you've got a two-hour round trip to get across town.

0:27Jawad MirYeah. No, it's all good. I'm sure I'll be back. I make occasional trips there 'cause I'm in San Fran and Redwood City occasionally, so whenever I'm there I try to make an effort just to go for a day or two. So I'm sure there'll be next time.

0:39Tim JohnsonOn… once you've crossed the country, it's an easy jaunt getting down here. Yeah.

0:44Jawad MirHow have you been?

0:45Tim JohnsonGood. Good. How about yourself?

0:47Jawad MirDoing great. Been great. You know, just keeping busy with work, and that's about it. That's life.

0:54Tim JohnsonWe've been coping with some rain here in Southern California, but, it's always, in spite of the mudslides, it's always sort of a pleasant change of pace to go from sunshine to actual weather. So I guiltily enjoyed all of the, like, downpour for the past few days.

1:09Jawad MirYeah, but some parts got hit really bad, right? Like, I think I was reading Hollywood Hills and certainly…

1:14Tim JohnsonYeah, a lot of the canyons had, you know, some slides.

1:17Jawad MirYeah.

1:17Tim JohnsonThere were over 400 mudslides around the area, and of course, some of those are, you know, pretty benign, but some took out homes. So it's scary. It's a desert. It's not really designed for seven inches of rain in two days.

1:31Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. Well, I hope everybody stays safe, and I hope everything remains well with you and your family as well.

1:37Tim JohnsonIt's, it's all good with us. Thanks.

1:39Jawad MirGood. Good. Well, good to have you again. We're gonna chat about Sinbad: Legend of Seven Seas. I saw it again this morning after a long time, probably a good 18, 19 years, I would imagine. And, you know, it's still, for me it's, it… Sinbad is quite interestingly special to me in a way which I never realized until the film came out. Was when I was a kid, probably, I'm willing to bet, seven, eight years of age, back home in Pakistan, and we used to have these cassette tapes where we would just listen to these stories like Tarzan and Sinbad in our native Urdu language. And I remember that one of the stories was Sinbad, and I remember the eagle and all that, and they used to have these sound effects of the eagles and everything. And then watching Jack and the Giant Killer and Sinbad and Seventh Voyage. So there's all that connection. Until the film came out, I didn't realize how much I have sort of grown up with it, but then kind of stopped watching or listening to those.

2:40Jawad MirSo it was a very interesting thing when it came out, and even this morning when I was watching it, all those sort of things kind of resurfaced. It… what was your experience in the very beginning? Like, how did you get on board Sinbad? Aside, you know, DreamWorks is DreamWorks, where you, everybody's working and you have different projects that come about. How did your sort of journey began on that, on that project?

3:06Tim JohnsonIt was a project in full production when I joined.

3:10Jawad MirOkay.

3:11Tim JohnsonAnd, it had run into sort of a tone and story conundrum. You know, the impulse at DreamWorks was always to go for a p… a pretty zany, broad social commentary style of comedy, and yet here was Sinbad with its roots, as you've already said, so richly in a more traditional, if not almost ancient cultural take on classic heroism, adventure stories. And that's of course, what I found and I think the audiences that discovered the film l-loved about the film, is it really kind of celebrates i-in what I would say is a fairly old-fashioned way, including in, at the time, an old-fashioned media, drawn animation at the time where computer animation was truly soaring into theaters with, you know, lots of different interesting, groundbreaking, visually exciting products. And along comes Sinbad, a traditionally animated movie on a traditional, you know, literary source, and frankly, with a fairly traditional take on, let's tell a rollickin' adventure.

4:19Tim JohnsonAnd so, I got involved when it just became really apparent that trying to impose too wacky a comedy or too irreverent a comedy or too socially contemporary a comedy was gonna sink the tone of the movie. And so joining, Patrick Gilmore to work with him to direct the movie, we had an incredible third act storyboarded when I joined, and it was about earning the third act that made the sort of story true up. And throwing out some of the wackier, sillier elements and really just honoring the idea that this was a scoundrel who learned to be a good man…

5:02Tim Johnson... And had a genuine sort of soul, mirroring moment where he decided he didn't wanna be that guy anymore, and he was willing to be a hero that would sacrifice. So it… these are some of the same things, by the way, that I think made it struggle at the box office. It was an old-fashioned story in a medium that was no longer, you know, sizzling hot. And it really was a very sincere movie. I mean, if you just watched it this morning, you're gonna know it's almost achingly sincere as compared to overly glib or s-self-mocking. It's a… which is unusual for a DreamWorks movie, even at that, at that time in those early days.

5:43Jawad MirYeah. And it's, it's, interesting you mentioned the last act, which I thought was great because it had a great message. You mean, you know, especially, what… the doing the right thing. And I felt, and I wasn't trying to look into it too much, but I just felt, and now that you mentioned that you kinda came in the last act, that… The first two acts, you know, they w… they had its moments. There were some g… great elements in there in terms of story, but I think there was a lot of, like, that edgy dialogue, like, you know, wacky dialogue. And I think that tone... Because the film became a little bit more serious in the last act, and I w… wonder if that's…

6:22Tim JohnsonYeah

6:22Jawad Mir... What you just said, right? Because that, and that maybe the fact that it didn't match the first two acts in terms of that tone. Like Prince of Egypt, you know, it didn't do great at the box office, but that tone stayed consistent.

6:35Tim JohnsonYeah, very much so.

6:36Jawad MirAnd, yeah.

6:36Tim JohnsonI mean, I think we, boy, I wish I could, I wish I had, like, the story screenings for when I first joined, because it was pretty outrageous, the first two acts. And yet the third act was more or less what you see in the film. I mean, refined and improved by the process, but the, it, I'm not surprised that you felt on a recent viewing that it still had a sort of ch… huge shift as it be… got to its sincere ending. Trust me, that shift would've been, seismic if we hadn't learned what we did and sort of tried to true it up. So, eh, but it was, it was an interesting, like, storytelling learning curve for me to try to do those balancing acts. And even though I think you're right that it's still a l… a little, a little jarring to get into the self-confessional breakdown Sinbad goes into, it st… it's still, I feel like we got it across the hump, so to speak, of you believing it and rooting for Sinbad to make that change, which when it was really glib, you actually didn't want him to change.

7:43Tim JohnsonLike, it was, it w… it, he was a bit of a clownish character, and you were like, "Well, I don't, I don't even buy that he would do this, and I'm not sure I want him to." So getting to a place where we could earn the epiphany was the biggest story sort of journey of that film.

8:01Jawad MirYeah. And I didn't realize, until again this morning that it came out the same year, I'm guessing it was a summer release, as Pirates of the Caribbean did. The original Pirates of…

8:15Tim JohnsonD… I would say we had a box office perfect storm. You know, it was, it was begun, you know, the film, in like 1999. And so, the perfect storm for us is, you know, we weren't, we weren't the fresh pirate movie we wanted to be because, Car… Pirates of the Caribbean beat us, you know, into the theaters. We were, frankly, we were post 9/11. Nobody wanted to hear stories from the Middle East.

8:42Jawad MirYeah.

8:42Tim JohnsonIt was just not a vibe Americans were comfortable with, you know, spending their ticket dollars on. We were, again, a drawn film rather than CG, which was, really considered groundbreaking and visually innovative. And we really were kind of, we were trying to, if anything, we were looking at movies like Indiana Jones that had an old-fashioned sense of adventure…

9:07Jawad MirYeah

9:07Tim Johnson... And a, and an exotic, you know, quest. But all of it just added up to a real box office struggle for the film. It just was not on... You talk about films that either get lucky with the zeitgeist and then sometimes ones that don't. We were just really unlucky with all of the different cultural and, you know, film trend moments of its time when it was released.

9:32Jawad MirYeah. So it, have you read, it's part of, I think it's called Arabian Nights, like One Thousand or some… I think the title is One Thousand and One Nights.

9:42Tim JohnsonThousand and One, yeah. I mean…

9:44Jawad MirYeah

9:44Tim Johnson... The source material, you mean?

9:46Jawad MirYeah. Have you, have you read the original source material, or did you read it at the time, or was it something that anybody references to?

9:53Tim JohnsonI'd read it, I'd read it several times before. I was a literature major, and I loved especially, even the, even going back to translated, works, I loved ancient works. So I spent my time in literature reading Beowulf and Icelandic sagas…

10:10Tim Johnson... And the Arabian Nights and the, that sort of earliest cultural attempts from around the world to codify what heroism is and the relationship between men and the gods. And so I loved those kind of stories, and it's why when Jeffrey said, "The film needs to be sort of trued up. Would you join it as a director and join Patrick?" I was really excited to because I just loved Sinbad. I loved the story. I loved the Rock, and in fact, I was al… in college, I, was a very passionate Dungeons & Dragons player and DM'd a game which I kept having The Rock appear as a villain sort of recurring. So I was already sort of steeped in a bit of the lore and a fan of the source material, and frankly, a fan of all the things that I just said sort of killed it at the box office.

10:58Jawad MirYeah. Yeah, and kind of going up onto the animation of it, I think obviously, you know, we all know that one of the c… most difficult things in animation, at least at the time, it may be true now, but not as much as it was back then, is the water sequences, right? Like, and this whole film pretty much takes place almost 70% of it on the sea. But I f… what I thought was interesting, and I w… I was wondering when I was watching it this morning, is that there was a sequence where, Sinbad, and, what's her name? The character that's played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.

11:32Tim JohnsonMarina.

11:33Jawad MirMarina. They're on the desert, and this desert kind of flows like a water and a shipwreck comes in. And I was wondering when I was watching, I'm, like, wondering was that something that was really challenging to do in terms of the animation at the time?

11:49Tim JohnsonYou know, overall w… it was probably the hardest film I worked on, including the ones that I didn't direct that I, you know, was involved with, I, because… ... It was sort of the state of the art of both mediums at the time for those mediums. I would argue that you can't find a better hand-drawn film than Sinbad. Human figures with subtle acting moving slowly, where the architecture, just the sheer drafting of a human face We're awfully sensitive to the details of a human face, and the uncanny valley awaits if things swim or don't move right. And our animators on that were just astonishingly gifted at the traditional art of drawn animation. But then in order to do the water or the sand, or a lot of the effects around Eris, the goddess of chaos…

12:39Tim Johnson... The Michelle Pfeiffer character, we used a lot of computer animation, effects and imagery. J… Jeffrey coined a term that I was never in love with at the time, but looking back, I think it was pretty accurate, tradigital. Traditional plus digital, tradigital was…

12:55Tim Johnson... Very much kind of the... Whether I like the term or not, it was the marching order of the pictures. How can we take the best of both worlds to create this, these exotic locations and these compelling, very, you know, relatable characters, and just really cherry-pick from what the state of the art of these two disparate mediums were, and try to make them cohere into one, seamless medium experience for audiences, which I would say, I think even looking back on it, we did fairly successful. I think visually the film still stands up as a really lovely blend of a lot of different creative, energies, voices, and techniques.

13:36Jawad MirYeah. It, you know, the tradigi… tradigital, the word that you just used or Katzenberg used, for me, the... I think even when the film came out, I couldn't put my finger on it. But again, watching it this morning, I think the wind, the s… the snow sequence with the eagle and all that was…

13:56Tim JohnsonYeah

13:56Jawad Mir... Beautiful. Like, the blend was absolutely beautiful. For me, that didn't sort of work in the beginning, the octopus sequence. You know, where the blend... It was just... It, I know, I get it, like, you know, computer animation is very different than traditional, and it just, it stood out, which it look, made it look great that, you know, wow, this is like, s… looks so real. But at the same time, it just, for me, it didn't work because it looked, again, computery and, you know, it, the worlds weren't re… really aligning for me. Was that something ever, you know, at the time, a part of a conversation, or at that, at that time it was like, "Wow, this is amazing"?

14:37Tim JohnsonA little bit of both, honestly. I was worried, and my suspicion is what didn't work for you is the level of, complicated texture mapping on our sea monster. Which is such a complete giveaway that it's not drawn, that it creates a huge barrier between, well, why is this octopus covered with an enormously gorgeous pattern flowing, but then fabrics don't have that on the human characters? Do you know what I mean?

15:10Jawad MirYeah.

15:10Tim JohnsonIt's like you…

15:11Jawad MirYeah, it makes sense

15:11Tim Johnson... If you're going to have, you know, el… elaborate patterned textures, well, don't just give it to the one CG element in there. And so I was wor… worried, and we did some tests of more simplified, but it sort of lacked the grandeur when it was too simplified.

15:28Jawad MirYeah.

15:29Tim JohnsonAnd in spite of m… my and Patrick's, reservations, and Ramon, our art director, it r… it, you know, everybody sort of enjoyed the largeness of the sea monster due to those sort of textures. So it's funny now you've seen such incredibly interesting blends including, Nimona, the recent film that, you know, premiered this year on Netflix, both of those Sony Spider-Man movies, where they're taking from traditional drawn animation looks and cell animation colors and flatness and edges in a way that I think is really interesting and mostly successful. And some of the w… reasons I think they're pulling it off is they're very careful with the texturing that they use to not, I think do what we did, which is kind of betray the complexity of CG's visual language a… and create a sort of a jarring juxtaposition.

16:28Jawad MirYeah. And, you know, the sequences, there was a sequence which I really liked the way the camera moved. This is just a comment. When the goddess pretends to be Sinbad and she comes to steal the book, and the camera, I'm not sure if, when was the last time you've seen it, but there's a, all these pillars, and the camera kind of just moves diagonally downward, like on a crane kind of an approach, and it just looked, the blend of that and the texture of that looked so phenomenally great even to this day. Like, it, that was just…

17:01Tim JohnsonOh, that's interesting

17:02Jawad Mir... That was really cool. I really, I went back and saw it a couple of times. I mean, it lasts like five seconds, not even, but it was just so beautifully done.

17:10Tim JohnsonNo, thank you. It's lovely to hear, and especially to hear when things sort of survive what's been now 20 years of in, of leaps and advances across all medium of film, live action and Marvel movies. And so, you know, the challenge of the movie w… was sometimes to make sure, to balance the majesty of sets and locations and the magic of, you know, the ocean and the desert, but with keeping intimate with the characters. So the rule of thumb we had is when you've got a close-up, let's make sure it doesn't do quick cuts. Let's let close-ups linger, and let's let them be as close as we can get with drawn animation, which frankly is about where our Zoom windows are now, sort of stirring them up. If you get, if you get too much closer than that in drawn animation, you start to run into some problems. And so we were constantly going back and forth between how do we celebrate the environment with, you know, David Lean largesse

18:12Tim Johnson... With how do we make sure we're inside the heads of these characters? And so it was strange to use films, like David Lean movies. It sounds very pretentious to, you know, look at those gorgeous movies and Lawrence of Arabia as a reference, but David Lean did that so wonderfully, you know, Lawrence of Arabia in particular. Those close-ups are stunning, and the actors hold the camera beautifully, and they communicate as great film actors do with incredible subtlety and rich vision into what they're thinking. And then the next shot might be this, insane vista that's a 15-mile horizon over the, over the oceanic sands, you know? And so we loved looking at those examples of intimate stories and grand landscapes to try to capture some of that for the film.

18:59Jawad MirYeah, and in most cases it did, and I think the reason in some cases it didn't is because of what we've got talked about earlier is the story being too wacky in the beginning and not so much in the last chapter. But there was that level of grandness in there, for sure. You know, even like, what was that sequence, where they p… they're on a island but it's not an island, and

19:20Tim JohnsonYeah

19:20Jawad Mir... You know, the monster opens its eyes, and that whole sequence and then the escape from there was just so amazing. Like, and the music does a great job too, right? That really carries cer… certain sequences.

19:33Tim JohnsonYeah.

19:33Jawad MirYeah. And…

19:34Tim JohnsonHarry Gregson-Williams'

19:35Jawad MirYeah

19:37Tim Johnson... You know, I had a sort of sad laughter with him at the end. I said, "Listen, the only good news about Sinbad not doing great is that whenever you temp a movie," which y… which is common in movies, you make a movie, you do a rough cut, and then you usually temp the soundtrack by stealing…

19:55Jawad MirYeah

19:55Tim Johnson... From other movies. And I said, "W… Harry, you're going to be on everybody's temp score because nobody saw Sinbad. Nobody's gonna recognize your music…" "... And everyone's gonna love this heroic, vibrant soundtrack." I think some of the themes in Sinbad still sort of hold up as good or better than anything, in film composition because he captured, exactly what we were talking about visually, grandiosity and enormous scale with intimacy and a sense of what the characters are thinking.

20:26Jawad MirIt's funny you mention that because I, similar, Road to Eldorado, which, you know, came out a few years before that, had a similar fate as Sinbad, probably not as bad, you know, because the story in terms of it was two wacky characters and you couldn't figure out if it was a serious movie or not, and it had a great score as well by Hans Zimmer. Like, there was this track, and I have used a lot of those tracks from Road to Eldorado as temp tracks because nobody knows about the film, and nobody knows about the soundtrack.

20:57Tim JohnsonIt's, it was the most backhanded compliment I could've given Harry, the, "Congratulations, you're going to be temped everywhere," so.

21:04Jawad MirYou were talking about David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia, and I wanna go back to, you've seen Sinbad's Seventh Voyage of Sinbad? The…

21:11Tim JohnsonOh, sure, yeah.

21:12Jawad MirSo there was that one-eyed monster with the little horn sticking out.

21:16Tim JohnsonCycl… the Cyclops.

21:18Jawad MirYeah. What, in your p… I know you came later in the film, but in, based on what you had seen in terms of storyboards, even in the early, versions of it, were there any kind of, storyboards or references to the original Sinbad or trying to im… you know, trying to have that kind of an approach? Or was it something that was com…

21:40Tim JohnsonIt was almost the opposite, Joakim.

21:42Jawad MirOkay.

21:42Tim JohnsonIt was, it was almost trying to avoid it, you know? And so if it was too iconic and we felt like let's not compete with Ray Harryhausen. Let's… In some ways we wanted to make sure that we weren't, I don't know, trying to one-up with new technology the gorgeous stop-motion work, that Harryhausen had done. And so, y… you know, the great thing about the original source material is there's so many different amazing narrative and character moments that it was pretty easy to, let me just silence this.

22:15Jawad MirNo problem.

22:16Tim JohnsonIt was pretty easy to, pick and choose from the source material what monsters, adventures, locations, and not have a lot of overlap with, the Seven Voyages.

22:28Jawad MirYeah. That's good. That's good to know. You know, just like any film, especially with animation, there's a lot of test screenings, right?

22:37Tim JohnsonYeah.

22:37Jawad MirLike, you go through, like, okay, what to do, what not to do, what to take out. With animation it's a bit different than live action because live action you can go and reshoot, not relatively fast, but faster than an animation because then you may have to draw or do a whole sequence or a scene altogether. What, do you remember the time when you guys realized that the response from the audience at any stage in the screenings is not coming across? Was there a time like that?

23:04Tim JohnsonWell, you know, we had, so a couple things. Back to your first observation.

23:08Jawad MirSure.

23:08Tim JohnsonIn many ways, test screens for animation are way easier to make changes than live action.

23:12Jawad MirReally? Okay.

23:14Tim JohnsonListen, it's so, live action is so expensive that to get…

23:19Jawad MirSure

23:19Tim Johnson... A crew and a location, to get your cast, who are probably off shooting something else, back in and hope that they haven't changed their hairstyle or, it's actually painfully expensive.

23:31Jawad MirTrue.

23:31Tim JohnsonAnd you gotta go beg the studio for money. When we test a movie in animation, we frequently test it way before it's finished. So huge sequences are still in storyboard, and therefore v… very inexpensive to add a line, change a energy.

23:47Jawad MirMakes sense.

23:47Tim JohnsonYeah. Make big cuts or changes. So the testing process, I would say with animation, is actually even more rigorous and painful as a filmmaker. And you're really able to learn which jokes land, which don't, how to make them land, if they're worth preserving, how to cut them, which, sequences need a different change of pace, which plot points or exposition points need more time to land. So that testing process, I feel, I don't remember specifically with Sinbad, but it would be typical for us to go through five or more tests of the film in various stages. The latter tests, and certainly the last test, your film is mostly done, and at that point, the test is really just for the marketing people. So they're, they're looking at it, from a studio sales point of view to go, what's an audience responding to so we know how to position the picture and cut a trailer together and whatnot. But on the other side of this is the strange, you know, difference between box office performance and audience reaction.

24:54Tim JohnsonWe had enormous good scores out of our test screenings. So it's one of those cases, which is not uncommon, where you have a film that when audiences see it, they love it and they give it a good CinemaScore. The exit interviews are really big. But getting an audience to buy the ticket was the challenge with Sinbad. So the g… the good news is our, you know, in some ways our word of mouth saved us from a even more disastrous, 'cause people saw it, liked it, and talked about it. And even to this day, I'm always honored when somebody has discovered the film and enjoys the story and, loves the techniques. But this was one where, we... I won't say we were blindsided by the failure of the box office. We sort of knew it was looming. Marketing people had done their sort of tests and shown trailers, and just nothing was really clicking with an audience such that they knew, like, okay, this is, this is gonna catch a wave of audience interest. It just really, it really on its...

26:00Tim JohnsonI think our opening weekend was 17 million, maybe less.

26:04Jawad MirYeah.

26:04Tim JohnsonAnd it just really never caught fire.

26:07Jawad MirYeah. And the thing is, you know, with any film, it's one thing to make it, and you and I talked about this earlier about Antz. It's easy to make a film, but it's hard to sell it, right? And…

26:21Tim JohnsonWell, it's, it's pa… it's, it's... I would say it's more painful to sell it. It's, making a film is delightful but hard. Selling a film is both hard and painful.

26:31Jawad MirYeah. Maybe that's, those are the right words. Like, you know, you at least enjoy the process of making a film. But selling it, whether, even if it's, you know, in this day and age where everything is digital and there are so many platforms, it's still hard because there's so much noise. There's so much stuff out there. So what I was gonna ask you is that marketing, you know, one thing I've always, I learned so much from DreamWorks when I was running the website was I was just fascinated by the way DreamWorks marketed its film at, you know, in, from 1997 onwards. And obviously there were some misses, you know, here and there. And, would it be fair to say that sometimes the marketing team, not just at DreamWorks, anywhere, doesn't really, they don't know how, not they don't know how to sell it, but they just don't know who the audience would be, because that's a big thing, too. Was there any kind of questions at the time the film was done when you got, when they were putting the trailers together and marketing material, "Okay, we don't know how to sell this film.

27:32Jawad MirLike, what is this film?" Was there any conversation like that?

27:35Tim JohnsonYou know, the, it's a, it's a bit of a trope for the, directors and creatives to complain about the m…

27:41Jawad MirI'm not saying that. I'm just talking…

27:43Tim JohnsonThe tools of marketing

27:43Jawad Mir... Yeah

27:44Tim JohnsonBut I would say that on Sinbad it was, I really respect and had great successes, in many ways, with the marketing department. Terry Press, I think at the time was head of marketing.

27:55Jawad MirI was gonna say her name. Yeah, she was fabulous.

27:57Tim JohnsonYeah, and Terry's, Terry's, kind of brilliant. But I feel like with Sinbad, they really pushed, the comedy and less the story, and even I was disappointed that we didn't really push the exoticness of locations or the beauty of these techniques that were sort of fresh and on s… to grab an audience. So, when they showed us the poster, I remember the art director was almost in tears and left the room, 'cause it was like, that's not the movie we made.

28:31Tim JohnsonWe wanted something that was just a little more exotic and a little more mature in our marketing, and we felt like this was being marketed to our youngest audience members, as a silly movie about a pirate dog. Like, it was just all about Spike the dog in all the marketing stuff.

28:50Jawad MirYeah

28:50Tim Johnson... So I, now that being said, I don't know that there was a more sophisticated or grown, older audience, you know, leaning. I really genuinely feel l… like we were the victim of that perfect storm we talked about, of a bunch of forces…

29:07Tim Johnson... Outside our control. And while I wish that we had the courage to market the film, with a little more sort of aggression in its belly, I can't blame the marketing department for h… Sinbad's performance.

29:18Jawad MirYeah. No, absolutely not. And I'm, I'm glad you mentioned Terry Press because she is such a force even to this day, you know, working with Spielberg, Sam Mendes. She has her own consulting firm and everything, and she, I even remember reading about the movie The Island, the Michael Bay one, the one that he…

29:39Tim JohnsonYeah

29:39Jawad Mir... Made with DreamWorks, and for a Michael Bay movie, it tanked at $14 million opening. And Michael Bay blamed the marketing department, but you know, Terry Press said that we just couldn't figure out what to... Like, even if, I showed the trailer to The Island to the kids the other day, and they're like, "What the hell is this movie about? I can't figure it out." But…

30:00Tim JohnsonYeah

30:00Jawad Mir... Th… that's, going to what Terry Press was saying, that, is to, she was truly a genius, and she is. Because she know, she's very blunt, and she says it as it is, and because that's her job. She's supposed to make, sell the film, and if people don't like it, then they don't like it, right? That's…

30:17Tim JohnsonYeah, I adore her. I think she's a force of nature, and she is blunt.

30:21Jawad MirYeah.

30:21Tim JohnsonBoy, she'll... But her job is to take a creative product and make it an event. You know, because these films cost a lot of money, and they…

30:34Jawad MirYeah

30:34Tim Johnson... Need a certain event scale, perception in the world to be successful. And when they are successful, they are an event, you know? Prince of Egypt was a modest success, but it was, it was an event. I mean, it, you knew it.

30:48Jawad MirIt was a massive event. Yeah.

30:50Tim JohnsonYeah. And Antz was a much more modest promotional budget, and, because it was a less expensive film, it actually was incredibly profitable. And we c… we, and in a, in a proportion into that film, Terry and team were able to make it an event, you know? Using mostly the voices as a reason to say, "You g… you can't miss this." and then later films, I mean, I feel like Terry probably wasn't there for Over the Hedge, and I, she wasn't there for Home. But both of those were, I think, cunningly marketed. And while I had furious arguments at the time, I can't argue with the results, which were, yeah, we were able to get above the sea of competing voices with those. Sinb… Sinbad, though, never really got above the sea of voices. I do think, as you mentioned, we were drowned out by, Pirates of the Caribbean. Just, it, Pirates of the Caribbean is a cool movie. It's full of cool people…

31:47Jawad MirYeah

31:47Tim Johnson... With cool set pieces, and had, I would say, in an era that didn't do this very often, a very meta sense of itself. It was winking at the camera. I mean, I think one of the, my favorite lines is when Jack Sparrow, you know, sort of cheats at a sword fight, somebody says, "You're cheating." He goes, "Pirate." Like what do you not get about a pirate? And so that sort of knowingness made it very contemporary, hip, and cool. And in spite of our attempt to have, you know, kind of irreverent humor, and a rollicking good time, and voices like Brad Pitt and Michelle Pfeiffer, we just were never cool. And being cool is one of the ways you pop above the fray.

32:29Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. A… a… a… and one of the things that I've read, and I don't know if it's 100% accurate, so please tell me if that, if you, even if you know this, is that, the, so the thing is, DreamWorks, I'm, I'm kind of talking this about a big picture now, was soaring from the day it started, like, you know, to Saving Private Ryan, Prince of Egypt, Antz…

32:49Tim JohnsonYeah

32:49Jawad Mir... Amistad, like Gladiator, American Beauty. I mean, there were just, like, hits after it. Almost Famous. Like Oscar nominations, Shrek. And then from what I have read, just like any other company, when you start off, st… start off, you have all these bold decisions that you take chances, and then when you become bigger and when there's stocks and all that stuff, then the decisioning making becomes a little bit challenging because there's all these other people that are invested their money. And Sinbad, from what I have read, kind of became the last step to the fall of DreamWorks, as a studio, and financially at least. Is that fair to say? Again, I just read this, on few publications online.

33:32Tim JohnsonIt was definitely, you know, for all the successes DreamWorks had up through, you know, 2003, it was still a very expensive studio to run, and every movie had to perform. You know, when you're only making a couple of animated films a year, and even making two was hard then…

33:51Jawad MirYeah

33:51Tim Johnson... You're pouring the energies of hundreds of people, and, all the costs associated with a business which... And frankly, it's a very expensive business because salaries are high. People make a good wage, in the talent pool of animation. So in spite of the successes, when Sinbad failed, it... I don't think we ever got to the, "Okay, the studio's in danger of shuttering," but it did put a wrinkle in, like, going public and other sort of ambitions of the studio, or going up to two or three films a year. It d… Sinbad was definitely a pothole in the, in the road, and the first really large-ish one, in spite of some disappointing, you know, performance, in other films.

34:37Jawad MirDo you remember the aftermath of the opening weekend, like having a conversation with the team or Jeffrey or your co-director at the end?

34:46Tim JohnsonYou know, it's, it's funny. The thing I remember the two conversations with Jeffrey. The first was on opening day on Friday. He sat me down. I think Patrick and Mara, my, directing partner and producer, he sat the three of us down and he goes, "I'm always an optimist. I love this movie. I hope we're gonna be surprised, but I've just seen all of the most latest market research. I think we're gonna have a challenging weekend."

35:18Tim JohnsonSo he sort of laid the groundwork for, "I think we're gonna struggle." and then the call on Sunday morning after we'd, you know, really struggled, he's like, "I'm so… I'm sorry. It's just really d… the audience is, not there for us this weekend."

35:38Jawad MirYeah.

35:38Tim JohnsonAnd I remember I told him, "I think, I think we just threw this party and nobody attended." And he goes, "That's exactly how it feels, like we threw a party, a birthday party, and nobody came." And so it was a dark weekend. You know, you don't... It's funny. I don't, I don't feel like I do, am motivated and, driven by the idea of box office, but I'm very motivated by the idea of a family with popcorn in their lap and their eyes on the screen. Like, that's an astonishing responsibility and compliment and gift to tell a story and then have a f… not just anybody, but a, but a whole family of all ages enjoy it. And I felt with Sinbad, we had made an incredibly enjoyable film for all ages, and it just had very few people see it compared to the expectation. And that was, you know, the… Later on, as it became clear that, you know, okay, s… studio's gonna have to, like, reset some ambition because we lost money on this film. The, only later did the actual kinda money side of it hit me. But just the idea that we had not grabbed butts in seats like we were all hoping for people to enjoy the film was pretty bitter.

36:56Jawad MirYeah. What's the most proudest thing from that film that if you look back at right now that you feel like that was something that we did was great? Could be a scene.

37:06Tim JohnsonI mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things I love about it. I mean, I love Brad Pitt's performance and working with him to craft that character, was a, was a really exciting journey. He, like a lot of actors, especially at the time, had never done, an animated character.

37:24Jawad MirAn animation, yeah.

37:26Tim JohnsonAnd like a lot of actors, he fell in love with it after initial hesitation. I mean, you're saying to a guy like Brad Pitt, who's j… obviously, you know, just a stunning leading man of a, of a onscreen presence, and you're gonna say, "We're gonna take away a… all of the tools that are visual, and leave you only with your audio, with your voice." I mean, that's just daunting. It'd be like sending a clarinetist on stage, and half his valves don't work. So you've taken away notes that he knows he can play beautifully.

37:57Tim JohnsonBut at the same time, for Brad and for many other actors I've worked with, it becomes this exciting challenge and awakening to the power they have as a great performer in their voice. So I would say that was one of the biggest things. I do feel like there's a couple of sequences in there. I love the sirens sequence, as the men of the ship are wooed by the watery sirens.

38:19Tim JohnsonI love the rock sequence. I feel like with the action scenes, they came together really sophisticated visually and filmically, and I think they hold up in a way that I'm, always be proud of. And mostly what I remember and proud of in the film are the things that an audience never got to see, the incredible, joy of working with traditional animators, drawn animation. Their talent, their humility, and the power they could bring, and the ideas they brought. My favorite moments of the film aren't on screen. They're laughing in a room full of people…

38:51Jawad MirOf course

38:51Tim Johnson... As we enjoy, you know, the discovery of the, of the, storytelling and the animation.

38:58Jawad MirYeah. That's true. That's so true. Do you think if Sinbad was to be released as a series now, do you think it would work?

39:07Tim JohnsonI don't know. If anything, we're living in an even more meta age, meaning I don't think it would work. I think it would suffer from some of the same issues that we've discussed. Which is you either do it as a dark drama, and really pour that on, or you go a little more, irreverent, and a little more Pirates of the Caribbean, a little more knowing, winking, outrageous with it. But we tried to have our cake and eat it too in a way that I think is entertaining to watch, but feels old-fashioned. And, if you were gonna do it today, the source material, of course, is still and always will be just wondrous in the, in the true definition of wonder. Like, jaw-dropping set pieces and great classic hero characters.

40:01Jawad MirYeah.

40:01Tim JohnsonSo I would say that absolutely there's a version of Sinbad, and, Thousand Nights, A Thousand and One Nights, that you could do today that would be incredible. But I don't think you could just transplant what we did with our DreamWorks…

40:13Jawad MirYeah

40:14Tim Johnson... Sinbad to today without a serious reinvention.

40:17Jawad MirI have always wondered, up until Clash of Titans remake came out with, was it Sam? Sam Worthington, I think, was in it.

40:25Tim JohnsonYeah.

40:25Jawad MirThe, yeah. I always wanted to see a new version of Sinbad, just because, you know, my childhood connection. And it's funny, asides from the animation film, nobody has tried it. I just find it interesting that in the time where remakes are being made over and over again, nobody has tried to make that film.

40:48Tim JohnsonI completely agree. If I, if I were to take a s… another stab at it in today's world, I would very much go back to the source material. And the core of the Arabian Nights is a story about storytelling. It's a w…

41:06Jawad MirYeah

41:06Tim Johnson... It's a woman keeping herself alive through the power of narrative, and dropping a complete, you know, whodunit, page-turning, you know, open-ended moment at the end of every story so that she could live another day to come back and tell the next chapter. And so I love that in the source material is this comment on storytelling and the power of narrative to save her life, and here within that are the stories of Sinbad, this episodic, set of escalating adventures. So there, I share your puzzlement. It's one of the richest and stood the test of time, you know, sources of the art of storytelling. Somebody will find a way to master it for a contemporary attempt.

42:01Jawad MirYeah, I hope so, 'cause I would love to, I would love to see that. A… aside from Sinbad, I mean, there's so many stories in there, Aladdin being one of them, of course, right?

42:10Tim JohnsonYeah.

42:10Jawad MirWhich Katzenberg did at Disney. But yeah, no, this has been great. Thank you, Tim. Unless you wanna add something, I mean, I've, I've pretty much exhausted all my con… conversations with, about the Sinbad, but if you have anything to add, I would love to hear.

42:25Tim JohnsonYou know, the only thing I'm hoping is that, your own nice words about it and our conversation lead people to continue to discover the film. It's, it's one of the many joys of animation is in some ways they don't suffer the same fate of a live action film where suddenly a hairstyle is completely out of style from a previous era.

42:47Jawad MirYeah.

42:48Tim JohnsonAnd even though animation has matured and changed and technology, there is something timeless about every animated film where they c… they can be enjoyed decades after they're made, and you're not sort of hit in the face with, the era it was made. So I love that we got a chance to talk about it, and then maybe we'll grab a few more eyes on the picture, which really does deserve to be seen for, family audiences from here on.

43:11Jawad Mir100%, I couldn't agree more. And it's so true about, animated films being timeless because, I mean, you know, I remember in the '90s I used to watch all the old Disney flicks like Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood, Jungle Book was one of my favorite, you know, and they're still relevant today, you know? And that's, that's the beauty of animation, and you enjoy it. And I…

43:36Tim JohnsonYeah

43:36Jawad MirYeah.

43:36Tim JohnsonYeah, my favorite animated film of all time is still Dumbo, which is... What year was that made? 19…

43:41Jawad Mir'41

43:42Tim Johnson'41.

43:43Jawad Mir'41.

43:43Tim JohnsonYou know?

43:43Jawad MirYeah.

43:44Tim JohnsonAnd it's, it's got one of the most wonderful silent main characters. It's got a complete drug…

43:51Jawad MirTrue

43:51Tim Johnson... Induced dream sequence in it.

43:54Jawad MirYes.

43:54Tim JohnsonIt's got a mother's, a separation story that is heartbreaking. It's just interesting when animation works well, it achieves a classic timeless sense of story, that really i… it goes back to, the Arabian Knights and Aesop's Fables. It, like, it taps in as a medium into classic storytelling of exotic, impossible to achieve visuals with talking animals and things that only animation still, can do as, better than anything any live action filmmaker can dream up.

44:33Jawad MirYeah. And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned Dumbo because all those classic films that are being now ma… remade into live action, I haven't seen a single one of them and I do not want to. Maybe they're great, but I just don't want to because that to me is the real storytelling.

44:50Tim JohnsonI agree. I feel like the reason to remake a movie creatively is because it needs to speak to a changed time in a changed way.

45:03Jawad MirYeah.

45:04Tim JohnsonAnd if you're not going to do that, if you're really going to duplicate rather than innovate, I ki… I just kinda scratch my head.

45:14Jawad MirYeah

45:14Tim Johnson... And it's comical that, like, I think it was Clint Eastwood said, "Hollywood's the only industry ever that doesn't remake and try to improve what didn't work. They just keep making what did work again and again."

45:27Jawad MirYeah

45:27Tim Johnson... And so it's, yeah, it's an odd, it's an odd one. I would, I would put as candidates for a new movies, remakes, a bunch of movies I've seen that I think were kinda brilliant but deeply flawed and could be done better, those would be better candidates to be remade than taking…

45:43Jawad Mir100%

45:43Tim Johnson... Classics that are near to perfect and trying to, I don't know, improve them, I guess. It seems pretty cynical.

45:49Jawad Mir100%, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Tim. Pleasure talking to you. Would love to chat with you in future as usual, and thank you so much.

45:57Tim JohnsonThanks so much. Great to talk to you.

45:59Jawad MirTake care. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share and comment, and do come back for another episode. Until then, have a great day.