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Brad Peyton

Director Brad Peyton on the set of Cats and Dogs 2. (Photo credit: Kimberly French)


Bond references, a cat impersonating Hannibal Lecter and a purrfectly mad Bette Midler. This is how Newfoudland-born filmmaker Brad Peyton does talking-animal, kids’ movies - his way.

The man in the director’s chair for Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, may seem to be a bit of a surprising choice since his early work has more in common with Tim Burton than say, Brad Bird – his 2002 short is called Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl – but the bespectacled, bearded 31-year-old knows a golden opportunity when he sees one.

Though the first to admit that he possesses a darker sensibility than the live-action/3D sequel may suggest, being offered the chance to helm a major Hollywood film as his feature debut was too good to pass up.

“Part of me has always been attracted to doing a family movie and I was talking to the producer of the first movie and I said, ‘If you ever do a sequel to that, I’d be interested,’” he revealed while in Toronto recently to talk about the film.

“So he called me and we started talking about it and part of it was the fact that I liked aspects of the first movie but the technology in 2001 wasn’t what it is today and I knew that I could really expand the world – I could do jetpacks flying around San Francisco! [Laughs] And when Warner Bros offers you an opportunity like this, part of you as a filmmaker, though it may not be exactly your sensibility, you’d be silly to turn it down."

“At a certain point, you want to prove to yourself that you can do this because you know it’s going to be difficult. It’s a much bigger movie than I’d ever even imagined doing but I knew that I’d start as one director and learn all these things and come out as another director.”

Not only did Kitty Galore allow him to stretch as a filmmaker – balancing the demands and considerations of live animals, puppets, actors and animatronics, not to mention 3D – Peyton was able to work with seriously talented actors - James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate and Neil Patrick Harris, voicing four-legged creatures in the film, - and one thesp in particular who managed to intimidate him.

“Walking into the room with Bette Midler, is sort of like, okay, 'What am I going to tell you that you’ve never heard?' [Laughs] You’ve done it all! But she was really great, she was really engaged and she was all about what the character was about and the back story. I know it’s a silly movie and it’s a kids’ movie but you have to remember, actors take their craft seriously. With Bette, she’s a pro, she’s a perfectionist – she wants to get it right.”

As the titular cat seeking vengeance through a hovering satellite and hypnotizing sonar waves, Midler’s distinct voice pierces the screen as she bellows and screeches in all three dimensions, bringing to life the baddie who forces sworn archenemies – cats and dogs, duh – to join paws (sorry) in order to save mankind.

Cats and Dogs
Diggs, voiced by James Marsden and Butch, voiced by Nick Nolte in a scene from Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
And Peyton couldn’t resist the urge to imagine our furry friends’ secret lives through a comic book lens, being a self-proclaimed comic book geek with a collection that numbers in the thousands, excited to set the action in an appropriately iconic, larger-than-life city.

“The first movie was 'Everywhere, suburbia,' women with apple pies and it was cartoon-y. Where, my sensibility is a little grittier – I mean, I’ve done that - but I didn’t feel it was really applicable to what I wanted to do with this. I’d been to San Francisco the first time when I moved to California and I think it’s a comic book city: there’s this big orange bridge, the prison’s on an island in the bay…it’s like straight out of an "X-Men" comic or something. I wanted to expand the world a little bit – like, if dogs have a spy organization, let’s show the cat organization. And what would that look like? 'Okay, I think it would all be shag carpeting, cause they’re cats,'” he says with a laugh, hinting at how much he relished the details while creating the cats' and dogs' secret worlds.

Indeed Peyton ensures adults will have plenty to laugh at as well, with numerous nods to James Bond – Kitty strokes a white mouse while coming up with her evil schemes a la Ernst Stavro Blofeld – and broadly mines the action film/odd couple genre for major yuks.

“You know what the funny this is? I didn’t draw on animal movies at all. I saw them to make sure I was catching the right amount of reality with the animals. But for me, the inspiration was from a lot of early Bond because I love the tongue-in-cheek aspect of early Bond - the villain’s petting the white cat, it’s kind of ridiculous - and I thought it was applicable to a family movie. Even the less overt references, or the really weird references – do you remember that scene in Terminator 2? – it’s the stuff I grew up on, it’s the stuff I love. I was learning to push as much as I could to get a cool reference point, something that I was into.”

Now that he’s wrapped his first film, the East Coast director is currently prepping the sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth, Journey 2: Mysterious Island, though there’s a certain comic book series that he’d love to get his hands on.

“X-Men. I’ve already met [the studio]. I’m like, ‘Let me direct an X-Men movie, I’ll do anything.’ Part of my taking on another big studio movie, was when I was a kid, I collected 'X-Men' comics religiously and I loved the aspect of teenagers who don’t know where they belong but they have powers and that’s what enriches them. It’s the choice of how you use the power which makes you a good guy or a bad guy. And I don’t know if they’ve really fully explored that aspect of the 'X-Men' yet. That’s like my dream project.”

--
Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore opens July 30th.



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