Wendell & Wild Director Henry Selick says his motto is to scare audiences, not scar them. In this interview he also talks influences and Key & Peele.
Wendell & Wild director Henry Selick on Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, story influences and creating Hell
Director Henry Selick is, like many others, a fan of comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele – so much so that he knew he had to get them involved in his latest stop-motion film “Wendell & Wild.”
During a recent press day for the Netflix film, Selick shared that he already had a short story written about two demon brothers around 2003. The film today, which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11 and drops on Netflix Oct. 28, centers around Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele) as they try to finagle themselves to the Land of the Living with the help of teen Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross).
Bringing On Key & Peele
A decade later, he saw Key and Peele’s comedy chops on their Comedy Central show “Key and Peele,” which he said he was “totally blown away by how funny, how intelligent, how versatile” the two actors were.
One of his favorite skits from the show is Key and Peele as two airline passengers prepared to take on any “terries” (terrorists) on their flight.
“I can’t help but crack up just thinking about it,” Selick said. “I think they’re the best comedy duo of my lifetime.”
After a few years, Selick decided to take a chance and see if the duo would be interested in working on any projects. His previous works, like the Academy Award-nominated “Coraline” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” aren’t particularly known for their comedy bits, but Selick wanted to incorporate humor with the help of the comedians.
As luck would have it, Peele was a big fan of stop-motion animation, Selick said, and pointed to the stop-motion logo for his production company Monkeypaw Productions.
After the two chatted about some of Selick’s ideas, the director said Peele expressed interest in “Wendell & Wild,” and wanted to join not only as a voice actor, but as a producer and writer. That eventually led to “an amazing collaboration,” Selick said.
“(Peele) said he just would love for a stop-motion film to be made and represent the kind of film he wished he could have seen as a kid with characters like himself on screen,” Selick said.
It took some time, however, as Peele was in the middle of working on his first feature film, “Get Out.” Incredibly nervous about the release, Peele wanted to pitch “Wendell & Wild” prior to “Get Out” hitting theaters in case the movie bombed, Selick recalled.
Of course, the film ended up being a critical and box office success, earning Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and now “everybody wants to be in the Jordan Peele business,” Selick said.
The real-life Wendell and Wild
Many parents might be able to relate to Selick’s inspiration for the two demon brothers, Wendell and Wild.
His sons, Harry and George, “could be angels” when they were younger, “but they could also be little demons,” Selick said.
Once when they were acting “demon-like,” Selick drew a sketch of them as cartoonish demon brothers, which sparked a story idea for the director. The short story he wrote ended up being the blueprint for “Wendell & Wild,” although changes came once Peele joined the project.
Peele advocated for casting people of color to voice characters in the film, Selick said. Additionally, one of the biggest changes to the original story was that Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) was set to be the main protagonist, and Kat and her friend Raúl (Sam Zelaya) were meant to be her assistants. Peele thought Kat should be the lead.
“I said, ‘You know, it’s been a while, but my last film had this young girl protagonist, Coraline, and I didn’t want it to be like that,’ and (Peele) said, ‘It won’t be anything like that if she’s a person of color,’” Selick said. “That really opened the door for me of really thinking of who Kat is, what her story might be, and it sort of rippled out to the whole world and became wonderful and challenging to piece this whole world together.”
Afropunk influences
Afropunk music and fashion was a major influence when it came to Kat’s character in the film, Selick said. The genre refers to African American and Black artists participating in punk and alternative subcultures.
In the film, Kat is a troubled young woman filled with grief following a tragedy. She finds herself in juvenile detention, and isn’t necessarily the nicest person based on first impressions.
Initially, Selick said afropunk would serve as an inspiration for Kat’s look – she wears a green double bun afro hairstyle, eyebrow piercings and punk rocker clothes in the film.
As Selick and Peele were looking at photos of modern afropunk styles, Selick said he was “floored by how insanely creative and beautiful some of the looks, costumes and attitudes are. It’s an outsider group, it’s never been a mainstream thing, and that really spoke to me and to Jordan.”
But the genre morphed itself into a bigger connection between her and her father.
“Turns out she’s not so much a rebel as someone who loved her dad who was into the first wave of Black punk music, and she’s into this later wave,” the director said.
Some of the bands that were influential to the film were Fishbone, Death, Pure Hell and Chicano band The Brat.
Creating the Underworld
The Underworld in “Wendell & Wild” is “a hell, but not the hell,” Selick said.
“It’s a place for the souls of the danged, not the damned,” he said. The danged might include crooked lawyers, pesky DMV workers and maybe a few meter maids. Primarily, it’s a place for “people who are bad, but not evil.”
The biggest challenge was figuring out what the film’s hell would look like. Selick looked at a number of inspirations, such as Asian Hell Gardens, which he described as “really scary and weird” and “very violent.”
But Selick’s personal type of hell comes from his upbringing. Growing up in New Jersey, he often found himself at Asbury Park, a seaside city with a, in later years, rundown amusement park.
It seemed to Selick that the operator of the Twister ride had controls that could “take things into a very dangerous place.” One day, according to the director, the ride operator turned up the speed of the ride and refused to stop. Selick said “our eyeballs were about to fly out of our heads and everybody on the ride was screaming at him to stop, and he was just laughing his head off.”
That ended up planting a seed in his head about a fun hell for the film: an amusement park with nonstop chaos where the rides never stop and roller coasters run off tracks.
But this amusement park isn’t located off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean or in any fiery pits. Instead, Selick envisioned the Scream Faire on a giant’s belly, named Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). Belzer’s final look was influenced by Rhames, once he was cast in the role, as well as Barry White, a soul singer with a sultry voice.
When it came to filming this giant, large-scale models were built so that Belzer, standing at around 300 feet tall in the film, truly looked like a tall menace compared to the other small-scale characters. The crew even took some pointers from “King Kong” by building massive animatable hands that are featured quite a lot in the film.
But like with Selick’s other films, which are more on the darker side of children’s animation, “Wendell & Wild” was all about finding the right balance of scary thrills without going too far. He described the film as a “comedy/horror/fantasy/drama.
“My motto is scare them, but don’t scar them,” Selick said. “(In) this film, the darkness comes from things that are real, terrifying and sad.”
Most importantly, Selick hopes audiences “love our characters,” and that the story “sparks their imagination.”
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About Wendell & Wild
From the delightfully wicked minds of Henry Selick and producer Jordan Peele, comes Wendell & Wild, an animated tale about scheming demon brothers Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele) – who enlist the aid of Kat Elliot – a tough teen with a load of guilt – to summon them to the Land of the Living.
But what Kat demands in return leads to a brilliantly bizarre and comedic adventure like no other, an animated fantasy that defies the law of life and death, all told through the handmade artistry of stop motion.
