Next, he found actor Bob Hoskins to portray private detective Eddie Valiant. We didn’t want to stop for little cameo bits, and only integrated the guest stars where it made sense.” I sort of put pressure on him and said, ‘Look, Steven, I’m not going to do this unless you deliver Bugs!’ The only problem was that we never wanted the movie to be fits and starts. “That was a prerequisite,” he says, “and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do the movie with Spielberg, because he’s the only guy in the world who could have pulled this off. The real challenge to all of us was to keep thinking, ‘Normal movie, normal movie.’ How would you do this like a real movie? How would you dub this scene? You include Toon sound effects, but still make it sound real.” Bringing together an all-star Toon line-up was an absolute necessity.Ĭonvinced that the animation aspect of it could be pulled off, Robert began pursuing the next most important thing on his agenda: getting the rights from various studios to use their characters in cameo appearances throughout the film. Nobody’s ever done that before, and that’s Zemeckis’ design of the movie. For instance, you start out on an animated character and then you pull back to include a real character. Notes producer Frank Marshall (who is represented on-screen this summer with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), “We treated Roger Rabbit like a live-action movie. He should always be touching something that’s real.’ I walked out of there in a daze, saying, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t anybody think of this earlier?'” Spielberg captured it perfectly when he said, ‘If the rabbit sits down in an old chair, you have dust come up. “After an hour and a half meeting with Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg,” Richard adds, “we had the whole thing worked out. And then, most importantly, we’d have to have interaction. So our first task was to move the camera, and the second was to find a way to light the characters so they’d look real. ILM, I was told, had developed a system where images could be combined and it didn’t look like Tony Tiger painted on glass. I figured that doing so would make it work, and bring the combination off wonderfully. The thinking is that if you move the camera, it’s harder work, because you have to draw every frame. I ran the camera through a kid’s legs and then had animated characters do the same, which you’re not ‘supposed’ to do. I had, however, done some commercials using Disney characters which combined animation with live action, and I violated all the animators’ rules. You look at each separately and it works, but the combination is deadly. “One of the first things I said,” he recalls, “was that I hate the combination of animation and live action because you don’t believe in it. The answer came the form of animator Richard Williams. While the writers went back to work on the script, the biggest concern was whether combining live action and animation could be pulled off with an unprecedented realism, without which the whole thing would have fallen apart. It just needed to age a bit, like fine wine.” Bringing Roger Rabbit to life was the key challenge. “We were both intrigued by the project,” he says, “and we found that the new Disney regime was not only able to pull this movie off, they were gung-ho to do it. Robert went off to direct other films, including Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future, and rediscovered the project while meeting with Steven Spielberg, who had been sent the script by Disney as a potential joint endeavor. But at that point, the Disney studio was on a very serious decline, and they weren’t about to get the movie off the ground.” “The writers, Jeff Price and Peter Seaman, were assigned by Disney to adapt the book, and the resulting script was very loosely based on it. “This is one of those projects that evolved over many years,” recalls director Robert Zemeckis in an exclusive unpublished interview that took place with him and everyone else quoted at the time of the film’s release.
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