Over the Hedge

I'm Karey Kirkpatrick.

This is Tim Johnson.

And I'm Bonnie Arnold.

Welcome to our commentary track for Over the Hedge.

I do love this sequence so...

This opening came rather late in the game.

It used to begin with RJ

racing straight to the cave with his mind on robbing the bear.

But about nine months before the film was released,

the realization that we were beginning

with something more suspenseful than humorous

sent us in search of something funny or something a little more outrageous

to open the picture with.

That was Damon.

Damon O'Beirne, our head of layout,

his comment about, "You need to let people know that this is gonna be a comedy."

What I love about this sequence is

it was the quickest turnaround from concept to execution.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, the challenge to find something fun

to open the picture with yielded a bunch of ideas

and one of them from Maurissa Horwitz,

who is in John Carr's editorial department,

came up with this idea of a vending machine.

Right, and then Tom Owens, one of our board artists boarded it...

-Right, storyboarded this... -... in about three days.

We approved it by the end of the week and had it into animation

-and turned around... -A week or two after.

Yeah. That was very, very quick.

No, no, bad idea. Bad idea!

You can't believe how many different versions there are of that stomach gurgle

to have finally come up with the winner.

Yeah, this is where the film began.

That shot right there, where RJ leapt in,

used to be the opening of the movie.

But the stomach gurgle, I remember being an important story point to say...

Remember there were all these questions about a year and a half ago...

What exactly does he want?

What does he want? Why does he...

And also, I think, to make RJ understand what his issues were

and what would make him a little bit more sympathetic.

I think that was the note that we had gotten a number of times

when we showed it to our crew, that...

There was some concern about

creating some sympathy or empathy for RJ.

When we just saw him open like it is now, at this point

in the picture, where he's raiding the cave, he was just a little thief,

but making him a pathetic thief actually is much more sympathetic.

Yeah, with the impulse control problem illustrated right there.

Hopefully, somewhere on this DVD

will be samples of all the different packages

designed by our art department to populate our world

with consumer junk that we have throughout it

because every single label and logo is invented.

We don't have any real products in there and they're really, really fun.

This pile of food and junk food is all invented.

And thanks to the sound team

for finally making those tins as loud as I wanted them to be.

I just have to give credit to Kathy, Paul and Christian,

our production designer and art directors,

for doing such a terrific job on all the design and products and...

Yeah, actually it's a challenge right away.

The first scene is at night and you can overbalance things

to be dark and gloomy

at the beginning of your comedy if you're not careful,

and Kathy Altieri with Craig Ring, our head of effects,

took a look at all of this stuff for us.

This is one of my favorite shots in the movie.

This was John Hill,

this great shot and great facial expression.

That's one of my favorites.

I think...

How about the contest of naming the Spuddies?

-Oh, yeah. -My daughter keeps asking me about that.

-How did you come up with the names? -There were about 200 different names.

It used to be a known brand which shall remain nameless,

that everybody knows what it was.

Then it was Jingles, Tingles, Dingles, Hingles...

And then there were like... Tim said there were hundreds more other than that.

We went through a list, we had a contest within the crew

of who could name that chip.

No.

And we had the advertising line which was, "Spuddies.

"They're like your friend, only they're a potato."

Nick Nolte nailed that line, we gotta find that for the alternate soundtrack

'cause Nick was absolutely amazing to work with.

Guy shows up with research on bears.

Actually looked on the Internet,

came in with an inch-big stack of paper

and began to, to our embarrassment since we had not done our research,

tell us everything we did not know about Ursus americanus.

"Did you know the raccoon's related to the bear?"

"No, Nick, I didn't know that, thank you."

I liked watching him the best, as you guys know,

every time he would do a different take, his face would just change ever so subtly.

But it would just give a completely different read on the performance

and I thought it was so interesting to watch him.

-And you'd break into a little sweat. -Absolutely.

Well, and Karey was in there reading with him

when he was doing all these growls.

And we kept telling Nick, "We can find bear noises, it's okay."

He goes, "No, no, I'll do them. I'll do them."

Karey at one point, looks over his shoulder at me in the booth...

"Help me.

"Help me."

He looked genuinely terrified of Nick as a bear.

"I love those things."

I mean, the way he inhabits the character now,

it's fun to watch and...

I love, too...

At one point when we were using real brand names,

before we decided not to do that,

these were potentially gonna be Funyuns, remember?

That's right.

And he had the line, "I love those things. They're like an onion, only funner."

The shots of the moon were actually photographs taken in my backyard,

in the greater LA sprawl here.

I have a telescope and took some shots of the moon.

I used them just to talk through the phases of the moon

that are gonna track RJ's progress,

but they ended up being good enough

to just pop into the matte painting that's in the sky there.

Tim is our moon expert.

-Yeah, yeah. -He knows the phases of the moon.

Every time it would go up, it's like,

"Well, that would actually not be waning crescent,

-"It would be waxing gibbous." -"Waxing gibbous," there you go.

Waxing gibbous is my code name, by the way.

Is it? It's on your license plate?

Well, it's the way I travel so people don't know where I'm staying.

It doesn't sound right.

Ben Folds, what a great teammate he turned out to be.

Ben came on board, not much more,

about 14 months before the film was released.

While that sounds like a lot,

when you're touring and promoting a new album,

writing three songs, recording five for us was a ton of work for Ben.

He did tons of demos for us, he'd be sending us little clips.

And the best thing about working with Ben is he tends to pick

whatever headline is at the front of the paper

and sing those lyrics to the tune,

so "the long arm of State Farm" was one lyric.

He sings a lot about Abe Lincoln.

That's right.

We can't even say what this song was originally called.

It was slightly blue, his original lyrics.

Some version of "I'm a jerk."

But he nailed it and I think we did great

in making the choice to have one voice for the music for the movie.

I think that was... It took us a while to get there,

but it was the right fit for the emotion.

We really tried to let Ben do his own thing on the lyrics,

although we were constantly telling him whose voice it was at any given point.

So we directed him in the same way, I suppose, we directed the actors.

Not telling them how to read the line or how to write the line,

but trying to build a structure

where they were nailing the emotion of the moment, so...

We had many versions of that title sequence, too.

Thom Enriquez, another one of our story artists,

must've done it like 40 times.

Yeah.

-Hello, Verne. -Hello, Garry Shandling.

This is one of, if not maybe, the hardest scene in the picture.

There are certainly challenges when you wrap a movie

so there's some challenging scenes at the end.

But introducing the characters,

keeping a pace, moving forward was hard.

And we have a lot of characters to introduce.

And a lot of information that you've got to get across

in order to understand the emotional journey

the minor characters go through.

I have to say, this is one of my favorite music cues before we leave this moment.

Rupert Gregson-Williams did our score,

phenomenal narrative quality to the score.

He really knows how to tell a story with the orchestra.

It also gave it an extra bit of heart.

-Yeah. -I really like it.

Finished. No, wait!

Come on, everybody. Wake up. Don't make me come in there.

Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy,

they only got to actually see each other on this movie

-after it was done. -At the press junket.

But, man, were they great.

We tried to get them together, but, again, on these kind of movies,

it's hard to get the actors' schedules synced up to what they do.

-Actually, Eugene lives in Canada. -I know.

And even though... But they have worked together before and they...

And there's a natural chemistry to their voices

that lets you relax into this happy married couple.

It's funny, when we told them what we were trying to do

in terms of the Midwest thing,

they both keyed into the same thing

without actually being in the room together.

Yeah, they found that Northern accent.

Lou, that'd be just super.

All right, kids, you heard your mother, and now, you listen to me. Shape up there.

Boy.

This is what I was afraid of.

So, Hammy's first appearance here,

this is done by one of our leads, Dave Burgess,