Creator Matt Groening and Friends on The Simpsons Movie!

Cartoonist Matt Groening and his TV writers and showrunners have been talking about doing a bigscreen version of their mega-popular animated TV series for years! Matt first created the funny Simpsons family as a short filler on TV's "The Tracy Ullman Show" twenty years ago! Well, stock up on pink donuts with sprinkles, go by the Kwik-E-Mart for some coffee and sodas and hit your local multi-plex because here comes The Simpsons Movie!

Lucky us, we got to sit down in Beverly Hills with the funnymen who have made this lovable, dysfunctional family so much a part of our culture for years. We wanted to know why the journey to the big screen took so long, how a movie story differs from an episode storyline, who came up with the hilarious movie song "Spider Pig" and, most importantly, will brainy Lisa get to keep the boyfriend she gets in the film! The poor girl can never hang onto a guy!

Plop down on your couch and get the scoop on life in the bigscreen Springfield from creator Matt Groening and current Simpsons writers and directors including James Brooks, Al Jean, David Silverman and Mike Scully...

TeenHollywood: Okay, Matt why has it taken 18 years to get this bigscreen movie made?

Matt: It's taken 18 years because we're lazy. Well, we've been asked that question quite a bit, and we don't have a good answer.

James: My current answer is 15 years to get up the nerve, and 4 years to get it done [humm, that's 19 years but whatever].

TeenHollywood: How was the process different?

Matt: Well, you know what's great about this movie is, on the TV show, we're working very quickly on a tight schedule, a tight budget. And on the movie, we were able to work on the script until we got it right. We took a long time writing the script. Then we went into production and we tried animation that is far more ambitious than anything we've ever done in the past, I believe. It's inspiring to the entire 'Simpson' enterprise.

TeenHollywood: You have Arnold Schwarzenegger as President. Yet, on the show it's an Arnold look and sound-alike called Rainer Wolfcastle. Why go with Arnold for the feature film?

Al: When we're doing the film, we had to have a President character in the movie. You know a lot of movies there's 'President Johnson' or some phoney guy who's just a fill in and then Jim [Brooks] suggested that we use Arnold Schwarzenegger. So over the course of the movie, as [Schwarzenegger's] fortunes would ebb and flow, we were just praying that he would get re-elected, and I even voted for him.

David: Initially, we first did a more of a caricature of Arnold. The final conclusion was why instead of using the Rainer Wolfcastle caricature, instead of suggesting Schwarzenneger, why not make his eyes a little more wrinkled and change his hairstyle and that's what we ended up doing.

TeenHollywood: There is a funny crawl going across the bottom of the screen advertising a fake Fox TV show. How did you decide what to call the show?

David: That actually changed. In the original draft of the script, they were doing different kinds of reality shows at the time, than the one we originally chose. I think the original show was a show called 'Ship of Skanks.'

Al: Then there was "Star Dancers Act." Fortunately, they keep coming up with brilliant reality shows.

TeenHollywood: "The Simpsons" is in tune with contemporary pop culture and political events. How do you stay on top of that?

Al: Both with the show and the movie, what happens is we write a year ahead on the show and four years ahead on the movie. So we actually don't do Jay Leno-type jokes about things in the moment. We do jokes about larger trends: the environment. We'll do things like how hard it is to get prescription drugs and its unaffordable. With this film, what we found is the longer the time length between when we started it, the more the issues in the film became relevant and we lucked out in that regard.

TeenHollywood: We understand that putting out the show and the film is a collaborative effort but who gets the final decision on what's funny?

James: You know it's an amazing thing; something we call 'table written'. The group changes - it was very large at the beginning, it got smaller, it shifted a few times. But it's as democratic an enterprise as you can possibly imagine. I mean somebody can be passionate about something and unless it gets a laugh at the table it probably won't happen. You know, the long discussions produce a result so this is very much a team project.

Matt: It's very, very hard to describe the process of working with other people, writing jokes, in the same room for hours a day, late into the night for months and in this case years, on end. I think it's sort of like trying to be amorous with a three-headed dog. You're going to get licked a lot, but someone's going to get bitten by the end of it. [we laugh]

TeenHollywood: Oooookay! Most of us hope the show will carry on forever, but how much longer do you guys think you can keep the creative process ticking along?

Matt: I always thought that the series would be successful. I thought if we could get it on the air, I thought kids would tune in for sure. I didn't know if adults would give an animated prime time TV series a chance, but I thought kids would. And the fact is adults did too. I would say that one of the interesting things about this whole process has been as famous and big "The Simpsons" have been around the world for the last 18 years, we were basically working in the dark. We'd work very hard on the show and then we'd go home and watch it with our families. And with the making of the movie and the attention that it's got and the promotions around the movie, specifically Kwik-E-Mart; to see the lines outside of Kwik-E-Mart and the enthusiasm of people were staggering.[note: the 7/11 stores have put up signs and "become" Kwik-E-Marts from the show].

TeenHollywood: What were the technical challenges of the animation in bringing this to the big screen?

David: We went to the widest screen possible to give a greater distinction between the show and the movie and then added more color details to the backgrounds.

TeenHollywood: For the bigger screen, did you feel pressure to put in more sight gags?

James: I think we did actually. There were a group of months where we were particularly feverish about the physical jokes. We'd be feverish about different aspects of the picture at different times.

Al: One example would be when we were editing, there's a scene where they have nooses for the family and there's a noose with a pacifier on it for Maggie. We kept having different lines for Homer then we realized nothing was probably as good as Maggie reacting and her mouth drops open and her pacifier falls out. A lot of it was just actually taking dialogue out. We actually wrote three movies and didn't give you the bad two. There's a lot of work that you don't see that led to what we have.

David: I think we thought, 'Oh, the big screen, we can put more physical details, movement in the background'. And you really can't because what it does is distracts. It upstages. It feels like, 'Oh, that's important for me to watch what happens.' So we tried that and it didn't really work.

TeenHollywood: Were you able to do anything in this film that TV wouldn't let you do?

James: Well strangely, nothing that we weren't able to do in the early days of the show but lately it's become very repressive and we're so happy with the PG-13 [rating] because of 'irreverent humor throughout'. I mean, we won't get a better review than that.

Al: In television what happened is in the light of the Janet Jackson [exposure at the Super Bowl] thing, all networks got constricted by the FCC, so the movie takes a little more liberties and we wanted to do a story that was more of a movie story and had a more emotional nature. It wasn't like 'South Park' where we were going 'OK, we're going to now show things we couldn't show on TV'.

TeenHollywood: One of my favorite musical parts of the show is the song 'Spider-Pig'. Why'd it take 12 people to write it? Who was responsible for 'Spider Pig'?

Al: It came into the movie fairly late. It was after the screening in Portland and David Mirkin saw Marge was looking up at the pig tracks on the ceiling and she said, 'Where did they come from?' and I said 'Well, Homer should be holding [his new pet] pig and saying 'It's the amazing Spider-Pig'. And then David Silverman and David Mirkin started singing that song and we're generous with writing credits.

David: Our feeling is that regardless of who in the room wrote it, it came from the room's energy that everybody should get credit.

TeenHollywood: Matt, were you surprised at hearing the song?

Matt: I was listening and laughing and I think I would have thought of it.

Al: I think this is the best year ever for those guys that wrote the original Spiderman [theme].

TeenHollywood: Will what happens in the movie now be reflected in the TV series?

Al: We weren't always sure what was going to be in the movie. And there are allusions to the film in the TV show but the other thing I want to say is, the movie you see on the screen is complete. You don't have to then watch the show. But if you like the movie, there's a show that we can recommend - the season premiere is on September 23rd.

TeenHollywood: Will Lisa still have her movie boyfriend in the series?

James: We talked about it. I'm inclined to hope we can bring him back.

Al: Part of it was over the writing, the character kept changing. His name was Dexter, then Adrien, then Colin. We couldn't settle on one but Jim thinks that an Irish romance would be suitably tragic for Lisa.

Matt: Yeardley Smith [who voices Lisa] had asked, 'Is there any way she could possibly keep this one?' Because in the show, we've done a few romances and they always end unhappy for her.

Al: Well, Yeardley's really funny. She says, 'Every time you give Lisa something, you take it away whether it's a boy or a pony.'

James: And we have active discussions about who Colin's father should be.

TeenHollywood: Matt, why did you go into cartooning?

Matt: People go into cartooning because they're shy and angry. I'm talking about that's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing cartoons of the teacher. I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, [they would say] draw me Snoopy or Garfield or something. And now, the feeling of success, being asked to draw Bart and Homer is unbelievable after all these years. [He gets up and walks to the movie's poster on the wall]. Look at that design of Homer. There are very few lines in that face. There's no human iris. It's just a dot and a circle. All you have to do is change the shape of the circle slightly and he's the greatest actor of the 21st century.

TeenHollywood: And he's voiced brilliantly.

Matt: Dan Castellaneta, yeah. Let's talk about the voices. The voices of our cast are absolutely perfect. Dan Castellaneta as Homer and Krusty the Clown and Grandpa and all the rest is actually unbelievable. In fact, I think one of our favorite scenes in the movie is Homer trudging through the snow talking to himself, cajoling himself to keep going and as he often does, disagreeing with himself. It was an improvisation by Dan and it's absolutely perfect.

TeenHollywood: Was it difficult to write a movie story, not just stretch a normal story?

Al: That was where it was great to work with Jim because he had done movies and David had directed. Jim always said, 'It's going to be funny but there has to be that point 20-30 minutes in where the audience realizes they're captivated by the story.' There's a conscious effort in the writing to go from fast to slow, shift pace at different points and have emotional moments that you can only get when you're really involved in the story. We wrote a scene where Marge and the kids went on 'The View', but that didn't really work.

TeenHollywood: The band Green Day is in the film? Why did you choose them?

Al: We were writing a scene where we wanted to have a rock band talk about the environment and then get attacked by the town. A letter came in saying Green Day would like to be on "The Simpsons" on the very day that we were writing the scene. Then of course it took 18 months to negotiate the deal.

TeenHollywood: But you killed them.

Matt: We're known to do that to rock groups.

TeenHollywood: There is some serious stuff in the film. Marge's speech is especially touching.

Matt: Marge's big speech in the middle of the movie we did more than 100 takes and kept rewriting and different kinds of performances and going through that and going in different ways.

David: We animated it at least twice completely and then the final animation was just kind of tweaked on. We were really trying to get to a woman who is completely broken and her spirit is defeated. I got there I guess by breaking the actress' spirit. She worked so hard at it and she wanted it to be as good and that's also a big impact Jim had on that whole scene. The whole goodbye scene, a lot of that was just we were just going to stop doing jokes and do something really emotional and change the rhythm slightly and let the audience really care about this and it worked. Julie (Kavner) did a great job on it but it was probably 100, 150 takes for the scene.

TeenHollywood: Could each of you tell us your favorite episode from the 400 Simpson episodes?

Al: Mine is next season's premiere, September 23rd. [laughter] It's called 'He Loves to Fly when it D'ohs' and it guest stars Stephen Colbert and also Lionel Richie. Stephen Colbert plays a life coach who helps Homer achieve his dreams.

James: 'Bart the Genius' comes to mind quickly. I just think that we did things with animation when that happened that just opened doors for us and 'Lisa and the Substitute Teacher' is always meaningful to me on another level.

David: I think of all the ones I've had the good fortune to direct and I've always enjoyed 'Homey the Clown' because it was so much fun to do and it came out very funny. One that jumps to mind is a second season one called 'Three Men and a Comic Book' because I just love the whole notion of it. It was great format and the references to The Treasure of Sierra Madre at the end always tickled me.

Matt: I like when Homer ate the Guatemalan insanity pepper and then had a hallucination of a coyote spirit voiced by Johnny Cash. That was pretty great. I also like the Frank Grimes episode and there was an episode from the last couple seasons where Homer was in the garage trying to kill spiders and the tables were turned on him. It was fantastic.

Matt: I would say the episode where Bart sells his soul.

David: There are so many. 'Lisa's Wedding'. The other one that I really enjoy is 'Lisa on Ice' where Bart and Lisa are rivals on a hockey team. The end of the second act particularly is hilarious.

Matt: There's one that's up for an Emmy this year that Al just submitted called 'The Ha Ha Couple'. I think it's a really terrific episode. It holds up against any of the classics.

Al: My favorite Simpsons movie is The Simpsons Movie. [laughter]

TeenHollywood: Simpsons is drawn very simply, with 2-D animation. Do you hope this movie will re-energize that art form?

Matt: There is something about the hand drawn gesture. I think it's why comic books are successful. Comic books are not drawn with computers. They're people. Fans have their favorite artists. In 'The Simpsons' I can see specific personalities of animators and directors. I can see David Silverman in basically everything that the Simpsons are today because of the rules that David and his cohorts established back in 1989. Back in the very early days we were basically making it up from scene to scene and realized that the characters had to look the same if it were going to be professional and these days we still try to obey the rule of 'no unnecessary motion and no unnecessary lines'. In "The Simpsons", we try to do every single emotion without adding extra lines. I love it, that deer in the headlights look that we have in [the movie] poster is something that you don't see in other movies.

TeenHollywood: After doing this process, are you thinking sequel?

Al: The universe of "The Simpsons" is so wide and the topics you can touch on; you can do emotions, you can do slapstick and it's the greatest job I've ever had. We started this movie because we had bought all the ownership rights to pink donuts. So we'd have to think of a similar concept for movie 2.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.