“Minions & Monsters” Screenwriter Brian Lynch on George Lucas, Movie Monsters, and Making Movies With Your Friends
Screenwriter Brian Lynch didn’t have to look far for inspiration when writing Minions & Monsters. The screenwriter behind some of animation’s biggest hits reached back to the movies that shaped him—from Ed Wood to The Muppet Movie—and even to the homemade films he made with friends as a kid, crafting a joyful love letter to filmmaking, storytelling, and Hollywood itself.
The seventh entry in the Despicable Me prequel franchise and the third Minions prequel is set in Hollywood in the 1920s. It follows the Minions, led by James, an irrepressible artist with a talent for storytelling, and his aides-de-camp Henry and Ed, as they search for frightening creatures to populate their monster movie. Of course, it quickly goes completely haywire for our Minion friends, but going off script has never dampened the spirit of a Minion. Co-writer and director Pierre Coffin returns as the voice of the titular characters.
Talking to The Credits, Lynch, who also wrote both The Secret Life of Pets movies and 2015’s Minions, explains how Minions superfan and legendary filmmaker George Lucas got involved and how the animated comedy celebrates cinema and the genre’s unique recipe for box-office success.
I heard the idea for Minions & Monsters came from Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri.
He went to Pierre with it first, and he told me that he wanted to do it based purely on the first half of the sentence when Chris said, “The Minions make a movie, but it’s a monster movie.” Pierre went off and wrote a page-and-a-half story outline that’s very similar to what’s up on the screen. When I read it, the filmmaking part was like me and my friends growing up.
This is a love letter to filmmaking and storytelling. Where did you start?
I wrote down a lot of my memories of making movies from sixth grade to college, then looked for the funny stuff. A lot of that made it into the movie. Where the Minions break back into the movie studio, that’s my friends and I breaking into classrooms to film. I’ve worked with Chris and Pierre for so long now, it’s like American Movie, which was a big inspiration for this. We’re a bunch of buddies making a movie.
What other movies influenced this?
Ed Wood. James is more talented than Johnny Depp’s version of Ed Wood because Ed Wood’s not a great filmmaker in that movie. Pierre had a list of silent movies we talked about, and I watched them for the first time, like Modern Times and Steamboat Bill, Jr., and then there was Citizen Kane. That film’s influence is obvious at one point in the movie. The big one, which is my favorite movie of all time, is The Muppet Movie. Again, a bunch of lovable characters who want to make their own movie. There’s a moment in Minions & Monsters where James sits in a director’s chair, and you see the joy as it’s all about to happen; that’s Kermit sitting in the chair on the soundstage for the first time in The Muppet Movie.
Do you feel like a tutor in cinema for the next generation?
I hope so, but what I hope even more is that kids pick up their phones or a camera and make a movie with their friends. I started making stop-motion animation with a big VHS camera, and now I’m doing animation on a grander scale, with Christoph Waltz voicing a character instead of my dad.
Minions & Monsters is set during one key moment in Hollywood—how was that conceived?
It was originally coincidental, but over the last year, we worked on it and discussed the opportunity to showcase the joy of seeing a movie in a theater with an audience. That’s why we have that line where Allison Janney’s character talks about the enjoyment of watching a movie in a crowded theater. It was originally longer, but it felt too preachy.
Are the monsters a metaphor for threats facing the film industry?
I’ll say yes, and that’s what we were trying to do, but I don’t think so. I love that you got that from it, though. At one point, the monsters had a different arc, especially Goomi. He was all about destroying the world, but as the movie-making experience went on, the monsters were falling in love with cinema as well. But then kids were like, “I want the monsters to win now because they have the dream too,” so we had to strip it back and be like, “No, they’re the bad thing.”
The movie starts with Minions being inserted into movies, and we move into this exhibit of iconic Hollywood ephemera, some real and some not. Walk me through that.
The opening sequence was all Pierre and his amazing animators. They found the footage, and we just had to make sure we could use it. The posters were all of us sitting around, trying to make each other laugh. We were like, “What genres were popular at the time? How would the Minions destroy it, and what’s the funniest version?” The poster that makes me laugh is They Came from Outer Space, and They Hit You With A Frying Pan: Part Eight Assignment Miami Beach. That went through a lot of iterations and was originally Part Four: A New Hope, but we were like, “It has to be funnier,” so that’s how we got to the Police Academy reference. When the cops were first chasing the Minions through Hollywood, they were going to inspire Walt Disney to create Steamboat Willie. They were literally going to be on a boat, it would pull out, and Walt Disney would be like, “Oh, I like that,” and the shadow would look like they had the mouse ears. It wasn’t that we were afraid Disney would say no; it just ruined the flow.
Let’s talk about George Lucas’s cameo. Was that in the script?
George had reached out to Chris and said, “I love what you’re doing. If you’re ever near where we live, I’d love to hang out,” so they did. In the museum scene, you see the airplane from Airplane! and E.T., so it’s all stuff we love, and we thought, “Let’s get a celebrity who is not allowed to leave the museum.” We talked about various actors and were like, “Would it be funny if Schwarzenegger was in there?” but when Chris said, “I know George. He loves the Minions and even does the voices for me,” there was nobody else. Chris said it would take half an hour, and George happened to be in France, so he went into Illumination early one Sunday morning. Pierre met with him, gave him a drawing he did of the Minions as Star Wars characters, which George was so happy to get, and they went into the booth. Pierre told me he was speaking almost perfect Minionese because he had watched the movies with his daughter so many times. Anyway, George did five or six versions of his scene; they were all really funny, and that was it.
You’re going to have a long line of Hollywood icons wanting to be in the next one.
I can’t wait. Guillermo del Toro was at the premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and came for dinner after. He loved the movie, so he sat with us, and he talked about filmmaking. We were like, “Well, the fourth movie’s going to have Guillermo in it.” I can’t wait.
Illumination has bases in the US and France. How do they get the balance right, fostering international and domestic talent?
Chris has assembled the most talented animators in Paris and the most talented group of creatives in America that I’ve ever worked with. While one group is sleeping, the other is making the movie better. It’s amazing. We have a meeting in the morning, then we write and work all day, and at night they come in, and we do it all over again. Chris would have gone where he found the people he loved the most, and when he founded Mac Guff, which is now Illumination Studios, he just went with the best people.
The Minions movies have made billions of dollars. Live-action comedies have struggled a bit at the box office these days, but animated comedies don’t. What’s the magic?
That’s a great question. People ask me, “Don’t you want to do live-action comedy?” and yes, of course, but this is where comedy is being made right now. The first Secret Life of Pets movie is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, with animated characters. The first Minions movie turned into an Austin Powers by the end, and Minions & Monsters is The Muppet Movie and Ed Wood. Right now, Hollywood is saying, “Comedy has to be animated.” Scary Movie reminded people that audiences still want to laugh. Last year, The Naked Gun did well. Given the opportunity, live-action comedies would do fantastically. Comedy is hard to get right, and with animated movies, we keep chiseling at it. If a character is unlikable, we can lift that character out. With a live-action movie, you’re stuck with the footage, and you’re not going to reshoot much if it’s a $20 million live-action movie.
Minions & Monsters is in theaters now.
Featured image: Center L to R: Dick, Ed, James, Henry and additional Minions in Illumination’s Minions & Monsters, directed by Pierre Coffin.
