Wes Anderson, on creating the movie, said, “the first idea for the movie had nothing to do with the setting. It had to do with this one character, played by Ralph Fiennes.” A friend of Wes actually inspired the role’, but he quickly knew exactly who should play the lead – “My friend Hugo and I made the script together, and our friend was the model for this character, and immediately as we started writing it, I began to think, ‘You know, I’ve wanted to work with Ralph Fiennes for some years, and I started thinking I would love to write this for Ralph.’” “In the end, I really don’t know who else could play this, nor would I want to see anybody else play it.” It didn’t hurt that she was already a big fan of the director, as she explained: “I’m a huge Guillermo del Toro fan. I’ve seen everything he’s directed and just about everything he’s executive produced and he’s an auteur, a true auteur. The first scene when everything is underwater — I said ‘Oh my God. They’re gonna be doing things like this. I want to be a part of this movie.’” In fact, when the two met to discuss the role, they spoke for three hours before even getting to the topic of the film itself, as she said explained: “We talked about everything. Life, love, antiques, our love of antiques, dieting, I mean everything but the movie.” It was clearly an excellent choice for the part, as the film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. The director was set on casting Bill for the role, saying: “I had to do it with him I just knew he was the perfect person for this. There’s just no one like him, he’s this great combination of funny and sensitive and sincere. I wanted to do a film centred around him.” It wasn’t a straightforward process to land him, however, having to spend months of reaching out, writing letters, and attempting to sit down with him – she said, “I spent months stalking him.” The two finally got together for dinner, and he agreed to take up the part that was written with him in mind. On the process, John explained how, despite being the exact person the writers had in mind when developing the character, he still had to audition multiple times: “I got the pilot for Scrubs sent to me, and in the margin for Dr. Cox, it said ‘a John McGinley type.’ So when I went in to audition, I said to Billy Lawrence, who’s a dear friend of mine, I said, ‘Well, I’m John McGinley.’ And he said, ‘I know, but because there’s so many ladles in the soup in television, you have to go through an audition process.’ Disney was the producer, so I had to audition twice at Disney. And NBC was the exhibitor, so I auditioned twice at NBC. So I auditioned for ‘a John McGinley type’ five times.” Thankfully he eventually was confirmed for the role, and he (obviously) performed the “John C. McGinley type” perfectly. Allison Jones told Michael, “I just met the weirdest girl I’ve ever met in my life. You have to meet her and put her on your show.” When Michael met her, he agreed, saying: ”Aubrey came over to my office and made me feel really uncomfortable for like an hour, and immediately I wanted to put her in the show. We didn’t totally know what we were going to do with her, we just thought it would be funny if Leslie had a college-aged intern who she wanted to inspire, and that person would be Aubrey Plaza.” Michael Schur explained their decision: “We’d originally designed the character of Andy to be there for six episodes, then be gone. Ann was going to wise up and realise he was a loser and get rid of him. But Pratt auditioned, and we were like, ‘This guy’s too funny to not use.’ We slowly changed that character to one that’s more loveable and sweet—a moron and doofus, but not a bad person.” Chris’ performance impressed them so much, however, that they decided to create a role just for him. He said, “that night we got a call from my agent saying that they liked what I presented so much that they were going to write in a role for me.” Casting Director, Robert Ulrich, explained why they made up a whole new character just for him, saying: “He really didn’t fit any of the parts. Basically, we wrote the part for him on the spot.” “I went in and improvised for them, with Kristen Wiig, for an hour in a room. Judd Apatow said, ‘Tell Kristen about your love life. Go!,’ and I said, ‘But, I’ve prepared the script.’ And I just kept going for an hour while they filmed it all.” They liked her audition so much that they added the part of a roommate to the script! Codirector, Ron Clements, explained how Robin improvised and adlibbed his way to create the part: “John Musker and I wrote the original script with the specific idea that Robin would voice the Genie and that he would be a visual as well as vocal shape-shifter. Robin would be encouraged to improvise to his heart’s content.” Ron recalled the first day of recording the Genie’s intro, which perfectly illustrated just how much Robin played around with the part: “The original scene was meant to be about three minutes long. For each take, Robin would add and embellish, so by the 25th (and last) take, the scene had expanded to about 20 minutes long! Robin kept coming up with more and more ideas. And he was consistently hilarious. At one point, we had to remove the genie’s lead animator, Eric Goldberg, from the recording stage because his uncontrollable laughter was messing up takes.” Mike, who played Ned in the film, spoke about how he came up with the idea for the movie based on Jack, saying: “The whole idea of the movie came after I saw Jack in another movie I wrote called Orange County. He was really funny but the part was not written for him. And I just kept thinking there’s so many different colours to his comedy than people have seen, at least in terms of the movies he’s headlined. I just had this image in my head of him jamming with a bunch of little kids, and while I was kind of afraid of what the Paramount version of that could be, I couldn’t shake the idea. So I just wrote it.” And it’s a good thing that Jack was happy to take up the role too, because Mike explained that without him as Dewey, he wouldn’t have wanted to continue with the movie, saying: “Had he not wanted to do it, I probably would have thrown the script away. It was so inspired by just knowing him that I wouldn’t want to see anyone else do it.” “I initially auditioned for the part of Rosa, which was not called Rosa at the time. Did not get it, but they called me and were like, ‘We’re going to write a different part for you.’ So my part was not in the script that I initially read.” “The character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine didn’t exist. “I went in and met with the producers, they didn’t have a role. They were like ‘we wanna add you to the show so much that the name of the character is you’.” They weren’t joking about making the character him – after telling them about his life they even included personal details in Terry’s character, including him driving a minivan! “Sam is famously the coolest man alive and both myself and artist Bryan Hitch just liberally used him without asking any kind of permission.” The two weren’t exactly subtle about using Sam’s likeness, in one comic Nick Fury even answered a question about who he would get to play him in a hypothetical movie with: “Why, Mister Samuel L. Jackson, of course. That’s not even to debate, Doctor Pym.” After seeing his likeness in the comics, Sam’s reaction was totally positive, in fact, he contacted Marvel and asked for the part in a potential movie, to which they said, “Yeah, we are planning on making movies, and we do hope you’ll be a part of them.” Mark Millar said what it was like when eventually met Sam – “The first thing I said was I hope you don’t mind me completely exploiting your appearance in my book thirteen years back, and he said, ‘Fuck, no, man. Thanks for the nine-picture deal.’” “We don’t have a marketing budget, we’re also a fledgling network, but we love the show. We want it to succeed, so we want to add an actor that has a bit of cache, somebody who can bring some exposure to the show.” He suggested Danny DeVito, to which the team said no. The reason for them turning Danny down was that they thought they had something good going, and the idea of inserting a movie star could upset the chemistry. The decision didn’t go down well, however, because John then said “okay then, I’m going to cancel the show.” Needless to say, Rob immediately warmed to the idea of Danny, and they wrote in Frank to be played by Danny, which was of course an absolute success. It was then a job for the writing team to develop a character based on Jorge’s personality, which they did excellently. Jorge was humbled by this, of course, saying, “It makes you feel like you’re pretty good at what you do.” “He was just adamant about the group, NWA, the kind of music that we were doing. And, you know, his whole thing was like ‘the film version of what you are doing and, you know, nobody is showing that.’ So he just kept saying, ‘Man, you Doughboy, you Doughboy, man. I could see it.’” Ice Cube was listening, interestedly, but thinking that John would be casting a big actor for Doughboy. John, however, kept saying “It’s you.” So, with Laurence Fishburne taking him under his wing, and giving him acting pointers, Ice Cube became Doughboy.
