Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore Cast Interview

26 November 2010

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore

‘Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore’ hit the big screen earlier this year, nine years after the original, ‘Cats & Dogs’. Both films will be released on Blu-ray^TM and DVD double pack on Monday, 29^th November.

Bette Midler, James Marsden, Christina Applegate are all on board lending their voices to the project.

- For the three actors, what was the best quality about the cat or dog that you voiced here, and are you a cat or dog person?

Bette Midler: I play Kitty Galore. Kitty Galore is an Egyptian Sphinx Cat. She’s hairless, except for a little hair on her tail, and she’s very cranky because she has been rejected by her beloved human family and she’s determined to rule the world.

I came in for a number of sessions and it was really curious because when I first started it was just a sketch and as the time went on, the backgrounds and the other characters got more and more filled in, that was very, very exciting to watch. I’d never experienced that before.

- Do you have a pet in real life?

Bette Midler: Oh, in real life, my pet passed. I’m a non-pet person at this point.

James Marsden: I play Diggs. He’s the German Shepherd and he’s a dog that worked for the police force, but was rejected from the police force because he had difficulty following orders.

A lot of raw ability and talent, but, unfortunately, his ego eclipses all of those natural abilities. But, he’s hired or recruited by this separate group of dogs to thwart Kitty Galore and, ultimately, has to team up with cats, which is the end-all, be-all.

That’s not happening, but he has to overcome his own sense of pride and all of that to work together. But, I like his confidence and his boldness.

Again, he doesn’t really know about teamwork so much, but he’s very, very comfortable in his own skin. And I’m a dog person. [Laughs] I’m allergic to cats. By default, I’m a dog person.

Christina Applegate: I play Catherine, who is the agent from MEOWS. She’s an incredibly sophisticated, smart agent, spy-like, if you will, and she begrudgingly has to be teamed up with these dogs in order to stop Kitty Galore, who is about to destroy her universe as well.

So, I love her. I think she’s a really wonderful, rich cat. And I am a ‘both’ person. I love all the animals, all shapes, colors, sizes and species.

- Could the actors about the process of doing the characters. Did you get to work together and was there a big moment where you discovered your inner animal?

James Marsden: It was an interesting process. We talked a lot about this yesterday, that when you’re in a film or doing television, and you’re in front of the camera, you have a tool box.

You have your expressions in your face, your body language. And this experience, for me, was challenging in a sense that you really do rely on your voice to convey emotion, to play a scene, for all of that. So, it was definitely a journey.

Early on we had some sort of scratch track sessions where we were just sort of finding the voice of the character; it was important to find the voice that matched the physicality of the dog, that matched the energy that was needed for the animators. And all of that was very new to me and a big learning process for me.

It was a great journey where we went many times all over the place to try to find the voice of Diggs, and it was unlike any experience I’ve ever experienced before. It was very gratifying to see the final picture, when all these puzzle pieces come together.

Brad Peyton: But I have to say you wouldn’t have known that because the first time James walked in the room, I’d sworn he’d done it fifty times. He just came with so much energy and it was great. He walked right into it.

James Marsden: You don’t always have that luxury on film sets to be able to play and go here and there and you’re not burning film. You’re just burning time in the studio, I guess. [Laughs]

Christina Applegate: Yeah, it took me a minute to figure out exactly what was going on. I know that for my first session with them, I had worked on Samantha Who? until about nine in the morning, and then I had to be there at eleven.

So, I wasn’t in the best possible condition to start doing this kind of voice. But Brad kept saying, ‘More energy. More energy!’ And with a lot of other animated movies, they can animate thought in the eyes of the character and they can animate physicality.

But for this, these are real dogs and cats. With our characters, at least, there was very little that was kind of enhanced. So, it really was a cat sitting there. [Laughs]

So, what we really had to do is convey so much through the voice. And I think that’s what I finally understood when he said, ‘More energy.’ It wasn’t louder, bigger. It just needed to be so full because that cat is not going to swerve this way or cock their head or do these things that you want it to do.

So, it took me a minute to get used to it and I think it turned out really well. I was happy. I’d like to go back and change a couple of things for myself, but I truly enjoy doing this kind of work. It’s quite gratifying to then finally see the picture and see what they’ve been so busy doing all these months.

Bette Midler: The real thrill, I think, comes from seeing the finished product. The fact that Brad can keep all these balls in the air and make all these movies that would form into one movie, it was absolutely staggering to me. I couldn’t imagine how he did it because he was working with live actors and he was working with animals.

There’s nothing harder than working with animals, no matter what. I mean, those animals really looked like they knew what they were doing, but, honestly [laughs], they’re animals. I love them, but, you know, ‘Stay, stay, stay.’

So, the fact that he was working with live actors and live animals, they’re actually quite similar, and then the robots and the cartoons, and it all melds together and you say, ‘Well, I can’t tell which part is drawn and which part is a robot and which part is a real animal.’ I couldn’t get over it. I just think it’s really an extraordinary achievement.

I mean, this is your Brad’s movie to direct and he has the actors, the cats, the dogs.

Brad Peyton: [Laughs] Yeah, yesterday there were a lot of jokes. There’s a list of things you’re not supposed to do, kids and animals, the list goes on, robots, explosions, lots of visual effects. It just felt like we pretty much put everything into the movie, but I had a really supportive group and I had a lot of people that I was collaborating with, and that was really fun.

And the great thing about this process, even though it’s really difficult, is you’re running along with animators at the same time you’re working with the writers, at the same time you’re working with the cast, which is difficult in one aspect of it, but you can take advantage of that as well.

You can try different lines. You can have the writers tweak jokes. You can let the cast play with it. So, for me it was taking the advantages of the process and just trying to use it as much as I could.

- Bette, is doing voice work for this film and recording songs similar in any way in that you’re trying to get across an emotion through your voice? And, secondly, did you channel anybody to play evil or did that come naturally?

Bette Midler: No. Pardon me? Did I channel anyone or am I just plain evil? [Laughs] I’m just plain evil. It’s true, and now you know the real me. [Laughs] There are some parts of it that are quite musical. Timing is very important in this kind of work because the phrasing works with the mouth of the character.

Once the mouth of the character is moving, you have to phrase along with the character that’s drawn and that is musical. And if you listen to that, you can hear where the beats are skipped and where you drop a beat or where you rush and catch up a little bit.

And I will say that the fact that I’ve sung for a long time has really helped a lot with that. Yeah, really, really helped a lot. I don’t think it helped the character, but it helped me get through the sessions. [Laughs]

- James, you have a few voice credits now. What is it about voice work that’s appealing to you?

James Marsden: Maybe the fact that you just sort of roll out of bed, and [laughs] vanity gets set aside. You really don’t have to worry about going through the works.

No, I’d be lying to you if I told you that wasn’t a part of it, but that’s definitely one of the fun elements of it - that you actually get to go in and really focus on one tool, your vocal performance.

I mean, voice work, specifically, usually it’s not that big of a time commitment. You can go in for a couple of days or a couple of months, here and there, and just go in and play. I guess I like being able to go in and just play and, again, you don’t have that luxury on film sets or television sets.

One of the great things about getting in there and working with Brad is we just would run the gamut and what didn’t work would be set aside and what worked would be enhanced and embraced and then given to the animators.

And you don’t get that sort of safety net a lot of the times when you’re working on a film set. When you go in and give a vocal performance, there’s a playful element to that that I like. I would love to continue doing voice work.

- Bette, if anything happened to your fabulous hair in real life would you also go maniacal and try to destroy the world? [Laughs]

Bette Midler: No. [Laughs] No, never. Something happens to my hair in real life every day and I’m normal. A long time ago when I first worked in the theatre, I was in Fiddler on the Roof. I was just a kid. I think I was nineteen or twenty or something like that.

And one of the girls who was in Fiddler was a Puerto Rican girl and she was famous and the reason she was famous was because the opening night she had done something to her hair. She had tried to straighten her hair or something and her hair fell out, literally, and she didn’t even blink.

She went out. She got a piece. She slapped it on. And she gave the performance of her life and she went on and became a really famous opera singer.

And I never forgot that. I thought, ‘Wow, check that out.’ She didn’t even bother. She didn’t waste any time and from that time on I never thought twice. I just look around, grab a piece, put it on and go out. [Laughs]

- As the writers, you’re writing about dogs and cats, but you’ve also written about chickens and squirrels. Is the animal world appealing to you?

Steve Bencich: Well, we’ve done a lot of animal movies

Ron Friedman: Bears, chickens, squirrels, pretty much every animal

Steve Bencich: Yeah, it was nice to have a couple of humans, though, in this movie.

Ron J. Friedman: Yeah, yeah. Actually, people have asked us a lot about what’s it like to write for animals. Is it different from writing for people?

And, from our point of view, it’s basically the same thing when you’re sitting there with a computer. It’s a name. Hit return. Type some dialogue. Hit return. It doesn’t matter how many limbs.

Ron J. Friedman: I will say there’s more crawling around.

Steve Bencich: A lot of acting things out.

Ron J. Friedman: There’s a lot of acting things out and even with Brad, I remember just from the very beginning it was like, ‘Can a dog do this? Can a dog do that? I don’t know. Let’s find out.’ So, we’d drop to all fours and crawl around.

- For the writers and the director, obviously, there’s the whole James Bond theme kind of running through this. I love a lot of the double entrendres and the Bondisms that were in it. So, can you talk about a little bit about that?

Steve Bencich: Yeah. When we first started, we were looking at ‘buddy cop’ films. We wanted to do the bad dog and the old dog teaming up. But when we met up with Brad, Brad was like, ‘Let’s get more James Bond stuff in this.’

Ron J. Friedman: It’s a spy movie after all and we’re huge fans. Steve and I went to high school together.

Steve Bencich: We watched lots of Bonds movies.

Ron J. Friedman: Yeah, we’d see a lot of movies together.

Brad Peyton: When we started too, remember we were like, ‘Let’s take all the stuff we love about the spy movies.’ So, we had like the Bourne Identity kind of handheld camera work on the ferry fight. There was a little bit of Mission Impossible.

I think the Bond just kept coming in because we all grew up on Bond and there’s this kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy with Bond.

It’s like a little bit ridiculous to see Sean Connery walk into a hotel room and he looks, like ‘no mics here. Okay. I’m ready to go.’

Like everything’s just a little bit ridiculous, the villain who pets the cat. I felt like the comedy from those early influences just kind of fed into like a family member.

Ron J. Friedman: I think, also, as soon as you bring Catherine into it and she’s kind of like the Russian spy that James Bond has to operate with and kind of talk in those terms, yeah.

Steve Bencich: And then, of course, we were lucky enough to get Roger Moore to do a cameo, which I personally—as a total film nerd freaked out over.

Brad Peyton: That was a real surreal moment too because it was weird directing him and it was like, ‘Oh, yes, what do you want me to do?’ ‘Could you scream like a cat that’s just been thrown across the room?’ [Laughs] ‘A little higher.’ ‘Oh, yes, yes. Okay.’

Yeah, it was really odd asking Sir Roger Moore to scream like a cat. I kind of cringed, actually. I gave the direction and I was like, ‘Is he going to throw something at me?

I have no idea how he’s going to take this.’ But he was really game. He didn’t bat an eyelash. He just did ridiculous cat sounds.

- Bette, unlike your character Kitty who’s hell-bent on destroying the world, you, as an activist, are hell-bent on making it a better place. So, I’m wondering what’s up with you and how you’re making the world a better place now.

Bette Midler: Well, a couple of years ago I teamed up with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to plant a million trees in New York City and we’ve planted about three hundred seventy-five thousand so far, in the last two years.

And I also am the founder and chairman of an organization called New York Restoration Project and we clean abandoned parks and public places and we also own 55 community gardens where people in the community grow their own food.

And we teach kids, as well, about nature, environmental science and all that sort of thing. So we’ve been at it for about fifteen years.

It’s our 15th anniversary this year and it’s been fantastic. It’s been one of the great projects of my life.

- There’s a girl in New York who has a blog about a tree that you planted in front of her house.

Bette Midler: And she’s mad?

- Oh, no. [Laughs]

Bette Midler: You never know. You never know.

- No. She loves it. She has pictures of it and the blog’s about her tree that you planted.

Bette Midler: Oh, that’s fabulous. That’s great.

- Could you compare doing this to being a 'Chippette' in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel? With that, your voice was changed and this is your voice. So, I just wondered what the different process was.

Christina Applegate: Very different. Considering the 'Chippettes,' I think it can be anybody. You really don’t recognize it because it’s just chipmunk sounds.

[Laughs] That’s a little bit more taxing as far as doing the chipmunks because you have to talk a lot higher than you normally speak and really slowly and everything has to be incredibly exaggerated.

So, you really feel ridiculous and the process is a little bit longer to do that and then they just speed it up and then it doesn’t sound like you. So, you try to put as much personality into that slow speaking so that when it speeds up it sounds like something great and, you know, quirky and sassy.

But, with this, I found I didn’t want to push too much because I think what’s great about these movies is the human quality that all these animals have. That’s why kids love it is because they can just think, ‘Oh, this is really happening because there’s this human inside there.

There’s this real person that I can relate to.’ So, I think it took me a minute to really find what that was, to get Catherine as strong as she was, but not make her unlikable as well.

- Katt Williams has such a comedic voice in the film. How did he take to voice work?

Brad Peyton: Pretty well. Katt’s a stand-up comic, and I think that he does voice work too. He does The Boondocks, and he does some other stuff.

So, it wasn’t his first show. He has a really great energy. He’s got a really intense energy and he just gets really into it.

So, what I tried to do with Katt, I’d leave the mic open and I would say, ‘Okay, let’s try the line.’ Sometimes we would write three or four lines and I’d constantly want his opinion, ‘Which one do you think you’d do?’

So, he would go through and go, ‘One, three, five, okay not four and six. Not going to do that.’ And then, I’d be like, ‘Cool, man,’ and then he would just do it.

But then I would say, ‘Okay, that’s great. The energy’s great, but just like let it go. Change whatever up.’ And he did so many jokes that way, like in the movie when he said, ‘My brain’s the size of a grape, no maybe a raisin, no a little grape,’ that was not scripted.

That was just him, like, ‘Okay, I’m going to say the line and then I’m just going to make my own kind of comedy with it.’

All I wanted out of Katt was just that, just let go, and it was interesting because, obviously, like Bette and the other guys, everybody knew them, but a lot of people weren’t aware of Katt’s comedy and I’ve been a huge Katt Williams fan for years.

So, there was a little bit of like, ‘Please, let me try with him. He’s so funny.’ Because I just knew his voice was going to be really distinct, and not enough people have taken advantage of this guy’s talents. His voice is amazing. He’s super funny. So, it was great to get him in there and just kind of let him loose.

I tried to do that with everybody. I tried to like give everyone enough room to like, if you want to change up the line, change it up. Make it yours. Have fun with it.

I want you to be excited and comfortable in your role. So, I tried to do that with everyone, but with Katt, especially. I was pushing him. Be funny. Please, just do what you do and I think he did. I think he kind of brought it every single time.

- James, what do your kids think of your family film roles. Do they think it’s cool that you’re an X-man, a talking dog?

James Marsden: They’re sort of over it now. The whole thing’s been demystified for them. Oh, I have a four-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, and what’s really interesting is when my daughter is four years old and when my son was about that age, I got excited because I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to get see their dad in this film.’

You forget that a child’s mind at that age, what they’re seeing on screen is real to them. They don’t see the manipulation. They don’t see the smoke and mirrors that’s Hollywood, but it’s very real.

So, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, they’re going to love this. It’s going to be great.’ And my son when he was that age was sort of freaked out by it when he saw me in X-Men. Well, first of all, he probably shouldn’t have been watching that movie anyway.

[Laughs] I just showed him my scenes. But then I later realized that it was the concept of seeing me in person and then seeing me on screen. Then he grew up and he sort of got into it a little bit.

Now he’s just sort of over it. Now I’m sort of just a dorky dad in the movies or whatever, but my daughter is getting a kick out of it now, and it’s one of the reasons why I like doing these types of films so that I can be a part of something that I can enjoy with my kids if they’re into it.

- For the actors, do you guys have a favorite childhood toy that maybe stokes fond memories?

Christina Applegate: I remember having all the dolls from El Coyote. I don’t know if they even have dolls there anymore. The restaurant.

I didn’t have Barbies, but I had hundreds of these Spanish dolls that were dressed like the waitresses there. I loved my little Conchitas. I loved them. I had a few of them. [Laughs]

James Marsden: Wow. That’s cool.

Bette Midler: Actually, my mother made toys. My mother made our toys. She made a rabbit for me. I still have it. He had little corduroy overalls and little orange feet.

She was really a seamstress, my mom. She’s fantastic, but in those days they used to have patterns and all the women would buy patterns and the pattern would come with the fabrics and you would sort of put it together.

- The stuffing too?

Bette Midler: The stuffing too, yeah. That was a great little enterprise.

- James, toys?

James Marsden: Oh, boring, the Star Wars action figures. Not, nearly as exciting or as original as either of these.

- Brad, could you tell us about the differences and or similarities between directing your actors and directing animal trainers?

Brad Peyton: Well, you know, it’s really funny. You just assume that a lot of the stuff as a director that you do with people are going to work with animals.

So, for example, we showed up one day and it was a really easy scene. It was Diggs and Butch walking through DOG HQ and it’s basically like a dolly shot and you’re just going in front of the dogs and they look over and we cut to what they’re seeing.

It’s pretty simple stuff, until you get there and you realize that dogs don’t walk and look. They walk and stop and look and then they look again and then they walk and they stop and they look. [Laughs] They think and then they stop and they look around and then they go again.

So, the camera operators were pulling their hair out and I went to the camera operators and I was like, ‘Can’t we smooth this out?’

And they’re like, ‘Brad, it’s a German Shepherd, okay?’ He’s like, ‘I shot Denzel Washington and after like a week I could understand how Denzel was going to move. Every day the dog moves differently, Brad.’ So, that was kind of weird.

And the other thing that was weird that you just forget is that you work actors: you walk into a room; you block out a scene; they have an idea of their motivation.

You have an idea of where the camera’s going to go. They understand all the simple stuff that you just forget about, eye-lines, all the really basic stuff.

A dog walks into a room, doesn’t know what an eye-line is, doesn’t have a clue what his motivation is besides getting food and hearing a squeaky toy.

As a director, you’re basically going, ‘Okay, I have to remember all the blocking, all the eye-line.’ You have to just take all that on because the animal trainer’s not interested in that. He’s busy squeaking toys and doing all his stuff.

So, with the animals, it was like a layer of thinking that you constantly had to do in order for the scenes to kind of clue together. And working with actors, they bring a lot to the table all the time.

- Bette. I couldn’t help but notice a fair bit of the Divine Miss M. in Miss Kitty and I wondered if world domination was always part of the plan.

Bette Midler: Oh, always. [Laughs] I think a lot female entertainers think about that when they start out. Yeah, I do.

- Bette, you worked with Nick Nolte on Down and Out in Beverly Hills. He plays Butch in this movie. What did you think of working with him again?

Bette Midler: I was looking forward to seeing Nick. I haven’t seen him in a long time. He’s so sensational in this movie. He’s so wonderful, isn’t he? I actually am not enough of a dog person. Does he play a lab? What is that?

Brad Peyton: That is an Anatolian Shepherd.

Bette Midler: Oh, my god. Well, he is that dog. [Laughs] Whatever it is, he is it. He was so brilliant. He was wonderful.

Brad Peyton: After a while, he said the same thing. He was like, ‘You know what, Brad? I think that’s me up there.’

Bette Midler: It was like, my God, if he was a dog, he would be that dog. [Laughs] He was wonderful.

- How challenging was it to orchestrate a movie like this, with so many animals and visual effects?

Andrew Lazar: I wanted to just say that we did warn Brad about directing the movie, how complicated it was going be. In our first meeting, I said, ‘Brad, you know it’s going to be a very long road and animals are tricky.’ So, I did warn him, but we’re really, really blessed.

I love where the franchise has gone. I mean, this cast is unbelievable and Brad has been very patient, if you look at the first movie and how different we were able to use technology and how advanced things have gotten, and I think that this movie’s more emotional. It has more action. It’s pretty exciting.

Polly Johnsen: Yeah, I mean, Andrew birthed this movie and I only got to join it in its incarnation, but I think it wasn’t even until seeing all of our actors together where it has sort of sunk in.

We’ve been used to seeing them throughout, and their performances got increasingly fantastic, every time we get a new thing from someone else. And now, to sit here and see all these guys, we just realized what a stupendous cast we really have. So, we’re very grateful.

Cats & Dogs And Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore are released on Blu-ray and DVD double pack on 29th November.