More than just a ‘silly’ spy movie By

“Thank you for smiling and laughing in there,” Nick Bruno and Troy Quane greeted our group of journalists during our roundtable interview in late September last year when we visited the sprawling Blue Sky Studios in Greenwich, Connecticut. The studio is about an hour’s drive from Manhattan and we went there just as autumn was setting in and this part of New England was starting to show its iconic fall foliage.

Before our roundtable interview with Nick and Troy, our group was given a tour of the campus. We started our tour with the story development team that introduced us to how the story for Spies in Disguise was developed. This writer was among a select group that was invited to preview the movie, which is loosely based on Lucas Martell’s 2009 animated short Pigeon: Impossible.

From the story department, we were introduced to some members of the animation team who showed us how one 10-second sequence took two months to perfect. Before you start doing math, there were about 90 people on the animation team who worked together with the sculpture and materials team to complete the task.

Spies in Disguise tells the story of super spy Lance Sterling (voiced by Will Smith) who was accidentally turned into a pigeon by young scientist Walter Beckett (voiced by Tom Holland). The unexpected turn of events forces Walter and Lance to rely on each other and learn to work as a team to save the whole world from a dangerous enemy.

Will was the only choice for Lance. “We wanted to build our very own spy… suave, debonair, cool and charismatic and, yet, at the same time, a little cocky and unlikeable. This is the guy who likes to fly solo. He’s a spy who does not play well with others and he wants to do it all himself.”

Will has “been an amazing collaborative partner on this movie,” according to Troy.

Nick and Troy are doing their feature directorial debuts in the film and they couldn’t be more excited to have two of the most bankable Hollywood stars providing the lead voices in their film.

“We look pretty smart right now,” Nick quipped when this writer asked how they could have foreseen two years ago when they cast Will and Tom that both actors would star in three of the biggest box-office hits of 2019.

“The fact that our two leads have $3B movies in one year is not a bad track record. But we couldn’t have possibly foreseen it, the one thing that we can foresee is you get the most talented people you can work with and collaborate with and good things happen and that’s more of an extension of them just being talented collaborators.”

“You are just seeing the beginning of Tom Holland. He is so talented and so charming and just a really good person and you don’t have a career as long and as much breadth as Will without having some talent and also being a really great guy.”

Nick added that they got lucky not just with casting their leads but in getting almost all their first choices for the rest of the cast. They started with Will and Tom and from there, they cast Rashida Jones, Ben Mendelsohn, Karen Gillan, DJ Khaled and Masi Oka to voice the rest of the characters.

As this writer has observed over years of set visits and hundreds of interviews, animated filmmaking is possibly the most tedious of all film genres.

Work on the movie started in 2015. Six hundred people worked on the movie. As co-directors, the primary function of Nick and Troy was to know a little bit of everything.

“We have a huge passion for all of it and hopefully encourage everyone else to put their passion into it. Your hope as a director is to inspire everybody else to give their best and the movie you have in your head gets better in a way that you couldn’t anticipate because you don’t have the capacity for 600 brains. It’s a long run, it’s a marathon and people get tired, they get worn out and you gotta be the cheerleader and keep them going and at the same time keep yourself going,” Troy said.

The original story that inspired the movie was about a spy who just wanted to have lunch and a pigeon that kept bugging him. From there, the story grew and evolved into something quite different. “We just kept pushing the parameters and building it to what it is now. It is quite different from the short but definitely sparked from that.”

And, according to Nick and Troy, the movie “is not just a silly spy movie. We had a message about bringing people together and trying to find a non-violent solution to resolving conflict.”

Spies in Disguise opens in cinemas on Jan. 22.