Could you tell me more about how you worked with your art director, José?
I did something that normally you never do. I worked with the art director in the storyboard process—not only as a consultant. He was a key member; he was the storyboard supervisor with me. I have the office where I work for all of my films, a little office in the center of Madrid. He sits next to me, and we draw little thumbnails. We talk about the shot, the angle, the shot size, foreground, background, what is happening. We have a storyboard artist next to us, and he elaborates on these little drawings, and makes a very basic animation. At the same time, we have an editor who helps to edit the scenes.
We then have our music editor, and we add the music. With a team of five people, this is how we worked for a year. Jose had to supervise all the character design. Even if there’s a team of ten people there, we’re adding every single animal you can think of, so we have to create thousands of designs. We had a team of over 30 people creating this amazing world. And here, while José was inspired by the graphic novel, he had his own vision.
The music is a key part of Robot Dreams—we already talked about ‘September’, but even just navigating the city, you’ll have snippets of people listening to different songs and the cliques surrounding them.
In a film like Robot Dreams, music is the voice of the characters. With Yuko and my music editor, we were looking for pop songs that represent New York. Of course, the first song we hear [‘A Bailar el Son’, performed by Venezuelan singer Canelita Medina] is a Cuban song. The second song we hear is by Reagan Youth, a punk band who sings an amazing song called ‘I Hate Hate’.
All this music appears through the street musicians, like the ones in Central Park. Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ is the main theme of the film, and Robot and Dog’s song. We also have The Feelies. They were this super cool band in the ’80s that appeared in many Jonathan Demme films. It’s a very eclectic soundtrack—we really wanted to represent this melting pot with the music.
For the original soundtrack, we collaborated with the same composer of my previous film, Alfonso de Vilallonga. He studied jazz at Berklee, and he made this amazing small ensemble with a quartet. We wanted to do cool jazz [for Robot Dreams]—one of my favorite animation series of all time is [Peanuts], and we all the amazing music by Vince Guaraldi. And jazz itself is a sound I associate with New York.