Lauren Montgomery has moved up the ranks of DC Universe animation from storyboard artist (Justice League Unlimited, Justice League: The New Frontier) to director, starting on League of Super Heroes. She co-directed the DCU Animated Movie Superman: Doomsday and solely directed the latest feature, Wonder Woman. Next she'll be tackling Green Lantern, but first she sat down to meet the press at San Francisco's Moscone Center during WonderCon 2009.
Groucho: First of all, what’s your first impression of Wonder Woman that you can remember?
Lauren Montgomery: Oh my goodness, I have no… probably the show—the Lynda Carter show, which I didn’t watch regularly as a child, but I remember seeing just a short snippet of it, and she was like, jumping really high, up to a rafter or something. I was like, “Whaaa? That’s crazy. People can do that?” That was probably my first memory ever of Wonder Woman. But, as far as my first impression of the character, she was kinda the only female superhero that was really well-recognized or well-publicized, I guess. So I always kinda identified with her, just because, you know, I—I liked the girl characters! You know, I was watching shows where there was always a bunch of guy characters and maybe, like, one girl character. And so I always kinda gravitated toward the girl character – that was all I had. And so, yeah, I definitely gravitated toward Wonder Woman…
G: And once you were in the position to have input on telling her story, what was important to you to get into it, from her rich history?
LM: Well, I just kinda wanted to make her as believable of a character as she can be, being that, you know, she’s not really reality. But, I didn’t want to make her campy or, you know, a parody of herself or anything. I just wanted to bring a believability to her, a credibility to the character that she is, you know? I just wanted to make her circumstances seem as real as they can, being as fantastic as they are, and just make her seem like she has a personality, she has a real train of thought and she has a goal—what she wants to do, and just not really cater her toward any one specific audience, like children or women or anything. I just wanted to give her a good film. That’s all we were really trying to do...
G: I’m interested in your use of reference—what were some of the comic books or artists that really came to the fore, and do you in these films use photographic reference or video reference of the actors?
LM: You know, we really don’t, mostly because we don't have really a time or budget to do that. (Laughs.) Um, I wish we were dealing with a feature animation-type situation, but we’re really not. We have an incredibly short schedule. So, you know, we get a script, and pretty much once that script is locked, we’ve got maybe a month before we’ve got to start storyboarding. So we’ve gotta just bang out with the rough designs. As far as artist’s reference, Bruce kinda gave me the go-ahead, said, "I wanna do this in your style. We’ve done enough in my style. I’m over it"—like "I’ll kinda pass the buck." So I was like, "Sweet! Then I don’t even have to look at any reference. I can just draw it in my style," which made it easier on me! We record the actors, and all we really have to go off of is their voice. We don’t have the luxury of being able to videotape them, especially because, usually by the time we’ve got all the actors scheduled and all of them are finally recorded, we’re, like, halfway done with the storyboard. And then, you know, we ship all the animation overseas—usually animated at some sort of animation studio either in Korea or Japan. I don’t even know if they would use it if we send it to ‘em. So, yeah, unfortunately, it doesn’t really do us any good to do that...
G: Can you talk about designing Wonder Woman?
LM: Well, yeah, she started out really different. When I started drawing her, I just started drawing, like, the stereotypical “pretty female” idea with the little button nose, or whatever, and she just never really left a lasting impression with me. And she went through a lot of revisions through DC, and like “Oh, no, we’re not feelin’ this, blah blah blah, this one sucks,” whatever. So it was just draw her, redraw her, and, I don’t know—we just couldn’t decide on Wonder Woman. Because whenever the main character—like, it’s gonna be with Superman or Batman—this is really picky, you know. They have their idea of how this character needs to be, and how they need to fit in to the comic book canon, and, you know, “This character cannot have this body characteristic, because it doesn’t work with their personality.” And so they’re really protective of their babies, and I think Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman are their most precious babies. All the other characters, they’re like “Oh yeah, fine. Whatever. Sign off, they’re cool." (Laughs.) But Wonder Woman was a bitch to nail down. And so, we went through a lot of revisions, and finally, I was just like, I’m out of ideas. I’m gonna have to hire someone else’s art, ‘cause I don’t even know what else to do! But, yeah, basically it was my last attempt at designing her, and I actually settled upon a design that I really liked, and that was the design that we ended up with, was that Wonder Woman, so. Thank God—she was a last-ditch effort but she was kinda the best one. It just ended up that way...
G: What were some of the spirited debates in breaking the story, and what ended up in the recycle bin?
LM: You know, I wasn’t really a huge part in that. I would sit in on some of the meetings, but it was really more between Gail, Bruce and Mike. So they would probably be better to ask about that...
G: How did you find yourself working for Bruce Timm?
LM: Um, well, I was kinda new to storyboarding, and I’d heard that they were looking for people for Justice League, and my roommate at the time worked at Warner Brothers, and she was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll get you a test” or whatever, and I’m like, OK! I didn’t really expect to get a job, I was just like: maybe a slim chance of me actually working on Justice League. And I did get the job, which was nice. And so I just storyboarded for the run of Justice League Unlimited. And after that was over—Bruce and James Tucker both kinda headed up Justice League Unlimited, and then James started Legion, and he offered me a directing position on that, which was sweet. So then I just moved up, like, one rung (laughs) and directed on that for a while, and then Superman: Doomsday came through, and Bruce was like “Oh, come do a section on this.” So I did that. So I’ve been working with Bruce for a little while. And then, you know, Wonder Woman happened, and he’s like, “Do this!” "Okay!"
G: I read an interview where you said Michael likes to write "director-embellished" action sequences. What does that mean exactly? Does he write some thing like "She fights—"?
LM: No, that’s literal! He says, “And then Wonder Woman attacks—director-embellished action scene follows.” I’m like, that – that doesn’t give me anything! (Laughs.) So I kinda have to, you know, fill in the blanks and insert that action scene, which is really the only. I mean, we’re kinda used to—we get trained to storyboard and we have to improvise, and you have to kind of create what’s not in the script. So you’re used to it. The only aggravation it creates for me is that there’s that space in the script that should be filled with words—that kind of fill the time in the storyboard where the action would be—and it’s gone. So this person who has to then storyboard this one page and has this one line of action, actually they were storyboarding more like five pages. They do one page and they’re like, “Sweet! That’s all I gotta do!” and it’s just hell for them because they realize that there’s five pages of work in one line on the script...
G: Because this was an original piece and not an adaptation, was there still a length consideration, or were there things that were cut?
LM: You know, there were a couple things that were cut, not—usually in animation, when things get cut, it’s long before they actually get to the animated phase. We’ll cut stuff in script phase, and we’ll cut stuff in storyboard phase. Once we get to animation, it’s pretty locked down, ‘cause it’s just way too much work to do superfluous scenes for no good reason. You can do all you want in live action: just shoot for an extra five minutes and you’re done. An extra five minutes in animation, someone’s gotta animate that, and it takes you months to do one fiv- minute scene. So we try not to make any unnecessary scenes. But yeah, there were a couple things that were in the script that we just cut down, you know, before we started storyboarding; other things during the storyboarding that I would just kinda cut out. And there’s actually a lot of stuff we cut out when we were making the animatic storyboards, just ‘cause we’re kinda given this time frame budget-wise—we can only ship a certain amount of material to be animated...because we don’t have the money to pay for it to be animated at that point. So when we’re doing this animatic, we’re like "Okay, we’ve got, you know, 7,000 feet cut off. We’ve gotta make sure we don’t go over that." So that means, "What seems unnecessary?" 'Cause we were already, like, 5,000 feet over—"We gotta cut out half the movie!" So, yeah, I think Wonder Woman was, like, 1,000-something feet over, so it was a good chunk of stuff that we ended up having to cut out. But what’s been Bruce’s experience and my experience, too, is that the tighter you get the movie, usually the better it gets. So it’s not really a sacrifice cutting some of that stuff out, ‘cause you find, "Oh, it actually works better, and it’s more entertaining, and it’s a little quicker, and it gets to the point more without these extra superfluous scenes, so…
G: Is it true that the first cut of the film got an “R,” and did that surprise, or…
LM: You know, it did, uh—it was a little bit of a surprise, but not really. When I was making the film, I kind of figured, let’s just go for it with violence, and we’ll let them pull us back if it’s wrong—we can always cut around it. I guess once we finally got the final cut, there was a lot of blood in it, so we were kinda thinking there might be a chance that it doesn’t really pass for a “PG-13,” and it just so happened it didn't. And luckily we able to just nip and tuck, and a lot of it wasn’t even changing the images as much as just taking out the blood. Taking out the blood will do a lot to kinda—and severed limbs: apparently they don’t like that. (Laughs.) But yeah, I guess seeing a lot of blood kinda turns the censors off a little bit. So yeah, it did get rated “R.”