Pierre Coffin: “The Minions were born somewhat by accident”

The yellow capsules of Illumination will let off steam this Sunday evening on TFX.

Here is the long version of our interview with Pierre Coffin, met in the summer of 2015, when Minions was released. At that time, the animated film had not yet grossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Since then, its sequel has done almost as well with 940 million revenues in 2022. And Minions 3 is already in the pipeline.

Despicable Me 1 And 2NOW The Minionstomorrow Despicable Me 3. Obviously, you can't let go of your characters…
(laughs) It's true, I'm having trouble. Each time, I tell myself that I won't be asked again, and then the producers or writers come back with a great idea. Here: I'm going to realize Despicable Me 3 because they offered me a crazy starting point. I immediately felt the pleasure that could take Steve Carell to play what we were going to submit to him and I told myself that I couldn't let that go.

Are the actors part of the creative process at this point?
Completely. Gru is his creation. He influenced 99% of animation… When you're accompanied by talents like Steve Carell or Sandra Bullock who makes the villainous Minions, we have to give them space to create, otherwise it's useless. I like to start from their voices and give my interpretation of what they play.

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How were the Minions born?
A bit by accident. In the first Despicable Mewe had imagined an army of bad guys, very muscular characters who did Gru's dirty work. The problem was that it made him very unlikeable. Originally the film was darker, almost gothic; Gru looked like Dracula and the minions looked like trolls. I didn't like it very much and so, to soften it all, we imagined that Gru knew all these assistants by their names. We reduced their size, we drew them yellow, we put glasses and overalls on them and… we had the Minions. From the first draft, we knew that we had enormous comedy potential that could counterbalance the hero's diabolical side.

Like the Gremlins, they actually act like children?
Exactly. They are completely irresponsible, do not express themselves clearly, and love Gru as if he were their father. The main influence was the Warner Bros cartoons, the old Bugs Bunny. Some cartoons from that era remain the funniest I've seen in my life.

But how was the film born?
Months ago, Chris Meledandri (the boss of the Illumination studio) asked me if I thought it was possible to make a feature film centered on Minions. I accepted because I love these crazy characters. They are made for animation. We couldn't do them live… They are very simple forms which allow us to return to the fundamentals of cinema, to Chaplin, to burlesque, to physical comedy… Brian Lynch (the screenwriter) came up with the idea of ​​the parallel world where everyone is evil and we very quickly imagined the genesis of these characters. Writing the script was pretty easy basically.

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From a narrative point of view, however, the Minions seem to have very limited potential….
(smile) You mean: wasn't I afraid of making an hour-and-a-half-long film with characters who don't speak (or only in rumbles), who are a little stupid and who aren't at home? origin as the villain's acolytes? The first year, we asked ourselves this question a lot. We even had a first version where we introduced a human character, but after a few months, we backtracked because it became a film about this character and less about the minions. That's when we had the idea of ​​bringing three characters out of the group: the big brother, Kevin; Stuart, the teenage Menfoutist; and Bob, the amazed kid.>>>

You were talking about the influence of cartoons. Was there from the start a desire to stand out from Me, Ugly… by accentuating this cartoon aspect to the detriment of emotion?
A little, yes, but it's inherent to Minions. Here the emotion comes less from the characters than from the artistic design or the staging. Transposing the action in 1968, playing with Technicolor and using music that we are not used to hearing in these contexts… all this had to provoke particular emotions. Laughter, but also tension and real moments of melancholy sometimes.

What's crazy is that you manage to convey this through the voices of the Minions who, literally, say nothing!
It’s one of my greatest pleasures! I'm alone in front of the microphone writing nonsense, wondering what words I'm going to use, what sounds to find to make sense of it all. Often I couldn't do it, and so I would use real words. The magic of the animation, plus the empathy we can have towards these little guys, means that we understand everything they say even though it is never clear.

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You work within an American universe and you have succeeded in dynamiting US animated films… but what part of Europeanness remains in your films?
A lot of people say there's an irreverent side to what I do. I often cite Gotlib’s Rubrique-à-Brac as an example; Sempé is also an essential reference for me. The simplicity of its panels, the economy of its staging: one idea per shot no more! I think of this rule for each of my films. But I think that above all I bring a somewhat rebellious spirit. For example: on Despicable Me 2when the writers pitched the story to me and told me it was a love story that would end in a wedding, I urged them to review the script. As they didn't find anything more satisfactory, they asked me to give my version of an acceptable marriage and I immediately told them that it needed the fourth, fifth degree, with intro music very soft, which would continue with a very French scene where the guests would dance the caterpillar to end with the Village People! Suddenly it became funny. When we push clichés to the extreme, and show that it's for fun, people feel it. By doing that, I Europeanized a little the initial idea which was very American – very first degree.

Ready for Minions 2 ?
Hmmm…. There I accepted Despicable Me 3but I think it will be the last. Perhaps I should make a film in France, with the constraints that entails. I would also like to do live performances, but while remaining very cartoonish. I tell myself that there is perhaps a way to return to Tati, with the poetic and funny side of his films, but frankly more burlesque. We'll see…
Pierre Lunn and Christophe Narbonne