The Appeal of The Ant Bully: “I think the lesson of the story and how the characters change. That’s the thing that I like. I like to see characters change through the course of the film. Here’s a kid who is a sympathetic character, he’s being bullied but then he becomes a bully himself. He starts terrorizing the ants. And then once he’s taken down into the ant colony to see the ramification of his actions, then you see that he’s always thought of them as this faceless crowd of stupid little ants and then suddenly to see them face-to-face realizes it’s not what he thought at all. I think there’s a lot of things you can extrapolate from that, and there’s a lot of themes in it that I think adults and children will relate to.”
John A Davis on the Writing Process: “Sometimes I have an actor in mind when I’m writing and sometimes I don’t – I just have the character. For example with the Head of Council in the movie, I always had Ricardo Montalban in my head. I don’t know why but I just always heard that voice because he’s so noble and powerful and strong. But then others I didn’t really have a specific voice. I think I had Larry Miller in my head for Lucas’ dad. Then as you start to get to know the characters, you start thinking about casting. As you cast, you go in and sort of fiddle with the script and change dialogue and sort of fine tune it for them. And then once I work with them and hear how they sound and the words [they use], I’ll change a little bit so it just sounds more like them. It kind of supports what they naturally want to do.”
Davis says that almost all of the characters changed a little bit once casting was complete. “For example, once Nic Cage was cast as Zoc, he has a certain manner of speaking and certain things just sound like Nic Cage is saying it, so I would go in and tweak the dialogue a little bit. And also Nic would re-do it in his style and that would feed back into the script.”
Allowing His Cast the Freedom to Improvise: Davis said he let his voice actors play around with the dialogue and try different things. “I always cover the script and then tell them to go off and have fun, and I’ll be writing in the margins. Sometimes they’ll go off and say something and I’ll go, ‘Yeah!,’ and write a little margin and then tweak it. You have to track everything and be careful because they’re recorded separately - and sometimes weeks and months apart. There may be an intimate conversation between Nic and Julia [Roberts] that can be recorded months apart, and so I’ve got to plan ahead and make sure I get kind of a spectrum of performance so that when I record the next actor, I’ve got somewhere to go and I can piece it together. You have to kind of Frankenstein it together and make it sound natural.”
Painting a Picture for His Voice Cast: “That’s one of the big differences between animation and live action is that nothing exists and so the actors, they typically… I try to get them all to record together but usually it doesn’t happen with animation, particularly with Julia Roberts, Nic Cage, people of that caliber. They’re on a lot of different projects, a lot of different movies, and so you have to record them separately.
They’re in a little booth behind a mic. They’re not on a set. They can’t see where they are and so they’re kind of operating blind. So one of my tasks is not only to tell them the motivation of the character, what the scene’s about and what kind of performance I’ve got in mind, but also to paint a picture in their head about where they are in blocking and staging, you know? If Nic Cage, Zoc the wizard ant, he’s mixing his potion, he’s getting frustrated, and is about to throw everything away and then suddenly Hova enters from stage right. She’s 20 feet away and he has to project loudly to call out to her. And then she’s going to walk closer to him and the conversation is going to become more intimate so by this line you’re like this [holding his fingers an inch apart] far apart and you have to kind of paint that picture for him.”
Up Next for John A Davis: “The Star Beast which is a live action film based on the Robert Heinlein novel that I’ll be writing and directing for Warner Bros.”
John A Davis Interview Video - Play the Clip
