Having just the right music in this cut is important. Alex Williams saw parts of my cut and although he loved what he saw, he wasn't that impressed by the Robert Folk score either, so I'm gonna be wantin jusssst the right classic music to use. More Ralph Vaughan Williams other than the opening would actually be quite nice.
Yeah, I spent the evening with Alex Williams. It was great - he's a very nice guy.
He was leaving for the UK ... leaving on thursday to work on a live action talking Underdog. He was packing up as we talked ... but stopped to watch The Thief.
I interviewed him on camera for an hour. We talked a lot, and he was excited to see all this stuff again. He was quite impressed by my cut, and what I was doing. He was interested in watching Raggedy Ann and Andy too, so we watched that - it had scared him as a kid too.
I learned a lot of random information - he kept pointing out who animated each scene as we watched the cut and I wish I'd been recording that, as it was a good commentary. The Thief was only his second ever animated job - he worked on a lot of stuff previously done by Art Babbit and others, and animated most of Tack of course and most of the opening of the film - Tack sleeping, The Thief and Tack being intertwined, the townspeople and henchmen singing, Tack getting caught ...
There's a townsperson who I thought looked like Saddam Hussein. Turns out, it is Saddam Hussein. It was a joke Alex put in.
I got to see some rare art from the film - he has a poster for The Thief Who Never Gave Up on his wall, and a great cel of the witch in her basket. On his walls were beautiful paintings by Errol LeCain and his own grandmother (I think, Dick's mother, I think) - also a brilliant artist. Clearly it runs in the family. Dick had tried to get her to work on the Thief, but she was doing her own thing.
He showed me the storyboards for Zigzag's entrance into town ... except that it's an early version of the scene. It's "Anwar the Grand Vizier" at this point, with lots of extra dialogue. His character design is different - he looks just like a character in the Nasrudin book I have who was a jerk grand vizier type who Nasrudin played a nasty trick on. It's clear that Zigzag was created by combining the character of Anwar with the character design of Nasrudin.
He pointed out who did shots, and noted who did a lot of the work on King Nod - and damned but I can't remember his name now. He said Richard did the pullback shot of King Nod shouting "The balls are gone!" ...
He signed my VHS of The Thief and my DVD of The Princess ... signing next to Tack.
It was raining, and I didn't have a ride, so he actually took me home. Yep. And then we got lost ... it was very embarrassing. I lost all track of where we were and felt like an idiot. It took ages to get home, and boy was my face red.
Such a nice guy. I couldn't stop thinking - here I am, trapped and lost in a car with a guy who did Tack in the Thief and Scar in The Lion King. Making a fool of myself cos I don't know where we are.
....
I had my video camera with me and got some footage of the rare artwork as well. It's quite bad quality but I'll try to work with it and Photoshop the hell out of it so you can see Anwar and the poster for The Thief Who Never Gave Up, which Gary Kurtz was going to produce.
And yes ... Alex was really wary about showing the cut to his dad, and said that he would probably take it the wrong way, think that someone was stealing his film again. But he liked what he was seeing so much that he is definitely considering it .... he might send the final cut to Richard, with a note explaining what it is.
EXTRA: In the original, Anwar slips on a banana peel thrown by a townsperson. Not stepping on a Tack.
Alex didn't mind some Calvert shots, but was annoyed by one of Tack tapping on the wall to the witch's cave. Of course - he did so much of Tack.
Alex didn't do the staircase scene and doesn't recall who did.
He remembers Jerry Verschoor well, laughing - Jerry was his assistant and was "completely mad," a really "weird person" who "couldn't do anything right." He "wanted to strangle him" most days. Heh.
Roy Naisbitt - "Nicest man on the planet."
Andreas Wessel-Therhorn - did nice work on the henchmen.
The copy I gave him of the Recobbled cut ... well I gave him four copies ... but the main one I gave him had my cover artwork on it. He liked it, saying it was "mostly on model."
=D
He looked at the back, at Zigzag and the witch as retraced by me ... "That's one of dad's drawings (zigzag) ... So's that actually (witch)."
I knew that about Zigzag, but not the witch. So, the more you know.