Star Interview

DIRECTOR CHRIS BUCK TALK 'FROZEN'

Q ; To begin with, can you talk about your original pitch meeting with John Lasseter and how you got him to sign off on making
Frozen?

Chris Buck: Well, we pitched three or four ideas to John, but this was the one that he just really jumped onto. The icy snowy world
was just something he’d never seen before in an entire Disney feature. Then the magical part of the story itself about The Snow
Queen character was something that just spoke to him, even though it went through many iterations of that character and how someone
that has this power, the snow and icy power. I’m trying to think about how the original pitch and what it was.


Q : So you started with the movie’s ending first, is that right?

Buck: John was the first one to say, “You have to go to this ice hotel. There’s this ice hotel in Quebec City.” So I went there
and stayed overnight.


Q: So when you went to the ice hotel, did you know at that point that you were going to use it as a model for designing Queen
Elsa’s castle?

Buck: No, it’s more about knowing that we were going to use a lot of these icy snow escapes in the movie.



Q: Did you already have the story of the film structured when you went on your field trip?

Buck: We had the first kind of pass at it. So it’s still going and doing all the research you can. Mike Jones the art director
had done a lot of research too on his own and he was going through a lot of books and stuff on the Internet. Turns out all the ones
he had tagged were in Norway.  In the meantime the animators were going to Wyoming and researching walking in the snow and trying
to feel what it would be like for our characters.



Q: At what point did you begin developing the characters?

Buck: Yeah, it’s not like we just say, it’s going to be this, this, and this. It was more like, we met with the character designer
and talked about the character ideas, but we hadn’t really fleshed them out. They started playing with ideas, winter costumes,
and all that kind of stuff.



Q: The film is a musical, so at what point in the process did Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez join the team and start writing
the music?


Buck: They came in about half way through, but there was still a lot of pre-production that had been done.



Q: Since you knew it was going to be a musical, you had to cast actors that could sing as well as they could act, is that correct?

Buck: So during casting the actors would always come in and read lines, but they’d also come in with a song too.



Q: Finally, are there one or two classic Disney animated films that helped influence you while making Frozen?

Buck: I always say my favorite film is Pinocchio. It was the first one I saw as a kid. But I think they’re all in our heads.
We know all of them so well.