‘Minions & Monsters’ Director Pierre Coffin on Returning to the Franchise

Pierre Coffin thought he was done with the Minions.

After nearly two decades inside the “Despicable Me” universe — the highest-grossing animated franchise of all time, with more than $5.5 billion worldwide across six films — the French animator had earned the right to feel worn out. Coffin co-directed four of those movies and voices every last one of the yellow creatures himself.

“Each film takes three years, sometimes four when things don’t go as planned. It’s exhausting,” Coffin says, sounding disarmingly candid during an interview with Variety. So after “Despicable Me 3,” he told Illumination founder Chris Meledandri he wanted out, and turned his attention to other projects, including the Olympics, short films and marketing work.

Then, one weekend about three years ago, Meledandri called with an idea — a Minion who sets out to make a monster movie. “When he told me that, I tuned out the monster. I got stuck on the word ‘movie’… That opened something up… Suddenly, I had a billion ideas,” he said. What surfaced became “Minions & Monsters” which sees the Minions making films at the birth of Hollywood. Coffin came up with the 1920s backdrop – an era that saw cinema shift from silent films to talkies — and did something the franchise rarely permits — make something personal. “Minions & Monsters” marks his solo-directing debut and it’s also the only film in the franchise that he was able to fully co-write with Bryan Lynch. “It’s the first time Chris really let me do my own thing,” he says.

“Minions & Monsters” follows James, an imaginative Minion who dreams of making movies, and his loyal friends Henry and Ed, who help him bring his stories to life. Their adventure unfolds under the eye of Max, a larger-than-life director inspired by European filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920’s and became pillars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

The journey sent Coffin back into his own childhood: Sunday-morning silent comedies, Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the awe of arriving in Detroit as a 10 year-old, sitting in a big theater to watch “Star Wars” and becoming fascinated by classic horror movies. Speaking over Zoom from London, days before “Minions & Monsters” world premiered on opening night of the Annecy animation festival, Coffin reflected on the making of the Illumination blockbuster franchise, the art of crafting irreverent comedy for children and adults, the language of the Minions and where he stands on AI.

Before this film, you had asked Chris Meledandri whether you could stop making Minions movies. Why?

Because it’s an enormous amount of work. Each film takes three years, sometimes four when things don’t go as planned. It’s exhausting. And on top of directing, I also do the Minions’ voices. If the script changes, I have to redo all the voices. I’m the only one doing that. So after “Despicable Me 3,” I told Chris I wanted to stop. I worked on other things: the Olympics, short films, marketing. I have a bit of a background in advertising, and I love short formats. Then one weekend, about three years ago, Chris called me. He said, “You’re going to say no, I know, but I’m telling you anyway: I have an idea.” The ideas for the films usually come from him. I can suggest things, but nothing I’ve suggested has ever really happened.

So what was his idea?

He said it was about a Minion who wants to make a movie about a monster. He summons the monster, or builds it, and then the monster turns against him, against Earth, against the universe, and the Minions have to fix their mess. But when he told me that, I tuned out the monster. I got stuck on the word “movie.” My mind went somewhere else. I started wondering when the story should take place. After the other films? No, that didn’t feel interesting. Before them? That opened something up. I started thinking: maybe the “Minions” films are a little like the “Asterix” books. They can travel, go to different countries, different periods. And if they’re making movies, why not set it during Hollywood’s golden age, in the 1920s, at the dawn of cinema’s industrialization — that moment between craft and industry? Suddenly, I had a billion ideas.

So the 1920s setting came from that idea: Minions making movies at the birth of cinema.

Exactly. If we were telling a story about Minions making movies, it made sense to place it at the dawn of cinema as we know it. And there is something very specific about the Minions: in the way they move, in the way their gags are constructed, they are heirs to silent-film stars — Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd. So the period allowed me to do two things. I could introduce new Minions in a new context, and I could pay homage to the people who invented a certain kind of visual comedy.

You also use the period to evoke the world around early Hollywood.

Yes, but without making that the main subject. There are details: Prohibition, the changing role of women, the opulence of the era. Above all, I wanted to show that Hollywood wasn’t simply “American” in some narrow sense. Many of the major studios were founded by immigrants, often from Eastern Europe. The Warner brothers inspired the two big studio bosses in the film. Max, for example, is a mixture of filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Michael Curtiz — the director of “Casablanca.” I wanted that in the film, because Hollywood was built by people who came from elsewhere.

Is that why this feels like your most personal Minions film?

I think so, yes. It’s the first time Chris really let me do my own thing. The condition for me was that I would write the film; otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it. I told him that if at any point he felt unsure about where I was going, that was okay. But he never stopped me. He told me, “Let me know when you need Brian.” I waited until I had the whole story, and then Brian came in for the English dialogue. The script became something else again through that collaboration. The story came very quickly. Within a month, I had the beginning, the middle and the end. I had even gone too far with the ending at one point — almost like “The Lord of the Rings,” with six endings. Eventually we kept it simpler!

Where did your relationship with cinema begin?

It goes back to childhood. My parents didn’t work in cinema at all, but we went to the movies. They thought television was a waste of time, so we had this old, beat-up black-and-white TV that I would watch in secret. The only thing I was really allowed to watch was “Les Histoires sans paroles” on Sunday mornings, with Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. That stayed with me. The whole opening of the film pays homage to those pioneers of cinema. It even begins with Muybridge’s galloping horse — the experiment funded by a wealthy man who wanted to prove that, at one point, all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground. That invention eventually led toward the camera as we know it.

Were you raised in France or in the U.S.?

I arrived in the United States in 1977, when I was ten. I didn’t live there for very long — only three years, then I came back to France for high school — but that moment was important. Barely a week after we arrived, my father said, “There’s a new film out, everyone’s going to see it, so we have to go.” We were in Detroit. I didn’t speak English, and the cinema seemed enormous to me. In France, in my little town, theaters had maybe 50 seats. There, it felt like 500.

Do you remember the first film you watched in a theater that really struck you?

Yes, that film was “Star Wars.” I didn’t understand a thing, but I had never seen anything like it: the music, the storytelling, the special effects. As a kid, I wanted to be the blond guy who saves everyone, and I also loved the outlaw rebel. Everything was there. Afterward, I asked my father to buy me all the behind-the-scenes material, and I started drawing by copying the creatures and machines. That’s why George Lucas appears in our film. When I said it would be funny to have him, my producer said, “I know his wife.” A week later, Lucas was in France, and I recorded him for half an hour.

I noticed there were lots of references to classic films in the movie. Is that also how you appeal to an adult audience?

Yes and no, because I didn’t do it on purpose. I had my little story about friendship among the Minions, and on top of that, the monster story pitched by Chris Meledandri. And then I thought to myself: I’m going to include all the movies I thought were awesome when I was a kid. Except I rewatched them all, and it’s awful: they’re not awesome at all anymore. But as a kid, they really freaked me out. I remember seeing “The Blob” in theaters — the first one, with Steve McQueen — I didn’t sleep for days. So I forced myself to watch them all again.

Like the other two “Minions” movies, this one is packed with so many gags. How do you make it work without overloading it?

I find the Minions work very well on multiple viewings. I realized this while reading stories to my children. Often I would read the text, then have fun asking them to look for things in the illustrations, almost like “Where’s Waldo”? You discover details everywhere. I do the same thing in the films. When I watch other animated movies and there’s a simple shot-reverse-shot scene, I sometimes think: what a waste. In animation, you can create anything. So why not put something ridiculous or funny in the background, even during a scene that’s only there to move the exposition forward? The first level of reading has to be clear for children. But there can be a second or third level for adults. That balance is hard. It’s easy to have principles; it’s harder to write on two levels at once. I tend to lean more toward adults, my producer (Chris Meledandri) pulls more toward children, and somewhere in the middle we find the balance. That’s probably what makes the films a little more irreverent than some of the competition.

Is there ever a culture clash between you and the rest of the team, who are American? How do you make sure your humor comes across?

No. I think there’s something universal about it. Everyone loves Chaplin, Keaton — let’s set generational differences aside — everyone loves “Mr. Bean” and Jim Carrey’s movies to a certain extent. There are universal things. For example, I don’t do “Les Tuche,” because it’s super French — even a bit chauvinistic; I’m not a fan. But it works in France, so it’s not my place to judge. The movies I love are universal — they’re loved whether you’re in China, London, or New York.

Could there ever be an R-rated Minions film?

No, I don’t think so. The Minions are funny because they’re like children. That’s how I see them now. They’re at their best when they feel like a bunch of kids at summer camp: clumsy, chaotic, emotional, not very self-aware.

The voices are central to why they work. How do you approach the Minions’ language?

I have a little glossary. Every time I go to a restaurant, or hear Spanish, Italian, Japanese — I go to Japan often — things get mixed up in my head. On the first film, I was saying random things: a jumble of gibberish with a few recognizable words. Then I discovered that in Italy, they had translated everything. Whatever the Minions said, they repeated it in Italian. That killed the magic. I called a meeting with Universal teams from different countries and told them: you can’t do that. The magic is that you understand them without really understanding them. Starting with “Despicable Me 2,” I began introducing more languages. Universal would sometimes tell me, “In this country, you’re accidentally using a swear word,” so I would change it. For each version, I spend about three weeks after the film is finished correcting those things and adding local terms where they help. In French, for instance, I might use words like “fissa” or “potos.” But what I’ve realized is that the words matter less than the context.

So the audience understands through sound and movement?

Exactly. Sometimes there aren’t even words, only intonation. Someone abroad may hear “fissa” without knowing what it means, but from the animation and the way it is said, they understand: he’s telling them to hurry up. There is no real vocabulary and no grammar. But it is still very scripted.

It isn’t improvised?

No. I can’t improvise; I’m not an actor. On the first “Minions” film, Brian Lynch and I asked ourselves how to write it. At first, we wrote everything in Minion language, but nobody understood it except me. Even now, I sometimes write something and later wonder what I meant. So we write in English. Then, once the storyboards are drawn and the editing has begun, I add the voices. At first it’s literally “blah blah blah.” I look for the musical cue: here he’s asking a question, here he’s telling a joke, here the other Minion misunderstands, here the first one corrects him. It becomes a series of little songs responding to each other. Then I add “lyrics” to those melodies when a word is important. The hardest part is that I’m responding to myself. I record one character, then another, then realize the answer works but the first line is slightly off. I can spend hours on that.

How do you know whether a joke actually works?

It’s awful. Comedy is unfair. When people leave a comedy, they say, “It wasn’t very funny,” or, “Some parts worked, others didn’t.” People who make dramas don’t usually hear, “It wasn’t dramatic enough.” Comedy is very subjective. And the worst thing is that the jokes that make you laugh at first make you laugh less and less after three years. You’ve seen them a thousand times, and you start doubting everything. Right now, I’m in a major phase of doubt because I’ve seen the film ten thousand times. There’s a sequence about the arrival of talking pictures, where the Minions move through different genres: detective films, war films, “Citizen Kane.” But “Citizen Kane” is not something children are going to laugh at. So you need something visual to finish the joke. At one point, they all make ridiculous faces at the camera. Is it enough? I don’t know. That’s the anxiety.

Do test screenings help?

Yes. We do three or four during production with regular audiences. Whether people say anything afterward is almost secondary. When you’re sitting in the theater, you know. You hear whether they laugh. You feel when they’re bored. You see when they get up to get popcorn. That’s when you know you’ve lost them. This time, we adjusted details, but the essence of the film barely changed.

Animation is facing a turning point with AI. Do you see it as a risk or an opportunity?

Honestly, I don’t know yet. I’m trying things and watching what happens. I’ve met people who are very excited by it. Jesse Eisenberg, who voices Dort in the English version, is also a filmmaker, and he told me he finds it amazing because he can storyboard an entire film by himself. Mathieu Kassovitz told me the same thing. For me, I haven’t yet managed to do anything funny with AI. Maybe I don’t have the right tools. I can see how it can speed things up, but animation is very embodied for me. I work through iteration with animators: maybe the character should raise his arm, maybe he should settle back, maybe the gesture should be softer. The animator tries it, changes it, undoes it, and little by little the character comes alive. AI, at least for now, doesn’t feel embodied in that way. But I’ve also seen incredible things. Trey Parker, from “South Park,” showed me something he was working on. The set no longer existed, but he wanted to change a performance. So he filmed himself on an iPhone in a T-shirt and applied that performance to a cowboy character. If you haven’t seen that kind of thing, it’s mind-blowing. For a director, it means you can change acting after shooting, even after a set has been torn down. That can save a film in the editing room.

Could the Minions’ voices eventually be generated by AI? That would save you some time!

Maybe. I don’t know. I’m a bad judge of that, because I doubt myself. I feel it makes more sense when I do it, but maybe that’s just habit. Sometimes, for marketing, people take my recordings, cut them up and put them in a different context. I’ll think, “No, that doesn’t work,” even though maybe it does. It’s just that I recorded the line for a specific situation, with a specific intention.

After this, do you see yourself making another Minions film?

I really don’t know. I’m waiting to see what this one brings me. I have a strange relationship with these films. Every time one came out, I thought, “You can tell only 20 people worked on it, that it was pulled in every direction.” And every time, I was surprised by the box office. This one feels different. Now, when I watch it, I think, “Actually, it’s pretty good.” Maybe it will be a flop, I don’t know!