Rio 2 Special: Hag & Con Questions for Director Carlos Saldanha
What was the first thing you did when you knew you were making Rio? Hag age 9
Umm….the first thing I did…I try to jot down everything cool to do in the movie, because I had the idea to do Rio for a long time. Not necessarily Rio, the original project was called Brazil. I wanted to do something that I could culturally share from my background to an audience.
I didn’t want it to be a niche movie – but something that everybody would watch. Usually when you make a movie from your home country, that’s outside of America….it’s hard to make it universal. It feels niche and I wanted to make something that felt broad and original and at the same time Brazilian.
I sat down and I wrote down all of the elements that I felt interesting about Rio and about Brazil and I tried to find a coalition with that and how the world would see that. Or how the world would like to see that.,..how I would like to see that.
Then I started to write down characters that I liked…like birds and the human story and that.
To be honest the very very first story was about a penguin. It was a penguin that arrived in Rio. That happened….that’s true.
Penguins come around summer time because you know…their flock gets lost in the stream…a little stream that arrives in Rio and they just jump up in the middle from the water at the beach.
And it’s absolutely true…I true, I have video to prove it. My children play with Penguins in the summer – so it’s amazing.
So that’s how the original story….a fish out of water coming to Rio to enjoy the tropic. And how his heart became warmed up.
Unfortunately when I had that idea there was about one hundred penguin movies. So the studio said no.
Who is your favourite character? Con age 6
Favourite character…they’re all my children. But if I had to pick one…I think Gabby is very special…..she’s like really funny. And working with Kristen is like….the combination of Kristen and Jermaine is just like this evil duet, it’s a lot of fun working with – so that one of my favourite duos
Did you make the animators go to the Amazon to draw for Rio 2? Hag age 9
No I went….I went with the family and the children. It was an amazing experience we really enjoyed it.
Rio 2 is in Cinemas April 4th
