Can you tell us why you decided to do a movie after so many years with the series?
We’ve always wanted to do a movie from the very beginning of the show, but we were so caught up in actually doing the episodes, we’ve always been struggling to meet our deadlines, so we never got around to it.
Finally coming up in 2007 it will be the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons. It started in 1987 on the Tracey Ullman Show. It’s the 400th episode of The Simpsons at the end of this season on Fox, and we figured that it’s as good a time as any to really try to do a movie. So we started planning a few years ago, and I’m surprised it took this long.
Is the movie that’s coming out changing everything or is it pretty much the same routine every day for you?
I wish I could clone myself, because right now I’m supposed to be back at the 20th Century Fox lot working on the editing of the movie. At the same time, the writers are writing new episodes of The Simpsons and across town in Santa Monica there’s another group of writers who are writing for Futurama, my other cartoon show, which is coming back in 2008.
What can people expect from the movie? Is it going to be more than just a two-hour-long episode?
Our lawyers just found a loophole, and it turns out we can actually rotoscope other classic animated movies. No. It’s going to be – that was a joke – you are going to see Bart skateboard with seven dwarfs. OK?
Here we have a TV show that’s still on the air and we want to give people a reason to pay their good money to go into a movie theatre and see something that they can’t see on TV. The story itself is an epic. Obviously, it’s going to be a wider aspect ratio than television. It’s CinemaScope wide screen, the story is bigger, the animation is more ambitious.
Is it a relief to get the movie out after we’ve all spent years bugging you about it, or have you got more trepidation about how it will be received now?
We want to make people happy that they’ve gone to the movies. It’s definitely a new challenge, but I think fans are going to love it. We’re trying to reward the fans of the show who have been following it from the very beginning and who have all of the secondary characters memorised, and they debate their various character flaws; and we want to get new people into the movie theatre who have never seen The Simpsons before and make them happy as well. So it’s a combination of what I think are really wild, funny side gags and a story with some real emotion in it as well.
You said you created The Simpsons as a retaliation for all the bad television you watched as a kid.
Yeah. I probably said that.
Is TV getting better?
Yes. I think TV is in a golden age right now. I think there are so many interesting things going on in television. I’m a fan. I wish I had more time to watch TV because there’s so many good shows on. And when you just look at animation alone, when I was very young, there were just a few studios doing animation, and it was all directed at children. It was getting cheaper and cheaper-looking, and the budgets were being cut. Now I would say, in part, because of the success of The Simpsons there are a vast array of shows, mostly on cable television, and some of them are better than others, but it’s great that they’re out there.
The success of South Park on the big screen, was that an encouraging factor for you guys?
South Park’s movie was definitely proof, to me at least, that you could do a movie based on an existing TV show and actually have it work.
Is The Simpsons still counterculture?
I don’t know. Maybe. Part of the success of the show is the fact that you’ve operated without studio notes from the beginning.
Has there been executive pressure on you, or has the success of the show guaranteed you operate without that dependence?
I think that it really helps that The Simpsons gets very high ratings, so there’s no reason for anyone to tinker with the show and try to fix it. But I imagine if we ever ran into trouble and ran out of steam that there might be some concern. So far that has not been the case, and we get left alone. I think it makes everyone happier.
How long does it take to make an episode?
It takes about six to eight months to make a single episode. We work on many, many episodes at the same time. In fact, I find myself thinking about an episode. How are we going to fix that episode? Wait. It was broadcast last week.
Is this show still political?
It’s very political. This show is very political. The movie will be political. And there’s politics under everything that we do. I don’t think there’s a monolithic point of view that the show represents. I have my own politics, which are pretty liberal, but I work with rabid Republicans on the show, and their voices are heard as well.
This family never gets any older. And what kind of unique challenges that is as the years go on that we never get to see Bart grow up, get married, have kids.
One of the great things about doing a cartoon show is they don’t have to age, and that’s one of the sad things about live action TV shows. There’s nothing really scarier than those reunion shows of people that you have fixed in your mind and go, ‘Oh, no. That’s what they look like now?’ So it’s good. But we’ve done shows where we flash-forward to the future, and we’ve shown Bart as US Supreme Court justice and Lisa as the president of the United States. So there’s still hope.
Does that make it more challenging in terms of when the writers are kicking around ideas?
I think the tendency is for us to cheat the kid’s age, so even though Bart is ten years old, we do have him getting into things that teenage characters will get into. Same thing with Lisa. Lisa is eight, and she’s already had romances, which probably most eight-year-old girls don’t have.
You were talking about Futurama next year – what does Futurama mean to you and how hard do you fight to get it back?
Futurama is definitely very close to my heart. I work with David Cohen on that show. What we tried to do was to take the great literary science fiction that we loved when we were kids and apply it to animation. The other people that I work with, on Futurama, are all big fans of Star Trek and all the other TV science fiction shows. I didn’t watch those shows. I was more into reading science fiction. So what we tried to do with Futurama is be satirical and funny about the future, and not have it be a military premise. Almost all science fiction on television is about being in the military in the future, and looking out a port hole and saluting a lot in uniforms.
We tried to do a workplace comedy set 1,000 years from now, and then as many science fiction motifs as we could. Science fiction often has a lot of gratuitous elements. There’s almost always a hot babe wearing a T-shirt, cargo pants and military boots running around. We did that. So that and robots and aliens, all that stuff, the problem with that is that I think a lot of people look at it and go, ‘Oh, that’s just another goofy science fiction thing. We don’t need to watch it. It’s for kids.’ But we really try to have adult elements in it. In a way I think it’s as sophisticated or more sophisticated as The Simpsons, and I’m really glad that it’s coming back.
Do you think The Simpsons can go on forever and do you have the same kind of passion for it?
I didn’t think the show would go on this long, just ‘cause I didn’t think about it that much. Back when the show went on the air as a series at the very end of 1989, I didn’t think of an end to it. And now other than negotiating for new contracts further down the line, I don’t see there’s any reason why the show should end. Creatively I don’t think there’s any reason for the show to end.
Do you consider Family Guy to be your competition?
No, we’re on the same network.
Has it driven you in another direction?
You know, I think at first we were a little worried because Family Guy is in the same area as The Simpsons, and their jokes are generally a little more outrageous than ours, so we felt like we had been outflanked on one side, in the very beginning. But then it became very clear that Family Guy had its own vision and its own style. Both shows take jabs at each other, and I know Seth MacFarlane, he’s a really great guy, and Family Guy does jokes that we would never do and they make me laugh. The more the merrier. I’m in favour of more animation on TV.
What do you think The Simpsons brought all this time to the American society?
You asked if The Simpsons is counterculture and I said I don’t know. I hope we are. I hope we provide an alternative to whatever else is the mainstream culture. I certainly can relate to that. Because I’m anti-authority, to say the authorities don’t always have your best interests in mind. And sometimes that’s a message that’s easy to get across in American culture, and other times it’s discouraged. The Simpsons has gone through culture with a number of different presidents and right now it seems like people are opening up their mouths again and speaking out, and that’s really good. But we’ve been doing it all along.
Can you see The Simpsons ending any time soon?
No. No. If it were just up to me, we’re having a lot of fun and we’ve got lots and lots of great ideas still to come, and there’s no reason for us to end. Especially since we’re still having fun.
The Simpsons Movie is out in cinemas this month
