Scott Christian Sava Interview written by the Ent on May 6th, 2022. This post contains affiliate links, you can find out more on our policies page or in the disclaimer at the bottom of the blog.
An Introduction to the Scott Christian Sava Interview
We were honored to be able to get the opportunity to sit down for this Scott Christian Sava interview. Scott is a director, producer, artist, graphic novel writer, and much more. He is perhaps most famous for Animal Crackers, but is also getting very popular on his Youtube and TikTok pages. We were able to discuss many different topics covering Hobbits, the Joker, and his upcoming projects. You can find portions of the interview in text below, but you can also check out our full interview here.
Does the voice actor match to the art or does the artist match to the voice actor?
Scott: Tony Bancroft, who directed Mulan, he was my co-director. So, this was my first film so I had a lot of help. Tony did it the “Disney” way first, which was to have him, the storyboard artists, and a bunch of others record characters. You can see the entire film with story boards. Disney will animate to that an then have the actors match the lip syncs.
As I was looking at the story boards with our voices, it wasn’t really that interesting. We had our first session. John Krasinski had a few sessions before Emily came on Board. When Emily came on board, this was their first time working together. They were just being goofy and having the best time. They were making each other giggle and John was cracking joke after joke. They would take a scene that would only have one line and it would be like a minute long, playing around. That was so much nicer than what we had. It was so much more natural.
So, we scrapped everything and decided to do a radio play and let the actors play. If I can make this interesting without the visuals and then we add the visuals to it, I think it will be much better. I like the idea of letting the actors take the script and run with it, then we edit it, then send it to the animators. That’s what we ended up doing, but we did try the traditional way first.
With Animal Crackers, you (Scott) wrote the graphic novel first, but also the Screenplay, but the stories are very different. How does that transition happen?
Scott: I was talking to a lot of people in the industry and I knew they wouldn’t want a child lead. There aren’t any kids starts anymore. Back in the 80’s, you had one or two, but really not. What I was being told was to send him something that has an adult cast.
So, I just made Owen and Zoey, who are my niece and nephew in real life, and are the kids in the comic book. I made them husband and wife. That was really the big change and once you did that, he inherits the circus and so on and so forth. I still like that the one line that made it through all the way from comic book to movie was “Holy moly, holy moly, I’m a hamster!”
When you go into creating a movie, do you have a goal to have lessons in the movie or does it happen naturally within the storytelling?
Scott: I think, a little bit of neither. I think what happens is is that I try to find meaning in everything. As I’m writing, I try to find out how do I wrap this up and point out something positive in this. How do I turn into something that is a teachable for either this character or the person. I think that’s just partly the parent in me and the optimist in me.
In Animal Crackers, there’s the whole thing about family. There’s Owen and Zoey working as a team. There’s Zoey believing in Owen, but they never fight, which I love. There’s the redemption of Horatio. He’s not this horrible villain. He has a reason why he’s doing it, jealousy, and it’s silly but he’s human. It’s not dark. It’s not grotesques. I try to write the kind of world I would want to live in. For that reason, there’s usually some good there.
What does the day of a director look like from your (Scott’s) perspective?
Scott: That’s Fun. Because for me, Animal Crackers and probably every other movie I do is going to be virtual, I just get to come down to the Hobbit Hole. Especially, if it’s done overseas, like in Spain, by the time I wake up, they will have been working for at least five hours. So, when I wake up, I have shots to look over, which is just so fun.
If you’re talking the very first day, it’s going to be screenwriting, re-writing the script, getting it polished. I’ll be booking trips to LA and Valencia, Spain. We’ll be starting casting and talking about who we want for the different roles and sending those requests out to the agents. Things like that. Tightening up the budget and seeing where everything goes.
I think making a movie the way we made Animal Crackers was very much like going to Disney World. It was very much like everything is exactly as I’d hoped it would be. Nothing is perfect. We had our ups and downs. We just really looked at it with that childlike wonder. Everything was just so cool. You have frustrating things, but overall you just keep that perspective of “We’re making a movie!” You just smile for two and a half years.
Continue reading for more of the Scott Christian Sava interview
With Three directors for Animal Crackers, how does that collaboration work?
Scott: Tony Bancroft came on board and he’s the one who’s got the most experience. He’s directed Mulan. He’s been in Disney for so long. He and I have been friends for a while and he said right at the onset “This is your film. You have final say. You get to do whatever you want to do” Which he didn’t have to do, he had seniority.
There was a ton of stuff where I was like, “We should do this, we should do this.” and he’s like, “I think we should do THIS.” I would say most of the time I would try it my way and then it would fail. Sometimes, like 20% of the time, it would actually be kinda cool. That’s what I was going for. I know what it’s going to look like if we do it the way Disney does it, what if we do it this way.
And it would fail and he’d say that’s why we didn’t do it that way at Disney. But the 20% of the time that it didn’t, that was kinda cool. We had the ability to because it was just us making a movie, we didn’t have to worry about a marketing or an accounting department. Most of this time, this stuff didn’t cost us more money, just a bit more time.
Then Jaime out in Spain, he and I had been working together for 15 years. Jaime made the whole film in Spain while Tony and I received everything after he’d already made sure that his team of 120 people had done everything up to at least a certain quality and degree. I think what he did was so much important because he did all of the work and all we had to do was put our stamp on it or put our notes to it. They did the whole thing, from modeling, texturing, lighting, animation to rendering. He was managing all of that. As far as who put the most time and the most effort into it was definitely Jaime.
Thanks for checking out this Scott Christian Sava interview. You can check out some related content here:
–Animal Crackers Parent Review
-Scott’s Youtube and TikTok Videos
-For another interview, check out our interview with L.K. Hingey
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