Hellboy: Sword Of Storms

TwitchGuru: So how did you get the opportunity to direct the first Hellboy animated movies?

Tad: Well I worked with other directors on the movies. For the first one I worked with Phil Weinstein, and the second one was with Victor Cook who used to work for me at Disney as a storyboard guy and director. I first worked with Mike [Mignola] doing a spinoff of the "Atlantis" movie. We were doing a television show so we hired Mike , just like he did in the feature film, as a consultant and he was happy to draw monsters for us. Basically, he read the first couple of scripts, and after that he said, "Just paraphrase it because I don't have time to read all these scripts." Then I was able to get a monster from him. So that was a lot of fun, and I developed a working relationship with him. He even said of some of those early scripts, "This is really dark. Are they going to let you do this?" It turns out, no they were not. We were cancelled on Friday the 13th before going to production so we tied together the few episodes we had into a sequel to "Atlantis". If you look at "Atlantis: Milo's Return" you'll really see a heavy Hellboy influence especially in the first third which has a Lovecraftian kraken monster. When I left Disney after 29 years I thought I should do some sample scripts and I asked Mike if I could do a couple of Hellboy half-hours. At that time Guillermo [del Toro] was in preproduction for the first "Hellboy" movie, and he was already talking about the possibility of an animation spinoff so I actually used Mike as a network. I pitched him premises, he picked some of them, I wrote outlines for him, he gave notes, we wrote scripts, he gave notes, and coming out of that process he had a good feeling for my knowledge of Hellboy. I learned more and more while working on those how Mike likes to see Hellboy treated and how his dialogue works and all that. When we finally got this deal that uncomfortable learning process of "Here's the guy who's going to take your character and ruin it," was gone. He already had confidence in me.

TwitchGuru: And it worked out?

Tad: I believe so. He seems happy.

TwitchGuru: So give me the pitch for "Sword of Storms". How would you describe it?

Tad: "Sword of Storms" is like an Alice in Wonderland trip in that Hellboy, Kate Corrigan, and another B.P.R.D. agent go to Japan to investigate a physic occurrence. Hellboy gets pulled into this world of Japanese legend and folklore which has repercussions in our world. Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman end up dealing with all kinds of monsters that result from it. We felt that this was a great introduction for Hellboy because it let him go through a variety of little scenarios, and made the most use out of the crazy creatures in Japanese folk tales.

TwitchGuru: And you wrote the story, right?

Tad: Mike [Mignola] and I wrote the story together.

Hellboy in all his animated glory

TwitchGuru: How'd you guys come up with it?

Tad: Basically we were talking back and forth over his kitchen table. We spent about ten or fifteen minutes coming up with a structure, but then he would pull out a book of illustration with all these creatures and he'd say, "Ooh, we have to use these guys! What about thing is there a way to use this thing?" Suddenly, because we were under a huge time crush, it just seemed like that through-the-looking-glass idea was the way to go. We didn't worry about what was going to be the one major Hellboy story and instead it was kind of an easy entrée for us to kind of go with something that was more episodic.

TwitchGuru: So was doing an adaptation of an existing Hellboy comic ever an option?

Tad: You know, strangely enough, in the early days of just thinking about it, and it seems odd to me now, but I thought that was exactly what we'd be doing. What happened was for a while it was going to be a "Hellboy" series and Mike [Mignola] and I started throwing back and forth ideas for a lot of 22 minute episodes. I guess that got us into the whole mind frame of coming up with original stories , and in the end I think it was the right thing to do. For a second film we were going to do his origin story, and it was one of the producers of the live-action film, Lloyd Levin, who said, "You've got to give the fans something different. They've read this in the comic, they've seen this in the live-action film, and you guys are doing it again."