I was fortunate enough to be invited to the world premiere of DC Entertainment's latest animated feature,
Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, at The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills on Tuesday and had an hour to work the red carpet before the screening. In my first interview, I spoke with legendary casting and dialogue director
Andrea Romano.
Andrea's work in animation stretches back to
The Snorks in 1984 and she has worked on nearly every animated series and feature produced by DC Entertainment since that time, including
Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, Teen Titans, Justice League, Batman: Gotham Knight, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern: First Flight, and more. She is currently at work on
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, which will be an anthology feature along the lines of
Batman: Gotham Knight, and
Batman: Year One, which will adapt the classic Batman story by
Frank Miller and
David Mazzucchelli.
BRENT SPRECHER: Hi, Andrea, Brent Sprecher from ComicBookMovie.com.
ANDREA ROMANO: Pleasure.
BS: This will actually be my first time seeing an animated movie outside of a home movie experience that is not an anime movie and I'm wondering if that is a change—having it here at The Paley Center, having a premiere—that you've seen since working on The Snorks...
AR: [Laughs] I love that you know that.
BS: …Is it the medium that's maturing or the audience that's becoming more interested in animated movies?
AR: The movies are getting more sophisticated. It's no longer just—you know, animation is not just for kids anymore. I don't know that it ever really was. … But, the technology that's developed over the years makes animation able to do many more things than we were ever could before. There are some things that we look at, in this piece too, that almost looks like a live-action. And, that's so great to watch on a big screen with a great sound system. Everybody doesn't have that at home, so when you get to come to these screenings at a beautiful facility like The Paley Center you get that surround-system, remarkable sound and it's really nice to see. The fault about it sometimes is any mistake, any little thing that doesn't look great, is magnified 20 times. What I like about seeing our projects on the big screen is every once in a while someone says, 'That really could have been released as a feature. That's good enough to have been a feature.' The last one that released was
Under the Red Hood…that I thought should have been released as a feature.
BS: Why do you think it wasn't? [Is DC] trying to create this as a secondary market that's separate from the movies to not confuse fans or is there not a large enough audience?
AR: I think there's both of those things. There may not be a large enough audience to exhibit—and I think a limited release might have satisfied that issue—but it's that same thing too of things being blown up on a big screen, with a critical audience seeing it night after night, they might notice all of the little problems. But, I hadn't seen the whole piece put together until I saw a screening of it and I was blown away. I mean, astounded at how sophisticated the animation was—I thought the story was remarkable—and the voice acting was excellent. You know, I work a lot, I'm very lucky, and so I tend to forget—you know, I'm already on to the third project, fourth project, tenth project since that one was made—and then it comes back around and I see it and go, 'That was
good!'
BS: So, you do watch them? I know some people don't like to see their work.
AR: Always. Always. Oh, I love to see them. Especially because, when I finish the project, there's no sound effects, there's no music, some of the editing's not done, the ADR hasn't been put in, so all of the 'oofs' and 'ughs' and fight walls aren't in there yet, and so when I see this tonight, with you guys, I'll see it for the first time in total.
BS: A lot of your work has been in the DC Universe. Did that come out of your background, were you more familiar with it? Did it just happen to be that way? Do you like it more?
AR: I am not as familiar with the other comic book universes. Not because I don't have a desire to, it's just that when I first started working in the DC world it was for
Batman: The Animated Series, back in, like, '91 I think we started. Then I got into that—you know,
Bruce Timm and I worked together really well on that and then we did the
Superman series and then we did
Justice League, and then
Justice League Unlimited and then all of these home videos, so that tended to be my focus. And, you know, there is always the battle between Marvel and DC and they may not want me because I am so affiliated with the DC world and that's fine. There's still so many [DC] characters that I don't know. There'll be some new character that shows up in, whether it's
Batman: The Brave & The Bold that I direct, or they'll bring in some obscure villain from something, and I'm like, 'Now I need to learn about this guy. Now tell me what's his story? Where did he come from?' Because all of the animation directors and all of the writers and stuff, they've been reading the comic books since they were five; I've come into this world as a 35-year-old, so I had to learn [everything] in the last 20 years.
BS: How important is it for you that it be faithful to the comic books? Where do you find the balance between keeping the fans of the comic books happy and making it your own, that will fit into the universe that you helped to create?
AR: I think that if the acting is honest and the performances are genuine that a lot of that falls away. I don't have to worry so much about the history, but I like to know. Because if there's some joke or some reference to something that has to do with the history of the character I want to be in on it so that I can direct it so that it will play to the inside fans who know, 'Oh, that's a callback to Silver Age Blue Beetle,' or whatever…and you know, I've got Bruce Timm who's such a genius at knowing all this stuff that I can go, 'Bruce, I don't really understand that line.' 'Oh, Andrea, that means…' And so, I get my research sometimes on the spot. Sometimes, if it's a character that's showing up as a major character and I need some back story on it, they'll tell me. … I think if we're not learning all of the time, we're not stimulated and we get stagnant.
BS: In all of your research, talking to Bruce, talking to other creators, and reading the books, was there a character that popped up somewhere where you were like, 'I would like to maybe explore that?'
AR: A character that really, really stimulated my interest that I knew very little about is
Nightwing. I really didn't know his whole story and in one of the—I guess it was in
Under the Red Hood,
Neil Patrick Harris played him—I love the character design, first of all—and he did a beautiful job performing him. And, as I learned a bit about the history of him, about how he and Batman split ways, and he became his own superhero, but then he comes back and works with him, that's a really cool kind of—it talks about
the family a bit. … And so, Nightwing, I think, is a really fascinating character and we've not done anything that really focused on him. I would like to see—I would personally like to work on something.
What do you think, CBMers? Are you interested in seeing Nightwing get his own animated feature? Sound off below!
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