Shrek, making a giant impression

The animated anti-fairytale Shrek is the surprise blockbuster of the year, and it comes with a Kiwi connection. Its co-director is former Aucklander Andrew Adamson, who talks to ROBERT WARD.

It's hard to believe this previously unknown expat Kiwi could have got his first film into competition at Cannes and given a cash-strapped Hollywood studio a box-office blockbuster.

With his long blond hair and pale features, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, three or four silver bracelets on his wrist, and a loose, unflappable manner, 34-year-old Andrew Adamson looks as if he's in a garage band.

Instead he's the man who, with American co-director Vicky Jenson, has marshalled hundreds of animators and other film specialists for four years to make a movie that has taken more than $US150 million at the American box office in only three weeks.

The movie, Shrek, is a huge relief to DreamWorks, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, former Disney film chief Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, because it was reported in the Los Angeles Times in April to be more than $US1 billion in debt. .

But Adamson turned down the life-changing chance to work on Shrek several times before he finally said yes.

It began while he was in New Zealand helping Peter Jackson on The Frighteners. By that stage Adamson had established a name for himself in Hollywood through his work as a visual effects supervisor on big-effects movies such as Batman Forever.

Universal Studios asked Adamson to help out on The Frighteners because they could see pressure was building. "The movie had expanded, it was quite a big visual effects movie by that time, and there were a lot of people there who really hadn't had the experience of being exposed to big visual effects movies before."

He got on well with John Garbett, one of the executive producers who was over from the States to supervise The Frighteners.

Adamson was finishing up visual effects on Batman and Robin when Garbett called him out of the blue and asked if he wanted to work on a new project, an animated film called Shrek.

Adamson declined initially but Garbett kept calling. Adamson finally went in to DreamWorks, met Katzenberg, read the script and warmed to its irreverent, anachronistic tone.

"I never imagined myself working on an animated movie, partly because the long-term nature of an animated film has never really appealed. In live action you have a year of development, creative time, then you have six months of very intense, instant decision-making where you're on set.

"It's quite stressful, but you can take another six months off afterwards and wait for the next movie to come up. So the idea of committing to something for four years was difficult ."

Shrek ended up helping him hone his writing skills, as the script needed a lot of work, and it also gave him focus. "If you write something for yourself it's too easy to put it aside if it starts not working and to begin something else. You don't have that choice if you're doing a movie for someone else. If they're getting ready to animate a scene, it had better work."

Working on Shrek meant working with Mike Myers, who gives the smelly green ogre of the title his voice. Myers adopted a Scottish accent - much milder than the one he used as the murderous kilted one in the second Austin Powers movie - and in the studio also tried to riff on Adamson's Kiwi accent.

But he missed his mark by making Australian jokes, including "a whole 'dingo got the baby' routine." Adamson responded by saying, "You're actually off by about 2000km, but I'll accept the compliment of the insult" and retaliated by making American jokes about Myers, who is Canadian.

Adamson got his start in computer graphics straight out of high school in Auckland at a company called The Mouse That Roared, one of the first computer graphics facilities in Australia and New Zealand. When Mouse was devoured by the bigger postproduction house Video Images, Adamson moved over to work for it.

He worked on the opening of TV3 and did a TV commercial that was voted one of the worst on air, "which was actually one of the high points of my career," he laughs, "considering it was a commercial." The ad featured a telephone that turned into a face and talked.

Local TV music shows also featured Adamson graphics - "a lot of flying logos, a lot of graphic openings. In the 80s it was all glass and shiny things, so I did a lot of glass and shiny things."

He started travelling to the United States each year for a computer graphics conference, met people from Pacific Data Images and in 1991 they recruited him to work in California, mainly on visual effects for commercials.

In another of the strokes of good fortune that have accompanied his career, PDI opened an office in Los Angeles to do feature film work, he got interested and worked on his first film, Barry Levinson's Toys.

"We did a lot of motion capture and animation and visual effects for that. And that got me hooked into the idea of making pictures that people wanted to see rather than pictures that were on TV when they went to the bathroom."

He went independent as a visual effects supervisor in 1994 and did the two Batman movies with John Dykstra, an effects maestro he'd met at PDI and clicked with.

When his Batman director, Joel Schumacher, made the crime drama A Time to Kill, Adamson took care of the effects.

By the time he signed on to Shrek with DreamWorks in 1997, the fledgling studio had bought 40 per cent of PDI and he found himself working with old friends at PDI's complex at Palo Alto in northern California.

Shrek was worth spending four years of his life on because it turned fairytale conventions on their ear. There's a beautiful princess (voice by Cameron Diaz) and an ugly ogre and they fall in love, without the ogre having to turn into a handsome prince at the end.

"This idea that a princess will meet Mr Right who'll be a handsome prince in shining armour on a white horse and she'll live happily ever after is a fairytale convention that a lot of people still suffer from.

"I think it's as harmful as a lot of the advertising that's done in representing people in certain ways. The idea that an ogre, because he's big and smelly and green, is used to scare children into going to sleep is not necessarily a healthy thing," Adamson says with a laugh.

He loved the fact that he and his colleagues were playing a fairytale against fairytales. A lot of the movie's fairytale characters have featured in Disney movies, and Adamson admits Shrek has fun with all previous animated movies where such characters have become icons.

" People have grown up with these fairytales represented in a certain way, and there's a lot of fun to be had with any icon, particularly ones are presented to the world en masse."

Now, Shrek is headed for world domination when it is released outside the United States this month, and a sequel is already in the works.

Adamson has a film in mind that he wants to write for DreamWorks. "It's probably a combination of live-action and animation, but it's very early days."

First on his agenda, though, after the seven-day weeks of the past few months and the promotional hoopla and limelight at Cannes, is taking significant time off.

"Time to go back home for a little while, then also to go somewhere on a small island where I can just sleep."

* Shrek opens on June 28.