By: debbie lynn elias
A man on the move with a voice becoming more familiar to us all as the years go by is Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Doing everything from voicing in How to Train Your Dragon on both the big and small screen to playing a zombie vampire in Fright Night opposite Colin Farrell and “kicking ass” with Chloe Grace Moretz in Kick Ass, Christopher’s talent affords him diversity of character and genre. Equally at home in comedy, action, family films or doing animated voice work, one of his most endearing performances comes as Alvin, slightly oafish friend to Norman in the “awesomely cool” stop-motion 3D animation delight, PARANORMAN.
While scheduling problems kept Christopher and I from chatting in 2011 about Fright Night, we recently made up for it in this one-on-one interview talking about PARANORMAN and some of his other projects, including several with his PARANORMAN co-star Anna Kendrick and the upcoming CBS show, Friend Me.
You never cease to amaze me with your voicing skills, Christopher. Difficult at best, with a character like Alvin, though, not only do you need to take yourself from your real life age of 21 at the time of filming and sound younger and with a varied tonal inflection, but you have to bring life to the character and elicit a range of emotions.
Aw. That’s so nice of you to say. I agree to an extent. I think that when I read the script, [Alvin] didn’t have too many emotions, I felt like. I felt that Kodi’s [Smit-McPhee] character and Anna’s [Kendrick] character brought so much humor, tragedy and sadness to it whereas my character was strictly there just trying to be funny. So that was really exciting because I didn’t have to go into a session really too stressed out to try and make the audience cry. I just went in there and was trying to be silly and funny. It came across really well.
You‘ve got some great scenes where Alvin really gets scared shitless. How do you about invoking that in your voice and making it believable?
[laughing] It was a lot of good directors telling me to scream louder and go more high pitched so it kind of took a lot on my throat but it came across really well.
Since you mentioned directors, how would you describe the directing style of PARANORMAN co-directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell and what is about them directing that helped your performance here?
They hired all these actors for a certain reason. Chris has been working on this script for a super long time. I think even before Coraline he had this idea. This is his baby. You can tell how passionate he was. And he hired Casey Affleck, Anna Kendrick, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jeff Garland – all these people that are super funny and super talented and they can bring more to the character than is actually on the page. So a lot of time when we were in the studio, he would let us improvise, like a lot. And you could just tell by the smile on his face that his baby was being brought to life and how excited he was.
How much of what you improv-ed do you see up on the screen in the final cut?
There’s a few things in there. There’s a lot of stupid Alvin gestures and phrases like “You just got Alvin – ed”. But a lot of it is from the script. The script was so good.
Normally with voicing, all the actors are off on their own in a “never the twain shall meet” situation. Did you get to have any 1:1 time with Kodi Smit-McPhee?
We did! We had one day where both of our schedules worked out. We came in and did about three or four scenes together which was such a huge benefit. I’m pretty sure that those scenes made it in the movie. I think the main one is there Norman is trying to read the story out of the book and Alvin just grabs it away from him and bully the hell out of him. [laughing]
How much of yourself do you see come through in Alvin?
Not much at all. That’s what I like about animated movies. When you film a live action movie there always has to be a little aspect of yourself in your character, but when you’re doing an animated character you get to create it from scratch. You try to make 10 year olds laugh instead of people our age. So, it’s really cool to go in there and try to create a character from scratch and bring something new to the table.
You have such a mix of performances. You‘ve got voicing with How to Train Your Dragon and PARANORMAN, you’ve got Smurfs 2 coming up, Kick-Ass 2, Fright Night and of course Pitch Perfect with your PARANORMAN co-voice star, Anna Kendrick. How do you blend this live action in different genres, the comedy, the voicing?
I think it’s just taking my time picking my projects. I don’t have a family to feed at the moment or a mortgage to pay where I need to be working every minute, but I think it’s been really good that I take my time to choose my projects and pay attention to each one and not really have to worry about what’s coming next, so I can put all my focus on one.
At this early stage of your career, have you developed a preference of doing voicing or live action?
No. I really love them both. I think it’s really cool to film a movie and then immediately after do an animated movie. What’s really cool about the animated movies is that you go in for 2 hours one day and then they don’t see you again for 3 or 4 months so you really have a lot of time in between to go and do something else.
In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, you‘re doing the sequel for that and it‘s a situation where you aren‘t starting from scratch. You‘ve got to pick up with the same beat where you left.
Yea. I’ve been doing 30 minute Cartoon Network episodes of How to Train Your Dragon so I’ve been in Fishlegs mode for a few years now.
What is this thing going on with you and Anna Kendrick popping up in projects together?
It’s really bizarre, right? On paper, we have three projects together but in reality we’ve really only worked on one of them together. We didn’t see other in PARANORMAN at all. Then, we’re both in Pitch Perfect, but I’m in that movie for like 3 minutes, and then we did a movie called Get a Job together in which we actually did about a month’s work together.
Get A Job hasn‘t come out yet, correct?
No. I think they’re aiming for 2013.
PARANORMAN isn‘t just a family movie – it‘s a “stop-motion 3D animated movie.” How familiar were you with stop motion animation before you got involved with PARANORMAN?
I love it. They don’t come around that often. They’re very rare when compared to regular animated movies which seems like probably one a week comes out. I was such a huge fan of Coraline. I saw that in theatres with a buddy of mine and we loved it. So, the fact that one of the workers on that wrote and directed PARANORMAN, really got me excited. That was one of the main reasons why I did it.
Did you get to go to the sets and see them during creation and construction? Have you been given your own Alvin figure?
I have an Alvin sitting right by my tv! And they flew me out to Portland to do my last ADR session for the movie and I got to go to the set and see probably over 100-150 people working on this movie, which is really exciting. You can tell when you see the movie that therefs a lot of passion and a lot of excitement put into it.
My nephews have already coined PARANORMAN as being “awesomely cool” and I must say, I have to agree with them.
That’s amazing! That’s the best review I’ve heard!
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