Cip and Dale Special Agents: interview with screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
Cip and Dale Special Agents
A few days before the release of Chip and Dale Special Agents on Disney Plus (recover our review) we interviewed the two screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) for a hilarious chat about the film, the original series and what has meant returning these characters in an extremely self-aware and rich film, full of quotes and cameos.Subscribe now to Disney + for € 8.99 per month or € 89.90 per year
Chip and Dale Special Agents
Chip and Dale Special Agents: interview with screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
Hello! Thank you and welcome to Pop Culture! I start immediately by telling you that I really liked the film: I grew up between the end of the 80s and the early 90s and Cip and Dale Special Agents was a must. I still have the original soft toys of the time ...Oh, my mother and I also recovered them from a closet along with some really embarrassing photos in which I sleep embraced! - th_culturapop_d_mh2_1 slot id: th_culturapop_d_mh2 "); }
We approached the film simply by asking ourselves why we should reboot Chip and Dale Special Agents. Because? In the moment in which we live, full of reboots, it is important to ask ourselves this question above all. For this reason I think that the tagline better expresses the concept of friendship that is the basis of the film: it is about two friends who have lost each other and have taken different paths and suddenly find each other. It is something that goes beyond business and the essence of the tagline is just that: it doesn't matter where they got as actors but what they were before, best friends.
We also hope that the tagline makes the concept of the film a little clearer: not a reboot of the old animated series, not just the same characters who are returning for a new adventure but two people in this strange universe.
I really appreciated the choice not to reboot the original series but opt for this return ...
It's funny you know, Chip and Dale are very old Disney characters ... they appeared in Donald Duck cartoons, we made cameos, they even appeared for the first time in Bambi. All the characters of Disney Afternoon, such as Baloo, who appears in The Jungle Book but also in Talespin, make a funny reflection ... they naturally suggest that they are actors in all respects in different costumes. Chip and Dale were naked in Donald Duck cartoons… it was enough to pass them through the costumes, enter another set and here they are interpreting other characters.
The tone of the film is extremely self-aware: did it come spontaneously or did you work on it from the beginning?
It's partly my and Dan's natural way of writing and this particular project made us reflect on why to do it? why do it now? What do we want to say with this film? At this point we put these questions in the characters: Cip often decides “why are we doing this? nobody really wants it ”. We immediately liked this approach, filling the characters with this self-awareness of who they were, of being actors. It was natural for us and in particular with Cip to face the concept of fame and say “it was ridiculous, I don't want to deal with it anymore and nobody cares who I am now”. It came naturally because they were questions we were asking ourselves as writers.
How did you manage to get all the quotes and cameos through? some are really "adults" ...
I don't believe it yet!
I don't believe it myself! We are talking to you three days after the official release and I'm not sure yet that we have really left everything. I'm afraid that someone will notice something and say "what are we inserting?!?". As you write it is easy to type "now this happens, and this character appears" is fun but there is work behind requests, permits and agreements. Reviving these characters, after 30/40 years, being able to use them and some of them even dubbed by the original voices was really a complicated magic of cinema. We too were surprised by the energy lavished in this sense.
Disney allowed us to do certain things - and I still don't believe it - thanks to their lawyers and director Akiva Schaffer who is a genius and also got on the phone along with our producers who tried to making sure we got some IPs was really a team effort to put them all in the same movie. We don't believe it and we won't believe it until we see the film on the platform. | ); } Did you know that John Mulaney and Andy Samberg would have voiced Chip and Dale? Did you write them with them in mind?
They arrived with Akiva halfway through the job more or less. They are fantastic actors, we couldn't have thought of funnier and better actors to voice our Chips and Chips… they have incredible chemistry.
We have always thought that they were the right voices but we would never have dared to contact them directly!
