In revisiting Wile E. Coyote’s long and winding history, I’ve seen you describe this film as “a love letter to failure,” which is a wonderful way of putting it. Which moments in his history felt relevant to that idea? The way that he’s described initially as a character is “the living, breathing allegory of Want.” He’s a villain. How were you able to reroute and rewrite that a little bit?
I see Want as having a lot to sympathize with, I think. I see a lot of humane qualities in him. What I looked the most at were the classic shorts that span twenty years. Once it got into later iterations, I’m not sure we considered that as canon.
When you watch them, they’re so timeless. I hope kids are watching them; they’re available. They’re just gorgeous. The painterliness of the vistas and just how the comedy is, I feel like it will play the same. The rhythms are so clean and funny. When you watch them, when you really sit and think about him and see his starving body… Road Runner is very smug.
The film takes a stance on that, but I think it’s easy to see a character who is undeterred by failing and who has a resilience that is kind of moving. That really is why a feature film with Wile E. Coyote can justify itself, whereas there are probably some Looney Tunes [where] you’d have a harder time. There’s an emotional component to his wants and hopes that’s interesting as an archetype.
How do you write his scenes as a nonverbal character in conversation with everyone else? All of the humans in the film are excellent, but they’re really mile-a-minute conversationalists, and you never don’t have a deep understanding of Wile E.’s motivations.
From the beginning, I was looking at Charlie Chaplin, and I remember rewatching Sweet and Lowdown and other movies that had a mute character. And on the page, just practically, he’s very present. That was something that was important to us. There was this really legendary puppeteer Dave Barclay, who had worked on Star Wars; he was on set with a Wile E. puppet of the right size, more than a tennis ball, to keep him central. But on the page, in the scenes with Will Forte in particular, when they are in a dialogue, it would often say in description what Wile E. is feeling or thinking or what he would’ve said, so that it reads as a dialogue and not ‘a monologue of a human and then, oh, the animators will figure it out.’ It was hard!