If you've cued up a children's DVD over the past few years that wasn't made by Pixar, chances are that Karey Kirkpatrick had something to do with it. His screenwriting resume is a veritable master class in family entertainment: Chicken Run, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlotte's Web are just a few of his efforts, and after making his directorial debut with Over the Hedge (just the year after he wrote the screenplay for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), he's moved on to his first live-action directing gig with the Eddie Murphy comedy Imagine That. Movieline talked to Kirkpatrick about Murphy's mystique, the film's soundtrack (for which the director himself recorded several Beatles covers), and the film he's planning that will mark a big departure from his usual family-friendliness.
I think there's this image of Eddie Murphy as this private guy who's completely surrounded by bodyguards. How do you connect with that, how do you make him vulnerable when you're working?
Well, he is present. What's funny is that at the end of the movie, we were doing a cast party and I'm a musician, so I put together a band to play at the wrap party. Thomas Haden Church was going to do a number, and a couple of guys from the cast were going to do stuff, and I went to [Murphy] and said, "Hey, you wanna come do a number with us?" And he said, "No, man. I'm too shy to do that." I mean, you don't think of Eddie as shy, but he is. Between "action" and "cut," he's a quiet guy. Like, I've never worked with Robin Williams, although I know people who have, and between takes I know he's still that same amped-up guy. Eddie's not like that. It's kind of amazing to watch, actually, when you say "action" and this switch flips.
You know what I would liken it to? Have you ever been to the Philharmonic? It's got some of the best musicians in the world, and I like to watch the ones that aren't playing. What are they doing? They're just sitting there in command of their instruments. It's even more remarkable when you go to watch the scoring of a movie with a seventy-piece orchestra, and people are literally doing crossword puzzles out there. They'll pick up their violin and rip through their passage with precision, and then back to their crossword puzzle. That's what it's like working with Eddie.
Imagine That falls into that genre of movies where there's a workaholic protagonist who has to ease up to either fall in love or reconnect with his family. But c'mon, you're a Hollywood director! You must be working pretty hard too...how do you balance those time demands with having a family?
It's the biggest challenge of my life, which is why I took the movie. I felt like I had something to say on the subject because I live it every day. How do I do both jobs? Well, the only answer I can come up with is that I wake up each day and think, "Who am I going to disappoint today?" [laughs] Someone's always going to be disappointed if they're not getting 100% of you, but I err on the side of, "Well, if I disappoint a studio executive, chances are I'm not going to put them on a therapist's couch in twenty years talking about me." So I'd better err on the side of my children.
So you feel you live by your movie's ethos, then?
I think part of it is that I know a few people who have teenagers that are having troubles, and they've sort of acknowledged that they know they're part of the problem because they weren't there when they needed to be there. There's no undoing that, and I don't want to go through that. You can't please your children all the time, but I certainly don't want to have a kid turn to me in high school and say, "You were never there." There's no job I have that's more important.
I'm sure you've long gotten over the thrill of hearing your words spoken onscreen, but hearing your songs on the soundtrack must be a new thing for you.
It was a blast for me to be allowed to be involved with the music...to hear me playing guitar in my own movie was a real thrill. And to be able to play with these great musicians and for them to be so complimentary to my versions! You know, if someone said to me, "We'd like you to drop your film career and go on a national tour as a singer," I would say, "Yeah, sure!"
Everyone in Hollywood wants to be a rock star, right?
Actually, for my fortieth birthday, I rented a theater and put together a band and invited 400 of my closest friends. "I need to live this rock star dream. You're important to me, please come be my adoring fan." [laughs]
What kind of thrill does that give you that being successful in Hollywood doesn't?
There's just something about playing music and doing it with other people -- I think music exists on a different plane. They've actually done studies about how it hits your brain in a different place, and there's something kind of transcendent about playing music. You know, I started as an actor and I did musical theater, and that camaraderie is infectious. I think I'm forever trying to recreate that. It's hard as a writer, because you're always being pushed out of the production -- writers get replaced so often. I remembered showing up at a movie premiere, I can't remember what it was, but contractually, they had to invite me. It was like, "Hey, here's the director." "Oh, hi! I wrote the first draft five years ago, then I got replaced by that guy over there."
Must be nice!
It's weird, you don't feel like you put the show on. But movies like Chicken Run, where I was intimately involved all the way to the end, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Charlotte's Web where I worked so closely with Gary Winick, those are movies that were truly collaborative.
You have a resume that's almost completely made up of family films, but you've got an upcoming project, The Best a Man Can Get, that's very different.
It's based on a great, great novel by John O'Farrell, who's a guy I met when I was writing Chicken Run. He and Mark Burton were this writing team that wrote for some great British shows like Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You, and they had been brought in by Aardman to just come in and do a pass to make sure all my British dialogue being written by an American sounded British. So I met these guys and really hit it off, and we talked about doing some stuff together and John said, "Well, I'm going off to write a novel." "OK, good for you," and then a year later he gave me that novel and it was The Best a Man Can Get.
It's about a guy who has young kids, a nine-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old, and how his life's been turned upside down. His marriage has been affected by this, he doesn't really know his place in the world anymore, and he's living a double life. He still has another foot back in his bachelor life and hasn't quite fully committed to fatherhood yet. And this book so spoke to exactly where I was at, since I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old, and I call that time in my life "The Valley of Despair." You just have all these sleepless nights, and there's a bond with their mother that the kids don't quite have with you, and it was hard for me. It's like what we were talking about earlier: There are things you can no longer do because you have other responsibilities. I think it's a lot harder for guys to accept that. This book explores that in a really honest and humorous way.
You know, I've spent the last thirty-two years (with the exception of Hitchhiker's and some specs I've written that nobody's seen) crafting a career of fantasy and putting words into furry creatures' mouths. It's great for me to explore the other things that I feel like I have something to say about.