The Bad Buys 2 director Pierre Perifel and co-director JP Sans touched down at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Wednesday to unv
The Bad Buys 2 director Pierre Perifel and co-director JP Sans touched down at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Wednesday to unveil 35 high-octane minutes of the animated heist comedy movie ahead of its theatrical launch in July.
The sequel opens with former heist maestro Mr Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell) living in L.A. on his uppers following his decision to abandon a life of crime, alongside Bad Guy collaborators Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos) and Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina).
They are forced out of retirement, however, by the arrival female gang, the Bad Girls, led by snow leopard Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), raven Doom (Natasha Lyonne) and wild boar Pigtail (Maria Bakalova), who draw them into a scheme targeting the interests of a space obsessed billionaire called Mr. MoonX.
Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), the red fox with a secret past as the Crimson Paw, also returns, as does evil guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade).
Director Pierre Perifel takes selfie with some of his team at end of Annecy presentation
Marc Piasecki/Getty Images for DreamWorks
Perifel and Sans whipped up Annecy’s enthusiastic animation crowd with a sneak peak of several scenes from the movie, including a spectacular opening sequence taking the gang back to their glory days five years earlier, when Mr. Wolf masterminds the daring theft of a priceless car in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, as well as a spectacular third act scene taking them into space.
Deadline sat down with L.A.-based French director Perifel, who has been with DreamWorks Animation for close to two decades, after the presentation.
DEADLINE: Was that really the first time you’ve revealed so much footage from the film?
PIERRE PERIFEL: Yes, apart from within the walls of DreamWorks. The movie is finished but the only screening I’ve had was when I showed it to the cast like three weeks ago. We had a gigantic content day, and I needed them to know what they had worked on. It’s the first time I’ve seen the movie play in front of an audience that has no idea what they were going to watch.
DEADLINE: Was it also the first time you’ve done so much of a plot reveal?
PERIFEL: We haven’t really told the plot to anybody. Even what you saw today, we left a lot out, we don’t reveal too much. There’s a lot going on in this movie all tied together, it’s quite frigid. As you’ve seen today, we go from Cairo to L.A. to a Lucha Libre event to a wedding, to a hangar, to a rocket ship base and then space.
The gigantic arc really is that our characters are now good guys trying to reinsert into society, can’t do it, and then they get pulled back into robbing something. They get a whiff of what they used to be and how frigid they were, and Wolf is like, ‘Did we make the right choice?
The Bad Guys 2
DREAMWORKS ANIMATION
DEADLINE: You said in the presentation, that you were desperate to do a sequel to The Bads Guys following its success in 2022, wasn’t it always on cards?
PERIFEL: I would never have gone into making The Bad Guys with the pretension and the audacity of saying there’s going to be a sequel. I had no idea. I was so focused on already making a movie that was holding together and good enough. And then when the movie got finished and started getting all the reaction, I got started to dream of making a sequel, because it’s so basic with this franchise to branch out and open a door. There are so many books.
There is so much you can explore with this. It’s such a great sandbox because we are playing with characters that are super fun. They’re animals in the human world so you’re already pushing the boundaries of realism, even though it’s set in a realistic world, it’s Los Angeles, it’s a rocket ship, whatever. It’s a very open sandbox. The audience are already on with us to push things, like having a character run up a spaceship, which makes no sense, because in the first movie we have a crazy meteorite that can control guinea pigs.
DEADLINE: You also said making a sequel was a terrifying prospect…
PERIFEL: The first time it kind of popped into our heads was when we did a preview screening for the first movie. When the moderator asked the focus group if it would like to see a sequel, everybody said, “Yes, course.” But then one guy said, “I want to see The Bad Guys 2, but I don’t know how they’re going to do a better than that one than that.”
We were like, “Challenge accepted”. It lit a fire and was why we started thinking of the second one before the release of the first one.
But then the pressure really came. I was like, “OK, we did a good first one, but can I do it again, was it a one-hit wonder.?” It’s imposter syndrome really. We also all know sequels are notoriously demanding because you have the pressure of everybody’s looking at it now, because now it’s a known entity.
DEADLINE: The films are based on the children’s books series by Aaron Blabey, but is this an original story?
PERIFEL: Yes.
DEADLINE: So what was the thinking in opening it in Cairo?
PERIFEL: Think of the opening of a James Bond film. I wanted an opening that was reminiscent of those movies, where you’re thrown into the action mid-heist, with kind of the dust and the warmth of a Middle Eastern city and then you demanding cut to their lives today in L.A. We needed that prologue to tell how good they were at being bad, and to explain what Wolf is going through later on in the film.
We wanted a frigid location that was iconic, the pyramids are the most iconic you can get. Kudos to Luc Desmarchelier, the production designer, who didn’t go to Cairo but did massive research into the layout of the city, from the residential areas to the freeway that kind of runs over rooftops, and the roundabout and then the bridge. Of course, the pyramids in the distance are clearly not there in reality, but it works.
DEADLINE: Where did the idea to introduce the Bad Girls come from?
PERIFEL: They are in the books. They are the league of heroes and kind of like Diane’s crew. We apply the characters, but we made them villains in this one, with the idea of having a bigger arc across other movies if they happen. The only female characters in the first film were Diane and Tarantula.
The books are a series of 20 books, which separate into two seasons of 10 books. The first movie is kind of straddling books one, two and three. This one is kind of three to five but we’re using moments and characters, we’re not following the storytelling.
DEADLINE: So there is potential for a lot more sequels?
PERIFEL: We’ll see about that [laughs]. The thing with those franchises is that you really can go into something like Mission Impossible, Fast and the Furious, James Bond… all these kind of episodic movies on which you don’t have necessarily to follow, the story, or the timeline.
DEADLINE: You’re French, born in Lyon, and studied animation at Gobelins, do you think you bring a French sensibility to your work at DreamWorks Animation?
PERIFEL: Of course, just the visual look and that kind of blend of the graphic quality, which is very much inspired by some of the French graphic novels. Even Luc Besson’s in there, in the sense that I grew up with Léon: The Professional, Nikita and The Fifth Element. Some of those shots weirdly, I’d sketch without even thinking, and then later on I’d think: “Hang on this is coming out of The Professional.”
France is really the convergence of its own culture, its graphic novels and animation, but also very inspired from Japan and animes from Japan. When I was a kid, we had tons of Japanese shows on TV as well as from the U.S. It’s a gigantic melting pot that makes France super intriguing and super dynamic. I brought a lot of that into this movie.
This is why there’s so many French artists working on this film because there’s a shorthand between me and my crew. I can give them a reference and they get it right away.
DEADLINE: You and co-director JP Sans also talked in the presentation about pushing the boundaries of the look of the animation with the apply of different lenses, while composer Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Across The Spider Verse) did a deep dive into his process for writing the score. Do you have awards hope for this film?
PERIFEL: We’re going to participate in the race… but I know it’s not always the most sophisticated humor. In the first season you have Piranha who farts all the time because he’s nervous. This is popular humor but when you think of awards, you think of something that is a bit more elevated. We’re riding that line in a good way. Its a gigantic entertaining film without cheating the audience because it’s really well made, entertaining, sharp and sophisticated, so, of course, we have hopes of doing the awards season…
It’ll be intriguing to see what happens this year… in terms of gigantic studio film there’s Elio coming out next week, there’s no Illumination film; Disney has Utopia, and then we have this one… There’s not a lot of gigantic, gigantic movies but next year is going to be pretty crazy.
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