Writer-director Dean DeBlois, left, Gabriel Howell, centre, and Nico Parker, right, on the set of the live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake.Helen Sloan/The Canadian Press
“I could always draw. That was one of the things I never had to try too hard at.”
Canadian writer-director Dean DeBlois makes the statement in an affable, matter-of-fact way, leaning forward on the chair he’s sitting on at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Toronto. He glances at his hands resting on the table in the small conference room seconded for the How to Train Your Dragon press junket. The live-action version of the acclaimed animated feature is out in theatres on June 13.
“There was a little smoke shop in the small town – Aylmer, Quebec – that I grew up in, where the very kind brothers that ran the place would let me hang out there on a Saturday and read every comic book on the rack.
“We didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t buy them. But I would commit them to memory and then go home and draw. A lot of that taught me how to draw – understanding anatomy and everything. But it also whet this appetite to tell stories and design my own characters, fill in their dialogues and create the world they live in.”
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DeBlois went on to co-write and co-direct the animated film How to Train Your Dragon (2010). He’s been vocal about the sanctity of animated films in the past, calling live-action remakes “disappointing.” But when Universal Pictures asked if he would consider making a live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, DeBlois immediately knew he had to steward the ship. He wanted to protect the characters, the world and heart of the film, ensuring it didn’t become yet another soulless adaptation likes the ones he’d railed against.
“And just very selfishly. I didn’t want to see somebody else’s version of it. So as hypocritical as it sounds . . . for better or worse, I wanted to try to deliver something that felt worthwhile, and that had those key pieces intact. Or, you know,” he adds with a laugh, “destroy my career doing so.”
Then again, DeBlois has always drawn his own career path. As a child, he was inspired by the adventures of Conan the Barbarian, as well as Star Wars (“specifically The Empire Strikes Back”) and E.T. His dream was to join Marvel or DC as a comic book artist but he didn’t know how to bridge the gap between his high school in small town Quebec and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Searching for direction, DeBlois discovered Ontario’s Sheridan College and its classic animation program. He found he had an aptitude for the craft, “designing worlds, telling stories and composing shots, but in movement – and for a world audience.”
Always partial toward heartfelt storytelling with adventure and wish fulfilment, especially if it involved a regular kid being drafted into a call for adventure that put him in over his head, DeBlois first worked with a group of “Disney Defectors” in Dublin during a time when that studio was making “not-so-inspired” films.
He learned a lot working on three fairly bad movies, he says, since he was surrounded by very talented people. That work took him to Disney, and the story department of Mulan, where he met filmmaker Chris Sanders, who was the department head. The duo worked together closely for three years.
Gerard Butler in a scene from the live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake.Photo Credit: Universal Pictures/The Associated Press
When Sanders’s pitch for Lilo & Stitch was accepted, they – along with a small team – moved to Florida and spent close to three years making a film that “turned out to be very quirky and odd and singular,” DeBlois said.
Then Sanders and DeBlois went their separate ways. DeBlois tried his hand pitching live-action films. Sanders eventually found himself at DreamWorks Animation and called DeBlois to work on a new project he had been assigned: How to Train Your Dragon. They had 15 months to come up with a brand new story based off of a book.
A meeting with then-DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg spelled out the plot – a David and Goliath ending, with a Harry Potter tone, and characters named Hiccup, Toothless and Stoick.
The animated feature and its two sequels would go on to garner legions of fans, sprawling into a media franchise and even a theme park in Orlando. DeBlois finds it surreal to see how the film has translated into pop culture. Creating the live-action version offered a way to add to the lore.
It came with its own challenges, of course.
“How do we deliver the wish fulfilment of dragons – this assortment of dragons with differing personalities, temperaments and attributes into a photoreal credible world,” he said.
On the other side, there was a private worry of dressing Gerard Butler, reprising the role of Hiccup’s father Stoick, in a fake beard and costume, and having it feel authentic.
“Was it going to look like we staged a costume play, and it’s Gerard Butler at a Renaissance Fair, you know,” he said. “Day 1 of shooting, that worry went away because the camera work was confident. The sets looked amazing, and the costumes looked amazing. And our actors were being fully committed. There was no sense of winking, that this is all make-believe. It really felt like a world come to life.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
