Nick McGrath meets Pierre Coffin, familiar to film-lovers as the voice (and creator) of Despicable Me’s Minions.
Aramshackle band of capsule-shaped, banana-yellow incompetents babbling like an unruly congregation of helium-sucking Esperanto-speakers don’t seem like your average celluloid heroes. Cheeky, adorably over-excitable slapstick mischief magnets, Minions are also big business, with the first two films in the animated franchise – Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 – spawning a swathe of hugely profitable computer games, apps, books and theme-park rides, not to mention an avalanche of DayGlo merchandise.
Despite the roll of A-list actors bringing the supporting cast to life, the most resonant voice in what might be 2015’s most popular multi-generational film, belongs to an anonymous 47-year-old father of two who can’t quite believe his luck.
Pierre Coffin, a Frenchman who co-directed the first two films in the series and the new film, Minions, also voices the films’ three main protagonists: golf-loving, spiky-haired leader Kevin, one-eyed dreamer Stuart and infantile balding rock god wannabe Bob; plus several hundred other yellow henchmen, collectively intent on chaotically serving the planet’s baddest baddies.
But the characters started life as anything but loveable. “The Minions came about by complete accident,” says Coffin, who is half French, half Indonesian, as he expertly doodles a thumbnail cartoon on my own children’s attempts at Minion art.
“In the first film, they were depicted as this big army of muscular thugs doing the dirty work of the arch villain Gru and we quickly realised that they were very unappealing and made Gru a totally unsympathetic anti-hero.
“To make him charming, we had this idea that he’d know all of his little helpers by their forenames, even though there were hundreds, and suddenly Gru was sympathetic. We then put goggles on them, added workers’ overalls, making them look like these subterranean mole men-type creatures, gave them an increasingly saturated yellow skin tone and then they became the Minions. And from that first scene we knew they gave the other characters counter-balance, had great comedic potential and were super cute.”
Visually compelling, the Minions’ other trump card is the torrent of high-octane, seemingly multi-lingual drivel that somehow succeeds in expressing their uncomplicated intentions.
“It’s gibberish,” confirms Coffin. “It’s a mixture of all the languages of the world and it’s about finding a particular magical rhythm and melody that makes the nonsense make sense.
“If I need to evoke something specific, I might search the internet for a particular word from a particular language like, for instance, something Dutch for an argument as it’s quite guttural. But without the visuals, the words are meaningless.”
Coffin’s personal journey is almost as circuitous as the Minions’ time-travelling quest to find their rightful place in their fictional world.
Born in France to Yves Coffin, a French diplomat, and his mother, Nh Dini, an Indonesian novelist, Pierre’s childhood was spent travelling back and forth across Asia. With his sister, Marie-Claire, the family lived in Cambodia and Japan before settling in a Parisian suburb in the 1970s. There his father’s ban on them watching television meant that reading, drawing and storytelling became his creative escape.
“My dad said watching TV was too passive and didn’t make you think, so I found this other side. I needed some sort of distraction, so I drew a lot, I read a lot and I listened to a lot of music, but I never considered a career in the arts.
“I was surrounded by people who were better than me but that gave me inspiration to find out how they did it better. I loved drawing but I just couldn’t do it to the level that some of my friends could. That pulled me up unconsciously because I wanted to be like them and I wanted to draw.”
Coffin’s strait-laced parents were also less than instrumental in inspiring or encouraging their son’s always good-humoured creative endeavours.
“A diplomat isn’t like a really funny guy and my mom’s stories are biographies, mostly about how she used to live in Indonesia during the Dutch colonies, so it wasn’t really fun. I have no clue where that humorous gene comes from, but France does have a culture of cartoons.
“There are great comic books, these great geniuses that manage to tell you a story in one frame and that became the thing that opened my eyes.
“How can you tell a story with one frame that by its simplicity, manages to tell a story, a gag that evokes an emotion in you? That became my motto throughout all my life. Simplicity. And the success of the Minions is not particularly the voice, it’s not particularly their characterisation, it’s the fact that anybody can draw them.”
Coffin’s own children, his eight-year-old son, Noe, and daughter Julie, 11, don’t appear in the film but their influence pervades the action. “It’s unconscious but when I see the movie I see my little girl in there,” says Coffin, who trained at the Gobelins animation school in Paris before cutting his teeth in 1993 on Steven Spielberg’s We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. “And with Stuart, who is a little grumpy and sarcastic like me, I also see my little boy, who is becoming a teen, so I see those traits appearing dangerously in him.”
Coffin’s children also provide a handy barometer for what works and what doesn’t.
“Every time I work on a scene or I work on the overall movie, I had my kids unconsciously in mind. Is that going to please them? Is it going to be funny for them? And if it is funny for them, is it going to be funny for their friends and their friends’ friends? I show them pretty much everything before it gets anywhere near the final cut so they also get to see all the sucky stuff I miserably fail on and the stuff I have doubts on.
“If it’s meant to be provoking some kind of a comedic reaction and if it fails then you say, ‘OK, back to the drawing board.’
“I totally trust their judgment and I suppose I use them in quite a sneaky way to try to get the truth out of them because my theory is that if you put kids in front of a movie or a TV series, they have a tendency to gullibly like everything and if they don’t like it, it’s only a sort of mild dislike. They’re not going to hate it; they’re just going to say it was good. It’s a subtle difference but if that’s the case you can tell something’s not quite right.”
With Despicable Me 3 set for a 2017 release and Coffin again directing, the unstoppable rise of yellow fever shows little sign of waning, but resistance does exist in the shape of Coffin’s truculent father.
“My mum had the life of an artist so I’m living her dream a little bit and she’s super proud of me, but my father, who is nearly 90, it’s fair to say he’s not really embracing my success.
“This is not serious for him. As soon as I started saying, ‘I really want to make movies,’ I’m not going to say he never helped me, but he never encouraged me to do this.
“We’re not getting along that well because he’s got that little resentment about him being wrong and not admitting it. So it’s very tricky. He always has this idea of me working in show business meaning that I’m strange. He never wanted me to do this. He wanted me to have a serious job.”
Fortunately for millions of movie fans around the world, Pierre decided to draw his own conclusion.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/26/pierre-coffin-me-and-my-minions