ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to director Robert Valley about his new Love, Death + Robots Volume IV episode, “400 Boys.” Valley discussed working with Tim Miller on the anthology Netflix series, casting John Boyega, and more.
“Dinosaur gladiators, messianic cats, string-puppet rock stars, it can only be Love, Death & Robots,” the official synopsis for the new season of Love, Death + Robots reads. “The fourth volume, presented by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) and David Fincher (Mindhunter, The Killer), sees Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2, Kill Team Kill) return as supervising director for ten startling shorts showcasing the series’ signature, award-winning style of bleeding-edge animation, horror, sci-fi and humor. Buckle up.”
Love, Death + Robots Volume IV is now streaming on Netflix.
Brandon Schreur: Robert, I absolutely loved your Love, Death + Robots episode, ‘Ice,’ from Season 2. It’s one of my favorite episodes of the whole thing. I was so excited to see that you were coming back to do another one for this season. I’m wondering, how does it feel to be able to return to this world and play in the Love, Death + Robots sandbox again?
Robert Valley: Oh, man, I’m totally happy about that. I kind of thought that, after ‘Ice,’ maybe from Tim’s point of view, they might want to get some fresh blood in there and try some different things out. So, I didn’t even bother kind of pushing the issue. But I’m in Vancouver, and they had SIGGRAPH here a few years ago. Maybe three. And [Miller] was here doing a presentation. I ended up meeting him face-to-face for the first time. He goes, ‘So we’ve got another season of Love, Death + Robots coming out.’ I went, ‘Oh, yeah, I heard about it.’ And he goes, ‘Do you want to do one?’ I went, ‘Yeah, I do, for sure.’ So he sent me the script to ‘400 Boys.’ But I kind of wonder, if he didn’t come to Vancouver and we didn’t end up getting together, if that was a bit of happenstance or how that would have played out. But, you know, that sort of happened, it presented itself, and I was totally more than happy to get involved again.
Sure. I’m glad it did, because I loved this episode. As soon as I finished watching ‘400 Boys’ this morning, I was like, ‘This rocks, now I absolutely need to read the short story that this is based on.’ Were you familiar with the short story at all before you started working on this? What kind of stood out to you about that short story that made you want to be part of adapting this specific story?
That meeting with Tim that I talked about, he already had an idea in his head for a story that he wanted to send me. This ‘400 Boys’ story has been kicking around the Blur offices for probably the better part of ten years, or more, maybe. Tim said he had read this a long time ago. It’s quite an old story. He sent it to me. To be honest, I liked ‘400 Boys’ and I was happy to do that, but if Tim had sent me any script, I would have undertaken it. I would have just taken it on.
Every one of them is a puzzle, and every one of them is hard in a different way. I kind of like the challenge of trying to figure out — there are a few things going on, here. There’s the season, Netflix, the ultimate clients. There’s Tim, the creator, and Blur, and they have their idea about specifically what they want. And there’s me, trying to connect the dots and thread the needle in a way that makes everybody happy, and still interject a vision or my angle on things. That’s what I really kind of enjoyed with this stuff.
Definitely. That kind of jumps into what I was going to ask you next, too, because I was kind of blown away by how much is happening in this story in such a short, 10-15 minute runtime. You have the animation, you have this really interesting story with so much world-building that kept happening so quickly, and then the actual design of the titular 400 Boys and all the other characters — I was eating all of it up. With all those things in mind, what were some of the biggest challenges you and your team had to overcome when tackling this?
For us, because we have a small crew, it’s not much larger than the crew of people in ‘400 Boys.’ But we did ‘Zima Blue,’ which had two characters, basically. Maybe a third one. Then we jumped it up to ‘Ice.’ I noticed the level of complexity and the time it took to do scenes with multiple characters on it was an issue, on that one. So we kind of went from two or three characters up to six characters. It’s not like we can just bring animators on this stuff — there’s a bit of a learning curve, you kind of get used to working with the same people, and all this kind of thing.
Then, he sent me ‘400 Boys,’ and what jumped out to me was the number of characters it would take to pull this thing off. I just knew that, right from the start. Also, the epic, Lord of the Rings-style battle sequence, which goes on for the last third of a spot, I knew that’d be kind of a difficult undertaking. And it was. This was definitely the most challenging little production that we ever worked on. We were pretty much running with one wheel in the ditch the whole time, but we pulled out of it, we got ‘er done, and nobody died, so that was good.
That’s good! I also love how you use John Boyega in here. Even, putting his casting aside, I was kind of like, ‘I’m getting an Attack the Block kind of vibe from this,’ which he was obviously in and everything. What made you want to work with John Boyega, and what made you feel like he’d be a good fit for this character?
I’ve mentioned this a few times today, but we were never able to successfully cast the voice for Slash. We started to sort of put together the voices for the rest of the ensemble of characters, but, after 20 or maybe more auditions, and even a couple of actual voice records, we cut it into the edit, we looked at it, and we thought, ‘That’s not quite right.’ Or, it even sounded better when we were in the studio. Once you put it on with the characters and in the situations, it wasn’t quite doing the trick. It was a combination of a guy being in charge but not sounding too old. And it needed an English accent.
That kind of reduced our pool of talent down quite a bit. Finally, at some point, I think the casting director was a friend of John Boyega. He came in, and we were happy to have him. He’s a total pro. Totally nailed it, he gave us the performance we wanted, and that was the last voice that we needed, so we were able to start animating.
Thanks to Robert Valley for discussing Love, Death + Robots Volume IV.
