The reason for all this coverage is…I participated in interviews with most of the cast this past weekend. And on top of my interviews, Erico from the website Omelete (Collider’s partner) flew here from Brazil for the junket and I’ll be using his video interviews as well. So…like I said…it’s Kung Fu Panda week on Collider.

Thankfully, I really enjoyed Kung Fu Panda so helping to promote the film is cool with me. And if you haven’t heard of the film yet…

Kung Fu Panda features Jack Black as Po the Panda, a lowly waiter in a noodle restaurant, who is a kung fu fanatic but whose shape doesn't exactly lend itself to kung fu fighting. In fact, Po's defining characteristic appears to be that he is the laziest of all the animals in ancient China. That's a problem because powerful enemies are at the gates, and all hopes have been pinned on a prophesy naming Po as the "Chosen One" to save the day. A group of martial arts masters are going to need a black belt in patience if they are going to turn this slacker panda into a kung fu fighter before it's too late. Fighting alongside Jack Black is a hell of a voice cast, with the film also featuring the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Ian McShane, Lucy Liu, Angelina Jolie, David Cross and Seth Rogen.

During the mini press conference, Dustin told a lot of funny stories and I was really surprised at how forthcoming he was about how he got involved with the movie and how his career has changed since he got in the business many years ago. Seriously, it’s a great interview.

Finally, before getting to the interview with Dustin Hoffman and Director Mark Osborne, if you want to watch 10 movie clips from Kung Fu Panda click here.

And, as always, if you’d like to listen to the audio of the interview click here for the MP3. Again, Kung Fu Panda gets released this Friday at theaters everywhere.

Question : You chose to have Jack and Dustin work together in this and that is unusual in animation, why did you do that and for Dustin, what was it like working with Jack Black?

Mark: It was actually really important for us - creating the characters is an evolution, we have an idea and then we bring someone like Dustin in to help us really author the character, because he’s such a huge part of creating the character. So for us there is a very important dynamic between Po and Shifu, and we wanted to actually explore that with both actors. So it was something that we did early on intending it to be a very playful session, an exploratory session, and we ended up actually getting a lot of great finished dialogue in that session, because the interplay was so great. And it was a thrill; they hadn’t worked together, so we got to pair these two, and just to be there was fun.

Dustin: Oh that it could be longer, is my answer. I wish there would be a way to make these films where the actors interact all the time, but the process is – you can’t do it. It’s been four years doing this, making it, so you work for a few days, see ya, later they call you, four months later you come in again, so you couldn’t have all the actors in the same place, but it would be wonderful if we could, I think.

Mark: There’s a time constraint, schedules are complicated, but also for us there’s a technical consideration too, so normally you’re just working with one person at a time, just because – sometimes we’ll come in and we’ll just need ten lines from a certain sequence, and that’s all we need.

Dustin: Some people have asked me a lot, did you enjoy doing it? And I tend to tell the truth in work, in life I don’t. And I said, ‘No, I don’t enjoy it, it’s painstaking,’ and finally I asked Mark, just in this last press conference, I said, ‘Can I ask you, do you enjoy it?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s painstaking.’ You know, it’s tough to make a regular movie, because it’s tense on the set, because you have to do a certain amount of work, you want to get all the coverage, you don’t know whether you’re making the right choices, directors always say, as actors do on the way home, oh I should have done this, I should have done that, but still when you compare it, it’s much more fun to make a regular film, this is – I doff my hat to these guys, there’s no other word for it, it’s painstaking.

Q: I want to ask you about finding this character, because it’s obviously a performance although we’re not actually seeing you, it’s still a performance, so you’re putting all your energies into your voice, I wanted to ask you how you set about portraying him, because he is an old guy –

Dustin: And I’m not, thank you. I met Mark and I knew Jeffrey, Jeffrey’s the one who asked me to do it, and I went to DreamWorks and I met Mark, and the producers and Jeffrey, and they showed me sketches of the character, and I said, ‘What is he?’ I didn’t know what it was. And they said that’s a very rare panda.

Mark: Red panda

Dustin: Red panda, thank you. Isn’t there a name for the red panda? People have asked me that.

Mark: Red panda. There is a scientific name I guess

Dustin: That’s like saying you have the pox, what’s it really called? We don’t know, alright, red panda. And I said, ‘Tell me about this guy.’ And they started talking to me, because I did have a concern that I didn’t want to – you know, I come from a generation who sees these things as cartoons, which is almost a pejorative today to call these things cartoons, because they are in their infancy of being their own art form. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. It’s extraordinary what you can do. To get highfalutin, if you look at the caricatures of Daumier, animation is going to enter that era any minute now where you can do an essence of human beings and classes, politicians or whatever, and do them in extraordinary [detail].

Mark: It was great, because it was important to us to ask Dustin to take it seriously, we wanted him to take the role seriously, we wanted to take the movie seriously, the world in the movie where we’re trying to make a true classic kung fu film that honored the genre and honored the traditions of animation. There’s a great tradition of very classic storytelling, so that’s what we were asking Dustin to do, and actually in our first meeting, I don’t know if you remember this, but you had just gone to your acupuncturist the day before, who had explained the idea of Yin and Yang –

Dustin: He kept hitting my yang though and it killed me.

Mark: So we were like, this is perfect.

Dustin: I was concerned that it would be two-dimensional, that’s what I didn’t want to do, and so we discussed what a third dimension is, and a character and a human being. I said, ‘Well, insight, introspection,’ there are few two-dimensional people in our administration, but we won’t get political, and suddenly my little red panda ears went up when they said, ‘He’s an arrogant guy, he’s all knowing at the beginning, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been wrong, and he has an arc.’ And I said, ‘Oh that starts to be interesting.’ You can’t print - in other words, he’s a prick, he’s a little prick. And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘I’m in.’ (he laughs) And I do - for what it is I do appreciate that by the end of the film he reaches a point where he realizes that a portion of his life he’d been living as a lie. So you just try to get as much human qualities in as you can.

Q: How much do you have to always consider that this is going out to a very young audience as well as regular viewers, for lack of a better term, and does the studio ever have to make you dial back on the violent scenes?

Mark: We take the approach that we’re just sort of making the film for human beings, we’re just trying to make the film that we want to see. We have to constantly check in and consider, just as filmmakers, the audience, and we try to think about the kid audience, but we don’t tailor the film, we don’t try to talk down to kids, because kids don’t necessarily respond to that I think. What we try to do is just take the job of telling a story seriously and, as far as the studio goes, we never dialed anything back because we were disciplined as filmmakers ourselves to consider the fact that – I have a seven year old son and a ten year old daughter, and I watch movies with them, I watch through their eyes and it’s a big part of how I learn as a filmmaker to understand how they see the world too. So I think it’s something that we do, and even when we tested the film, we did test screenings, we were always trying to push the envelope a little bit, we have a very scary villain, we wanted to have a very scary villain, we have a prick at the beginning of the movie –

Dustin: Not a scary prick though.

Mark: But there’s some intense emotional stuff in the film, and for us that was important for the storytelling, and audiences never complained about any of it, even the most dramatic sequences in the film. And so we knew early on that we were striking the right balance, we mentioned yin and yang, the whole film is about the yin and yang of – there’s violent kung fu action, and then there’s a soft cuddly panda. So we were constantly trying to find that right balance, and it seemed every time that we were hitting it, so we never had to dial back.

Dustin: You know, it’s interesting for those of us who have kids, the shock of recognition when you start reading children’s books to your kids, and you’re reading Pinocchio and you haven’t pre-read it before you’re reading it to your kids because you read it long ago, and suddenly you’re at that point, ‘And Pinocchio is in front of the fireplace, and the fire starts to burn his legs up.’ And you just stop talking. [He laughs] And I remember the first film I think I saw was Bambi, and the trauma stays with me, they were all killed in the fire in the woods. The amount of children’s literature that has violence in it is extraordinary. I’m not saying that it’s right, but it’s amazing.

Mark: It’s an important part of storytelling. It’s an important part of being a kid is to be scared in a safe environment, and there was a promise that Disney sort of used to talk about – Walt Disney used to say, is a promise that we make our audience, we say we’re going to scare you, but everything’s going to be okay. It’s kind of like riding a rollercoaster, it’s thrilling but you know you’re in a safe environment, so it’s that kind of important storytelling – the thing that’s important to us in telling the story.

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