Did you have any concern about doing an R-rated film and how it might affect the studio’s reputation as a producer of children’s entertainment? Or was it a choice to change the studio’s trajectory? Greg Tiernan. Everyone else can get in there through that little crack in the door that hopefully we’ve opened up.Ĭartoon Brew: Greg, Nitrogen Studios does a lot of service work on children’s properties. Greg Tiernan: That’s what we did set out to do, and we just made that one small step. This film should make a big impact and really expand the market for different kinds of animation because you definitely did it right. We wanted to get this done really bad, and I can promise you if we hadn’t sold it to Annapurna and Columbia, Seth, Evan, Greg, and I would still be out there pitching this movie, trying to get it made. ![]() We went to big ones, small ones we even started talking about maybe private investors. How many other studios did you pitch it to before Annapurna and Sony got involved?Ĭonrad Vernon: Oh, dozens. So we were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, but thanks to Annapurna and Columbia/Sony, I hope that we have opened a door and proven that there is an audience and a viable market for this type of animation-that people of all ages love animation, so filmmakers should be able to make all kinds of animation for different audiences. Most live-action studios were saying we don’t understand animation so we don’t want to get involved, and most of the animation companies were like, we have a brand name and we’re not ruining it with this movie. That was a pretty damn good package along with all the artwork, and people still didn’t understand what we were going for because it had never been done, which is kind of amazing to me. ![]() When we were pitching this, we had Seth and Jonah promising to star in it, I was going to direct it, we had Greg’s studio and he was going to co-direct with me, we had a script written by Seth, Evan, Kyle, and Ariel. And the reason it was really important for us to make this movie is because we wanted to tear down that wall for telling different types of stories, and bringing different genres into the art form of animation. I think a lot of people in the feature animation industry will be rooting for it because we need more films like this and this is a great example of what animation can be and where it can go… Conrad Vernon.Ĭonrad Vernon: Greg and I always like to say, for a long time animation has been seen as a family/kids’ medium-even genre-because that’s pretty much the only films that are made in animation today. These are excerpts from our conversation. ![]() In a phone interview with Cartoon Brew, Vernon and Tiernan spoke about the challenges of selling an R-rated animated feature in Hollywood, producing a film on a fraction of the budget of Hollywood CG animation features, and knowing when you’ve gone too far in an R-rated cartoon. Prior to Sausage Party, their company had focused mostly on children’s animation with their biggest credit having been the CG Thomas & Friends series. Tiernan would produce the film at his Vancouver, Canada-based Nitrogen Studios, which he’d opened in 2003 with his wife, Nicole Stinn. ![]() He invited Greg Tiernan, whom he’d worked with on Bakshi’s Cool World in the early-1990s, to become a co-director on the film. Vernon, who discovered Heavy Metal and Ralph Bakshi films as a teenager, had been wanting to make an R-rated animated film of his own for most of his career, and jumped at the opportunity to helm Sausage Party. Rogen described the film to Vernon as a film about “a bunch of hot dogs that escape their packaging to go fuck buns.” Afterward, Rogen pitched him Sausage Party, an idea he’d conceived with frequent collaborators Evan Goldberg and Jonah Hill.
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