Henry Selick Talks Netflix’s ‘Wendell And Wild,’ The Jordan Peele Business And Afropunk

Thanks to a perfect storm of creativity and ambition, we have Wendell and Wild, the latest stop motion animation gem from director Henry Selick.

A collaboration with Jordan Peele that initially came about before the groundbreaking Get Out was even greenlit, it tells the story of a pair of scheming demon brothers who get a teenage girl to summon them to the Land of the Living. It’s a wild ride wrapped in a stunning vision. It’s now streaming on NetflixNFLX
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I caught up with Selick to find out more about his first film since 2009’s Coraline, the narrative influences of Afropunk, and why securing a PG-13 rating was key.

Simon Thompson: Welcome back. It’s great to have you helming something like this again. Is it rude to ask what took so long?

Henry Selick: Not at all. Coraline came out in 2009, and I did have a follow-up project and spent several years on it. It was called The Shadow King, but ultimately it didn’t work out. There are always other factors involved in how a film gets supported or not supported by a studio, and this one got shut down. What got me going again was seeing the Key and Peele show on Comedy Central. That started in 2012, and by 2015, I was so in love with the show I reached out to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele because I happened to have an old story in my hip pocket. It was just seven pages, inspired by my sons when they were little and demonic, about two demon brothers. It was that show that inspired me to have another go at getting a film going. That led to us meeting up and Jordan turning out to be super knowledgeable and a fan of stop motion animation. After hearing the story and reading the pages wanting to become a collaborator. It was before he shot Get Out, his first live-action horror film. His ideas were so good, his ideas for the new company he was forming, Monkeypaw Productions, were so intriguing that that’s when it really happened. It was still a long time ago, but if you discount the pandemic, it’s not quite as long. It took other people’s talents to inspire me to have another go and make it a film, and I’m really happy with it.

Thompson: Interestingly, you say that when you approached the guys before Get Out? Was it strange for Jordan at the time for someone to come to him with a film project like this? He was still very much seen as a comedian.

Selick: I wanted to work with both of them, and Keegan-Michael just assumed that because they did this on other shows, it was about voice work. Jordan happened to know what I did and loved stop motion, so it was his idea to step up and be more of a co-filmmaker. I knew what geniuses they both were from their show and that they wrote a lot of the stuff they perform, and then he let me read his screenplay for Get Out. He’d been working on it for many years, and it was his pet project. I instantly realized what a hell of a great writer and storyteller he was. I can’t really explain it all, but I think it was meant to be and that he saw something in my work. I already knew about a certain level of talent, but then from his screenplay, I saw this whole other level. We worked out and developed our story and characters, and I brought in an illustrator and another producer to help, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, but we still needed to take the story out to pitch. He had lots of things going, so I was spending a lot of time developing it, and then he got the word that they were going to make Get Out; it was very low budget, and just before it came out, he was like, ‘We’ve got to go out and pitch Wendell and Wild,’ because he was worried Get Out might bomb. I hadn’t seen any footage, but I’d read it and knew it was great; then it was this phenomenal hit, and everyone wanted to be in the Jordan Peele business. At that point, he was the locomotive, and I was the caboose. We didn’t go everywhere with this because we knew our story was very unusual, and we also wanted a PG-13 rating. For animation in this country, it is hard to get that. People don’t believe in it, but we wanted that room to play. We took it to a couple of places, and Netflix was the one that said yes and gave us the rating we wanted. It was a long journey, but after Get Out was released, the world changed, and we were finally on our way.

Thompson: Stop motion animation is time-consuming and is not the cheapest medium to work in. How easy was it to get people on board? In a world that’s hungry for constant content, there can be a tendency for people to want instantly or sooner and as cheaply as possible.

Selick: Absolutely, and it’s a complicated thing. If you go back to The Nightmare Before Christmas, that happened because it was a gift to Tim Burton to get him to come back to Disney and make big blockbusters like he was doing outside with the Batman movies. The idea was that it’d be done on a low budget. I had been friends with Tim for years and knew about the original idea for that project, but he was directing other live-action films, so he asked me to direct it, and we did our job. It was made for a much lower budget than traditional Disney films, and it came out and made its money. As far as its afterlife goes, no one could have predicted that. We were making James and the Giant Peach when Toy Story came out, and of course, CGI happened, and then it’s all got to be CGI. Toy Story happened to have an incredibly good story, and the look was new, but it’s always, ‘What are the easy things for us to understand about how we make more money in animation?’ So in the middle of James and the Giant Peach, the Head of Production told me, ‘Well, we don’t see this stop motion is a viable form anyway.’ We weren’t even done with the film. With stop motion animation, it comes and goes, then it comes again and goes again. Things changed with streaming because many streaming groups realized, especially Netflix, who was the first, that we don’t have to be successful with everybody that opening weekend. We can take chances, and we can find our audience. That helps Netflix take chances on stop motion, traditional hand-drawn animation, and lots of CG. They’ve got my film, Guillermo del Toro has the beautiful Pinocchio, and they’ve got two projects with Aardman Animation because it’s a different business model. I’d like to think that if people watch the films, stop motion doesn’t have to disappear for eight years before it returns.

Thompson: Aside from the animation and the brilliant way the story highlights themes and issues for discussion, the film’s soundtrack is a brilliant narrative driver. It was great to hear bands I love, like Fishbone, used this way. What can you tell me about that process?

Selick: I will take this credit. As you’ll know, in 1985, I directed a music video for Fishbone, so I knew them. I knew about their contemporaries; I’m an amateur musician, so I had that history. Where it began was Kat. What does she look like? Jordan and I both agreed this somewhat new-fangled cultural movement called Afropunk was really cool. It has been around for about ten years, maybe a little longer, where younger people honor first-generation black and brown punk bands from the 70s and 80s. They have their own unique fashions and also honor new bands that are either punk or black punk adjacent, like Janelle Monae. She has performed at their festivals and is a great example. The outfits are some of the most creative work I’ve seen humans ever do, including the use of color, body art, and the rest. So it starts with Kat and who she wants to be once she has that chance. It grew from there to what her music would be like. It became bigger and became an emotional connection to her Dad, who turns out to be a huge fan of first-generation bands like the ones I knew of. I didn’t know all of them, but I certainly knew Bad Brains, Death, Fishbone, and Living Color, which came later. That’s when we were off to the races. She had this boombox, and there’s a mixtape, but what are the songs? Jordan had some excellent contributions, Netflix had some great people like Brandon Coulter, one of our execs, and Karen Toliver, who came in as a vice president, gave us a kind of a new lease on life to bring back some of the songs we couldn’t afford. My editor, Mandy Hutchings, was great because she knew all the bands from all the eras, so it was a lot of fun to pick the best song for the moment and the inner life of our characters. It didn’t all come together until very late in the process, but I’m so happy it did. It’s just one of those things where we were toying with it, backed away from it, and then embraced it, and it gelled about two months ago.

Thompson: You touched on The Nightmare Before Christmas, and 2023 is the 30th anniversary. What do you have planned? Have you started to have discussions about how to celebrate that? I’ve been to previous celebrations of the movie at the Hollywood Bowl, and they have been incredible. What are you thinking?

Selick: I’m on the periphery of discussions. I hope there will be a big public reunion. Tim is very low-key but has secretly attended the Hollywood Bowl. A reunion with the performers who are still with us and key talent would be great. I never know what Disney has cooking. They’re polite, but they don’t keep me in the loop all the time.

Wendell and Wild is now streaming on Netflix.