Every day was a balancing act of being respectful to the characters, and pushing them to more heightened places. “Rather than trying to second-guess what an audience or the studio, I just went with my instincts and what I really gravitated toward and enjoyed.”įor that film, Gillespie mashed up the beats of a biopic with streaks of violence and prickly humor. “From the sheer volume of them and the stakes that are involved, you get to explore things more.” Gillespie’s wife eventually pushed him to find a film that would fit his risk-taking approach on commercials. “I had been doing commercials for 25 years, and in some ways, I had taken more chances in commercials,” Gillespie says. He says he discovered his voice again with I, Tonya, his gnarly look at the career arc of figure skater Tonya Harding. While his follow-up indie, Lars and the Real Girl, garnered acclaim, his remake of Fright Night and the Disney sports drama Million Dollar Arm felt like safe bets. Woodcock, found his feature career stalling in the early 2010s. Gillespie, a longtime commercial director who made his feature debut with the ill-begotten comedy Mr. It’s one of those places where you’re going to lean in.” Image: Walt Disney Pictures It had to be this very aggressive moment. “There were executives,” Gillespie admits, “that said, ‘Well, maybe they can scare her, and she can sort of stumble-’ I’m like, ‘No.’ That’s splitting hairs. Instead, The Baroness’ three guard-Dalmatians leap on Estella’s mom, pushing her off a cliff to her death. Kicked out of school for aggressively fighting back against bullies, she and her mother Catherine hightail it to London, where they hope to get an assist from The Baroness (Emma Thompson). But in some ways, it now defines his entire career.Ĭruella opens with young Estella, the girl who will eventually become the fur-coat-wearing, cigarette-puffing haute couture designer of Roger and Anita’s nightmares. And it’s a sequence the director couldn’t imagine pulling off 10 years ago. How Gillespie factors the spotted pets into the plot of the new Disney film is a squeal-worthy moment of depravity. There’s no 101 Dalmatians prequel without at least one Dalmatian. “The dogs something that we knew we had to address,” he tells Polygon. But Cruella wants to turn puppies into coats for the sheer fashion value! That’s a choice.Ĭruella director Craig Gillespie had his work cut out for him. The Batman baddie could have been transformed into an unhinged killer by factors out of his control. In theory, coming up with an entertaining origin story for 101 Dalmatians villain Cruella de Vil could be more of a challenge than, say, a Joker movie.
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