ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl directors Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park, the latter of whom is also known for creating Wallace & Gromit. Crossingham and Park discussed bringing back Feathers McGraw for the new movie, how the stop-motion medium has advanced in recent years, and more.
“Aardman’s four-time Academy Award-winning director Nick Park and Emmy Award-nominated Merlin Crossingham return with a brand new epic adventure, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” the synopsis for the movie reads. “In this next installment, Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master… or Wallace may never be able to invent again!”
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl releases on Netflix on January 3, 2025.
Brandon Schreur: To start, I’m going to ask you the question that I’m sure you’re going to be asked a million times today, but we’re doing this the day after the Golden Globe nominations came out. And I was so excited to see Wallace & Gromit got in there. So, congratulations for that.
Merlin Crossingham: Oh, thanks, yeah.
Nick Park: Yeah, we are, too, to see our movie in there with all those other fantastic movies. It’s incredible. Such an honor, already.
Sure. I know that, nine times out of ten, nobody ever makes a movie trying to get awards, but what was your reaction when you got in there? Was it a huge surprise?
Crossingham: I think it always is, isn’t it? I don’t ever think anything is going to get that.
Park: It’s never expected. It’s just so overwhelming. The Golden Globes! It’s amazing.
Crossingham: But it is exciting. It is exciting. You say you don’t make the movie [for awards], but when you get the nomination, oh my goodness what a bonus is that. It really is — it’s lifted everyone here, as well, the whole crew. Our names are at the top of the list, but everybody within the studio kind of gets a lift and a buzz from it as well. The trickle-down is massive.
No, it’s super exciting, so congratulations again. I’m excited to talk to you about this movie, Vengeance Most Fowl. I’m curious about where the ideas from this came from and how long you’ve been working on it. I know Wallace & Gromit has been around since the 90s, but it’s been a minute since we’ve had the last feature film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. How long have you been trying to get this made?
Park: Well, it goes back quite a ways. The idea started kicking around, really, back in the days of Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Which was 2004 or 2005, something like that. We just had this idea of — I mean, gnomes are part of Wallace & Gromit’s world, it wasn’t a big step. But it was like, ‘What if Wallace was to create a robot gnome to help Gromit in the garden?’ It just seemed like a really fun idea.
There was a lot of evolution to that idea. Every time I pitched it, it seemed like there was something lacking. It just seemed like tech going wrong isn’t enough, it needed some kind of sinister motive. A character that is more sinister and more personal. That’s where Feathers McGraw was the perfect answer to the problem, really. He has this history with Wallace & Gromit. They helped put him in prison in the zoo 30 years ago. It suddenly upped the anti and gave a great driving force to the movie.
That’s how it suddenly became a feature film. It was a 30-minute film until then.
Crossingham: That’s true.
Oh, interesting. Feathers is something I wanted to talk to you about, too. I always loved the character, and it’s so cool to see him back like this and in such a big way. This whole movie just feels really epic and I was so into it. It’s not lost on me that this movie very much kind of feels like a direct sequel to The Wrong Trousers just because of what it does with Feathers. I know we’re talking 20, 30 years ago, Nick, but when you were working on it back then did you ever have ideas to bring Feathers back in this kind of way or did that just happen naturally as this movie was developing?
Park: We mentioned it from time to time, just in-house, but it was never really taken seriously because what would the context be? What’s the idea? Nothing quite seemed to spark anything. Bringing him back, it was really the answer to a big story issue, really. It wasn’t like we set out to make a sequel.
Crossingham: It’s a bit of an accidental sequel, isn’t it?
Park: Yeah. It was the perfect answer. But we were so surprised, on the internet, the amount of people that really love [Feathers]. I mean, you have to love your villain. But how popular he had become.
Crossingham: I think the fan response was quite overwhelming, actually, wasn’t it? There was a flood of enthusiasm of people going, ‘Oh my god! Feathers is back!’ Just before you make that kind of announcement, there’s doubt. It was really nice that our initial confidence was born through with the response from the fans. That was great.
Sure. I saw a lot of that excitement, too, and I was one of the people championing it. He’s just so much fun. I really want to talk to you about the third act of this movie, too. I love the stop-motion medium, in general, but seeing you guys go crazy with it — I mean, there’s a long chase sequence involving cars, motorcycles, boats, and trains. It’s so much and it’s all so cool to look at. I’m curious about what the process of making something like that is when it’s on such a big scale. Is that something you could have done 20 years ago or has the stop-motion medium advanced enough so you could only do it now?
Crossingham: It’s probably a bit of both, isn’t it, really?
Park: Yeah.
Crossingham: I think, as a studio, we’ve gotten better at making films and more confident. When we were working with Mark Burton, the screenwriter, on Act 3, we weren’t limiting ourselves in terms of ideas based on what is and isn’t possible in stop-motion. Once we had our ambition, we then tried to figure out how we would do it. There were certain things we could and couldn’t do and we had to work around those. But we always wanted to make the end like a big movie ending rather than anything else. I, personally, didn’t think about Act 3 as an animator, I thought about Act 3 as a filmmaker. Then I think we kind of reversed into the animation to see what we could do. I think, for me, that was the start.
Park: Even though Wallace & Gromit is clay, it’s central to that whole kind of ethos of Wallace & Gromit, we just saw the effects give us new tools in the shed which we could play with. We had a fantastic visual effects team. Even though we wanted to be spectacular and fast and all this, there’s a lot of water. There was still thought into it’s got to fit the stop-motion world. It was getting the right balance, there. If it got too stop-motion-y in the style, it would distract. We just wanted to find the level that just works and you don’t question it.
Crossingham: And this is the scale that we work at. This is Feathers’ actual cell from the movie, and this is the actual Wallace & Gromit from the movie. Just to give you an idea of a scale of things.
Thanks to Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham for discussing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
