You’ll think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit while watching the playful and clever Coyote vs. Acme, in our theaters thanks to Lucky Red from September 2. The director Dave Green, still overwhelmed with joy at the film’s rescue (theoretically canceled for tax breaks by Warner three years ago), chatted with Indiewire about his undertaking, which began in 2019, and about the very human bond that Coyote vs. Acme shares with the masterpiece by Zemeckis & Williams from 1998. The technique and spirit are very similar, but there was on the crew a person who had worked on both.
Coyote vs. Acme on the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, building on that experience
Dave Green, like his cast, is on cloud nine for the rescue of Coyote vs. Acme, which had been tucked away in Warner’s drawers for three years, before finding a new owner at Ketchup Entertainment, which secured its worldwide distribution. The joy comes from a visceral love for Looney Tunes, nurtured in early childhood also through relatively newer productions like The Fabulous Tiny and Animaniacs: “They were violent and irreverent. They weren’t syrupy: they were sarcastic, subversive and absurd. With this film we tried to take up the baton as best as we could, attempting to maintain that tone, that voice, ensuring absurdity, intelligence and sophistication, black humor and laughs.”
Green jokes: “The crazy thing is that, when I signed, I hadn’t even thought that Willy Coyote didn’t exist!” All told, planning a live-action/animation hybrid film is very complex, especially with the standards that in 1988 imposed Robert Zemeckis and Richard Williams in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Fortune had it that the two films shared a member of the crew, namely the puppeteer David Barclay, also a collaborator of Jim Henson and George Lucas. Barclay created and operated on set a life-sized Willy Coyote, as a reference for the cast in the scenes where they interacted with the character. Two takes were shot, with and without the puppet in frame, to capture the actors’ most spontaneous interactions with him, and to naturally leave space for the animation to be added in post-production. In this way they also avoided the perennial problem of this kind of film: the difficulty for a human performer to keep their gaze in the right spot when forced to stare into space!
Considering that a major studio tried to bury the film, just as the mega-company ACME tries to nullify Willy’s lawsuit against its gadgets, the movie proved even more metatextual than expected: “It became like a game of mirrors, where it almost seems we shot the film after it unlocked! It’s surreal, but we actually confront these things in everyday life, we try to have a voice and autonomy in a world ruled by corporations.”
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