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Bello! Next month we’ll come back to the little, cute, bright yellow helpers who tell the lies of the world, like Friends & Monsters is released in time to clear the US Independence Day weekend box office.
It is the seventh episode in the Despicable Me franchise and the third stand-up tour of Kevin, Stuart, Bob et al. The series has grossed £12.3bn worldwide, with the box office accounting for almost half (with limited sales, and DVD sales coming in at just £725m).
Pierre Coffin has directed all but two of the films, what he told the Guard 11 years ago they were all chosen permanently by his own children.
Whenever I was working on a scene or I was working on a whole film, I was always with my children without realizing it. Will that please them? Will it be funny to them? And if it’s funny to them, will it be funny to their friends and their friends’ friends? I show them well before everything gets close to the final stage so they get to see all the absorbing things that I fail miserably and doubt.
“If the goal is to evoke a sense of humor and it doesn’t work then you can say: ‘Okay, back to the drawing board.’
“I really believe in their opinion and I think I use it to trick them into getting the truth out of them because my theory is that if you put children in front of a movie or on TV, they have a tendency to like everything and if they don’t like it, they are a little disgusted. Then you can say that nothing is wrong.”
The son of a French diplomat and an Indonesian novelist, Coffin spent his childhood in Cambodia and Japan before the family settled in the Parisian suburbs in the 1970s.
Banned from watching TV, Coffin read a lot of comic books and did a lot of industrial painting, before studying cinematography in Paris and having a brief stint in London working on Steven Spielberg’s We’re Back! Dinosaur Story (1993).
The change in leadership was unexpected. “In the first film, they were portrayed as a large group of criminals doing Gru’s dirty work,” he said, “and we quickly realized that they were unpleasant and made Gru into a ruthless antagonist.
“To make him cute, we had the idea that he would know all his little assistants by their names, although there were hundreds, and suddenly Gru was kind. Then we put glasses on them, added overalls for the workers, made them look like humanoid creatures of the molecular type, gave them a yellow skin appearance more and more. They had a great ability to be funny and they were very beautiful.”
The new film – set in 1920s Hollywood – is pre-Gru, but features voices from Jesse Eisenberg, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz and Jeff Bridges.
So please submit your questions for Coffin in the comments below by 9.30am BST on 19 June and we’ll publish the answers as part of our regular reading discussion on 3 July.
