Les Simpson, c’est la série incontournable qu’on a tous déjà au moins regardée une fois dans notre vie et qui continue de traverser les générations. Quel est le secret de sa longévité ? Lors de notre visite au Festival international du film d'Annecy, on a posé toutes nos questions au créateur de la série, Matt Groening, au scénariste Matt Selman et à l’animateur David Silverman.
00:00The cliché in the writers' room was 13 and out, 13 and out,
00:04and they told me that my career was going to be over
00:07because the show was not going to work.
00:11I watched every cartoon that I could as a kid, so I liked everything.
00:15In particular, there was an American cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle,
00:20by Jay Ward and Bill Scott, and it was very crummy animation,
00:24but it had great writing, it had great voices, and it had great music
00:30because at the time when I was looking at these cartoons,
00:34animation was actually declining in quality, at least animation on television.
00:39Everything was getting cheaper and crummier,
00:42and I thought, well, that was the way it was.
00:46And so I thought, let's try to do a show where the animation –
00:52sorry, he's an animator.
00:55That the animation isn't important.
00:57That is the quality of the animation,
00:59but what was important was the writing and the voices and the music
01:02and that people would come along.
01:05And David was one of the original three animators on the show.
01:10I did a little animation of my own in high school,
01:13and it was too hard.
01:16It was too hard.
01:17And my father was a filmmaker.
01:19The original Homer was a filmmaker, and he loved cartoons.
01:23And since my dad was also a cartoonist, I said, why don't you do animation?
01:26He said, the secret of animation is to get other people to do the hard work.
01:33And so I took that to heart, and I moved to Hollywood,
01:35and I met up with these guys.
01:37Great story.
01:39I don't mind doing the hard work.
01:41It's fun.
01:41It's a lot of fun.
01:42Even when doing the Tracy Ellen show where we had limitations,
01:45we'd at least threw ourselves into it and do the best and do interesting things,
01:49if not, you know, almost embracing the lack of time we had.
01:53But I was inspired by the early days of Hanna-Barbera,
01:56the days of, you know, Quick Drama DeGraw and Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound,
02:00but also the old Warners cartoons.
02:02And then, but also there's inspiration from the comic page, you know,
02:06like the Peanuts and Walt Kelly's Pogo all inspired me, you know,
02:11in cartooning and animation.
02:13And then the later TV specials that Chuck Jones did for, like, The Grinch
02:18and things like that.
02:19I was inspired by my favorite show, Family Guy, which was, like,
02:22I found out actually that, you know, that came out after The Simpsons?
02:26I'm, like, this huge Family Guy fan, and then I got this job,
02:29and, like, this is, like, oh, my God,
02:30if I could just bring Family Guy to The Simpsons,
02:32this would be amazing.
02:38It seems like so many titles and names in comedy are puns and stuff.
02:44And for me, The Simpsons was just a very sort of neutral, bland name that exists.
02:51It's a very common name.
02:54But there is an element of simp, simpleton, in it,
03:01and that's sort of a half kind of wordplay that's in very good.
03:05What about the Homer Simpson character from the novel?
03:10The character of Homer was named after my father, Homer,
03:12but it was also inspired by the novel Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West,
03:18which is a great, great classic of Hollywood.
03:22How does it feel to be a hero, Bart?
03:23Pretty damn good, Phil.
03:25Your family must be proud of you right now.
03:27I bet they're jumping up and down.
03:28My God!
03:31The show was started out as very short cartoons, 15 seconds long,
03:35four of them on an episode of The Trace Hillman Show for a week.
03:39And the executives at Fox would come to the Friday night filming of The Trace Hillman Show
03:45on the Fox lot, the live action part.
03:47And then in between the different sketches,
03:49they would run the Simpsons cartoons that we had completed.
03:54And the in-studio audience laughed so hard at those little cartoons
03:59that Fox realized, oh, there might be something here.
04:03And it was a brand new Fox network.
04:05And so they offered us a pilot, like a single episode.
04:10And I talked with James L. Brooks, who was the producer of The Trace Hillman Show.
04:14And we agreed that we needed to have more than one episode,
04:18because if that episode was a hit, it would be another year before we could do a second episode.
04:22So we were able to persuade the Fox network to put the show on the air with 13 episodes.
04:30So the first 13 episodes, the success of the show is all based on those first 13 episodes,
04:35all of which we had in the works before we saw the results of the first episode.
04:39So we were, you know, guessing about what would work.
04:43And it turned out it worked amazingly.
04:46The production period of, like, you know, once we have the script, you know,
04:51we have a table read of the script, so boarding and et cetera to finish, that's...
04:56Six to nine months.
04:57Yeah, six to nine months, yes.
04:58The time that a script is developed and getting it to the table read might be a longer period.
05:02And the time afterwards in the post-production may be a little longer.
05:06So it depends.
05:07And sometimes you can almost track an episode by the time the writer says,
05:11I have an idea for X, and the time it gets on the air is like nine months.
05:15At the shortest.
05:16At the shortest, at the shortest.
05:17It could even be a year because we have episodes that we say that hold over to the next season.
05:24And, you know, there you go.
05:26Obviously, we work on many episodes at the same time.
05:28Yeah.
05:29Exactly.
05:29Yes.
05:30We don't do one a week.
05:31In fact, that is Matt Selman's ordeal, that he has to keep all these episodes that are in different stages of completion.
05:40But that's fun.
05:41And, like, if you work on an animated movie, you're doing the same scenes, the same story, the same characters for four years.
05:48And by, you just get sick of it.
05:52I mean, you just get so bored.
05:53Like, every day, we go in and, like, we're working on different stories in different stages of animation.
05:58So it's very stimulating.
05:59We don't have enough time to get bored with any particular phase of the animation.
06:04You know, the show has found a home on Disney+, and we've connected with our young audience in a way we never dreamed of.
06:20And one of the cool things we do that people don't really know about, we don't like publicize, but it's cool, is that sometimes the version that's on streaming on Disney+, is a little bit of a longer bonus episode with extra scenes that we just couldn't – we had to cut to be on Fox in America.
06:37But, you know, we can put the – what we think, what we hope is the best version, not just the most indulgent version.
06:42Sometimes those will have, like, an extra scene or an extra joke or be edited a little bit differently.
06:47Or the ending will be – like, the thing over the credits will be a little different.
