BERLIN – The rapturous reception given prehistoric family comedy The Croods at its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival has already started to stir talk about the DreamWorks' animated 3D feature being the next in a multi-title franchise.
It was a subject broached at the press conference following the film's initial press screening here, with the directors indicating, not surprisingly, that they would be up for a Croods 2.
“The nature of this film was the road trip, of all the movies I've done this was the most heavily story boarded,” said Chris Sanders, who co-directed The Croods with Kirk De Micco. “So if we did have to put together another film quickly, we'd have a lot of spare parts to work with.”
Nicolas Cage, who voices Croods' patriarch Grug, also suggested he would be up for a sequel.
“Yes, I would like to see another adventure with the Croods,” Cave said.
Both Cage and co-star Emma Stone, who voices Grug's rebellious daughter Eep in the film, commented on the experience of creating a character entirely using their voice. Cage, who recorded dialog for The Croods over a period of two years, likened the process to keeping his “instrument” in tune for life acting gigs.
“50 percent of a performance is voice and I consider all acting to be music on some level so this was an opportunity to stay in tune with my instrument,” Cage said, noting that he would go into the recording booth with no preparation. “I just look at the lines as they were written that day and have at it. I'm be remembering images from my past, conjuring things up, as remote as a television commercial. And they could cherry pick what worked and what didn't.”
The Croods is Stone's first animated feature and she said she was surprised at how well animated the process really was.
“I'd done a lot of ADR work on my movies like Easy A, with the narration, so I thought it was going to be like that – I'd just read my lines,” Stone said. “Then I realized there was so much physicality involved – you are really playing an animated character. Which was great because I come from improv and sketch comedy – I always want to go bigger and bigger – and with a character like Eep in The Croods, you can't go too big.”
The Croods bows in the U.S. March 22.