{"id":7036589,"date":"2026-08-10T12:13:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/animation\/interview-director-dave-green-on-coyote-vs-acme\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T12:13:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:13:20","slug":"interview-director-dave-green-on-coyote-vs-acme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7036589","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW: Director Dave Green On “Coyote Vs. ACME”"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\"CoyoteVsACME1<\/figure>\n


<\/strong>After years of anticipation,\u00a0Coyote vs. ACME<\/em>\u00a0finally opens in theaters on Aug. 28. Director Dave Green shares his thoughts on the release and presenting the Looney Tunes characters in ways we\u2019ve never seen them before. (This Animation Scoop Q&A<\/em> was edited for length and clarity.)<\/p>\n

Jackson Murphy:<\/strong>\u00a0How does it honestly feel after all you\u2019ve been through, after all this movie has been through, that it is finally coming out in theaters where it belongs?<\/p>\n

Dave Green:<\/strong>\u00a0It is completely surreal. We cannot believe it. All of us, we\u2019re just\u2026 We\u2019re thrilled. This is a party. Could not be happier, honestly.<\/p>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0Celebration is in order because the movie\u2019s a lot of fun and it\u2019s great and it\u2019s got so many elements to it \u2014 and getting it out to everybody. This is based on a 1990 New Yorker article which is really fascinating, and I guess it just goes to show you never know where stories can come from. You never know where inspiration comes from. How did you first find the article? What stood out to you about this?<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0Well, I was not the one to find the article. I think Warner Bros. and James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, the first screenwriter on the film, collectively found the article. I\u2019m not exactly sure. But when I read it, I thought it was absolutely genius for so many reasons, and one of the reasons is that it is the Looney Tunes tone. It is dry and funny and smart and ridiculous and honest all at the same time. And that\u2019s to me what the very first Chuck Jones Looney Tunes were all about. They were all about that foundational tone of intelligence and wit and sarcasm, and so we tried our very best to kind of carry the torch that the article carried and bring that to the screen in this adaptation. The article handled so much stuff right that it was a great jumping off point, along with the original drafts of the script too, which people had put some hard work into.<\/p>\n

\"CoyoteVsACME2<\/figure>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0Absolutely, yeah. This is Wile E.\u00a0Coyote\u00a0suing\u00a0ACME\u00a0[for] all the faulty products, all the bad things that have gone wrong in his pursuit of the Road Runner over the years. And the second scene of this movie is basically a Wile E.\u00a0Coyote\u00a0\/ Road Runner cartoon. You got the opportunity to basically direct a Road Runner \/ Wile E.\u00a0Coyote\u00a0cartoon. How did it feel putting that scene together?<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0It was amazing. One of the first steps on this journey was I called Pete Browngardt, who worked on the \u201cLooney Tunes Cartoons\u201d. [He] created that show, and he gave me some really great advice. And he lent us two story artists, one named David Gemmill, another named Ryan Kramer, who are absolutely hilarious. They joined a larger story artist team, who came from different backgrounds. Their work was just laugh out loud funny. And David Gemmill, I believe, was the artist who did the first story reels on the Wile E.\u00a0Coyote\u00a0chase. It began as, like, a 12-minute sequence, I think that he showed us over Zoom because we were building this movie during COVID. He\u2019d show us these long runs of that sequence. It was just laugh out loud funny. It was an amazing playground to work with those characters, to work with the set of gags that those characters rely on and also to kind of work with and jump off of the camera language that those early shorts were built with, which is a very side-scroller. You never see what\u2019s coming as the camera is tracking rom left to right. And a camera kind of becomes a part of the joke. It was so much fun to learn from my story artists and learn from the original Chuck Jones shorts, and then give it a modern update as well and try things with camera that they never had access to, obviously, in the animated world. But yeah, that was our goal to kind of expand scope in that way.<\/p>\n

\"CoyoteVsACME
Dave Green<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0This movie is very ambitious. That\u2019s one of the words I kept thinking while watching this. This is so ambitious. You have worked in a live-action \/ CG combo before with \u201cTMNT: Out of the Shadows\u201d, so you\u2019re familiar with that. But I feel like this is another level in terms of all these characters. There is so much movement to this film, and how did it really challenge you and surprise you, that whole process?<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0It was all new to me, to be honest. Shooting motion capture actors is a completely different process than shooting animated characters like this, because motion capture actors walk onto set. You can have a conversation with them. You can point a camera at them. Looney Tunes characters do not exist. So it\u2019s really about working with the invisible and then supporting the cast to feel like the characters who are invisible are actually there and basically giving them kind of proxies and things to look at and deal with to make the scene come alive. We built a life-size Wile E.\u00a0Coyote\u00a0puppet for Will Forte and Lana Condor and John Cena to reference on set. We had this amazing puppeteer named Dave Barclay, who is a legendary Henson-trained puppeteer who worked on \u201cThe Dark Crystal\u201d, and he was a puppeteer for Jabba the Hutt, and he\u2019s absolutely amazing. And he would do the first couple takes of the scene with Wile E., giving Will and all of our cast eye line. And then he would show them what Wile E.\u2019s gonna do and what he wants, and he\u2019s gonna pick up this piece of dynamite. Dynamite\u2019s gonna explode, and then the room\u2019s gonna be filled with smoke. And so we do the first couple takes with the Wile E. puppet and then strike the puppet, and then Will would do the scene without the puppet. And he was, first of all, really open to working with the puppet as a co-star in the first place and then was very good at running the scene without the puppet at all \u2014 really could track in, with his eyes, the parallax of, \u201cOkay, Wile E.\u2019s not standing up against the wall. He\u2019s standing three feet away from us.\u201d And there\u2019s a big difference in eye line. So yeah, we had a cast who was up for the assignment and ready for that challenge and loved collaborating with Dave.<\/p>\n

\"CoyoteVsACME4<\/figure>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0I completely agree with that because as I\u2019m watching the film, I go, \u201cThey are so game for this. They are all in.\u201d Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena, they are so all in with the Looney Tunes aspect of the movie and with the legal comedy aspects of the movie. And some of my favorite moments of the movie are some of the emotional moments. What you do at the end is really, really nice. And also early on, there is this montage. It\u2019s the moment when Wile E. sees the ad on\u00a0TV\u00a0with Will Forte, and you show clips from classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and you edit it in such a way that it\u2019s like, \u201cWow, it\u2019s kind of powerful, especially for the Looney Tunes fans who have grown up with these characters.\u201d What have these characters meant to you, and how have you seen the reaction, and you hope that the diehard fans get out of moments like that in this film?<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0That was something we found in editorial, honestly. We had a cut of the scene that didn\u2019t have those cartoons, but my editor, Carsten Kurpanek, who\u2019s absolutely brilliant\u2026 he and I, for some reason, we would end up finding these supercuts of Wile E. getting injured on YouTube. And we started watching them. It would remind us of gags that we had forgotten about and it reminded us that there\u2019s so many funny moments and slices. And I think one day he just did it as a trial. \u201cWhat if we cross-cut to these vintage cartoons as memory?\u201d And early in the movie, it plays, I think, really funny, and then later in the movie, it plays it on a deeper level. But yeah, I think when you think about this character, you think, okay, he\u2019s\u2026 I don\u2019t wanna say a flat character, but I think the 30,000-foot view is he just wants to chase the bird. He blows up\u00a0ACME\u00a0products. He gets injured. Rinse and repeat. But if you really start to study him, this is a character who wants something very, very deeply, and his passion and his persistence and his resilience are what fuel his every day. And when you start to look at Wile E. that way, you\u2019re like, \u201cOkay, this is actually a really deep and human person\u2026 character that we\u2019re talking about.\u201d And once you start to think about his personhood, then you start to think of all of the injuries and all the times that\u00a0ACME\u00a0has mistreated him, and you start to realize, \u201cWell that\u2019s actually a bit unfair, you know?\u201d And then you think about the history of injury that he\u2019s had to sustain and how resilient he\u2019s been and how much pain he\u2019s had to endure. And once we started thinking about Wile E. on a deeper level like that, it kind of unlocked everything for us, and it took it from what could have been a 15-minute or a very short SNL sketch version of the movie into something that could actually sustain a full film. \u201cLet\u2019s start to think about who Wile E. is as a living, thinking, breathing being. So that was kind of our goal.<\/p>\n

\"CoyoteVsACME3<\/figure>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0There are absolutely\u00a0layers to this. One of the most fascinating things about this movie is how you use the characters sort of in playing parts. There are classic Looney Tunes characters that are good guys in this movie, and there are classic Looney Tunes characters that are bad guys in this movie. It almost reminded me a little bit of The Muppets in how the characters kind of play parts in various ways. Was that a very interesting process for you deciding who\u2019s a good guy and who\u2019s a bad guy in this?<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0Absolutely. Thanks for saying that, and that was one of our goals. We really thought about The Muppets and how The Muppets usually are not acknowledged in those films as The Muppets, or as a gang, you know. And sometimes in Looney Tunes films, you\u2019ll see the opposite. You\u2019ll see the Looney Tunes addressed as a gang, like an\u00a0ensemble. \u201cThere\u2019s the Looney Tunes.\u201d And that\u2019s something we really wanted to get away from because we wanted to be really not an ensemble Looney Tunes film in the traditional sense. We really wanted to tell Wile E.\u2019s story first and foremost, and have him be the entryway to the rest of the characters. Sammy Burch, the screenwriter, actually comes from a casting background. Her mom was this legendary casting director named Jackie Burch, who cast movies like \u201cThe Breakfast Club\u201d and \u201cDie Hard\u201d, and she\u2019s absolutely brilliant. So Sammy grew up in a casting household and had experience with casting herself. And so when she came onto the project, she was like, \u201cOh, this is so much fun. If we\u2019re gonna do this kind of family riff on a courtroom drama or courtroom thriller, who are these characters who we\u2019d cast in these roles?\u201d So we kind of looked at the cast of Looney Tunes as a casting pool, a set of talent that we could kind of pluck from and then place these actors into roles that made sense for them. So many of those ideas came from Sammy about who would fit in what role.<\/p>\n

JM:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s very cool. You have a lot of fun with that and a lot of surprises with that. This is one of those movies that, for me, you just never know what\u2019s gonna happen next. It\u2019s so unpredictable. Are those the kinds of movies that you love \u2014 these kind of unpredictable, you never know what\u2019s gonna happen? \u2018Cause that is on display here in \u201cCoyote\u00a0vs.\u00a0ACME\u201d.<\/p>\n

DG:<\/strong>\u00a0Always. Always. I love not knowing what the roadmap of a movie\u2019s gonna be. That\u2019s a great compliment. I really appreciate that. I love rug turns, and I love twists, and I like tonal pivots. Those are all part of our effort, so thank you for seeing that in the project.<\/p>\n