Chris Appelhans

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First Draft Episode #310: Chris Appelhans

Chris Appelhans, writer and director of Netflix animated movie Wish Dragon, and illustrator of picture books Sparky! (written by Jenny Offill) and A Greyhound, a Groundhog (written by Emily Jenkins).

Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Chris Appelhans, writer and director of Netflix animated movie, Wish Dragon and illustrator of picture books, Sparky! (written by Jenny Offill), and A Greyhound, A Groundhog (written by Emily Jenkins). I so love what Chris had to say about how expertise in one art form does or doesn't translate to proficiency in another art form, the roundabout way he got his writer card, and we talk a lot about the beating heart of stories, human connection.

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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Chris Appelhans.

Sarah Enni:  Hi, Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris Appelhans:  Good. Thank you for having me on this podcast.

Sarah Enni:  I'm excited to talk.

Chris Appelhans:  I'm a little star struck because I heard about it from my wife so many times.

Sarah Enni:  Well, you know, your wife is one of the leading guests, I think she holds the record for number of times being on this podcast!

Chris Appelhans:  No wonder she loves it.

Sarah Enni:  I'm so excited to talk about Wish Dragon and I also have questions about the picture books that you've done, and a lot of the other work that you've done on movies, but first we're gonna go way back to the beginning and ask, where were you born and raised?

Chris Appelhans:  Oh, I was born in [unintelligible] Idaho, population, 400. I lived there until I was four and then we moved to the huge metropolis of Idaho Falls population, 30,000 and lived on the outskirts of there until I went to college.

Sarah Enni:  Okay, small town Idaho. I always ask people how reading and writing was a part of growing up for them. But I also want to know about illustrating for you.

Chris Appelhans:  Probably pretty equal of those things. My twin sister is a crazy reader, like on the Maurene level. Like you can't really talk to her during the day if she's reading and she would never come to dinner until we literally, as a group, all yelled like, "Dude!" So I think I was really surrounded by lots of books and lots of readers.

And I liked writing for school, and I liked to play Dungeons and Dragons, and I liked to make stories up, and I liked to invent. It was one of the advantages of growing up there is, we didn't really have TV till maybe I was like 11 or 12, and my mom would just kick us outside like, "Get out of here, go entertain yourself." So I think there was a lot of self-fantasy building all the time, whatever that could be, just a stick in some mud, or your friends.

So I think drawing was, I liked doing it. I did it for fun. I don't think it was a passion the way that some people... like some people watched The Little Mermaid when they were six and were like, "This is what I shall do." And that wasn't me at all. I was like, "Cool. That's fun." So it was all around the idea of stories, and making up stories, that seemed really fun. And drawing was a part of that, that I liked amongst all the other things I liked.

Sarah Enni:  So it sounds like you didn't feel destined to do this, but I know you wound up going to ArtCenter, which is for people who really are super focused on art and illustration. How did that end up happening?

Chris Appelhans:  Maybe my junior year, the art program in my high school was taught by the football coach. And there was like Art 1, and I was like, "Okay, Art 1." And then I was like, "I took Art 1. What's next?" He was like, "Oh, there's no Art 2." I was like, "Why is it called Art 1? What about 2, 3 and 4?" So I think because of that, maybe on some level, it didn't seem like a career thing. Cause you're in school and like, "Here are your careers." And that just seemed like a hobby.

And so in my junior year, a family friend was an artist who lived in Southeast Idaho and he had gone to Ricks College, which is now BYU Idaho. And they have a weird kind of feeder program thing with ArtCenter. They had a lot of ArtCenter grads from the sixties who were Mormon move up and teach.

So they have good teachers who were out finding kids and then train them and they'd send them up to ArtCenter. So I met one of those kids who was halfway through ArtCenter and he just told me what it was like and said, "Here's what you need to do if you want to try to get in." And I thought it was super lucky. Cause I looked at the list of art schools on whatever US News and World Report, or whatever. And I didn't know anything about how to do it. But I think seeing him, and knowing he was doing it, and he was from where I grew up, just made it seem like, "Oh, okay. So this can happen."

Now the young artists coming up are all like that, it's nuts. Because the only barrier to anyone's artistic growth now is desire to teach yourself and the ability to seek out knowledge. So if you love drawing and you're nine, there's just fucking [unintelligible] book. I don't know, it must apply to writing, but I don't know if it's quite as dramatic. It's like a leveling up game. Wherever you start, there's the people you aspire to, and then there's all the levels of learning that are in-between.

And the most important thing, I think, to progress is to be able to latch onto that next level and see people who are doing that, figure how they got to that step, and make one step at a time. You work your way up to this highest level. Now, if you're a young artist, no matter where you are, you're surrounded by literally tens of thousands of other people. One step above, one step below, and incredible knowledge. So your typical 23 year old studio hire is just bonkers, now. They're just all on steroids. So that's great. I think it's just democratize that knowledge.

Sarah Enni: That's a good way to put it. I have thoughts about how early people need to be good at things.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, that's true.

Sarah Enni:  But, there's nothing preventing you from going back, you're timeline is just different.

Chris Appelhans:  And it's a good point; in terms of your skills as an artist are only as useful as your human insight, basically. Because at some point, you're designing and drawing, but what gives your work it's personality? And to me anyways, it's real value is that it's an expression of this individual. So you gotta work on that too, which you can't do that by practicing. You have to live.

Sarah Enni:  That's, oof, I've been having a lot of thoughts lately about the importance of having something to say.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, I was just talking to Jon Klasssen, you've interviewed Jon, (Caldecott Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of the I Want My Hat Back series, and The Rock From the Sky. Listen to his First Draft interviews here and here), and he was talking about this George Saunders book he's reading, I forget what it's called.

Sarah Enni:  The Russian literature one? (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders)

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, it's a breakdown of these short stories. And in that book, he describes his discovery of like, "I want to be Hemingway. I wrote a bunch of like Hemingway stuff, and it was pretty good, except it was just somebody trying to be Hemingway. And then I started to write in the style of the jokes I would tell at a cocktail party, with all the skills built over all those years, and it was like everybody said right away like, 'This is what we're supposed to be doing.'"

How do you shortcut that journey? There's no way. And the second part doesn't work with the 15 years of struggling trying to be Hemingway, cause you're acquiring like a crazy arsenal of skills and do's and don'ts, and mileage that makes you good later. I don't know, it seems unpredictable.

Sarah Enni:  And this leads me to my next question, which I love asking people who studied art. I love talking to, and have talked about people finding their writing voice, which is what we're talking about. But how do you think that applies to art? What was it like finding your voice with your illustration? Cause I think that's what you focused on at ArtCenter, illlustrations specifically.

Chris Appelhans:  I think it's pretty much the same. I think that's one of the neat things about getting to a certain level in any of these arts, whether it's writing or illustration or music, is you're mastering a craft. It has all these principles and then there's intuition and happy accidents. And it all applies. It all just switches over.

So when I went from trying to be an illustrator to trying to write a screenplay, there was a journey you went on, there were principles about composition, a focal point, and balance and counterpoint, negative space, and the need to condense an idea just so it can come across as remotely clear.

[Both laugh]

Chris Appelhans:  All of it just went (makes a zip sound) right over to writing. Didn't make you good at it right away. But you start at like level five instead of level one. So I think anything that you've experienced as a writer, you can imagine exactly that as an artist. You like a certain artist, you imitate their style. You're only understanding maybe the superficial aspects, the way they use the pen, the way they use the watercolor. And then it takes five years before you realize all the fundamentals of like figure drawing and anatomy, or design and simplification, that they're doing, that actually that last part is just the frosting on the cake.

And same with writers. You might recognize a writing voice, but there's also much deeper stuff going on that defines their style. So that's what's kind of cool. It just all relates. It all parallels and the same with music. Same with any art form.

Sarah Enni: I heard you one time talk about, I don't remember if this was with respect to a teacher or what it was, but that someone was like, "You'll learn to draw over four years at ArtCenter." And then you said that you went in feeling very confident, but then it took you 10 years to learn to draw.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah. My second year of figure drawing, the teacher was like, "All right everybody, y'all think you're super talented. You wouldn't be here if you were not talented, but it's gonna take you..." And he was in his late thirties, he was like, "It's gonna take it like five years, minimum, 10 years, realistically, before you really, really know how to draw. You might know how to draw some stuff, some circumstances. But to really master it so you can illuminate any idea with it, five years minimum, 10 years average."

And I was like, "Okay, old man. I'm gonna do it this semester." But I think you need that basically delusion, you know? But it was, I think, 10 years, at least for me. I was not the five-year... I mean, even now there's so much I can't draw, but I think that it was a very helpful journey to go on because it immediately humbles you when you face any other specialization.

So when I looked at screenwriting, I'm like, "I think I'm a good storyteller, but I'm not a good screenwriter. I'm still a beginner storyteller. So like, 'Just chill out, dude.' And you better just relax and learn this craft and try to make something as cool as you can." You need to be doing that always. Otherwise, I don't think you're practicing the right way, but don't think that you're gonna be great at this in a year, you're not. And that I think is very helpful.

There was a point, maybe in my mid-thirties, where I had been so busy with work. And I always loved music, and I always wanted to make music and write songs. And I always did it in an amateurish way, but there was a point where I'm like, "You know what? This is not gonna happen because I know what my career is gonna be like, it's gonna be busy. And if I was really serious about this, there's just not enough life left to do all this stuff."

And it didn't make me sad. I was almost like, "I'm kinda glad, cause I'm not kidding myself. I'm not gonna sit down four times a year and diddle around on the piano and think I'm gonna come up with something great." Like, "No, you're not." If you want to do anything great, you're gonna have to go sit at it for five, six years. So I think that that was really helpful.

And it really helped me when it came to making a film because you have probably 200 to 500 people on these and of those, most of them have a specialized skill that takes at least five to 10 years to master. And you are just totally fucked if they don't give you their all. And you can't do it, you can't. No one person is talented, or has enough time in their life, to get good enough to chip in with... that's like, no one builds a skyscraper by themselves. They might know how, but it's just impossible. And it's exactly the same. So I think that helped me. I was still delusional in a lot of ways, but at least not that way.

Sarah Enni:  I want to ask about leaving ArtCenter or, even as you're studying, you immediately went into film. So it seems like you always knew. I'm sure some people leave ArtCenter and just exclusively paint or do fine arts. So what made you so sure that you wanted to go into this broader field and how did you get started there?

Chris Appelhans:  I think it was a basic instinct. Which, as you do in college, I had a lot of phases. My sophomore year I was gonna be a gallery artist. My junior year, I wanted to be an illustrator. My senior year, I wanted to do concept art for games and movies. And you're so convinced at every stage. Children's books and movies, I felt like the audience there came at it from more of a pure place. Kids don't give a fuck. They're like, "I don't care who you are. I don't care that you're Madonna and you wrote a child's book. It's not good. I don't care. I'm not gonna finish it."

Sarah Enni:  And plenty of Madonnas have written picture books that are really crappy,

Chris Appelhans:  B.J. Novak (The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak) wrote a great children's book, which has succeeded entirely on its merits. And people resented him. I'm like, "What are you talking about? This is a great idea."

Sarah Enni:  It's brilliant.

Chris Appelhans:  And when I read it to my friend's son and watched him freak out, like "You did it. It's all here." So I think a part of me was drawn to the fact that in those fields, at the end of the day, you would be a little more judged on the merits.

I just got lucky in that I put some of my work online in those early days, and Doug Chang, who was the production designer on all the second generation of Star Wars movies, he was just the sweetest man in the world. I never even met him in my life. He just found my website. And then I got a call from Robert Zemekis' production company, which was making a movie called Monster House, and that was my first movie job.

And they just said, "Doug called us, he sent us your website. He said, 'this seems like very cool work. You should talk to this kid.'" And then I did. It was like a total godfather move, I mean, I'd never even talked to him, but I always knew that he connected those dots. And I try to do exactly the same thing cause you can see, in a young artist, you can see that they've got a voice you just feel like, "Let's not waste this. Let's get it in the mix as soon as possible, they're ready." So that was the other part, that was just good luck.

Sarah Enni:  That's amazing. Two of your early credits were Coraline and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. And those are both movies with such distinct looks, and so different as well. So I'm just interested in, I think it speaks to the talent and the plasticity of mind required to see what someone's going for and bring that to life, as opposed to, what your actual natural voice is.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, I think it was a good lesson in, what I found to be, over time, good direction. Which was, you get talented artists together and you have a certain amount of faith in their talents and a certain laissez-faire like, "Make it cool." And then you have a certain specificity to your vision and a relentlessness to be like, "But I want to like this at the end of the day." So Henry Selick, who did Coraline, and Wes Anderson who did The Fantastic Mr. Fox, were very supportive and very open-ended in some ways.

And in other ways where, like, "I know exactly what this needs to be, and I want it to be it." The first director I worked for, Gil Kenan, did Monster House the same way. And the experience was you felt good because they were trusting you, but you also felt just exhausted by them sometimes. Like, "I gave you something so cool, just lay off, stop asking for more."

And I remember being halfway through Wish Dragon and thinking the whole time that I was being really effortlessly kind to everybody and just gently pushing them all. And everyone who rolled out the show would always have this final thing like, "I'm so fucking glad to not have to take one more note from you...'Oh, it's great so-and-so. Just one more thing!'"

So I think it's almost like being a sports coach or something, you need to trust all these guys and put them on the floor, but you also have to push them out of their comfort zone, to go a little bit above. And what they did, made me look good because they, to your point, they embraced a certain voice that I had, or quality to my work, but they also funneled it through references, through guidance, through art direction, they funneled it into part of a bigger vision.

So, on the sports analogy, I was able to play well in two different style teams because there were good coaches. And if you have a bad coach, then it's a free for all, or everyone's blaming each other, or nobody understands what anyone else is doing and so they all do worse than they are. Which happens the other 80% of the time.

And that goes to a lot of, I think, what's hard about arts and even people talking about books or writing. There's a sort of intangible humanity to stuff that is pretty much the most important. And then there's the craft. And I think there's a lot of talk around the craft sometimes. It's almost like when you're at an intermediate level, as a person who thinks about literature or movies, you can sometimes actually be way farther off than a general audience. They may even be blind to something. You almost think you know better, but you're like in this awkward stage where you actually are not yet appreciating just how hard the simple things are.

And I went through that as an artist. I went through a phase where I would look at Disney drawings and be like, "This is simple. I can draw a whole anatomical figure drawing with light and shadow and it looks like a photo." And then I look at Donald Duck and I went like, "Ha, I can do that." And then I tried to draw Donald Duck and I'm like, "What the?" And then I was like, "Well, you guys move him like 24 times a second and you... wait, what?"

And then every choice that they've made about what they chose to draw, and what they didn't, you realize, "These people all know how to draw way better than me." Then they decided they wanted to make their drawings move. So then they'd said, "Well, the only way that works is we throw most of the details away." Then they decided they want their drawings to express life and personality, a whole new set of principles come in. And then by the time you've gone on the little journey they did, you're looking at that stuff in Bambi or Pinocchio, and you're like, "This is one of the greatest artistic accomplishments." And we're all just following these footsteps.

So, it's a fun journey that just has to have a humbling stage.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, I think you have to go through those. I think about growth as like, um, like I'm drawing in the air, it's like these cycles and moments, I feel like it's...

Chris Appelhans:  It's like falling uphill.

Sarah Enni:  [Chuckling] That's a good way to put it. And you get to these hubris stages and then I feel like there's inevitably this humbling trip. And you're like, "Oh my gosh, this whole other door opened that is this whole other skills that I don't know." I think about this a lot with dialogue. Cause sometimes you'll be watching something, or listening to something, and a line just hits you. And you're like, "That is so good. And I don't know why."

And that's really cool cause you're like, "There's still so much room to grow and understand why that worked, or why that hit me." And then sometimes it's like it's just magic. It's just the actor saying it the way it's written. Sometimes you'll never know.

Chris Appelhans:  And then I think sometimes you'll see the work of a writer and they can just keep doing it. And you're like, "Well, then they know what they're doing."

Sarah Enni:  I want to track both how you were moving up in film and animation, but also you have a couple picture books. So I would just love to hear about how Sparky, which I love so much. And is it ground? Oh my gosh, I read the book...A Greyhound, a Groundhog. So Sparky was written by Jenny Offill. A Greyhoud, a Groundhog was written by Emily Jenkins, and you're the illustrator for both. So did you know you wanted to do children's books? Were you kind of waiting for those gigs or how did that happen?

Chris Appelhans:  Oh, I can't remember. Let's see. I knew I would like to do children's books. And I have a wonderful book agent, Judy Hanson, who I'd met through friends who are illustrators. And I can't even remember. At that point, I had a lot of illustration experience from movies and stuff, so it was all online. So I'm sure that they shared some of that with publishers and were like, "Oh, that's interesting. Maybe let's send some manuscripts, see if there's a good fit."

And both of those manuscripts stood out to me because they were thoughtful, they were interesting. But they also felt like the author, either on purpose or by accident, left all the right things out of the words, which is the hardest thing about making a picture book, I think.

Sarah Enni:  With respect to the illustration, Klassen was talking about how picture books are not the moments of action, which is what you're illustrating for movies and film all the time. And he was like, "What is the moment of stillness that happens right before or after, that then triggers the imagination of the reader?" Which is the whole point.

Chris Appelhans:  And it's a little bit like when you write a screenplay like, "Get in and get out." Start as late as you can and get out the second you can, which it's weird to think of a children's book that way. But a lot of the same principles apply. Which, the filling in of stuff should be doing a lot of the work. If you're doing a lot of that in shoe leather yourself, you're just wasting everybody's time.

Sarah Enni:  The other thing that's happening while you're working in film and TV and illustrating for books, is your writing screenplays.

Chris Appelhans:  Yes.

Sarah Enni:  Were you always thinking that you wanted to direct one?

Chris Appelhans:  I don't think I had the full tangible comprehension of that, as like, "Here's all the skills you would need to do that. Here's how you would build them." I was like, "Ooh, this is a cool story. What about this story? And here's another cool story. Here's a cool story, I made all these paintings for this story." I was learning to tell stories.

Even to this day, I don't think I really have a writing voice, the way a novelist does. I think I have just a tiny bit of a screenwriting voice, but it's very workman like. It's like, "What you're going to enjoy about a screenplay, is it's gonna be good characters. It's gonna be a good story." But you read some scripts samples and you're like, "This is a delight to read this person's writing voice." You almost don't care, you're like, "This story doesn't make any sense, but I just like reading this."

So I think I was starting to learn. And then I had a second project that was a live action idea. It's almost, basically, like Stranger Things, but too soon. So I had this idea, I had done maybe 20 sequence paintings of different moments of it. It was very much like an Amblin movie kind of thing. I had a great high concept. And so I pitched it around through my agent, and I got mostly rejection because everyone's like, "Oh, nobody wants to do movies with kid protagonists."

And this was four 14 year old’s, basically opening a Pandora's Box and having to sort shit out by themselves. And everyone's like, "We love this idea. It's kind of cool. It's got spectacle. What if all the kids were just 30 year old men?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

Sarah Enni:  "What's fun about that?"

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah. And then they were like, "What if, The Rock was with them the whole time?" The whole point is that there isn't an adult in the room. That's why it's a coming of age story. That's what's relevant. That's why it's hard. That's why the characters grow. And then, one of the last meetings I had, was with Bob Zemeckis' company.

I was so naive. I had like a half-an-hour pitch, which is like a total no-no.

Sarah Enni:  Oh, really?

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, your pitch should be like 10 minutes long, pithy and tight. Thank god I had all these cool paintings so people would sort of put up with it like, "Okay, well that's cool." I really thought really hard about the story and it was a well-told 30 minute story. It was good. So I did my pitch for these executives at his company. And they were like, "This is actually kind of great. I mean, this is us! This is what we used to do! I think we're interested in this."

And then they almost like just erased me from the room, and turned to each other and they started talking about like, "What writing people should we hire for this?" And they started naming writers like Smathers and Blatherstein, like all these famous writers. And I was sitting on the couch with all my little drawings being like, "This is so cool. They like my idea. Now they're gonna take it and go have real writers, write it."

And then this person, who had been sitting in the corner of the office the whole time on a laptop, turns around and it's Bob Zemekis, and he's like, "We always fucking do this. We hire these people. It's like a half a million dollars. We never like it. And then we throw it away and we start again with the movie. You just told the story. You know how to write a screenplay. Why don't you have him write it?"

And the executives turn around and are like, "You know how to write a screenplay?" I don't even know what a [unintelligible] looks like! I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And he was like, "He's cheap. Just have him do it." So they hired me, like work for hire. They'd own the idea, but I got paid to write a screenplay. And again, to the good luck aspect...what if he'd gone to the bathroom and doesn't hear the pitch. What if he's not in the room that day?

I sell them my idea and I'm like, "Yay, how cool. They thought I had a good idea." So I think that was the moment that I was given the, "Yeah, sure, you're a writer card." And once you've been paid to do it once and you write something halfway decent, it sort of legitimizes you. And, of course, I had so much to learn. So I took a long time to write a draft of the screenplay. And I was instantly humbled, you know, like, "Oh my God, this is so hard." And all the movies I thought sucked I'm like, "Actually they're pretty good."

And unfortunately, when I turned that screenplay in was the same month that his company, ImageMovers, and Disney, who had been partners, broke up. It was a little tragic in that I loved that idea and I thought it had a lot of potential, but on the other hand, I got paid to make that leap from a person who liked to tell stories, and had some instincts about it, to figure out how the heck to turn that into the craft of screenwriting. So that was very, very lucky, I think.

Sarah Enni:  So how did you develop the idea of Wish Dragon?

Chris Appelhans:  It is a very weird, personal story, which I always feel like I want to explain because otherwise, if it was someone else, I'd be like, "What the fuck is this kid from Idaho doing making a movie about China?"

So I started with my friend who, I went to Shanghai almost 20 years ago, and it was with Ben Zhu. So Ben and I were great friends in college. And I used to go to his house and hang out with him and his mom. And his mom is like a mainland China mom. She's strong, yells at Ben all the time, loves him very much, pushes him really hard, super sweet to me cause I'm a guest to the house. So I spent years accumulating this observational data of his relationship with his mom. And she was so loving in ways that probably he couldn't see, cause he's being yelled at the whole time.

Anyway, so we went to China in 2014, I think it was. And I met his cousin who was basically Michael, who is basically... I'm like a doppelganger of him or vice versa. We're just like the exact same person except... on other sides of the world. And we just had this instant, like, "Oh, well we'll be friends for life." And we would just do all these things. We loved to talk about politics and culture and life. And it was really one of the first times that I'd traveled and met somebody who really challenged my ideas, but also who was very similar to me.

So I really thought, "Wow, here's a person like me, so whatever lived experience he's having of his country is probably similar to what I'd have if I lived there. And so for the next 10 years or so, we were friends, I would travel occasionally to visit. And I would just watch him navigate modern China, which is crazy. And especially that period from maybe 2005 to 2015 - ish. 2015 there was this radical change in which it modernized faster than anything. It's never happened before in human history.

Sarah Enni:  Explosive.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah. So, I sort of had this glimpse of this world that was changing crazy fast. And then Michael, his personal story, just had all kinds of drama. Like he had this high school sweetheart, she was from a rich family. He's from like a middle class-ish family. And basically they had to break up because her parents were like, "You can't marry him unless he can buy you an apartment in Shanghai." Which, even at that time, was like a million bucks. And I was talking to him and I said, "Dude, your life is like a Dickens novel, or a fairy tale like Aladdin, or something." And he's like, "Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that's a Chinese story, Aladdin?"

The light bulb went off. And I just suddenly looked at everything I'd learned about his life through that sort of fairy tale lens. And I went and I read the Chinese folk tale, which is exactly what we all know it; Peasant boy, he lives with his mom. He finds a genie. He falls in love with a princess. He completely loses himself in playing that game. And then he comes out the other side and he finds himself again. And it's got all kinds of other great stuff, but that was just an epiphany moment where I'm like, "I think that old story totally applies to this modern predicament."

It was basically like, "I'm just gonna make a movie for my friend." [Chuckles] And I think at the same time, what I felt like we could do is recreate my experience, which was I met one person and through his specific life story, I got to discover, slowly, this country and understand it and understand families and communities and change.

And so I thought, "Well, if we could do that a second time for a much wider audience." To me, it's a very real way to connect two cultures than the sort of, outside/in kind of thing. It was just totally a personal idea. And I thought it was cool. And I developed a 15 minute pitch and a three-page treatment. And that was based on aspects of the fairy tale that I wanted to embrace and aspects of this personal story that I wanted to capture. But the high concept was like the Aladdin story in modern China.

And then that got a lot of interest, as a high concept, from all the studios here. So I went around and met with all those people and did the pitch. But honestly, those conversations, especially at that time, were pretty discouraging. Cause it would be like, "So we love this idea, Chinese Aladdin." I'm like, "Great, so I'm gonna give you my pitch." And they're like, "Oh, don't worry about it. We just need to get this thing done. Let's just get out there. Whatever it is. Chinese Aladdin." And I was like, "Right, but I have a very specific story I want to tell." And they're like, "Oh sure. Anyways, We just love this idea of it." And I'm like, "I haven't told you the idea!"

And then I had a meeting with this Space Effects, which is not even an animation studio, just a VFX company in Beijing. But they have a team of young Chinese millennials, basically, who helped develop it, they wanted to get into animation. So I met with them and they were like, "So cool. But what's your story?" I was like, "Ooh, okay!" And then I tell that story and they're like, "Oh, this is good. We like this. This speaks to some of our generational things, but here's all the shit you have totally wrong." Like, "Are you joking?" They're like, "He's not gonna hug his mom in the first scene of the movie." And I'm like, "Right. Of course."

So as soon as I talked to them, I'm like, "Oh, that's the only choice. I have to do it with these guys." And so the movie was, I mean, it's essentially up until about year three, it's an indie animated movie. They financed the first two years of development. And I went over and researched for almost six weeks, going around and interviewing and going to Shanghai and Beijing. And writing the first draft of the script, and then working with their team to revise it. And really just trying to get to some solid starting point of a framework for all the ideas we had that the movie could serve.

But it was a total... I mean, the longest, stupidest journey to take. On the other hand, I think anything else would have been a disaster cause you can't make this in LA. This was 2014 when I finally set off on this journey. And I thought, "Well, all we have to do is build an animation studio from scratch. Recruit..." Cause the way I envisioned it, you know, I came from DreamWorks and Disney. And especially in the big studio environment, it's a minimum of a hundred million bucks upwards to 150, 175.

So that was the only quality level that I knew. And so I'm like, "Well, it's gonna be that, it just has to be." And this was a $35 million movie. So that's one of my big sources of pride, which doesn't mean anything except to other animation people, is that it's out there holding its own with movies that have five times the budget

Sarah Enni:  You've had a lot of experience on movies, you've written, you have this really personal connection to this story. You've chosen the partners that you feel confident with. How do you become a director? Like how do you even know where to step? Like that feels so wild to me.

Chris Appelhans:  I think that for me, what saved me, was I knew story. I knew how to write. I knew how to storyboard at a basic level. And I designed and worked on a lot of movies. And I'd spent time in editorial. So to me, writing, directing the performances, figuring out how the hell you're gonna shoot it, and how it's all gonna get cut together and have a coherent look, those are the key ingredients of directing.

And no director is gonna be elite in all of those. Spielberg doesn't write any of his movies cause he knows other people are way better at it. And it should be that way. If you're doing everything, you've made a terrible mistake. Because there are people who are better than you, that will make you look way smarter if you hire them.

So I think for me, my strengths starting out, were that I knew story. I knew how to design movies. I sort of knew how to shoot them. Sort of knew how to edit them. And the rest was total terrified improvisation. Which turns out, when you talk to other directors, you're like, "So when's that gonna go away?" They're like, "What are you talking about?"

Sarah Enni:  You've done a really good job of pitching, overall, a little bit of what Wish Dragon is about, but can you give like the official pitch?

Chris Appelhans:  In a nutshell, it is the archetypal Aladdin folk tale, but transposed into modern day Shanghai. It's this 19 year old college kid, Din, and his childhood friends. He grew up in a Shikamin, which is like a poor communal neighborhood, not even poor, it was just all neighborhoods in China at this time, in the eighties and nineties. This communal equivalent of like a huge apartment building where everyone shares a bathroom. It's a very unique, amazing setting to grow up in. He and his childhood best friend, Lena, grow up there. And then her family, as happens all the time in China, become bajillionaires overnight. And they move to the fancy part of Shanghai and at 10 years old, or whatever, they're separated.

And so, at 19 years old, he's at a real fork in the road of his life and feeling like the world has changed around him. And he has a certain set of values that are very much humane and based on just caring about his friends and his family, before anything else. And he's totally, secretly, freaking out that that's not sustainable. And so he's trying to get back in touch with his childhood friend cause he feels like, if there's one other person in the world who feels this way about life, it's this person.

And in the course of that, he finds this teapot and summons the genie. And then we introduce Long, who's the Wish Dragon character. And the story is really about this bromance and Long is the opposite of your best friend genie. He's very charming, but he's basically a terrible person. And every Wish Dragon has to serve 10 masters before they're free to go off to the spirit world.

So when he comes out, Din is his very last master and he's basically like, "I don't fucking care what you wish for. I recommend like a pile of gold and then, I don't know, another pile of gold. What could be better than that?" So he's like a Tony Stark. He's sort of a voice of all of our secret like, "Well maybe I would wish for a lot of money. That sounds great!" And of course, what Din wants is this friend which cannot be wished for. And so, basically, Long is stuck with this annoying ass kid and drags them on this journey in pursuit of this very idealistic relationship. And in the course of doing that, they both kind of change.

But it is, in a lot of the superficial plot points, it will look like the Aladdin movie or folk tale and then underneath, I think, it's a much different story in terms of who the genie is, so to speak, and what his arc is. And also maybe a little more of a grounded and less tidy version of how you can retain your identity and your values as you get older, without getting lost in a world that is often telling you, like, "Here's what success looks like: A big fancy house, nice cars. This is how you're gonna define success in your life."

And that's sort of what the core of the movie is about. And we've debated that a lot, writing the film. Because China is a country that is now solidly, in many ways, almost indistinguishable from... You go to Shanghai to a mall, it's a fancier mall than here. And you go to a lot of nice neighborhoods and a ton of cities were just tens and tens and tens and hundreds of millions of people have reached a pretty comfortable middle-class life, but that's all like really a generation removed from almost near starvation.

So to tell those people like, "Money doesn't matter." Like, "Shut up." But you also have, in that frenzy, you can see a lot of loneliness, a lot of isolation, a lot of disenfranchisement of some of the communal values that really held things together before. And as an American, as a westerner who finds my life a little lacking in community, even though it's uncomfortable, even though it's annoying that you know your neighbors so well, it also connects you to this community that gives some fulfillment to your life.

So we were always trying to balance saying, "Money is great, but... it can't provide meaning to your life." It can give you everything else, which is why really rich, old dudes build museums because they're about to go out the door and it's like, "Well, fuck. How can I use this money to feel like I've made some human impact?" And it's why I think there are so many people who have lives of incredible happiness and dignity with very little.

And so if there's anything that the movie does, I really hope that it can essentially leave people with the message that, at the end of the day, whatever your circumstances are, whatever your starting point is, you still have control over the type of person you are. There are a lot of problems that won't solve, but essentially being a decent force in the world and valuing other human beings that you come into contact with, that is where the deepest satisfaction in your life is gonna come from in the long run.

Sarah Enni:  The OG Disney Aladdin is really about power and, of course that involves money. But it's a monarchy, it's kind of a whole different thing. And yours is much more really explicitly about consumerism. He literally sits and talks to a billboard of his friend because she's not physically there.

And the design of China is so realistic which, by the way, is of course how American cities look too is we're surrounded by advertisements. We're surrounded by things that show what you should believe in. Even if it's disastrously at odds with where these advertisements physically are placed, that sort of cognitive dissonance that we've grown to use to, but it really made me... cause you had to design it, so it made me think about that.

Chris Appelhans:  That's very observant. And it's so heightened there. Like when we did our research trips, we would go to these old Shikumen, which are basically those neighborhoods you see. We interviewed a 90 year old lady that was still living in that one apartment and everything else had been demolished. And she's just standing there cooking defiantly like, "No." And then you could just turn around 180 degrees and you could throw your pencil and hit a Lamborghini dealership. And whatever neighborhoods we would research, they were gone by the next year when we would come back. Because the turnover is so remarkable.

I think that's the hardest thing to keep track of in today's environment, which is that our identities... we're so pushed to consider them as a sort of collection of consumption patterns. And that is, "Oh, so you're an Acura owner. Oh, so your clothes are from Madwell."

Sarah Enni:  "I don't buy Apple products." Is like a whole identity.

Chris Appelhans:  Right. And even your consumption of media is like an identity. And I think all of that, in a way, that's timeless, you know? But I think it's a little bit in an absence of like, "Who are you as a person? What relationship do you have with the other human beings that are within a stone's throw of you?" And that's really, for me, I have very little sense of that.

I go play soccer, when I can, on Saturdays like the way I would go to church. It's like my chance to just be around a cross section of random humans from my community and just crack jokes and feel like you can pat somebody on the back and ask them about their day and feel like they needed you and you needed them.

And so I think maybe the fact that I was a little hungry for that was a motivating factor in the movie to try and say, "Let's just not forget that this has a lot of value too."

Sarah Enni:  I love it! Well, I want to kind of start to wrap up here. I did just want to talk about it coming out on Netflix and just what's that experience been like that? It's so different than I'm sure what you thought was gonna happen for most of these six years. But in some ways it's also so cool. Like I told my mom, she was feeling sick, and I was like, "Well, I got the perfect thing. Just sit back and watch this on Netflix." And she was like, "Yay!" So accessible.

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah. Very mixed, but mostly good. I think lucky in the sense that the movie... we planned for it to be theatrical. And then probably six months ago, along with a bunch of other poor movies, all found out like, "You're going to a streaming service." And we're like, "Nooo!" We all love the big screen. Wish Dragon, I don't think is a movie that lives and dies by being in the theater, which is lucky. Cause if you were in the middle of making Gravity and they're putting it on TV, it's like, "Forget it."

Sarah Enni:  I mean, Tenet he was like, "What?"

Chris Appelhans:  Yeah, exactly, it's much more character driven. It's much more based on comedy. There's some lovely scope and spectacle to it, but I was like, "Okay, well of all the projects I've developed over the years, this is one that I feel less freaked out about that.

On the other hand, we went and watched it, just cause they do a little qualifying run so we could go, just the crew, we just went to watch it in North Hollywood, just to have a nice final moment. And watching with a group of people, I'm like, "Oh no, this is fantastic." To be there with a hundred humans, no distractions, riding the rollercoaster. And when a movie works, that's really lovely to ride together.

So that was like, "Oh, that's too bad. I really miss that." But then you find out how many people are gonna see your movie and how, essentially, the barrier to entry is eliminated. And for the type of movie that I'm making, for the people that I wanted to reach, and over this last couple of days that it's been out, that was a very mind-blowing and gratifying thing. Because you don't get any box office bonus, but the fact that 5 million people in Nigeria are gonna watch the story and some percentage of them are gonna take something from it, I'm like, "What? That's so beautiful."

What a magical thing that we have created, whether it's Netflix or any of these places, we've created this sort of messaging portal for anything. It's extensively for entertainment, but it's also for just like, "Here's some human shit that we're feeling over here." And it's like, "I feel ya!" And that's a good feeling. So I think in the big picture, it's a hundred percent, uh, like I'm happy. I'm happy that that's how it ended and it's a good fit for this movie.

Sarah Enni:  Well, I always wrap up with advice. So I'm gonna ask you a completely impossible question, which is... what would you tell to someone who wants to one day direct an animated movie? What are the many ways that you can sort of get started?

Chris Appelhans:  "Ha, You fool!"

[Both laughing].

Sarah Enni:  "Turn back!"

Chris Appelhans:  "Run!"

That's a good question. It's probably different for everybody. I think it's a combination of, wherever you come from into a directing role, if you're lucky, you might understand the craft of like 60% of what's needed. And in many cases, a lot less. An animation, in some ways, is the most intense collaborative form cause it takes so long and the level of specialization is insane. And any one of those specialized parts not working, and everything breaks.

So you could do everything right. You could do your writing correctly, your staging, your story boarding, your comedy, your character development, your animation, and then you light it wrong? And the contrast is on the wrong place and the faces are not looking right. And people can't see what anyone's feeling or thinking and they stop laughing. So it's this sort of delicate Faberge Egg that has to just go through this insane factory and all these hands have to touch it.

For me, I look at it now, and I'd say a big part of it is a vision and a passion for an idea. And then an equally big part is you are doing this with a team and if you don't have the team and they don't love the idea too, and they don't care about it and they don't bring their heart and soul to it, it'll just be a shadow of what it should be.

And so it's partly you, and then it's a huge part of the people that you bring together and then you got to inspire them and you got to make them see what's possible and then let them do their thing. I'm not a natural leader. I'm uncomfortable in that role. I never really wanted it. And then it occurred to me like six months in I'm like, "Oh no, that's the only way this is gonna happen."

And everyone could tell, when I had to get up and speak to the crew, everyone was like, "You look so miserable doing this." But when it came to working on the movie with them on the floor every day, I was so happy and so in the zone with them. So I think that would be my advice. It's project and people that one without the other is pointless.

Sarah Enni:  I think that's a wonderful takeaway. Thank you for giving me all this time.

Chris Appelhans:  Thank you! So many good questions. The writing part is, it's amongst the hardest, and none of the rest of it matters if you don't figure that out. So I feel like that is the horrible burden of writers.

Thank you so much to Chris. Follow him on Twitter @dairysnake and follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni, and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). As I mentioned at the top of the show, leaving a rating or review on Apple podcasts is a great way to support the show and help new listeners find us.

I'm gonna read a recent review that was left now. This review was left by WendyLovesPeterPan. WendyLovesPeterPan says, "Insightful questions, soothing voice. Not only does Sarah have a great voice for this medium, as an author and purveyor of all sorts of literature herself, she's able to ask authors questions deeper than any passing fan girl could. Great author advice. Plus always an extra dose of insightful conversations on life and the creative philosophies that drive our creative careers. She has a fantastic blend of guests writing across all genres, no complaints about anything." And then WendyLovesPeterPan includes my favorite emoji, which is a face just covered in hearts, a blushing face covered in hearts.

I mean, sometimes it's embarrassing to read these reviews in the credits because they're just so, so sweet. That's just the nicest, most generous review and WendyLovesPeterPan, I so appreciate you taking the moment to leave that review because it absolutely means that more listeners will find the show. And it really means a lot to me personally. Thank you so so much.

First draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.

And, as ever, thanks to you, perfect episodes of Frasier, for listening.

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