“Ocean’s Eleven With Chickens” Chicken Run Dawn Of The Nugget Karey Kirkpatrick & John O’Farrell

After a 23 year hiatus when the chickens made a daring and entertaining escape from Tweedy’s farm, Ginger (Thandiwe Newton), Rocky (Zachary Levi) and their flock are back with a new adventure and new voices. Screenwriters Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, who both worked on the original Chicken Run in 2000, have returned to co-write the follow-up Dawn Of The Nugget. Technically speaking, Karey is the main screenwriter on the original and John wrote additional material.

“We very much inherited the DNA from Nick Park and Peter Lord in the late 90s when we first met,” recalls Karey Kirkpatrick.

Developing The Nugget

Nick Park and Peter Lord, contacted Karey about a decade prior floating the idea of a sequel to Chicken Run. “Whereas the first movie was The Great Escape with Chickens, this would be Ocean’s Eleven with Chickens,” declares Karey. This gave rise to a dilemma – a heist movie needs a “diamond” or other thing of value that needs to be “heisted.” Many creative conversations ensued about corn or chicken feed, but the stakes weren’t high enough to drive a movie. They eventually landed on the idea of making Dawn Of The Nugget a rescue movie. They also decided on Rocky and Ginger having a child Molly (Bella Ramsey) during these intial story meetings.

There was a male rooster character called Nabi who was a friend of Ginger’s in the first film, they wanted to revisit, but he was cut out after the two drafts because he played too juvenile. There was further discussion of revisiting Nabi as Ginger and Rocky’s child to make it a father-son story. But Nabi tested badly and was cut a second time. “You took a feminist anthem of a movie with all these women and the male characters are the buffoons in the first film, and women lead the charge, and turned this into a father-son story,” decried the audience. After realizing the essence of the original Chicken Run was disrupted, Nabi was changed to Molly to make Nugget a mother-daughter story. “This had its own bit of trickiness because we didn’t want Ginger to be that stereotypical overprotective mother worried about her daughter,” adds Karey.

Rocky (Zachary Levi), Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) & Molly (Bella Ramsey). Image courtesy of Aardman Studios/ Netflix

At that time Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) was brought back into the coup to be an additional villain to Dr. Fry (Nick Mohammed). “Ginger could have all these flashbacks to Mrs. Tweedy to demonstrate her anxiety wasn’t generalized anxiety. Mrs. Tweedy also helped the Ginger-Molly story.”

“We had to find that balance between the lovers of freedom, who’d moved on as parents, who were realistic about what they had achieved to protect on their island,” adds John. This is an allegorical look at the issue of an influx of refugees in England. “They’re having to decide whether to escape or rescue everyone. That is a wider political maturity for Ginger and the chickens to realize that it’s not just about their own safety and their own tribe. ‘No chicken is an island.’ Do we just save our little band of chickens, or do we save all of Chickendom? And that was something that hopefully had a little bit more social relevance.”

Writing Characters That Are “Human” Chickens

“We think of them as chickens, to be honest. They are people in chicken suits,” states Kirkpatrick. “The chicken ouver creates joke opportunities. It creates a culture. It creates a world that is unique to animation. It’s a world that is unique to the Aardman style.” Admittedly, the characters don’t look like regular chickens with their toothy grins.

Adds O’Farrell, “When Ginger and Rocky are being overprotective parents, Rocky says, ‘If it’s up to you, Molly would still be in a shell.’ That’s not something a human would say, but it’s perfectly natural for a chicken to say.” The shell gags remind people that the characters are chickens.

He quotes another gag from the first film when Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow) is asked to fly a plane so the chickens can escape the farm. He responds, “No, I’m a chicken. The Royal Air Force doesn’t let chickens behind the controls of a complex aircraft.”

Writing Collaboration

Kirkpatrick and O’Farrell live on opposites sides of the Atlantic which represents a ten-hour time zone difference. Says O’Farrell, “For the first draft, I actually flew out to LA and we just cracked the story together in a week or so. Generally, one of us will write a scene and send it to the other. When it’s 3:00 pm in London, it’s 7:00 am in LA and we’ll talk for three hours or so and then the other one will pick it up.” It’s baton writing at its finest.

We’re a 24 hour writing machine.

 

The duo creates a very detailed outline which they divide and assign scenes. Then they return the scenes for review and rewrite each other. Periodically, they would work virtually in real time.

John O’Farrell trained in sketch comedy and Karey Kirkpatrick in improv and animation. “So maybe sometimes I veer towards a sketch idea for a scene and he’ll make sure it’s serving the macro characterisation and story structure,” confirms John.

Karey Kirkpatrick

“John started in BBC Radio, writing jokes for Spitting Image,” says Karey. “He has way more experience as a straight up comedy sketch joke writer than me. And as a result, I find him to be a much more agile joke writer – especially jokes that leap off the page. I came from an improv background, so my jokes tend to be, ‘riffing together out loud and in the moment’ kind of jokes.” Even when they both agree on a joke, they need to decide where it might fit into a screenplay. “We both worship in the same church. We’re not really filling in each other’s gaps. We just enhance each other,” clarifies John.

“I write humane comedy,” says John. “I tend to pedal in glib irony,” claims Karey. “I think it’s one of the reasons that I love British comedies. I was heavily influenced by Monty Python and the things like The Fast Show and Smack The Pony. It’s just a style that really speaks to me that I like that’s more understated and less in your face.”

“Pretty much every film I’ve been involved with has some kind of positive message that it puts out into the world. I use satire and allegory to make my point on the world and on society.”

Karey has more experience writing feature films as well as directing, so he feels more comfortable with arranging set pieces. He has written 62 screenplays and had 15 movies made os he takes the lead on the screenwriting.

Writing The Heist/ Escape Film

Although Ocean’s Eleven and The Great Escape were springboard movies for Chicken Run, Dawn Of The Nugget didn’t use them as a strict template.”There are certain tropes and we throw little nods to the movie such as going through the tunnel and bouncing the ball like Steve McQueen,” says Karey.

Dawn Of The Nugget clearly needed a breaking in sequence – with chickens. There was an impenetrable place that the chickens had to breach to rescue Chickendom.

“The first Chicken Run movie was set in this nebulous, post war, industrial 50s era. So we decided we’ll have a mod 60s feel to Dawn. really We wanted the place that they’re breaking into to have a Bond feel. When Mrs. Tweedy appears, it’s sort of an early Avengers,” says Karey.

“And the big early idea that we came up with conceptually was that they’re brainwashing chickens to make them happy to die.” says Karey. “So, that gave us a little added layer of diabolical sci fi.”

“One thing that has survived almost untouched since the very first draft, was this short industrial film idea that we had, which was showing how the brainwashing chickens science works.”

“The basic structure of opening on the island and the kid runs away is still intact. The only thing that was different in our first couple of drafts is that the place that they went into was a little bit like Alcatraz,” continues Karey.

Once inside the plant, the second act involves the chickens being in a dark place. John suggested a happier looking place might work better. “That opened the door to some other visual possibilities.”

John O’Farrell

Adds John, “There was another idea which I used to quite like that they were free to choose the red seed or the blue seed. Both lead to brainwashing. There was an allegory for the limited voting choices we’re offered in political parties. The seed made it harder for the chickens to recover so we landed on collars that could be switched off much more instantly.”

Advice To Writers

“I think a great story is a great story, but you have to make the most of the potential for visiting a world and enjoying a cast that you can’t do with a live action film,” states O’Farrell. “And heading into that crazy world where you can really use your imagination. That’s where animation lives at its best.”

Kirkpatrick is more circumspect because with the exponential improvements in technology, the line between animation and live action films are becoming blurred.

He compares the live action and animated versions of The Lion King. “There are some criticisms such as, “Wow, live action is weirdly not as expressive. Because you can’t do the squash and stretch and the kind of things that you can do in animation in a live animal’s face.”

“So, figuring out what medium your story should be told in is the first thing that any writer does. Is this a book? Is this a play? Is this a musical? Is it a TV show? Is it a movie? Is it an animated movie?”

“Something that takes advantage of the unique qualities that animation can bring to a movie, which is the way characters express themselves, the way characters are designed, and creating a special world. Look at a movie like Inside Out and the way the inner life of a human being was realized. I don’t think live action could do that by any stretch,” concludes Karey.

[More: Karey Kirkpatrick Discusses “Smallfoot”]

by Staff Writer

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