For 30 years, Brad Bird‘s adult-animated noir epic, Ray Gunn, was kept like a secret speakeasy password, spoken in whispers by criminals, rebels, and writers looking for an ending at the bottom of a bottle. After decades in the cask, Bird is finally ready to pour a glass.
In July, I traveled to Netflix Animation Studios in Burbank, California, for an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at Ray Gunn. What I saw was a hard-boiled detective story set in a bustling metropolis where 1940s cinema collides with imaginative science-fiction iconography to create something fresh, innovative, and dangerous.
Among the day’s presentations, I sat in on a roundtable discussion with Bird and composer Michael Giacchino. Together, they opened up about the decades-long journey to bring this sci-fi noir vision to life.
When a project sits on a shelf for three decades, the world around it inevitably changes. But for Bird and Giacchino, the core DNA of Ray Gunn remained intact through every iteration.
Bird: It’s definitely changed, as every project does change. But fundamentally, no. The stuff people think is really current was in there a long time ago. It’s just that it was either ahead of its time or pessimistic about where we were headed.
Giacchino: It was more about listening to things from the past. I became obsessed with a lot of radio plays and stuff like Johnny Dollar and crazy, old investigator things—The Shadow. I listened to those incessantly. A lot of my heroes worked on those.
Every epic story starts with a single spark. For Ray Gunn, that moment arrived in 1979 through a radio speaker and a misheard bassline.
When Bird first heard the B-52s track “Planet Claire,” its driving, repeating opening line sounded to him like Henry Mancini’s iconic “Peter Gunn” theme. Realizing it was a retro, theremin-heavy sci-fi track instead, inspiration struck. “No, no, it’s not Peter Gunn, what is it? It’s Ray Gunn,” Bird surmised. Lightning had struck, and the ideas began pouring down like rain.
Bird: The “Planet Claire” thing, which is what helped me come up with the name Ray Gunn, is what made everything else happen. It was about juxtaposing big band swagger with film noir. So he [Giacchino] clicked in and brought in many other influences, aiming to create a modern noir sound. It comes down to what works with the story as you’re writing. What makes the best movie?
To bring the film’s musical atmosphere into focus, Bird and Giacchino needed a unique vocal force to capture the character of Venus Nova—a search that ultimately led them to New Zealand singer-songwriter Kimbra.
Bird: A great friend of mine, who’s an animation supervisor on Ray Gunn, kept going, ‘You’ve got to listen to Kimbra.’ So, I listened to an album she did, and it was great. When I realized this movie would get funding, we reached out to her. Michael and I met with her very early and started discussing which songs we needed for the movie.
It was really interesting because I could be unbelievably specific. I could say, ‘I want you to write an earworm, but I want it to be slightly annoying, but it has to be something you’d instantly find yourself singing.’ Whatever I said, she did it perfectly. I felt like I wasn’t a director because I was sitting there going, ‘Thank you, I have no notes.’ It was exactly what I’d asked for.
Giacchino: I didn’t have to do anything, really. Kimbra knew what she wanted and exactly what Brad was talking about. She would tell these great stories about being in New Zealand, and she would climb into the trees and sing on her own in this field with no one else there. She said she was finding the voice for Venus’ character. She would climb up into the trees and make up words.
The downside to harboring a world-changing idea for thirty years is watching the rest of Hollywood slowly catch up to your imagination while your script remains trapped in development limbo.
Bird: One of the hard things about having an idea for this long is that, along the way, I watched other films do some element of what we thought we’d do first. Over the course of thirty years, someone used jetpacks, or someone else did something else we were going to do. Everybody’s going to think I’m copying them, but in fact, we were doing it first. If someone backed it, I didn’t see a reason to change it just because someone else had used it differently.
I pulled the story out again during the pandemic. When you pitch ideas and don’t pay for the development yourself, and they choose not to make it, they can make it so you can’t make it anywhere else. That’s the part that drives me crazy. If you don’t want to make it, fine. Let me try to get some other financing for it.
With the green light finally secured at Netflix, Giacchino had to tackle the monumental task of building a score that balanced pulp detective tropes with futuristic wonder without treading on his own past work.
Giacchino: It was a little like Ratatouille in the sense that whatever you can grab that’s in the room, that fits the mold, you can use. There are a lot of synths in this. There’s also a lot of string-based elements with a Maltese Falcon feel. There’s a lot of sax and big band, but I also didn’t want it to feel like The Incredibles.
In this film, there are two main themes: a love theme and the main theme. There’s a detective theme and an Eyera theme. You take those themes, and you keep them consistent, story-wise. That’s the true North Star. It’s so much better to show than tell. Exposition is as weirdly a weapon as music can be. If it’s too heavy, if there’s too much weighted exposition, you get bored. You sit there feeling like someone is trying to teach you a lesson, or keep poking you the whole time.