Make no mistake—Seth Rogen and company take their comedy quite seriously, particularly when it comes to Sausage Party. A triple threat bringing his skills in writing, acting and producing to the Sony animated release, Rogen fought for more than three years to secure financing for the film—which brandishes his and creative partner Evan Goldberg’s signature brand of hilarious raunch—even after securing a staggering roster of A-list actors who would lend their voices to the film.
Eventually finding a home at Sony Pictures, with backing from Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, Sausage Party can certainly be considered a successful experiment, receiving good marks from critics and raking in over $100 million worldwide, balanced against a budget of some $19 million. Below, Rogen addresses Sausage Party‘s long road to theaters, exciting avenues to be explored in feature animation, actor Edward Norton’s surprising behind-the-scenes role in the film, and his hopes for an evolving industry.
Where did Sausage Party come from, as an initial concept?
It started maybe around 10 years ago, when me and Jonah Hill and Evan first started talking about the idea of doing an R-rated animated movie. It was really mostly out of a love for, like, Toy Story [laughs], and the other Pixar movies that were starting to come out around that time. And really, we just kept thinking, “Someone’s gonna do an adult-oriented one of these, at some point, and we just really want to be the ones to do it.”
Parallel to that, we would always joke around about this idea of food in a grocery store. It’s funny—I was actually looking through my computer at old files the other day, and I found the very first outline we ever had for it. It was from 2008, I think, and it was very similar, in some ways, and very different in a lot of ways—you could see the themes for what became the whole movie, but the thing that we really loved was this theological analogy that we could make, this idea that food had a belief system, and that the movie could kind of become about the food exploring its own existence, and really pushing the limits of the rules of these animated movies in some ways.
Speaking to the genesis of Sausage Party, Rogen says, “We just kept thinking, ‘Someone’s gonna do an adult-oriented one of these, at some point, and we just really want to be the ones to do it.’”
Sony Pictures
Generally speaking, as an actor looking at animated projects, what are the unique opportunities inherent in that medium that excite you?
When I first started doing it, honestly, it was just kind of the novelty of it. I was a big fan of animated movies, and so the idea of getting to see myself even represented in animation was incredibly exciting. But the truth is, a large part of the reason this was so exciting for us was because I was doing a lot of child-oriented animated movies, and as much as I loved them, it was becoming increasingly difficult to muster the enthusiasm for them, at times.
I just knew, as good as these movies are, they’re not the kind of movies that I always run out to go see; they’re movies that I always watch eventually, but they’re not the kinds of things that I’m generally incredibly enthusiastic about, because they’re largely geared towards children. That’s why this one was different, I think, and so much fun, because it had all the fun and the novelty of acting and performing in an animated movie, but the knowledge that I was actually making something that I, as a filmgoer, would be really excited about.
Were there specific inspirations for Sausage Party? You’d mentioned previously that this film is certainly without precedent.
Really, the Pixar movies were an inspiration, but when you’re making an R-rated animated movie and the closest thing you have to go on is a Pixar movie, there’s a lot of room there. [laughs] So there was no precedent—that is true. A lot of our exploration and the journey was finding a tone and a style that worked, and how do you balance the subversive nature of it with the child-like quality of it? And the fact that it looks and feels and has the skin of a movie that is more traditionally geared toward children. How much can they swear, and how far can it go? How violent can it be? What are the rules of the violence?
We really found that the only way for it to function in our heads was if every scene was very analogous to a conversation we could imagine ourselves having in real life, basically, and as soon as it was just about food stuff, we couldn’t wrap our heads around it anymore. It always had to be like, “OK, it’s a hot dog and a bun talking, but with the analogy, it’s two high school kids who are in Catholic school and have a crush on each other, and they know they’re not supposed to do anything, but they kind of are fooling around behind the sports shed.” And then, “OK, this is the scene where you are starting to have less faith, and your partner is starting to have more faith, and so you argue about that.” “This is the scene where you’re trying to convince someone that their faith is stupid, but you don’t realize you’re being insensitive in doing that, and only reaffirming their thoughts.” [laughs] That’s what we found we had to do for every scene in the entire movie, no matter how weird it seemed like it was; it had to have some anchor firmly in a conversation that we ourselves could picture having.
Rooting a script like this with dramatic stakes seems like a real challenge, although it certainly works in keeping the film from veering off into sketch territory.
Sketch realm, or something that you just don’t relate to in any way, emotionally. It’s food talking to each other about food stuff, and you don’t care about that, but as long as you always can see what the food is talking about is directly paralleling something you yourself have experienced, then it’s not just food talking. That took us a while to learn—there were times when there were some jokes or scenes that were just based on being food. “We need to find refrigeration, or we’ll start to rot!” And it’s just like, what is that? [laughs] I don’t relate to that in any way.
“There was no precedent—that is true,” Rogen says of venturing into the world of R-rated animation.
Sony Pictures
This film took a while to bring into reality. Does no amount of star power guarantee backers for a riskier or more experimental project?
No amount of star power makes it easy to do something that just hasn’t quite been done before. That is terrifying to studios, in general, if they can’t point to another thing that’s worked that is like the thing you are trying to sell them. But as a filmmaker, the problem we constantly run into is we kind of only want to do stuff that you can’t point to another example of, because it’s only then that we feel we’re doing something that is creatively relevant and exciting. Honestly, the [original] script was pretty much the script that we made—we were very proud of the script, and we thought it was going to be a very original idea.
We thought that people would just flock to it, and that we would have a bidding war, and there would be this amazing frenzy for it. And the exact opposite of that happened—everyone really seemed to appreciate it, and the studios we pitched it to all would laugh, and they’d say, “Oh, this is so funny! This is wonderful…Good luck getting it made.” It was incredibly encouraging in some ways, and then very discouraging, because nobody wanted to make it. It literally wasn’t until Megan came along and was like, “I’ll co-finance this with a studio, and maybe that will take some of the weight off, and some of the fear away, and mitigate the risk in some capacity.” And Sony did it. It would not have happened otherwise.
It’s interesting to see what people can get away with at the moment when animating for television, rather than for film.
Yeah, for sure. It is something that we always were very adamant that there would be a market for, because on TV, the most successful cartoons are for adults. It was because of that that it was even more perplexing that people looked at us as though we were trying to sell them the London Bridge. [laughs] We were like, “No! There’s no movie precedent for it, but The Simpsons is one of the most successful shows in the history of television, and it’s an adult-oriented cartoon. This isn’t that weird a concept.” But it was weird enough that it just hadn’t been done in movies, and so part of our approach was to just approach it like we would approach one of our live-action movies; our whole philosophy with live-action movies is like, what is the amount of money we can make it for, and the amount the studio will give us with no notes in any shape or form, and just leave us alone? [laughs]
To us, the budgeting of the movie is as much a creative decision as the director, the actors or anything like that. It ultimately dictates a lot, and we’re not the kind of people, also, who are just always trying to get the most amount of money they possibly can for their movies, because we want to be sustainable, and we also don’t want to be known for being irresponsible, and taking ideas that are viewed as having a lot of risk and not acknowledging that.
That being said, when it works, it pays off better than anything, and that is also part of what we try to sell ourselves on—if it hits, it could hit big. But I sat in a room with [Sony boss] Tom Rothman, and I was like, “This will work. I just have a sense that people will like this.” And it’s funny because we had released The Night Before already, and I was like, “You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t sit with you in a room before The Night Before and tell you that this is going to be a massive mainstream hit. I didn’t do that; I’m…
