Fancast Exclusive: Horton Hears a Who Co-Director Jimmy Hayward

Finally, Dr. Seuss gets a worthy adaptation in animated form (if only we could wipe The Cat in the Hat and Grinch Fart Jokes from our collective minds). Jimmy Hayward, co-director of Horton Hears a Who, has a strong hand in finally delivering on the promise of Dr. Seuss in fluid, beautiful motion, with the voice talents of Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and the legendary Carol Burnett. I got to talk exclusively to Hayward recently, and here are some of the interesting things he had to say about staying true to the Good Doctor, how he got his cast together and what he learned about the Carol Burnett Show.

We didn’t have the boundaries like gravity and the safety of actors getting in our way, so we could take stuff a lot further and get a lot crazier with stuff. There’s only so much you can do with live action. By animating this picture, we could literally do anything we thought of. It made it an easier experience – not that translating Dr. Seuss to the screen was easy, it was not easy. An incredibly deep process, but we didn’t have the limitations of the real world holding us back, so it felt like the best way to go.

We went to Dr. Seuss’ archives, because Audrey Geisel was an executive producer on the movie and we very much kept the estate in the loop of everything we did. They approved and we loved that. It really gave us a stable sense that we had their approval. We went to his archives and looked at his fine art and I read about 21 original manuscripts. I saw all his notes to himself. I looked at all the memos between he and Chuck Jones from when they did the Grinch cartoon, because that was the one that he was involved in. You can see his taste. It almost gives a real understanding of how he’d have production-designed it. We built a style guide, then we started breaking down the rules of the design sensibility, and from there we figured out “wow, so there’s no straight lines anywhere, put wrinkles in trees this way, and leaves always lean in thirds” and all these different rules.

Jim was our first choice for Horton, Steve was our first choice for the mayor, and Carol was our first choice for the kangaroo – we got all three of them, lucky us.

Before [Jim] decided to do the picture, we went to his place and hung out and talked about it, felt each other out. We came in with the same opinion of who Horton should be as Jim did, and we all love and revere the book and love this character, but we also agree that the simpleton approach that’s been taken before felt like it was not going to sustain a full movie. We felt that if we retained that warm center and that trusting, big-hearted, optimistic character in the middle, he could have flights of fancy and he could be the imaginative guy who would believe without question immediately that there are little people in a speck.

Steve’s a proper genius just like Jim is. Steve will describe himself as put-upon and a little bit panicky, which is kind of who the mayor is anyway. Steve brings great humanity to every character he plays. No matter how much of a jackass the guy is, you’re still rooting for him because Steve lands this humanity to the character that makes you desperately want the guy to win. He has such a great vocal quality, too. Sometimes it’s even what he doesn’t put in that makes his stuff hilarious. His timing is great. He just felt like a great guy to be a microscopic man who’s the only guy in town who knows that a giant talking elephant in the sky is carrying them around on a flower.

[Jim] was writing letters to the Carol Burnett show and saying “I do 150 impressions so I think I should be a regular cast member.” Then he gets a rejection letter and he’s like “You mean… you mean… I got a letter from Hollywood?!” He’s just so excited to hear back from the Carol Burnett show that he didn’t care that it was a big fat “no.” He’s a huge fan, he reveres her, too.

We’d be at craft services eating lunch and [Carol] would be talking about [her] show, because I asked her all kinds of question like the little dog in the Warner Bros. cartoon. “How many hours did you guys prepare? What was the rehearsal like? Who did the majority of the writing?” She said “ah, we didn’t really rehearse. We worked, like, 30 hours a week, because I knew Harvey [Korman] was going to do something crazy anyway. Nobody’s going to stick to the script anyway, so what’s the damn point?”

One of our studio execs is a massive Judd Apatow fan and said “you’ve gotta check out The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” The day it came out, I landed on a flight from New York, and he was so insistent that I go down there that he had a car pick me up at the Arclight and drive me straight there before I could even go to the hotel. Obviously, liking Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared – we’re all fans of those guys and Seth in particular. One of the guys had done a test of this little blue mouse running around inside a cow skull from this desert sequence that we used to have in the movie, and I loved the character. We were over at Jim Carrey’s house and he said “I need a confidant – not a sidekick, just some buddy that’s warning me that I look like I’m out of my mind,” and I said “I’ve got just the character.” I loved that little blue mouse and I wanted him to be in the movie, so Morton the Mouse was born. Then one of our executives, said “dude, we should get Seth Rogen to play that voice,” so we got on it and cast him.

Seth would just roll in in flip-flops and be right in it. It took us a day or two to get the guy going, but stuff like that moment where he said “Whoa, that was weird” or “My brownies are burning, I gotta go” - Seth wrote that.