David Silverman on The Simpsons - Interview
Animator Worked on El Dorado, Pixar's Monsters, Inc.
Nov 12, 2009
David Silverman has been with The Simpsons when they were just interstitial shorts for The Tracy Ullman Show. Jumping to director during The Simpsons' first two seasons, he later left to join Pixar as co-director of Monsters, Inc. After that, he returned to direct 2007's The Simpsons Movie and act as a consulting producer and occasional director.
Suite 101 chatted with David during the 2009 Ottawa International Animation Festival. Note: no tubas were burned during this interview.
S101: How did you get started on The Simpsons?
David Silverman: “I worked in animation ever since I left UCLA in 1983. I was freelancing, bumming around. My friend Bill Kopp and I worked on One Crazy Summer, a live-action film with 10 minutes of animation, because the main character – played by John Cusack – was a cartoonist.
“Another guy who worked on the film, Wes Archer, also worked for Klasky-Csupo which got the job doing animation for The Tracy Ullman Show. I was at a crossroads, thinking I’d quit animation, but I was a fan of Matt Groening, so I figured I’d work on this cartoon for a few weeks.
“I’m really glad I took that gig.”
S101: The first couple of years of The Simpsons, the art changed significantly–
Silverman: “It wasn’t changing. If you look at the end of The Tracy Ullman Show, that's the direction we were going for. It took the first season to get everyone’s drawing up to speed. That was the hard part: that season was only 13 episodes long and the whole time we were training people how to draw the characters. That's why you see the art shifting.
“By the beginning of the 2nd season, I was pretty happy with the way (the episode) ‘Bart Gets An F’ looked. Beyond that, it developed further as we got more and more used to the characters.”
S101: How much involvement did you have with the development of the characters?
Silverman: “I had a great deal; trying to get people to draw together. I did a lot of drawing of proportions, showing how to draw the characters. It wasn’t so much developing the characters as getting everyone to draw them the same way Wes and I drew them on The Tracy Ullman Show.
S101: Who decided to make The Simpsons’ skin yellow?
Silverman: “That was a very interesting decision by our colour stylist Gyorgyi Peluce. Bart, Maggie and Lisa don’t have a hair line, if you make them flesh-coloured, what's their hair? If you make their hair a different colour, then you have to put in an artificial hairline. And that destroys the graphic nature of the character. Think of the way Bart’s head is, with that serrated top. If you added lines for his scalp, he wouldn't be nearly as interesting graphically, and neither would Lisa or Maggie.
“Making everyone yellow did 2 things: it made you accept their skin colour and hair colour. Also, it worked with the rest of our colour palette: pink walls, Marge's blue hair, and green carpeting. All these bright, primary colours; if the characters had been flesh-coloured, it wouldn’t have been as graphically pleasing.”
S101: Like Keith Haring.”
Silverman: “(claps hands) Yeah! Or, going back even further: Peter Max: these vibrant colours. So making the characters yellow solved 2 problems in one move: solving the hair colour issue and maintaining the graphic element. Matt liked it, and that’s where it went.”
S101: What got you directing?
Silverman: “When The Simpsons became a series, they made Wes and myself directors because we'd been there so long.”
S101: And what was your first episode?
Silverman: “The first one of mine that aired was ‘Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.' But the first episode that I actually directed was ‘Bart the Genius.’ That introduced Martin Prince, Principal Skinner, and the whole school setup.
“That was a lot of fun because it had a great dream sequence in it where Bart’s doing a math problem and it turns into a train, and all the characters turn into numbers. The opera sequence was also a lot of fun cutting back and forth.”
S101: What inspired that?
Silverman: “I think a lot of Chuck Jones cartoons, especially for the one-off type editing during the opera sequence.
“In UCLA, I had taken a class in American Expressionist theatre and we discussed (Elmer Rice’s play) The Adding Machine, about an accountant who starts losing his marbles. I asked my professor if I could do a set design for it, which was influenced by German Expressionism like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I kept adding numbers into it; one thing after another turned into numbers, so I used that again for the dream sequence in ‘Bart the Genius.’ I think I overdid it . . . (laughs) no, it was fine!
“The 2nd one I did was ‘Bart the General’ which introduced Nelson Muntz the bully and Herman the one-armed antique dealer. We haven’t seen much of Herman lately (laughs). Then the third one was the Christmas special, which was the first to air.
“What happened was, the guy who initially was supposed to direct the episode dropped the ball and it really threw the whole enterprise into turmoil because it came out so wrong. All eyes were on me because they liked how ‘Bart the Genius’ came out. I think they made me supervising director because producer James L. Brooks said, ‘David did the right thing. Yay David!’ (laughs).”
S101: So they brought you in to clean up the mess.
Silverman: “Yeah, I had to redo that whole episode, that and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ with Ms. Botz the Babysitter Bandit. I also directed (‘Life on the Fast Lane’) which had the great Albert Brooks doing insane ad-libbing as Jacques the Bowler. The first season was fun, but a lot of work.”
(In Part #2, David Silverman talks about going to work for DreamWorks Animation and Pixar.)
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