Let's get ready to Taaaangllllllllllllle!!! Anybody that still believes Disney needs Pixar to pump out classic animated films will be...ahem...upbraided by Tangled. The 3D, animated Rapunzel retelling is released in the US today with an impressive 88% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics are already calling it the most entertaining Disney film in over a decade. As with all the films in Disney's immortal canon, the heart of Tangled lies in its music. Disney brought in lyricist Glenn Slater (a Tony nominee for Broadway's The Little Mermaid) to put words in the mouths of Rapunzel, her paramour Flynn Rider, the sinister Mother Gothel and the rest of Tangled's colorful cast of characters. Slater took some precious time out of a full schedule of coast-to-coast travel and press junkets to talk about the whole experience. Take it away, Glenn!
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How did you get involved with Tangled?
Prior to my involvement, Disney had approached Alan Menken to write the score. The directors (Byron Howard and Nathan Greno), who are relatively young, told him that they wanted to find an approach to the songs that felt less "Broadway" and more contemporary. I'm a generation younger than Alan, and I make a point of keeping my finger on the pulse of the music industry, so I think he thought that I might be a good fit for the sensibility they were looking for. Together, we looked at the drawings of Rapunzel, our main character; we saw a teenage girl with long hair and a flowing dress sitting barefoot in her bedroom strumming a guitar, and immediately thought: '60s Joni Mitchell-style folk-rock. We pitched the idea to the directors, who loved it, and we were off an running.
How much did you know about the project before you started working on it?
We met extensively with the directors, the screenwriter (Dan Fogelman) and the story team, and were shown hundreds of concept art images and a full storyboard for the project before we wrote a note. One of the great things about working at Disney is that everyone there, from John Lasseter all the way down to the film editors, is an artist, and the dialogue about the project is rich, wide-ranging, and constant. So by the time we were ready to put pen to paper, we had a very clear idea what kind of songs the story required.
Tell me about your history with Alan Menken, and what he's like as a collaborator.
About twelve years ago, Alan was working on a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the lyricist he was colloborating with wasn't working out. Alan's manager, Scott Shukat (who conveniently also happened to be my manager), brought up my name as a possible replacement, saying that my style was close to [the late ASCAP lyricist] Howard Ashman's, and suggested that we meet. At the time, I was in my mid-twenties and hadn't had a single song published or a single show produced, but Alan decided to take a chance on me, and Disney (for whom I had done a project a few years earlier) enthusiastically agreed. We wrote a handful of songs for Roger Rabbit and found that we clicked. The project fell apart soon after, but by then we had been asked to work on an animated Western (which became a film called Home On The Range), and we were off and running. Since then, we've also collaborated on the Broadway version of The Little Mermaid, as well as stage productions of Sister Act and Leap of Faith.
For a lyricist, Alan is a dream collaborator. He has an uncanny ability to pinpoint the exact emotional nuance that a story moment requires, and to translate it perfectly into music, and he does it with terrifying speed: often, after discussing a scene for a few minutes, he will sit at the the keyboard and start playing; three minutes later, he'll take his hands off the keys and there it is -- a gorgeous melody, complete and intact, and perfectly attuned to the dramatic situation. Because he's so prolific, he's not the least bit precious about his work -- if that particular melody doesn't quite match up with what I had in mind, he'll toss it without a second thought and come up with two more that are even better.
Did you and Alan work separately and then get together to hash things out? Or is it more fluid than that?
Generally, we'll sit together in his studio with a script and talk through the scene at length. I'll suggest a title, or scribble a few lines of possible lyric, and he'll start improvising melodies while I sit in the room with him. Once he hits upon something that feels right to both of us, he'll whip up a quick demo and hand it off to me. I then go home and spend about a week working out the lyric. Once I have something, we'll reconvene and then it becomes quite fluid: he'll adjust the melody or harmony to support the words, adding notes here, changing notes there; or sometimes he'll want to change the melody slightly, and then I'll adjust to him, going back and forth until we're both happy.
Were Disney and/or the directors very specific about what they wanted, or did you have fairly wide creative latitude? What kind of direction were you given?
On this film, the directors were extremely specific about what they wanted. They gave us detailed notes about tone, character and the fictional world they were creating, and were assiduous in making sure we delivered what they needed, to the point of vetoing particular words, or insisting on certain orchestrations. For Rapunzel's first number, we wrote four different songs; when they finally picked one, they wanted us to throw out the entire lyric and write a new one with a completely different idea. I eventually did about 30 drafts, each time getting closer and closer to what they wanted, until we finally nailed it. Thankfully, they had a very clear vision of what they wanted; and some things that they asked for that I didn't agree with at the time made perfect sense when I saw where they were ended up.
How closely did you work with each song's performers? Did anything change about the songs in response to their feedback or abilities?
We were lucky to have fantastic singers and actors on Tangled, and we did get a chance to work closely with them in the recording studio, mainly on solving some of the tricky acting challenges in the songs. Mandy Moore, who plays Rapunzel, had to find a tone that somehow balanced a sharp intelligence with almost total naïveté, and to do it in a song crammed to the brim with lyrics; Donna Murphy's song ["Mother Knows Best"] was written to change tone almost line to line, in a way that borders on the deranged. Both of them have fabulous dramatic instincts and vocal chops, and they each found brilliant solutions to most difficult passages, so we happily didn't have to change a thing.
There must be so many differences in word choice, tone, etc. from character to character. How do you get into each one's mindset? And what has to change from one to the next?
This kind of lyric writing is very much like acting: you have to imagine yourself into the psychology of the character, mine the script for clues about what kind of words and phrases and visual details the character might plausibly use, and dig into your own emotional resources to find correlatives for what the character is feeling. The writing becomes almost like staging the piece in your own mind, providing all the voices, settings, lighting clues, the works. In this case, the challenges were considerable: Rapunzel has never seen anything outside of her tower or spoken to anyone other than her mother...so what nouns would she be aware of, what slang would she know, how would she describe things she had never seen or experienced? Flynn Rider has to shift from glib to sincere in the course of the film; how does this change track with the change in the way he talks and sings? Mother Gothel has to seem believably loving and maternal in Rapunzel's eyes, while somehow also being sinister and cruel in the audience's eyes; how can this be conveyed through language?
What was it like seeing the finished movie for the first time?
Absolutely glorious! As I mentioned earlier, everyone in the animation building is ridiculously talented and seeing my own work supported and elevated by the brilliant story artists, animators, and voice actors has been both humbling and exhilarating. Even if I had nothing to do with this film, I'd be blown away by it. I think it's the best film Disney has done since the mid-'90s.
Any exciting projects coming up that you can tell us about?
Our stage version of Sister Act is coming to Broadway in April 2011, with Leap of Faith to follow in November. I'm writing a beatnik jazz musical called Beatsville with my wife, composer/lyricist Wendy Leigh Wilf, and an adaptation of the Coen Brothers' film The Hudsucker Proxy with composer Stephen Weiner. And I just started working on a musical about Harry Houdini, with a book by Aaron Sorkin and a score by Danny Elfman. So...I'm keeping busy, to say the least!
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Visit the official Tangled website to hear the soundtrack, watch behind-the-scenes videos and get tickets!
