In Herbie: Fully Loaded Lindsay Lohan plays Maggie Peyton, daughter of NASCAR motor racing legend Ray Peyton (Michael Keaton) and proud owner of a run down VW Beetle with a life of its own. Against her father's wishes she continues the Peyton tradition for racing with impressive results.
Keaton himself is best known for his roles as Bruce Wayne and alter ego Batman in Tim Burton's 1989 film and its sequel Batman Returns. His other films include Night Shift, Beetlejuice, Pacific Heights , Much Ado About Nothing, Multiplicity and Jackie Brown.
Herbie: Fully Loaded is directed by Angela Robinson, who brings the much loved Disney icon bang up to date. She made her debut with the feature D.E.B.S.
How important was it to you Angela to make your Herbie film without tons of CGI, keeping it as realistic as you could?
Robinson: "Actually that was one of the first things that came up when I was talking to Disney about doing the movie. I feel kind of alienated from the overuse of CGI in big summer movies. There is some CGI in our movie, but I felt a real responsibility to the origins of Herbie. It was so charming what they did in 1968. Even though the special effects were cutting edge at the time but when you look at them again they have this charm. I also tried to look at the language of Herbie which was very simple and had a lot of slapstick and a lot of heart to it. So in reintroducing it to a modern audience I tried to find the right balance. The original conception was to have him be a full CG animated but I thought it would be more charming and more true to the original movies to make him more low tech. So we went with that."
The car is definitely a 'him' then?
Robinson: "Yeah. That happened very quickly. In the first couple of weeks I'd say move the car here, move the car there, and then I'd start saying things like 'he's coming in late on his cues' and the script supervisor said 'you mean Michael?' and I said 'no, Herbie'. After a while everybody started to relate to Herbie. And now I say 'him'."
This is a fun family film Michael, so how deeply did you approach your character?
Keaton: "I always ask a lot of questions and get things clear with the director before I do anything. Sometimes that's a long process, sometimes it's a shorter process. Here I thought that if I was going to do this I would need to think about it a little bit, without putting the father character in a Herbie movie under too much scrutiny. But you still have to do that basic work. When Angela and I talked about it she was looking at me and probably thought 'wow, he's thinking about this way too much!'. But what I like to do is go all through it and then throw it away and show up and go to work. So that's basically what I did here."
You play a retired NASCAR legend - are you a good driver in real life?
Keaton: "I'm a sound driver; I'm just a very fast driver. After I had kids I really started wearing my seatbelt because he was always telling me to wear it, and he was correct. It took me that long - like a dope - to wear my seatbelt, which was really stupid. It would really bother him if I didn't. And I also don't drive quite as fast as I used to."
How about you Angela, what do you drive?
Robinson: "I drive the most boring car, a silver Honda Accord. It looks like every other car in LA, so all I do is lose my car in parking lots over and over again. I spend hours looking for it, because it's so undistinctive. But it's a great car. I'm a pretty careful driver though. I used to be kind of a speed freak. When I was in college I'd say challenge myself to get to the airport in the time it took to play the extended remix of Pump Up The Jam or something like that. Now I'm kind of a wussy driver."
How was Lindsay's driving before, during and after the film?
Robinson: "We went to a driving school actually, the Richard Petty Driving Experience. Anyone can do this. It's something like a hundred bucks and it's kind of insane - I was asking myself 'why is this legal?'. You show up and they teach you how to drive one of the stock cars, a NASCAR. They give you a lesson of about an hour and then they stick you out on the California Speedway where we filmed the big race at the end of the film. So you're in the actual car and the actual track and they say 'Drive! Fast! Faster - what are you, a wimp?'. We did that and we also had special Volkswagen Driving School . We went to where the police learn to drive in LA. And Lindsay kind of took off in the bug. At first she was learning to drive straight, and then she was just off. We were like 'Lindsay, come back!'."
Was there a great deal of pressure to protect this Disney franchise?
Robinson: "I actually felt the pressure after I took the job. I loved the Herbie movies when I was a kid, and I loved this script. I thought it was going to be a remake, and I was really happy it wasn't, it was a whole new adventure taking the character and putting him in this Herbie Goes To NASCAR story. I thought that was hilarious. Once I got involved I'd have the script out and someone in Starbucks saw it and said 'you're making a Herbie movie?'. Everybody I talked to would remember where they were when they saw their first Herbie movie, or tell me that they owned a VW. That's when I started to feel the pressure. But I didn't so much feel it artistically."
You are one of the few people who hadn't seen a Herbie before, aren't you Michael?
Keaton: "I've been thinking about that and I thought 'did I have a stroke?'. I vaguely remember a Bug with flowers on it, and Dean Jones. That's it. I missed it, I don't know what happened. I know these films existed as part of the culture but I didn't know they were this big. I mean I can remember where I was during the moon landing, and when Kennedy got shot. But I don't remember where I was when Herbie came out."
You're a good guy here but you've played the villain before - do you have a particular preference?
Keaton: "It depends on the writing. Someone asked me that and I said 'no more bad guys' but the I thought what if someone walks in tomorrow and hands me a role and it's so brilliantly written? I would probably do it. So you never really know."
So you try to mix it up?
Keaton: "I used to. Now I don't know that anyone has that luxury because of the nature of the business. I read the other day that in the 80s they were making 700 movies a year. They made 200 last year. That's less than a third. It's unfortunate but that's how it is. If you sit around whining about it you're just wasting time. It's just what it is. I always thought my job was to do something different, I didn't know that there was any other way, really. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. I also set it up early on so that I could have a wide range of places to go, a lot of options. I consciously did it then, but not so much now."
What was your initial reaction to this script?
Keaton: "I thought it was a nicely written film. And when I saw a screening of it I really admired what Angela had done. I thought she positioned the movie really nicely so that for an hour and a half you were on board, as it were. And I thought they created a natural character out of the car. I also admired how good Lindsay was in the movie. She's very talented, but she's actually really good in this movie, and it's sometimes hard to tell in movies like this. I've never worked as hard than I did when I was finding how to do Bruce Wayne in Batman, because I knew that if I didn't do it correctly it would be way off. So I thought Lindsay's performance, inside this world of talking to a car, was really good."
How about your own interaction with the car?
Keaton: "I like finding that really weird place where you play the 'reality' regardless of what it is."
How did you decide how to give Herbie his powers of expression? And was it achieved, with mechanical effects or CGI?
Robinson: "You know, it's probably about 75% mechanical effects. I said I wanted to do it for real and have Lindsay and the actors to act to a 'puppet car' as opposed to a movie special effect. We built four animatronic Herbies, so that if you'd have looked under the hood there was a huge computer inside. It took four puppeteers to operate Herbie. And it's like Michael says about underestimating these things, you look at it and say 'aah, there's the magic car'. But it was very hard to achieve. I had so much respect for the old movies, where so much was communicated through Herbie. Don't forget, he doesn't talk. Everybody thinks it's a talking car, because you always know what Herbie wants. That was a really difficult exercise, asking yourself how a car might express frustration. I was trying to do it as minimally as possible."
What is your abiding feeling about Herbie now that you've made it?
Keaton: "I like the fact that I'm in a good family movie. This is classically 'Disney' and yet is very contemporary - it's retro and yet it's modern. Angela did a really good job of sewing those two things together but when you look at it, it still looks like a Disney movie. And they have longevity."
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