The Kirkland Conversations
Part I. The first in a series of dialogues with animator, artist, director and filmmaker Mark Kirkland.
A while back I wrote a “Suggested Simpsons Syllabus,” a list of twelve episodes from the classic years of The Simpsons that I was recommending to a curious viewer who had limited experience with the show.
After drafting the list I observed that two of the episodes were directed by prolific series director and animation industry veteran Mark Kirkland, with whom I had a couple of nice phone chats earlier this year. So I decided to reach out and ask him if he would mind being interviewed about The Simpsons, animation in general, his other interests and anything else he might want to talk about.
In the course of these exchanges we discuss how besides his decades of working in animation Mark also sometimes makes short films, many of which can be viewed publicly on his Vimeo and/or on his personal website. Mark also makes lively and interesting use of the Instagram format and I can’t recommend strongly enough that you go follow his work there at @markk1914.
These transcripts were edited for brevity and clarity. And to remove interruptive filler sounds from a nervous and enthusiastic interviewer.
Is it okay if I ask you about The Simpsons first?
Yeah!
The two episodes that ended up on my list are “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” because I wanted to try to get at least one Sideshow Bob episode on my list (and I actually selected that one as my favorite, which might be a controversial choice but that’s how I feel). And the other one I mentioned is “A Fish Called Selma,” which I often cite as my very favorite episode. I’d say most of the time when people ask me for my favorite Simpsons episode ever, that’s usually the one I go to first, which I’m happy to talk about why that is.
But do you have anything to say? I don’t know what it’s like as a television director, an animation director, whether or not you remember specific episodes and have strong feelings about them, or…what is that like for you? And do you have anything to say about those episodes?
Yeah, it’s…first of all, when we work on ‘em, you know, we — it’s a team. And the director is kinda running that team. We answer to people and people answer to us. So it’s definitely trying to deliver up to the script. We have very tight, good scripts, good audio recordings that come first. And then we start visualizing. And we’re trying to make it as cinematic an experience as possible, and the script — you always wanna deliver the script but you wanna see if you can plus the script and put in visual things that were yet to be explored or…you know, the script becomes mile posts that you have to hit, you want to hit, but you try to deliver a visual experience for everybody. And the best way to do that is with artists and animators and people who live in the visual world.
The writers, they can visualize what they’re writing…but very often they’re not artists. Some are, or some have a little bit of level; they’re all visualists though in that they can visualize what they’re laying out a blueprint for. But that’s when it becomes exciting for us to collaborate with them. And the voice people. So it becomes a finished piece with the team, the artists. And the director has a lot of different tasks.
Now, when we direct an episode, it’s really like in our kitchen for ten weeks or more, because then we go on to another show. But for two and a half months, or around that amount of time, you’re thinking about that show a lot. So what that means is, if I don’t remember a show, it’s rare, because I worked on it for two and a half months. So there’s usually something that I remember about every episode.
Although I’ve done a lot of episodes.
Is it true that you have directed more than any other Simpsons director? Or is that statistic out of date?
It’s probably going to become out of date with my friend Steven Dean Moore comin’ up because he’s still working and I’m not. I think I still have the record by a little bit. So I probably still am the one. But I was the record-holder for, God, twenty-five years or something. Twenty years probably.
I do have questions that are springing to mind from some of what you just said about the more general process. But I’m curious before I get to those if I mention “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” this great episode where Sideshow Bob gets elected to be Mayor of Springfield…can you remember specific things about working on that? I always think of like the end, there’s that whole parody of All the President’s Men?
Yeah.
I don’t know if you have a specific memory of for example anything like that or is it more kinda like you’ve done so much work, maybe you don’t file those visual memories away?
Well the interesting thing, and this is a parallel: I’m a long-time Beatles fan.
Yeah, me too.
Did a deep-dive into their work and I was reading recently where someone asked Paul McCartney “Do you listen to your old Beatles work?” And he said “Not really.” He said “Unless I’m preparing for a show and we’re gonna cover a song and I wanna go back over it and hear how we did it.” You know?
So that’s similar to your relationship with Simpsons episodes?
Yeah. I mean, like, it may be twenty years since I’ve seen “Sideshow Bob Roberts.”
Because you don’t want to, or because you’re just too busy? What is that?
Probably the same reason Paul McCartney doesn’t. When you’re living with it you’re living it one frame at a time. And often it meant each episode was a responsibility for the directors, ‘cause…the way I put it is, when we used to give tours I would tell the people visiting: “There’s twenty to thirty thousand drawings in every episode.” And any one of those drawings can become a problem for a director. In that if one is wrong, or poorly done, or stepping on a story and can be improved, then back in those days it was the director who was called in to fix it.
There were no digital components at all back in the Nineties?
Not in those episodes, no. Nothing. No. Those episodes still had cells painted by hand. They were shot on 35mm film, in some cases with cameras that were sixty years old. And then it would come back in film and we would sit with our editor Don Barrozo and we would do a director’s trim: make it a nice presentation. And then we would take that presentation in to Fox and present it to Gracie Films, and then they would do a fine-cut edit. The fine cut was usually content, like “We’re twenty seconds too long on the show; what do we cut out.” Don Barrozo, our editor, said “They usually don’t get into the weeds on the editing.” They usually, you know, delete content to squeeze the show into its time length.
But everything was mechanical; everything was old-school mechanical and I have told people, the way we were working…certainly there were aspects that hadn’t been done. But the general technology we used was the same that they used to make Steamboat Willie.
Yeah! In that process, is it like you are showing up to these meetings with the entire team, or only with the animation team perhaps, and then you get told you’ve been assigned a certain episode? And then a script shows up? Is any of this roughly what happens?
Well, actually you’d be directing an episode. And a script would come your way.
They would tell you “This is your baby; you’re gonna own this one.”
Yeah, and as directors we were in a rotation. And scripts were handed out in a rotation format.
So they’re not thinking like “Oh, Kirkland trained with so-and-so,” or “He’s really good at this particular thing so we’ll give him the one where…”
Sometimes. Sometimes that happened. And a lot of it was cloaked. By upstairs, by the writers, producers…we weren’t privy in on a lot of that. One time they did want me on one was where they go to England because I had traveled to England with them and I was, you know, Jim Reardon and I went, we were the only two directors. And Jim was supervisor; I was directing. But it meant I was the only director in rotation that they had gone to England with.
So was this a later one? Was this like “The Simpsons are going to England” kinda thing?
Yeah, with Tony Blair, y’know.
Yeah, okay, sure. I think I’ve probably seen that one, yeah.
Yeah. So that was one that I do know they said they wanted me to do that one. But generally I wasn’t…I never really knew what/why/where, you know? I do know I was the first one to direct…“Principal Charming,” with Patty and Selma, or I guess Skinner falls in love with Patty…
Yeah, it’s a classic, yeah.
Yeah. I later realized reading that they said that was like an experiment for them, to try to go off a main family member and make them so prominent. And it worked. So it meant with the success of that show they started writing more for secondary characters to take a lead in the story.
Yeah, that’s a really good one, too.
Yeah, that was pretty funny.
You started during the second season? Is that right?
I came aboard first season at the end; they still hadn’t aired everything, they were still doing retakes on “Krusty Gets Busted.” David Silverman was…then he had to redirect a good hunk of the “Babysitter” episode. So they were still working on Season One but when I came aboard I was put right onto show five, Season Two…
And you’re like a kid, you’re like twenty-five, thirty years old or something?
Thirty-three. The only director I knew before me that had been older than me was Milton Gray. I’m even a couple months older than David Silverman. Wes Archer’s younger than me, Rich Moore is younger than me, Jim Reardon’s younger than me…so I was the old guy. At thirty-three.
Did you wanna say more about coming on hand and that “Principal Charming” episode before I ask you more questions? I didn’t want to cut you off.
Oh, only that I’ll tell you a funny side story that I remember.
Please.
That one was, character-definition-wise, was “How do we help the audience, besides ourselves, distinguish Patty from Selma?” Patty has the round hair…
Yeah and Selma has the two little, like…
It’s like an “M”. And the other thing was, Sam Simon said, “Well, why don’t you give…” ‘Cause I brought this up to Sam Simon, who at the time was showrunning. And he said “Why don’t you give Selma little earrings that have an ‘S’ on them?” And in a closeup the audience could see an “S.”
Even if they don’t consciously process that.
Yeah, yeah. It’s a little identifier. And that was something that I worked out with Sam. I don’t think we kept it. But I think Patty has big round earrings and Selma had the little “S” earrings.
I do love that Patty and Smithers have both come out as gay now. I actually thought, of the more recent years…maybe it’s not so recent anymore; could already be ten years ago at this point. But the one where Moe became this Harvey Milk-type figure and Smithers kinda had to confront him about the fact that he can’t lead the gay community if he’s not really gay — I actually thought that was one of the better episodes from that era that I had seen and personally I liked how it was handled.
Well the fact that our show even opened that up…you know, we weren’t the first…Will & Grace and Ellen were early on.
But you guys did do the whole Homer’s Phobia; that predated Will & Grace. That’s a brilliant episode.
And that won an Emmy; that was directed by Mike Anderson. And then a couple years later I directed one called Three Gays of the Condo.
Homer moves in with two gay men, right?
He decides he likes the lifestyle and one of them does make a pass at him and then he realizes “That’s not me,” you know?
So for example on Homer’s Phobia, would you ever touch an episode that was not yours to direct? How does it work? Would you be working on things or were you just like “I’m the director of these specific episodes and that’s what I work”?
Yeah, pretty much. The only way we would be involved in another director’s project would be if the other director said, “Hey, could you come take a look at this?” Especially with newer directors, they would come to me; a lot of them had assisted me at various times and a lot of them might come to me while thumbnailing out some storyboards and go “Hey, can I run this past you?” So that would be your only thing was act as a consultant. Or they might particularly come to you and say “Hey, this new guy is coming onto my show; I never worked with him before. What do you think of his work?” They wanna know what his strengths are and what his weaknesses are so they can get a heads-up.
The resources felt tight all the time. The resources for good drawing…it took a long time to train someone to be a good layout artist and to be able to do good acting and good volumetric drawing and good perspective, good composition.
Does that say more about the industry at the time, or something about the show that you were working on in particular because it was such a unique entity? Or is it both? What is that?
Both. It’s both and it also takes time to learn animation. It’s not a quick craft that you learn. You have to be good at drawing, you have to be good at acting, you have to be good at perspective, you have to be good at cinematic thinking, movie-making. So that’s a lot right there! Those things take years. We often felt like it took somebody a season or two — at least a full season and usually we felt, okay, very often they have to work on the show for a year, and even sometimes two years before you can kinda hand them a really juicy scene that you need.
The fail-safe or backstop was always the assistant director and the director going over everybody’s work. And so the directors and ADs were often working long hours, late nights putting scenes together. You couldn’t just keep passing the scene back, passing it back, passing it back, you couldn’t do that. You had to keep the trains moving. You tried to give back and get out of people as much as you possibly could, and as a good director you had to delegate. You can’t take it all on yourself. The people that tried to do that would end up getting ill and having medical problems.
Can I go back to the process?
Sure.
You get a script; they say “This one’s gonna be your show to direct.” Can you talk to me about what happens next? Is it that you sit in the office or you take it home with you and you just read the whole thing through a couple of times? Is it that you as a director start to see, like you said, that cinematic thinking — you start to see these broad images come into your head of what the episode’s gonna look like?
It can be that way. If possible, if the director has the time to his advantage, is to go to the table read and watch the actors perform, listen to the reaction that certain beats get and glean from that any behind-the-scenes discussion of where the idea came from or what they’re expecting to see.
And there might be, if you get to talk to the writers or the producers over there, they may tell you “Look at this comic book.” Or “Look at this movie.” So you go study all the reference. And then if possible you can sketch right then and there ideas as you see them, like what a character looks like. And you can show it to them and they can go “Yeah, that’s in the right direction.” Then you’ve got something to hand to the design department.
Because one of the early meetings you’re gonna have is — the director then sits down with the storyboard artist and sits down with the designers and they have questions for the director. Which is, “What do you wanna see here?” And if the director already has an idea, any thumbnailing, any of that saves a lot of exploration time that people just go ahead and follow your notes. There’s room enough for creativity for everybody. The director does not solve all the problems. But the more prepared those people are on the storyboarding and design, the faster they are gonna get to a finish that’s okayed, rather than “Well, I did three versions that got rejected before I got my fourth one.” They would rather get an okay on a design on the first go-around.
So it’s your responsibility to be clear about what you’re looking for. To empower them to give you good results.
That and then also sometimes the director doesn’t have that time because they’re shipping another show. If you’re in that assembly line during the period I was doing those episodes, I might have been doing three or four episodes a year.
That’s where it comes in that you have to kinda trust your top people to do what they’re trained to do?
And if you’ve worked with a storyboard artist and designer for five or ten years and you know what they’re good at, you could have a pretty brief conversation and tell them “Why don’t you go watch this film?” or “Show me what you got; what’re you thinking?” And then they’ll come back with their ideas. David Silverman, he used to say that to me too: “See what they bring up.” Cause you don’t want to pre-squash ideas. Because somebody might have a better idea than what you would’ve had. And so you might look and go “God, I wouldn’t have thought to do this but this is great and funny; I like it.” And my gauge is: I’m laughing. That’s a good sign. Or I’m really impressed by a visual or “Wow, that’s gonna look really cool.” That’s the kinda stuff we’re looking for. Entertainment.
Once you’ve started to lay the groundwork in your mind, having read the episode and maybe gone to the table read, would you personally yourself start to storyboard the episode? Is that how it starts to take visual shape?
I would thumbnail. And very often on the back pages of my script I would draw little thumbnail sketches, just rough ideas. And I liked doing it, because the saying is in drama and film, “Is that on-script or off-script?” And you can get off-script, like run down a rabbit hole and it’s got nothing to do with the story that you want. But if you’re literally drawing on the script, you are literally on the script. So you’re very close to what they’re — you can check yourself.
But I would very often take a pass and draw as many things as popped into my head. And unless there’s reference which you go to, you do automatic drawing. Like, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind. Try putting that down and look at it. And keep moving fast.
Like letting it reveal itself to you.
Yeah. Like the subconscious; what is the first thing that comes to mind? Cause very often I was trained too that sometimes the first thing that comes to mind is the best.
And then change and edit. And then other people, look at their ideas. And try to be open to “The best idea can come from anyone on the crew.” Try not to be ego first but try to put the show first, to get to the best.
I can jump into memories of “Sideshow Bob Roberts.”
I would absolutely love that, if you wouldn’t mind, please.
Okay, there’s not a lot that I remember but I can remember…maybe this was the first time I directed a Sideshow Bob. And I remember drawing all that hair and going, “Aw, man, what a model sheet!” Cause it’s like he’s got Marge hair times ten.
The way to do it, too, is don’t try to draw all the little bumps; just got for the main shapes. We would do that for our layouts. But also with the time, Harry Shearer did the character Birch Barlow.
Yup, the Rush Limbaugh-like…
Yeah, based on Rush Limbaugh one hundred percent. And when we had a show like that, you know, Harry Shearer was — I don’t know if he’s still doing it or not but Harry Shearer was on the radio all the time doing political spoofs.
I didn’t know that.
Oh God, yeah. And he could spoof the Bushes really well and he could spoof Rush Limbaugh really well.
This was just an L.A. thing, that he was on the radio?
Yeah. I think it was NPR.
Oh, okay.
I think he was on National Public Radio.
I was a kid, I was, you know, how old was I when that episode came out…I mean probably, I dunno, eleven, ten, something. Maybe twelve.
But I don’t think I had ever actually really heard Rush Limbaugh at the time. It was one of the many, many, many times in my personal development and growing up as a Simpsons fan where I could recite and visualize the parody that you guys did backwards and forwards, and only later caught up with what it was actually parodying. Which happened all the time.
Yeah. So, I remembered that being Harry doing a great…
It was fantastic, yeah.
Yeah, he was spot-on. But remembering he was doing that kind of comedy on the radio, so he was all primed.
He was ready to rip and run.
Ready to do it. And I remember the end of one of the act breaks — probably the movie reference we referenced the most on The Simpsons was Citizen Kane.
Absolutely, yeah.
So cinematic. And I remember there’s a scene where “Sideshow Bob Roberts” goes up to the podium and there’s a big visual of his head behind him. Well that’s directly, like we woulda been looking at Citizen Kane and copying that camera angle and that poster behind him. And he goes into that long, long laugh. And it’s very demonic.
Nobody has a diabolical laugh like Kelsey Grammer. He’s absolutely brilliant.
Yeah. And I think Bart or someone had a question like, “Does he find something funny…?” I can’t remember the line but I remember that it was all Citizen Kane shots, you know? And I remember working on the timing sheets. That’s one thing you don’t hear directors talk about too much, is the actual — that’s getting into the weeds.
If you wanna go there, I’m fascinated to hear it. But I’m such a layman, you might have to…
Well, besides the drawing, there’s a process of: how do those drawings get put into a timeline. And we have these exposure sheets, which — think of what a music score is for a musician. Well, an exposure sheet accounts for every frame of film. There’s twenty-four frames in a second, and that’s a movie standard. And you get on one of the columns…’cause it’s all like a spreadsheet, really…but you’ll see where the audio track is read and you can see everything, including the laughter, you’d see the “ha— ha— ha—” spelled out phonetically. And then you have to put the drawing pose numbers and where you’re calling for overseas to in-between them and do the breakdowns. Cause we animated a system called “key poses,” as opposed to drawing one drawing at a time. We draw all the key poses and we rely on assistant animators and animators to fill them in.
Is that what they used to call “in-betweeners?”
In-betweeners, yes. And I remember that — we have professional timers. And they work hand in hand with the directors. But one of the jobs a director does is take a key scene like that and check the timing on that laughter. And you can see the “ha— ha—.”
Now this is really in the weeds, but we have a thing called “overshoot and settle.” Overshooting is like someone, like Buster Keaton running to a bus stop. And he stops on a dime. Well his body would actually overshoot that stop-point and then it would settle back.
So we had a layman’s term, we had a little symbol on the exposure sheet calling for the overshoot and settle. And doing a laugh, “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha,” you know, Kelsey Grammer’s, you would hit the vowels of the “ha.” So on the “U,” “H,” “U,” “H,” you would have the bob, the head-bob, go up on that to hit the accent.
And I remember Brad Bird was very much involved, and had been at that time on The Simpsons for a while as a consultant. But I’ve known Brad for a long time; we knew each other all the way back to CalArts. But he would come through and check in with people and his main job was to go over storyboards. But he would give notes. But he was always on hand, like a consultant, and he was always big on, like, if you had somebody laughing, let’s say, that it wasn’t even and mechanical. That you would stagger the frames. And I remember inching through that laugh to make it feel lively. That’s what it does.
Same thing happens like, an audience clapping — all the directors hated the crowd shots. They take forever. But if an audience was clapping, we would sometimes get it back from Korea and it just felt like the clap itself was very even and mechanical. And I remember Brad talking about, “Well, make sure each character has its own timeline track, but also make sure things aren’t moving evenly, like, make them clap down faster than their hands come out.”
Yeah.
Let’s pause there, hop off this call, and then I’ll send you another link; we’ll get back up and running in a minute, okay?
Sure. Yeah, that’s good.
Coming up in Part II of “The Kirkland Conversations”: Mark and I discuss details of “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” including Mark’s interest in directing courtroom scenes, how animators have to be good actors and how the Simpsons artists would study films they were parodying.