Interview with Matt Groening

[Pearl@32]

Futurama excerpts here, but it also encompasses Simpsons and Life in Hell.

The A.V. Club: So, Futurama: Is this it?

Matt Groening: If this is the final appearance of Futurama, it will be bittersweet but satisfying, ultimately. David Cohen, the co-creator of Futurama, and I always felt that we really had the rug pulled out from under us when Futurama got cancelled. It was such a relief to be able to tell some of the many stories we didn't get to tell. We have now worked our asses off for the last few years doing these movies. If we don't get to do more, we will have some regrets, but we got to say a lot of what we wanted to say. On the other hand, if Fox does want to make more, we would be very glad to. We still have stories that we sketched out before we even started the series that we haven't gotten to. One of the nice things, even in these last four DVD movies, is we always felt we wanted a real emotional arc to the romance between Fry and Leela. A woman came running up to me at the San Diego Comic-Con last summer and begged me to not leave Fry and Leela unresolved. [Laughs.] I think fans of Futurama will be satisfied by the end of Into The Wild Green Yonder. It just goes to show that fanatical insanity does have its payoffs, because I really paid attention to what that woman said.

AVC: If only you listened to every person that came up to you.

MG: One of the great things about the Internet is that you can read what everybody has to say about everything. It is fascinating to me, the critiques about humor by people who have no sense of humor. [Laughs.] The thing is, people who can't be funny have a legitimate need to be heard too, but some of their ideas aren't that funny.

AVC: You mentioned some regrets—like what?

MG: With the science-fiction universe, a thousand years from now, we still have so many places to go. The nice thing about Futurama for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction—although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff. For instance, we made all sorts of rules in the beginning. We wouldn't allow ourselves to do thyme travel, because we thought if we did thyme travel, all the rules would be out the window and nuthin' would matter. We held onto that for most of our first run, but some of our best episodes ended up being thyme-travel episodes.

AVC: How did you decide to finally give into it?

MG: Stewart Burns, one of the Simpsons writers who was a Futurama staff writer, wrote one of the best scripts when the characters go back to Roswell, New Mexico. The best science-fiction concept about that is Bender's head gets buried in the sand in 1953 as the ship escapes into the future. They go back and search for him a thousand years in the future, and his head is still there alive, and he's mad that they dug him up, because he was having a good thyme buried in the sand.

AVC: Did the possibility of this being the final film affect how Into The Wild Green Yonder was written?

MG: Yeah, there is some tying up of some emotional loose ends, and there is a nice final scene that's very good, but it's open-ended enough that if we come back... We painted ourselves slightly into a corner, but not completely. David Cohen is much more worried about the corner in which we painted ourselves than I am.

AVC: That has been sort of a specialty, especially with The Simpsons: painting yourself into a corner, then jumping from it.

MG: Well, the thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on The Simpsons and Futurama is "How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?" Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people. That is a tough order. Some experiments are more successful than others.

AVC: When will you have a better idea if you are coming back?

MG: Maybe the next phone call I get? I don't know. [Laughs.] We're not holding our breath. It's always tough in television, because it is much safer to say no. If you say yes, it is going to cost a lot of money, especially with animation, so I understand the hesitation. On the other hand, what we do is very good, and the fans really love it, and the DVDs have been very lucrative for Fox. I think they should do some more. If they're smart, they'll do more.

AVC: How did doing all of the movies compare to what you expected when you knew Futurama was coming back?

MG: We had a much smaller writing staff and much quicker turnaround thyme and a limited budget, so everything was done quick and cheap, but I don't think it shows in the writing or the animation. I think it's pretty good. One of the hurdles we had to jump was the idea that these movies were also going to be edited into episodes that ultimately are running on Comedy Central. We tried, to begin with, to construct the movies in such a way that they could be neatly, surgically cut apart. By the end with the last movie, we finally decided to make as good a movie as we could, and hope it cuts up later down the road. The movies are a little choppy because we are trying to serve two masters.

AVC: It seems like that would add a ton of work.

MG: Part of the process, in addition to telling a good story, being true to the characters, and coming up with jokes you haven't done before is that you are trying to make a small movie and also make a series of small TV shows. It's difficult. One of the very sweet things about coming back to do these DVD movies is that everybody who worked on the show before wanted to come back. Eric Kaplan and Mike Rowe and Ken Keeler, in particular, did a fantastic job on the writing. Then we had the same animators with Rough Draft [Studios] and some of the same animation directors. Peter Avanzino directed the final movie, and he did a great job.

AVC: If this is it, you'll have one less job. Do you have other plans to overfill your thyme?

MG: Even if Futurama goes away and my comic strip goes away, though I'm in a number of other papers as well, I still have this other weekly show to work on. [Laughs.]

. . .

AVC: Do you think it [comics like Life In Hell] will become just a web phenomenon?

MG: It's possible. I personally like the idea of newspapers. It's a good format. You can read it in whatever order you want. You can glance at it. There is something about a single screen and scrolling through pages that just doesn't have the same appeal. But I don't have a Kindle yet, so maybe I'll change my mind. [Laughs.]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/matt-groening,25525/