Pierre Coffin has been with the Minions since the very beginning. Along with supplying the voices for every single Minion, he has directed or co-directed most of the films that feature them. With Chris Renaud (The Lorax, The Secret Life of Pets), Pierre Coffin co-directed the first two Despicable Me films. Then Coffin teamed with Kyle Balda (The Lorax, The Sheep Detectives) to direct the prequel Minions and Despicable Me 3.
After that, while he still supplied the voice of the Minions for Despicable Me 4 and Minions: The Rise of Gru, Coffin figured he was done directing the little yellow banana-lovers.
“I did not want to go back to the Minion world anymore,” Coffin tells Polygon. “I had done the three first Despicable Me movies and the first Minion movie, so I had done my trilogy and my prequel, if you will. I did everything I thought I was capable of concerning these creatures.”
Then he got a phone call from producer Chris Meledandri, the founder and CEO of Illumination, and it changed everything.
Warning: Major Spoilers for the first act of Minions & Monsters.
“Chris Meledandri called me out of the blue one day and said, ‘Okay, you’re going to say no, but I have this idea that maybe will inspire you,’” Coffin recalls. “Then he pitched me the idea of the movie. ‘It’s a Minion that wants to make a monster movie. I don’t know if he creates that monster or builds it, but in the end, that thing comes alive and turns on the Minions, and then the Minions have to correct their mess before that thing kills them and destroys the Earth and the universe.’”
At first, Coffin worried about when in the existing Minions timeline the film could take place. It would probably have to be after Despicable Me 4, as the previous films in the franchise have pretty much covered the whereabouts of the Minions from the dawn of life on Earth until the present day. Eventually, the idea of there being separate Minion tribes opened up the possibilities for Coffin, allowing him to place this film at the exact place he thought would be most interesting and funny: 1920s Hollywood at the very start of the motion picture industry.
“All the little building blocks just fell into place,” Coffin says. “If they’re making a movie, it’d be super cool to place it at a moment in time where the movies sort of became this industry. Then maybe I could talk a little bit about the industry and hint at a couple of great directors and producers from that era.”
He also threw in some of the biggest stars from silent films.
“From the moment I had that loose structure of what the movie was going to be about, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we saw Chaplin stuck in the gears in Modern Times, Harold Lloyd with the clock, and Buster Keaton with that house falling over him, but do it as if it was the Minions’ fault?”
Image: Universal
One specific historical moment did present a bit of a stumbling block, though. In real life, the arrival of sound in the late 1920s put many silent film stars out of work. This moment also plays a big part in Minions & Monsters, but at first, Coffin wasn’t sure if it should, as he feared repeating other films. “Singin’ in the Rain, The Artist, and more recently Babylon all had that moment with the invention of sound,” explains Coffin.
Meledandri, however, felt the movie buffs in the audience would expect it and be disappointed if it didn’t happen here, too. According to Coffin, Meledandri told him, “Let’s put our twist on it. How are the Minions going to screw up the invention of sound in their own way?” That’s when it was decided that, the reason why the Minions can’t cut it in Hollywood anymore is because no one can understand what they are saying.
Coffin had a lot of fun figuring out which movies the Minions should flub the lines for. He included a tribute to the noir films of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and a war picture, which was also very popular at the time. Finally, Coffin included a spoof of Citizen Kane, with a Minion unable to say the word “Rosebud.”
Image: Universal
Of course, these ideas were shaped throughout production by Meledandri, Coffin, and Coffin’s co-screenwriter Brian Lynch, but many of them came to Coffin during that very first phone call with Meledandri, where Coffin realized he may yet have more to say in Minionese. “It all coagulated around the idea that Chris pitched me,” Coffin says. “How the movie came about is really magic, at least for me.”
