Fittingly, given the key role of music in the film, Bird first conceived the idea for “Ray Gunn” – a noir detective caper set in a “Jetsons”-style retro future – after hearing The B-52s’ song “Planet Claire.” To Bird, the tune sounded like a mash-up between the theme song to 1960s detective series “Peter Gunn” and “a ’50s monster sci-fi movie,” Bird says in an interview a day before the film’s premiere. “I went, ‘This is not “Peter Gunn.” What is this?’ And then I went, ‘It’s Ray-Gun.’ And then I went, ‘Ray Gunn: It’s a guy’s name. He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.’”
Michael Giacchino and Brad Bird (courtesy of Netflix)
Courtesy of Netflix
“I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly,” Bird explains, referring to the studio’s reputation for catering to younger audiences than the one he’s aiming at with “Ray Gunn.” “If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, ‘Oh well, it’s meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,’ and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.’”
“Ray Gunn”
Netflix
As it happens, protecting — versus exploiting — art is one of the themes of “Ray Gunn,” which follows the eponymous private detective (voiced by Sam Rockwell) as he uncovers a dastardly plot involving Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a superstar singer with a huge secret.
For Giacchino, the trick to scoring a film filled with so much intrigue is keeping the viewer guessing. “Probably the second toughest thing was just making sure everything was always in alignment thematically, so that I didn’t give the audience something that they shouldn’t be thinking about,” he notes. (The actual toughest, he says, was an intimate scene between Gunn and Nova when they’re first opening up to each other. “It needed to really hit every single emotional beat in this perfect way,” he explains.)
