Looney Tunes: Back in Action

FROM THE SET (posted 2/25/03)

"It's a complicated movie, because half the stars are on the stage, and the other half don't exist," says director Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers) on a lavish sci-fi lab set on the Warner Bros. lot. His human stars, Fraser and Elfman, stand amid this morning's extras, which include a slew of '50s-vintage monsters and aliens. A couple of foam rubber puppets are the only traces of their crucial costars, Bugs and Daffy, who'll be added by animators during a full year of postproduction.

In the tradition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit-or, more to the point, Space Jam, in which Michael Jordan dished out assists to Bugs and Daffy, and Warner reaped a fortune from ticket sales and merchandising-Looney Tunes will blend live action and animation. But this time, Dante says, he and his team of writers (headed by Larry Doyle of The Simpsons) will try to recapture the anarchic spirit of the franchise during the '40s and '50s, under such legendary directors as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng.

Elfman plays a studio exec who fires both Daffy and his partner in crime, a security guard played by Fraser; when Bugs reminds her that he's no good without his comic foil, she agrees to join him and Fraser on an around-the-world search for the feisty mallard, during which they encounter virtually the entire gallery of Looney Tunes characters. Elfman, who was daunted by the task of acting alongside invisible costars (the puppets are only used for scale and location), took the advice of an actor friend who told her to get physical with the 'toons. "With that, my whole viewpoint changed," she says. "I had a scene where Daffy trips me in front of the whole board and the brothers Warner, so I grabbed his beak and dragged him out of the room by it."

After a few takes of fighting off aliens at a top-secret government lab called "Area 52," Fraser sits down to ponder a career that has veered wildly from such serious fare as The Quiet American and Gods and Monsters, to the campy Mummy movies, to this. "I don't know what to say," he says. "I love to work. And c'mon, it's Looney Tunes. I think comedians, myself included, owe them a debt of gratitude. You learn a lot about comic timing, rhythm, pace, joke setup and delivery. It's Funny 101."

—Steve Pond