How does anybody give notes to the man who invented the voice?

Josh Wassung spent this year directing the last twelve minutes of Optimus Prime that Peter Cullen ever recorded, and he has now described the job twice, on the same day, to two different people. There was a stage conversation with Steve Weintraub at the Collider and Hasbro screening in Los Angeles, which Collider published in full on September 18 alongside the video. There was also an email exchange with Jackson Murphy at Animation Scoop, published the same day and covering different ground. Bleeding Cool ran a write up of the Collider half on September 24, six days after both originals went out. We went back to the originals.

We have had the credits since the poster went out, and we knew Wassung directed it and Ryan Parrott wrote it. What we did not have was the man who was in the booth.

The job arrived over Zoom. Wassung co-directed Predator: Killer of Killers with Dan Trachtenberg last year, his reps introduced him around afterwards, and Zev Foreman and Cyrus Warner at Hasbro got on a Zoom and asked whether he fancied it. “That’s kind of how it happened. I don’t know how else to explain it. I mean, it helps that Predator was pretty cool.” Parrott’s script already existed, and Wassung says it was already good; but the question Hasbro actually put to him was a scheduling one, how fast he could direct it and how fast his studio could animate it, because the anniversary was not going to move. He puts that conversation in December. Production started in January.

They went back to the paintings and copied the imperfections

“We were really going back to the original art. We looked at original matte paintings from the pilot episode of the series, but also paintings from the movie, and we really analyzed, zooming way in and analyzing the brushstrokes, analyzing the colors.”

Any director can say they went back to the source, but Wassung went back to the brushwork, and what he set out to reproduce was what 1986 animation could not help doing. Asked what would surprise people about making a short like this, Wassung went straight to it: the hundreds of hours that went into making something look imperfect. “If you pause it, you look at the lines around the Transformers, they are not perfect; they are sketchy.” The Animation Scoop answer puts the same thing in production terms. Texture, paint, lighting and compositing are named as four separate departments all working toward one deliberately handmade line, and animation and rigging sit on top of that, emulating what he calls the uniquely fun cheats of a hand drawn robot’s movement [1].

So four departments spent the schedule making a line look like it had been drawn by a tired hand in 1985. Wassung talks about the recording sessions the same way.

Unicron approaching in a still from the 1986 film The Transformers: The Movie, his horned face lit from within against a starfield, the flat cel colours and hard black outlines of hand drawn animation clearly visible

The 1986 film. Wassung’s team went back into paintings like this one and analysed the brushstrokes. Image: Hasbro.

The booth

Cullen was 85 when they met, and Wassung says he looked and sounded it.

“He was 85 when I met him, and he looked and sounded like an 85-year-old. And then he sat in that sound booth, and he was like, ‘Sound check, sound check,’ and then he just turns it on, and it’s like you get chills. He sounds like a totally different human. It just turns on. It comes out of him, even at 85.”

Murphy put a version of the same question to him by email and got the same answer at lower volume: that Cullen could go from a funny 85 year old man straight into Optimus Prime at the flip of a switch, as if no time had passed since the first recording.

Weintraub then asked what it is like to direct the man who originated the part, and got a single word back. “Intimidating.” Pushed for a story, he told this one:

And so, he would just do tons of takes, his own. He would just, “Alright, here’s the line. Cool. I’m going to give you a whole bunch.” And he would do, like, 17 of them. I could tell he wasn’t so sure. You know, “Who’s this relatively young guy, this young whippersnapper,” if you will. And on the comm, I was like, “Hey, Peter, I actually really liked take four out of 17.” And he goes, “That’s the one I liked.”

After that, Wassung says, it became a back and forth, Cullen started asking him questions, and the note Cullen kept giving him was to make sure he got what he needed. From there, Wassung says, they talked about pushing the emotion, and about digging into Optimus reckoning with his life and what the whole war had meant.

Frank Welker, who voices Megatron and Soundwave, recorded on a different day. Wassung says both of them do the other’s voice. “Not one, but both of them would impersonate the other. I’m serious. They would impersonate the other and pretend to be having conversations with the other one. They’ve done it so many times. They would have full conversations. I’m not kidding you.” Two men in their eighties doing each other’s Optimus and Megatron, for their own amusement, and it went down on tape! Weintraub asked whether anyone had got Cullen to record an answering machine message. Wassung was too intimidated to ask.

What it means now

Cullen died on August 26, three weeks before the anniversary run began, and Wassung was asked whether that had changed the film for him.

“It was very heavy to hear of his passing, and immediately I go to, without going into spoilers, him walking into the light. There’s such an emotional moment that we put into the performance. By the way, shout out to Jarret, the voice of Bumblebee. He did such a great job. He brought such emotion in this emotional goodbye. It just felt like immediately, it’s almost like this short was designed as a goodbye, but we didn’t know at the time, you know?”

Wassung’s answer comes out the same way in both interviews: the job was to stay out of the way. They copied the 1986 line work rather than cleaning it up, and Cullen was handed the line and left to find it himself. Wassung wanted the short to end on an open question rather than an answer; and he will not say what the Easter eggs are, yet he confirms they are in there and that a second viewing will catch them [2].

There are two weeks left to take him up on that. The 40th anniversary run is on through October 7 at Fathom, and for anyone who cannot get to a screen in time, the 4K steelbook of the 1986 film is up for pre-order at $56.44, out on November 17.

The full stage conversation, recorded at the Los Angeles screening and published by Collider Interviews.

[1] Wassung’s own list, from the Animation Scoop answer: texture, paint, lighting and compositing working together for the line work, with animation and rigging handling the movement. The Third Floor, the studio he co-founded with friends he met on Revenge of the Sith, carries the “animation and imagery by” credit on the poster.

[2] He was asked whether they are single frame gags or things you can spot on a rewatch, and said the latter. Asked which toy he would go back for, he said Grimlock, and added that he had told his parents at about four years old that he knew perfectly well Santa had not brought it.

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