Dougal Wilson takes over for Paul King as director of the latest, highly anticipated Paddington film installment. Following great success overseas, Paddington in Peru opens in theaters in North America on Feb. 14. Wilson, who makes his feature directorial debut, discusses what went into this major, complex production. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: That UK box office has to make you feel good.

Dougal Wilson: It certainly does. And yes, I’m very relieved more than anything else. It was quite a daunting prospect to be offered this wonderful film, especially because, obviously, I’m a bit of a newcomer to the whole franchise. I was flattered to be offered, but that immediately gave way to terror because I had a pretty high bar to follow.

JM: Yeah. Many people say “Paddington 2” is the greatest movie of all time. I like it a lot. I like both of them a lot. I read that when you were announced as director of Paddington in Peru, it was about a week after that video of Paddington and Queen Elizabeth II came out, which made waves all over the world. So was that really a crazy week in your life with the news of you joining the franchise coming out and that incredible video of Paddington and the Queen?

DW: Well, I was a bit too busy working on development of the script of this film. In fact, I actually think I was in Peru when the Queen video came out. I wasn’t involved in making the Queen video because I was just very busy prepping this one. That was a wonderful idea and it was really well done. I think I was on a bus traveling from Nazca to Lima in Peru. I’d just been looking at the Nazca lines and I’d been location scouting and just generally researching Peru. So that was quite an all-immersive development process to make this film. It’s a new environment for Paddington’s adventure. We’re very aware that London is very much a huge part of the first two films. So I was very concerned about how we were going to put Paddington into this new world, but keep the same charm and keep the same visual invention and keep the same amounts of visual comedy in this new environment. Traveling around Peru… it’s an incredible country with incredible diversity of landscapes and fantastic culture — and just getting as much information as possible to help me achieve that. And I think I literally watched the Queen video launch on my phone on an overnight bus journey.

JM: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s so cool you got to go to Peru. In “Paddington in Peru”, the family goes there. They’re looking for Aunt Lucy. And there’s scenes of young Paddington and the flashbacks with Aunt Lucy. And lots of, obviously, animation has to go into making the CG characters look good in this environment. When it comes to that animation perspective for those environments, how challenging was it?

DW: I worked with a fantastic team who worked on the first two films. We have this incredible animation director, Pablo Grillo. He’s fantastic. He really is the visual soul of Paddington, along with Ben Whishaw, who provides the voice and the mannerisms and the demeanor of Paddington. It was a well established technique and team to put Paddington into these scenes. The general method was that if it was an interior scene in one of our fantastic sets, designed by our production designer, Andy Kelly, the actors would be, say, in the office of the Reverend Mother, who runs the Home for Tired Bears, which is part convent and part bear retirement home. So there’s some scenes with Paddington and the characters. We have an actor who plays Paddington, Lauren Bertrand. And she literally wears the hat and the coat of Paddington, and interacts with the actors and blocks out the scenes. So we’re able to rehearse with Paddington and everyone gets to know the scene, and Lauren learns the lines and lip syncs the lines, and off-screen we have another actor who sounds a bit like Ben Whishaw providing the lines.

And after a few scenes of filming you really get used to this and you just believe Paddington’s there. But of course then we have to take Lauren out, so the scene is clear. The actors are still there, but now they know exactly where to look and how to act and how to emote. We then film it and get the clean pass. And then, Pablo and his team start their work and complete the magic and provide the animation to slot into the scene. And this works in exterior scenes as well. Sometimes it’s not always Lauren who’s in the scene. If it’s a chase scene — there’s a lot of chasing and action and Paddington does a lot of falling over and flying and floating and he’s in the water a lot — we have other stand-ins as well. We have this physical clown comedian, Javier Marzan, who’s a Spanish clown. And in some of the chase scenes, he also helps us develop the action scenes. We’ll have Javier, who’s a bit bigger than Paddington, but sometimes we actually stick a Paddington face on roughly where it would be on Javier, and develop a chase around a set. Or sometimes we even block it out just in the studio, in the offices or in Framestore, which is where we do our post production and we develop an action scene that way.

We also have other stunt performers. There’s quite a sort of pyrotechnic chase in Act Three where Paddington is falling off cliffs and running down stairs. We have various stunt performers also standing for Paddington. So it’s important to get that real physical representation of him when you start filming and then we add to that afterwards. And we don’t purely rely on post production. We try to get as much of the analog information as we can. And then obviously we have the Ben Whishaw element, which is an enormous part of that. That’s all done during the edit, but we also capture Ben’s face. But it’s not motion capture. We’re capturing it for reference. And we also get a lot of Ben’s performance and that all feeds into Pablo and his team’s work.

JM: This is very Indiana Jones-esque for families and adventurous. And Ben Whishaw did the voice in this and the other two films, as well as an animated series shown here in North America on Nickelodeon. When did you first know and how did you first know the kind of deep connection that Ben has had to this character through this voice performance and in what you can just tell about what he loves about this character?

DW: I just associate Ben’s voice with Paddington. I mean, obviously he’s a fine actor who plays lots of other characters. But in those first two films, it’s quite difficult, when you’re watching those films, to imagine that voice belonging to a human. It works so well with the character of Paddington that you just completely attribute it to Paddington. So when I first met Ben for a read through of the script, and I was sitting in our sound studio, and he started speaking, and I was wearing my headphones, and I closed my eyes, it was very strange. There was Paddington in the room with me, and then when I opened my eyes, it wasn’t Paddington, it was Ben. So you can tell it’s absolutely connected, and there’s something magical about the way Ben performs the character that feels absolutely right. And he also understands… how to intone those lines. And he also understands what Paddington would and wouldn’t say, and that was so helpful to have that experience.

JM: This is your feature directorial debut. You’ve done a lot of music videos and commercials, and I wonder what some of the biggest surprises were for you about directing a big production like this, with the animation visuals factor, with the star studded cast that you have. What surprised you about the feature film directing experience?

DW: Mainly how long it was, because like you say, I’ve been involved in mainly shorter form pieces. The longest thing I’d done was probably a 14-day shoot. This shoot went on for about three months, which is a real marathon, not a sprint. So I had to learn, and luckily the crew will help me not to exhaust myself too quickly because I’m very used to, in my shorter form work, putting as much detail and planning into every moment as I can. And I was going to use that approach with this film, and I did as much as possible, but instead of doing storyboards myself, as I often do, I had to employ three storyboarders and become better at delegation, which doesn’t come naturally to me because I like to be in control of every detail. And I had to learn to trust my team, but one of the big surprises was that it was easy to do that. It was easy to trust these fantastic people I worked with. I had the same cinematographer as the first two films, Erik Wilson. I had my usual production designer, Andy Kelly. I had a fantastic editor, Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. And a great visual effects team. So one of the big surprises was that I could trust people to help me and to achieve this mammoth task.

DW: One of the big surprises is just how many different scenes go into making a big adventure movie like this and how one day you could be filming an action sequence on the deck of a ship, which we had to put on a gimbal in the back lot of Sky Studios Elstree. And then the next day, you could be filming Mr. Brown in his corporate boardroom deciding to jump out the window to do a base jump. The contrast between scenes and readjusting your mind between different things that are completely contrasting and very strange together. They don’t make any sense if you don’t know the script and you just walk into the next stage and suddenly there’s a different set, something completely different. That took a bit of getting used to because I’m not used to making something this epic in scale. Usually it’s more focused on one theme or one scene. So that was very surprising, but it was great fun.

JM: A thrilling experience for you. This will be a thrilling experience for families. Since “Paddington in Peru” is coming out on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, here in North America, the same day as “Captain America: Brave New World”… How do you feel that Paddington is a superhero?

DW: I think he’s a superhero in his world outlook and seeing the best in everybody — and showing us all how if we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.