July 12th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
25 years after the release of the original Space Jam, the Looney Tunes are back with a new basketball superstar, LeBron James, for sequel Space Jam: A New Legacy. It opens in theaters and debuts on HBO Max this Friday July 16th. Director Malcolm D. Lee, of live-action comedy hits The Best Man, Girls Trip and Night School, talks love of Looney Tunes and LeBron, plus the iconic Warner Bros. characters he *couldn’t* include in the movie.
Jackson Murphy: What do the Looney Tunes characters and the first “Space Jam” mean to you?
Malcolm D. Lee: Well, I’ll answer it like this: the universe of Looney Tunes characters means quite a bit to me. They were part of my childhood. That was my Saturday morning ritual: a bowl of cereal and the Looney Tunes, for hours on end. So I love the Looney Tunes. I did not see the original Space Jam movie when it first came out. I was in film school trying to be the Orson Welles and wondering, “Why was I not making movies already?!” I was already doing short films in film school in my parents’ basement. And the last thing I wanted to do was watch what I considered a kids’ movie. I didn’t see the first Space Jam until I started working on this.
JM: Wow. Well, it is fun. I remember watching it once in my house and then it played all the time in the cafeteria in my elementary school on rainy days on VHS. It was a popular choice. But such an iconic movie. And in this [sequel]: LeBron James. Fans of his are absolutely gonna love what he does in this. And he turns into a 2D version of himself in the middle of the movie. How was it for him in the voice booth doing those lines?
MDL: LeBron is a consummate professional. He loves being silly. He loves to laugh. He was game for pretty much anything we wanted him to do. When you’re in the animation booth, you gotta kind of push your voice even more and be a little more extreme sometimes. And he was game for all of it. We did hours upon hours upon hours of him doing it. He had a very busy schedule. He does have a day job! But he’s really fantastic. And the 2D Tune of LeBron – we were all very excited about it, and so was he.
JM: Cool. It was the first time for me to see hand-drawn animation on the big screen in quite a long time. It’s gorgeous looking at the 2D sequences! There’s a “let’s get the gang back together” portion of the movie. What kinds of Looney Tunes studying did you do to satisfy all the fans in bringing them back the way you do?
MDL: I have such a love of them. And then I got a refresher already and then I was reminded of why I love them so much: Daffy and Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny… and Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, who I did not have a great love for – Coyote and Roadrunner. I watched them as a kid but I was like, “Why aren’t they ever talking?!” Then you come to realize, that’s Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. That’s great physical comedy. Coyote just keeps trying. I asked Spike Brandt, who was our resident Tunes expert, “How would Porky do this? What would be his reaction? What is Tweety’s thing that makes Tweety Tweety? Is Tweety a boy or a girl? Is Roadrunner a boy or a girl?” You start to remind yourself of who these characters are and then hear their voices and you go, “This is why I love them so much.”
JM: They are such great characters, and I love the scene in this where they’re all practicing [basketball] in the spaceship. It’s so fast-paced, which must’ve been a challenge for the animators. Could you tell in working with them that that was a challenging sequence to put together?
MDL: All the animated sequences were very challenging. Usually, from my understanding, they would’ve done many of these things and made many of these decisions already before we started shooting. But that wasn’t the case by the time I got on the movie. A lot of things were very much in flux. But something like that, which has such a fast pace… it went through numerous iterations, by the way. We threw a lot of things up against the wall. We had a whole Tune training montage, where they were riding bicycles and lifting weights and running like Rocky in Tune World. There were all kinds of things we were experimenting with and trying and storyboarding out and pitching out but this is where we landed. But to great effect to your point: I think it’s also all very, very beautiful.
JM: And what was the process like in making them into CG characters? Obviously that’s another major point everybody’s talking about. I think they look great.
MDL: Thank you so much. That did take a bit of doing. We knew that we wanted AL-G [Rhythm, played by Don Cheadle] to be evil enough to make them change and bring them into the modern era. And by the end – make sure they were on theme with “be yourselves” and be happy with that. That process was a difficult one because the WAG [Warner Animation Group] artists had to teach the ILM [Industrial Light and Magic] artists about squash and stretch… about their expressions… about the creases in their lips when they smile… to be expressive and to get that charm that these 2D animators are able to get out of the Tunes and translate that to CGI. Not an easy process. A long process and a lot of nitpicking. “We gotta raise an eye. We gotta close the neck. We have to make that more of a bell shape.” We had this great animator Devin Crane, who was a great liaison between the ILM crew and the WAG group, who really helped elevate these CG Tunes.
JM: Two powerhouses there with the looks of the characters and it’s paying off. Zendaya voices Lola Bunny. What made you decide on her? I think she’s fantastic, especially in some of the key, more subtle, emotional moments.
MDL: Zendaya is really having a great moment right now. She’s taking ownership of herself, her brand, her status in the world and her stature. And that’s who we want Lola Bunny to be: female empowerment, powerful, feminine but tough and strong with a little bit of humor as well. She was the perfect person to play Lola Bunny, and we were so fortunate that she agreed to do it.
JM: Yeah. One of the really unbelievable things about this movie is how many characters you bring in for the basketball scenes. Your access to the Warner Bros. archive is just unbelievable. Did you know how much you were getting into and how much access they were really gonna give you?
MDL: No! I did not know. But I’m so glad that they did give us access. I was a little bit greedy. I wanted a little bit more. Iron Giant, King Kong, Neo, the It Clown [Pennywise], Captain Caveman and the Harry Potter kids… they weren’t enough! I wanted the LEGO characters and I wanted the Willy Wonka characters! But you can’t have everything, and we had a great presence from all those things. The TV show Batman, Tim Burton’s Batman – it’s all kinds of great IP that exist and you start to realize, “Wow! What a track record that Warner Bros. has.” Being able to pull all those characters to not only be at the game – to be this great spectacle – but also see what’s not distracting from the game itself. AND being able to go through all the different IP worlds to pick-up the Tunes!
Malcom D. Lee and Jackson Murphy
JM: Yeah. When one of the characters says early on, “Warner Bros.: We Have The Classics”, I’m like, “You do have the classics!” For me, “The Matrix” and “Casablanca” are up there. What are the one or two classic Warner Bros. movies that have always stood out to you – that you’ve always loved?
MDL: I’ll tell you what, I’m a big “Mad Max” fan. But even bigger than that is “Austin Powers”. I love the “Austin Powers” franchise. So glad we were able to include Austin Powers and Dr. Evil in this movie.
JM: There are some big surprises for fans of those franchises and more. When I was Googling today “Classic Warner Bros. Movies”, the fifth film that came-up on the list was “The Hangover”. And I thought, “Yeah. It is a classic.” In a different sense, but it makes sense.
MDL: (laughs) We couldn’t have the Wolfpack show-up, though.
JM: No?
MDL: A little too far [out of] field. What would they…? Zach Galifianakis would’ve been good. If we had a Zach Galifianakis cameo, Yes!
JM: Listen, if you make another “Space Jam” movie or another Looney Tunes movie, if we can get Zach Galifianakis in on this, that would be great. So what do you honestly think – after working with these Looney Tunes characters now and so in-depth on this movie – their lasting appeal is? And what do you think a new generation of kids is going to get out of these characters after seeing this film?
MDL: I hope they embrace them like I did when I was a kid. They’re charming. They’re fun. They’re funny. They’re physical. They are classic, evergreen characters. Their style of comedy is also evergreen. I feel like they’ll wanna see more and more of them as time goes on.
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