Jill Culton is the first woman who is the writer and main director of a major, original animated film. Her passion project for close to a decade, DreamWorks’ Abominable, finally opens Thursday September 26th. Culton shares behind the scenes stories about creating the world of teenager Yi and her new yeti friend, Everest.

Jackson Murphy: In July, I visited DreamWorks Animation and saw 30 minutes of footage of “Abominable”. I also met you and many of the other creative minds behind the film. How has your life been in these past two months?

Jill Culton: My life has been crazy in these last two months. We finished the final mix and color timing for the film. And we have been showing the movie and going around the world. Our world premiere was at the Toronto Film Festival… which was fantastic. It had a great response. So we’re proud and we’re so excited.

JM: Abominable is DreamWorks’ first original animated feature since 2013’s Turbo. You’ve been involved in some original fare with the first Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Sony Animation’s first film, Open Season. Have you always been more attracted to coming-up with ideas as opposed to working off of existing material.

JC: I also worked on Toy Story 2, so I have worked on some sequels. But I think the thrill of being a creator – I’m the writer of this project as well – being a writer/director, one of the most amazing experiences is when you get that challenge to come-up with a story yourself. In this case, I got to invent the lure of the yeti. I did research and found out that there’s not much that’s known about yetis, except that they live on Mount Everest. And we’ve all seen those footprints in the snow. But I got to create the whole lure around them – that they have the power to control nature, and what that might look like and his hum that is in harmony with Yi’s violin. All these components are so exciting to be able to work with.

It’s terrifying, too. You hope what you create is going to resonate with the audience. I think sequels – it’s not that they’re not as much fun. They’re a real challenge to see where the journey goes next. You have these characters that you’ve established that you need to build on. And these characters: we’re introducing them to the world for the first time. So that’s really exciting.

JM: And I read that when you were introduced to Toothless and the world of How to Train Your Dragon, that it blew you away. And you were so amazed with the characters and the visuals that you wanted to work at DreamWorks. Toothless doesn’t speak English, and neither does Everest in Abominable. I feel like these two characters would get along if there was a sort of DreamWorks Animation Cinematic Universe.

JC: (laughs) Yes, they probably would get along. You know what really got me when I saw How to Train Your Dragon so many years ago? I had been courted to come to DreamWorks for quite a few years. And that was when they were making Shrek and Madagascar, these wonderful movies that are hilarious with really broad humor. But being at Pixar for the first decade of my career, my storytelling sense was a little different. It wasn’t quite the broad comedy. It was more of the heartfelt storytelling that I knew from Pixar. Those were the stories I was very attracted to. And I think when I saw “How to Train Your Dragon”, I knew that that story was similar to my sensibilities. And I knew there was a place for me at DreamWorks. That’s how that film influenced me.

But the characters, whether it’s Toothless and Hiccup or Everest and Yi, they’re in a long tradition of characters like E.T., King Kong and the girl, and Beauty and the Beast, and The Black Stallion. These movies that are made when there’s a relationship between a human and a non-human character that resonate so well with audiences. This is really classic storytelling, and I hope that really resonates with the audience.

JM: You worked on this movie for several years, then you left the project, and then you were brought back. When I met you in July, you mentioned that you were not surprised when you got the call to return – and that you were waiting for it. And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Was it a gut feeling or a lingering thought in your mind that “they’re gonna bring me back”?

JC: I think it was a gut feeling and a hope. This movie is so dear to me. It’s got a lot of personal elements of my life in it. It was a story that I felt like needed to be told. Sometimes stories hit you like that when you get the opportunity to tell them. I just thought the world needs to see this story. It’s got so many great messages to it and such a strong female lead – the likes that haven’t really experienced before. So when I got to come back and finish this movie and make it what I truly always wanted for it to be, and to actually see it come to life… like I said it was a gut feeling, but I also had this hope for this movie to come out the way it was supposed to be. And it is now, and I’m so excited about that.

JM: As you were making this movie, and especially once you returned to the project, what kinds of gut feelings or hunches (when it came to making certain decisions) did you experience?

JC: This film had, in the end, an 18-month production schedule. And that is pretty tight for an animated film. And we had an amazing crew that was so incredibly talented and also an amazing crew of actors to work with. Because we were going so fast, I was in this mode where making decisions quick and on my feet… I had to do this on a daily basis. I think everything from making decisions to cut scenes that weren’t working, or to take sequences and divide them up and do cutbacks (back-and-forth). This film has more sequences than an animated feature usually does. They usually have between 26 and 30 sequences. This one has 41, so it’s cut much more like a live-action film with inner-cuts. You see this movie and I was like, “Let’s up the pacing. Let’s try this.” That’s the job of the director actually, but my gut was leading the charge on this. I hope it resonates with audiences in a powerful way.

JM: And will you ever look at blueberries the same way again?

JC: (laughs) Probably not, right?

JM: That sequence is crazy.

JC: I wouldn’t mind having a giant one. I just want to experience what that’s like.

JM: There’s the giant blueberries, there’s the field sequence, there’s the cloud sequence. What was the toughest one for you?

JC: You touch on something that was probably the biggest challenge for both myself and the crew. And it’s the magical component of this movie. Everest has the power to control nature and heighten nature with his magical abilities. And these are things the world has never seen before. We’ve seen giant waves done in CG, but we’ve never seen giant tidal waves of canola flowers. And nothing like that exists. So our entire team had to come-up with the technology and the way we were gonna tackle these giant, magic set pieces.

Most of them started a year before they were finished. The big scene on the bridge with the Northern Lights – the kind of magic storm in the sky – that took a year to do. And probably the one that I was worried about the most was the cloud coyfish scene. And part of it was that you’ve just finished this entire third act of action, and I wanted to give the audience a break – and not only that but do it in a way… the last leg of the journey is to get to the peak of Mount Everest, and how in the world are these kids going to do this? So this last little leg of magic should be an inspiration and the audience should be in awe, and their breath should be taken away. And yet if it didn’t look good, or if they looked like hokey fish in the sky, people might just burst out laughing.

So we had multiple conversations with our team (like 60 people in the room) saying, “How can we make these fish look believable, but artistic and almost impressionistic of fish? How can the light of the sun reflect through them to make those orange spots that are signature of coyfish? How are the kids gonna ride atop them? What are the clouds going to do?” We saw test after test that just was not working. And then of course, like every great moment in this movie among our crew, at the last minute, things came together. And I remember all of us cheering in our dailies room when the clouds finally showed what they could possibly look like. Every scene with magic in it was kind of like that. We had to make it up. We had to use our imaginations and come up with a strategy.

JM: And be efficient about it all.

JC: Exactly! With limited time.

JM: Now you’re not gonna have much of a break once “Abominable” opens because you’ll be joining Brad Bird, Dean DeBlois and Peter Ramsey in Italy for the View Conference on VFX and animation.

JC: I’m so excited to be at View. I’ve never been before. It’s one of the biggest conferences of CG in the world. I’m so happy to be going with Dean. That’s so fun that we had movies come out in the same year. And all those guys are friends of mine. [Abominable] will have come out by then, so the good thing is I get to show a little behind the scenes footage. I’m probably gonna talk about music. I just wanna talk about some of my favorite parts and some of the making of this and show some of the team – and how much we work together to create some of these great set pieces that you see in “Abominable”. It’ll be a lot of fun.