Brad Bird really misses the way movies used to be made — or, more accurately, the way movie stars used to be. The venerated director was a welcome presence earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, where he reflected on his 30-year career and teased his latest film, the sci-fi noir Ray Gunn. Endearingly, though, he really gets animated when the conversation turns to the “imperfections” that added charm to Old Hollywood productions.
“There’s a history in animation, if a character is human and at all idealized, they always have to be so beautiful,” Bird tells Inverse. “And you go, ‘No’ — I mean, the most interesting faces that we have, you just think of the 30s and 40s. It’s like Ingrid Bergman: They said her eyebrows were too big and they needed to pluck them when they brought her over to the United States to be in movies. And David O. Selznick flung his body between her and all the people that were ready to fix her and said, ‘Don’t touch a hair on her head.’”
