After leaving Pixar, where he worked as an artist on the likes of Ratatouille, Wall-E and Finding Dory, to start his own studio, Alex Woo knew he wanted his first film to be about dreams. It took a while for this idea to get deeper than that.
“It’s been nine years in the making, and it started off by just wanting to explore the dream world in an animated space. The exciting thing is that anything can happen if you set a movie there – which is also the biggest challenge, because if there are endless possibilities, nothing means anything, and we needed a way to ground the story and add stakes.
“So I drew from my own personal experience, and a very specific time I woke up from a dream to find my mum at the front door of our house, bags packed, explaining to me and my brother that she was going away for a while. It was a scary time for us, and I just remember feeling like I wanted my family to be whole again; remembering that transformed this story into one that explored waking up to the challenging truth that parents and families might not be perfect, but it’s still worthwhile to have them.”
In Your Dreams, the first film to be released by Woo’s Kuku Studios – pronounced “coo”, the Chinese word for “Cry” - follows siblings Stevie and Alex struggling to adapt to the reality that their parents (Simu Lu and Cristin Milioti) have fallen out of love. While out shopping one day, they discover an ancient book about the legend of the Sandman and discover that it’s possible to get their parents back together; they just have to go to sleep, find him, and get their wish granted.
To get there, they must navigate a land of nightmares, travelling on a flying bed with young Alex’s stuffed animal Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) becoming a living, breathing sidekick on their journey. It was a story mapped out over a period of six months, with Woo building on his experience at Pixar – where the studio’s famed "Brain Trust” of senior creatives are known for completely revamping films that aren’t coming together – to fine-tune both the story and the mythology of his universe.
However, Woo was keenly aware that simply having worked at Pixar was not enough to get studios to take a gamble on his story.
“We started the company with no director credits to our name – working at Pixar gives you some pedigree, but it doesn’t give you a green light, just a foot in the door. We couldn't just tell studio executives that we were great storytellers, we had to show them to convince them, especially when the story we’d written was so cinematic.
“So our idea was to storyboard the entire movie and perform all the key scenes for executives like it was a play – putting on a show for our 30-minute keynote presentation. We had them laughing and crying by the end of the pitch, and one of them told us that it felt like they’d watched a movie; we convinced Netflix we could be capable storytellers by making the entire film right in front of them!”
Don’t worry, Woo recorded that pitch, and he promises you will get to see him and Kuku co-founder Stanley Moore act out all the roles at some point in the future. However, despite effectively bringing the story to life, there was still a lot of fine-tuning needed due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.
“One of the biggest challenges was finding the right tone for the parents’ dynamic, as for a young audience, divorce is a difficult subject that needs to be handled delicately. We recorded arguments between the parents 20 different times, trying to modulate how we could communicate the gravity of that conflict, without making it too off putting or intense for young kids.
“If you pull back too much, you don’t feel any tension, which is necessary, but you don’t want to upset your audience right out the gate. I think we landed in a good place, especially as we stuck to the most important thing where we didn’t paint either the mum or the dad as a villain, or have one who was more obviously in the wrong – life is more complicated than that, and I didn’t want to simplify why a couple might separate.”
That same challenge returned as the story entered the dream world, with Woo struggling to create terrifying nightmares that wouldn’t scare his young audience too much.
“We drew a lot from our own dreams and nightmares, and there’s a naked dream in there taken directly from my own subconscious. I always dream that I’m naked in a department store while I’m surrounded by clothes on the shelves, I have no idea what it means, but this poetic irony has been stuck with me for years.
“I’ve also had the teeth falling out dream so many times, which is a sign of anxiety and not having control; I’m very much a type-A personality like Stevie is in that regard. Those nightmares were fun to do, and I think they help balance out darker nightmares like the tornado storm, helping to modulate the level of intensity so all audiences could find it palatable.”
The relationship between Stevie and her younger brother Elliot – voiced by newcomers Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen respectively – was inspired by Woo’s own relationship with his younger brother, but the similarities between the director and his lead protagonist don’t end there.
“She’s a 12-year-old girl and I’m a middle-aged man, but we share a lot of traits, specifically that desire for perfection. In some ways, that’s great if you’re an artist as you’re striving to be the best, but it’s also a curse as it’s unachieveable, and this movie is me reconciling and dealing with the fact I can never actually achieve perfection.
“If you put too much emphasis on that, it can become unhealthy, and you can get lost in your dreams. That’s where the biggest overlap between me and Stevie is.
“My brother finally got to see the movie yesterday, and I was sad I couldn’t be there to watch it with him. He was really touched by it, which was a nice moment for me – it's always good to sneak a personal film through the system like this, just don’t tell Netflix I’ve done that!”
The relationship between the siblings is all the more impressive when you factor in that, like most animated productions, the two young actors only ever shared the booth once.
“It’s the nature of how animation is done, because of scheduling purposes, and that’s even more the case when these are kids you need to pull out of school! I ended up acting across from the kids throughout, and I feel bad for them, as they’re so great at what they do and I’m not an actor, but they still managed to give really great performances despite that.
“The one scene where they were in the same room was in the Sandman’s Castle, and they disagree about whether they should stay and have their dream come true. It was a physical scene requiring intense emotion, and it was necessary for them to be in the same room to act off each other; it came out beautifully, you can feel the emotion in that scene, although you wouldn’t know the rest of the time they’re acting against me over Zoom!”
With In Your Dreams tipped for big things – awards pundits are even predicting it will get a Best Animated Feature nomination at the Oscars – all eyes are on what Kuku Studios will do next. Woo, quite honestly, has no idea what that will be.
“I wish I could say there was a strategy behind this being our first film, but it wasn’t a mission statement, it was just the first story that got a green light! Luckily, it was the one we were the most excited about, and we’re very proud of it, so it all worked out, but there’s no plan for our next move – we just want to keep telling stories that touch and entertain people.
“Kuku means cry in Chinese, and our big inspiration is the Greek theatre masks for tragedy and comedy, as the stories which have both are the ones I love the most and want to make. want to tell stories that make people cry tears of laughter because they're laughing so hard and cry tears of pathos because they're feeling so deeply.
“If I get to keep doing both of those things, then I will be very happy...”
In Your Dreams is streaming on Netflix from Friday, 14th November.
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