Aaron Horvath (‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ director) on turning a game into a movie

When Aaron Horvath started working on “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” he and his fellow director, Michael Jelenic, knew they wanted to avoid the mistakes that had plagued so many video game-based movies in the past. They wanted to make this movie a cinematic expression of a gameplay experience. “We knew that people coming into this movie love Super Mario as a character, but they also love Super Mario as an avatar,” he tells Gold Derby during our recent chat as part of our Meet the Experts: Film Animation panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). The two wanted to encapsulate the visceral emotions that players experience when playing the game. “For us, it was the challenge of blending the emotional experience of playing a game with the emotional experience of watching a movie. That sort of core approach informed us all throughout.”

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” from Illumination and Universal, can currently be streamed on Peacock, seeking to put a new spin on the classic Nintendo characters. Mario and Luigi are two Brooklyn-based plumbers/brothers who end up in the Mushroom Kingdom. When Luigi gets trapped by Bowser, Mario must team up with Princess Peach and Toad to help rescue him in the strange new world they find themselves in. The film stars Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, Jack Black as Bowser and Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong. Horvath has previously been nominated for four Emmys, all in the Best Short-Form Animated Program category. He’s been nominated for “Mad” (2012) and three times for “Teen Titans Go!” (2017-19).

In the process of trying to nail down how their character sounds, the one that presented the biggest challenge was Jack Black as Bowser. Horvath saw Black’s voice as usually being sweet and gentle and really wanted him to tap into his imposing rock and roll persona that he was known for with Tenacious D. “We ended up doing a little bit of post-production work on his voice just to see what it sounded like if we processed the voice a little bit to make it sound more like a menacing dragon.” Black really enjoyed what he was hearing and it ended up becoming a part of the character. “It was so much fun for him to hear the processed voice in his own headphones that he naturally fell into this performance and we didn’t end up using any of the post-processing. He just had a ton of fun with it.”