Wallace & Gromit: Nick Park interview

His latest feature film may have taken more than £30 million at the UK box office but the thing that still gets Nick Park animated is short movies. Nick brought his plasticine pals Wallace and Gromit to the Brief Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol recently, and we caught up with the claymation king after a typically self-effacing chat about his career.

"It can often be harder to make a short film than a feature," the 47-year-old reflects whilst sipping tea and chewing Liquorice Allsorts in the Watershed Cinema offices. "I've come at it by trial and error really, not knowing a lot about the theory." That trial and error has led to three Academy Awards for the one-time National Film and Television School student, who admits that all of his lessons "are taken from live-action filmmaking".

Park is best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit, and it's their 1993 short The Wrong Trousers that has proved most influential on his subsequent career. "For me that's a benchmark," he says. "It fitted very well into half an hour, there wasn't too much story, everything was fairly simple, it was very much about Wallace and Gromit's cosy world, and it was resolved in a - I think - surprising way. Not that it aimed to but it ticked every box." It's clearly still working: leading American critic AO Scott was recently moved to write that the world of W&G "is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies".

Given that it takes Nick and his Aardman cohorts five years to produce a new feature, it's easy to see why he's keen to return to shorts in the future. "On a feature, so much rests upon it and there's so much responsibility for it to work," he admits. "I miss the freedom that you have making short films, where you can have an idea - it's all about the ideas - and if it doesn't work, there isn't that much at stake; you can move on and do something else. On a feature film, especially working in clay animation, every single idea you put in gets analysed by so many people that it's very hard to keep your confidence and belief in it."

The filmmaker - Nick Park CBE, to give him his official title - has been animating clay since the age of 11 (check out 1971's Walter Goes Fishing for his first piece of claymation - it's on the Region 1 Wallace and Gromit DVDs) and says that his storytelling skills were honed after joining Aardman in 1985 and spending some time working on TV commercials. "Working on commercials is a very tight discipline," he notes. "It's all about how to tell a story within 30-40 seconds, and that's a great exercise."

And what tips does the genial Lancastrian have for budding animators? "Storyboarding is just so important," he states, "especially in animation." His eyebrows suddenly develop the expressiveness of Gromit's: "When I've been to talk to students, I've been amazed that sometimes they're not doing storyboards. It allows you to make the film in your mind beforehand - you can start editing, jiggle the frames around, and think of the story and structure, which is such an important part of filmmaking. I couldn't recommend it enough actually, it's vital."

Adrian Hennigan | Published 14 December 05