Brad Bird Reveals How a B-52s Song Accidentally Inspired His New Film RAY GUNN

Sometimes a movie starts with a grand creative vision. Sometimes it starts because you completely misunderstand a The B-52s song.

That’s basically how director Brad Bird first stumbled onto the idea forRay Gunn, an animated sci-fi noir adventure that had been kicking around in his head for more than 30 years before finally making its way to the screen.

I recently attended a screening of Ray Gunn in Los Angeles, and while I can’t get into my thoughts on the movie just yet, Bird participated in a Q&A afterward and shared the wonderfully strange story of where the whole thing came from.

The spark arrived when Bird first heard The B-52s’ “Planet Claire.” The opening reminded him of Henry Mancini’s famous theme for the detective series Peter Gunn, and Bird initially thought he was listening to some strange new version of it.

Then the music took a turn. Bird explained: “Yeah, yeah, I misunderstood a song. I heard B-52s’ “Planet Claire” for the 1st time, and it started out dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. So I thought it was a new version of Henry Mancini's famous song for Peter Gunn, which everyone, you may not know the name, but you've heard it. Trust me.

“And, I thought it was a new version of that, but then it kind of went... And it sounded kind of like alien planet. And I went, it's not Peter Gunn. What is it? It's Ray Gun. And then I went, Ray Gun. What would that be? And it kind of went from there.”

That little musical misunderstanding planted the seed for a movie that would stick with Bird for decades. The project actually predates The Iron Giant, but getting it made proved to be a much longer journey than Bird could have expected.

When the project didn’t move forward at Turner and later Warner Bros., he didn’t spend the next three decades obsessively trying to drag it into production. He packed it away and figured its time had passed.

As Bird put it: “Well, I think it's easy to give the impression that I just stood there waiting to make it, and I, you know, when they initially weren't going to make it, um, at Turner and then Warner Brothers, um, I put it away.

“And I thought, well, that's that idea, you know, it's kind of like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where, you know, it goes into a box and the box is forgotten.

“And so I was, you know, I thought that would be the fate of it, but, when I had some success, people started asking if there was anything I wanted to do, and among many things that I wanted to do was this. And fortunately, eventually, somebody saw it the way I saw it, which is this would be a fun movie, you know?”

It’s pretty crazy that an idea sparked by Bird mishearing a B-52s’ song managed to find its way back to him decades after he thought the project was dead.

Bird went on to make The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Tomorrowland and Incredibles 2, but Ray Gunn never completely disappeared.

Eventually, the opportunity came along to pull it off the shelf and finally make the thing. Now, more than three decades after “Planet Claire” sent Bird’s imagination in the wrong direction at exactly the right moment, Ray Gunn finally exists as a finished movie.