“Luck”You can turn your day around right now.
Skydance Animation’s inaugural feature, a division ambitiously managed by John Lasseter (ex-Pixar boss), has finally been uploaded to Apple TV+.
“Luck”The story of Sam (Eva Noblezada), an eleven-year-old girl who feels constantly unlucky, is told by Sam. She’s been a part of the foster care system for as long as she can remember, to the point where she has “aged out”she was rescued from her foster home, and now she is rooting for Hazel, a much younger orphan to find her forever family. She thinks that her luck is changing when she meets Simon Pegg, a Scottish talking cat. She follows him to the land of luck. Sam might end up changing their lives and turning Sam’s world upside down.
To realize the ambitious vision of “Luck,”Lasseter and Skydance Animation team contacted Peggy Holmes. Peggy Holmes had worked with Lasseter previously on several DisneyToon features. Holmes spoke with Holmes about the development and release of “Luck,”How difficult it was to test animated movies during the pandemic. Also, whether Lasseter agreed to her argument about the cat talking in the movie. He famously stated that humans and nonhumans could not communicate.
: “Luck”The announcement was made in 2017 by a different creative team. Your appointment was in 2020. How was the whole thing for you?
Peggy Holmes: That’s such a great question. Skydance Animation was my first stop. I was working on a TV series. When asked to direct this series, I looked at all the options. Two things caught my attention. The first was the notion that Sam was being raised in foster care. That was number one. Number two was the leprechaun. These two items were important to me. I am a member of a large family. Family is very important to me. I thought, We have the potential to adopt someone who was raised in foster care and eventually have her find her forever family..
I also thought it was a good idea to imagine that your forever families could be many things. It was an idea I felt strongly about, that I could make something similar. And then the whole leprechaun part — I looked at that one little leprechaun and thought, What if we blow this up into a magical world that no one’s ever seen before that we didn’t know existed? These were just my muddy thoughts that I had. Oh my God, I feel as if I could capture this deep, true emotion core and make it a magic world.This could potentially be very entertaining. So, I guess that was what I meant. “I’d like to do something like that.”They replied, “Let’s go.”It was amazing.
They also claimed that “You have 18 months; get started.”
Like, insane. It’s an honor that you said this. Like, let’s be real. It was a great compliment.
What was the hardest part of turning it around
First of all, I want to make it very clear that we feel super fortunate to have been able to continue working through COVID. It is a great feeling to be able to do what we love. However, I believe that this is one of the many things Kiel enjoys. [Murray, the writer]You can pretend that you have time, as I did. You can pretend you have time. That became a way to work to put aside all that and just do what you love. And, like, somehow we’ll work it out. It was a kind of, I believe, a way to actually work.
What was your luck in production?
We had a lot of luck, my goodness. You are sure to have good luck.
Was it difficult to re-team with John Lasseter.
It was wonderful. What I love about being at Skydance is that we’re very small. We’re growing. We’re growing fast. But we’re very small. It’s really fun to be part of building a studio and the leadership and the challenges that come every day and being involved in helping to strategize on how to build a studio. It was an enjoyable part of my job.
Positive stories are my favorite form of creativity. I do. Skydance and John Lasseter and David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, they really want that animation division to tell deep emotional stories in worlds that are original that we’ve never seen before. For me as an artist, I’m just glad to work in that environment. It’s super fun. John is a great storyteller as we all know. He’s been a great mentor. He’s been very involved in story meetings, and he’s there as much as you need him to be and or not, you know. It’s been a great process.
“Luck”There is a talking cat character. And I’ve always heard these stories about how John never allowed human characters and animals to speak to each other. Do you remember him bringing this up?
It didn’t really come up. And I don’t know why, maybe it didn’t come up because we were building a whole magical world. We’re building a world that none of us knew existed before.
Every day of our lives, we experience both good and bad fortune. What we didn’t know is people over here that are creating it. We just didn’t know that. We did so much research to find the truth. We had done extensive research on icons, symbols, colors, and numbers around the world. I did tons of research about luck. I discovered that luck is a random phenomenon. That’s the thing. Luck happens by chance. You can’t create it. You don’t know when it’s coming. It’s unpredictable. You don’t know if it’ll be good or bad luck
We followed very specific rules about luck. Anything that involved superstition or religion or spirituality was eliminated. Sam also had to be free from clumsiness. The movie’s luck felt like real life luck, so it was very relatable. We didn’t tell a story where now someone is going to create all the bad luck and send it to everyone, because luck is random. We just stuck to the rules of the world and I didn’t have trouble with John. We stayed together that way.
It’s true, there isn’t anyone throwing salt over their shoulder or not trying to step on a crack.
This would suggest that luck has a sinister undertone. This would also indicate that luck could be targeted. And that’s not how luck works.
Other animated films have come up into a little bit of a problem because you couldn’t do screenings the same way that you could in the past because of the pandemic How did you gauge whether or not these things were coming across?
That’s a great question. Here’s what we did — we continued to do internal screenings. Even in the internal screenings, we would send everyone an email with a link to watch the movie at their home. And then we’d come back together on Zoom and discuss it.
An audience preview was done in a theater. We had a lucky break. Because COVID was down we were able give an audience preview. We had to do this even though the movie was only 25% animated. The rest were storyboards. Imagine how nerve-wracking it was to work in a 500 person movie theatre. It was a blessing, I must say. Because, you know, here we are, we’re watching the movie and five minutes in Sam has some physical comedy, bad luck. The audience laughs and then the entire crowd is laughing. And you’re like, “Oh my god. This is amazing.”That experience was invaluable to us as we made the film.
And I will say also, in that audience preview, at the end of the story without giving away what happens at the end of the story, there were two moments… And I was so touched by this where the audience gasped and started clapping. They were so happy it seemed like Hazel was going get Sam’s wishes. And Sam got a forever-family, and they started clapping. So I’m like, “We are on the right path.”That was a truly amazing experience.
“Luck”It is now available on Apple TV+
