The Big Picture

Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, both experienced in the industry, have teamed up to direct their debut feature, The Beanie Bubble. The film focuses on the women who played a part in building Ty Warner’s toy empire and explores the Beanie Baby craze of the 90s. Gore and Kulash aimed to strike a balance between joy and meaning in the film, creating a fun and colorful experience while delving into darker themes.

Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash may be new to directing, but neither is a stranger to the industry. In addition to co-writer The Beanie Bubble with author Zac Bissonnette, Gore has also written for Saturday Night Live, Futurama, and The Oscars. Kulash has directed over 20 music videos for OK Go and has credits on the soundtracks for everything from The Flash to The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The husband-and-wife duo recently teamed up for their debut feature, The Beanie Bubble, which focuses on the women who helped build Ty Warner’s (Zach Galifianakis) toy empire, which led to the Beanie Baby craze that took the 90s by storm.

Collider got a chance to speak with Gore and Kulash about what makes them good collaborators, what drew them to this story, and how they approached the tricky balance of tone, structure, and color in the film.

COLLIDER: I want to start with probably the most important question, which is what is your favorite Beanie Baby?

DAMIAN KULASH: The snake. No, actually, I’m sorry — the purple monkey that hits the camera in the crash scene.

Such a good scene.

KRISTIN GORE: Yeah. And I really like the ghost — Ava’s ghost in the film.

Image via Apple TV+

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I have to say, Spooky was one of my favorites, too, by the end of it. Damian, you have a composing and music video directing background, while Kristin, you’ve primarily acted as a screenwriter. How did these backgrounds help you prepare for directing your first feature?

KULASH: On the one hand, we never could have made this without already knowing what we wanted to make. On the other hand, nothing can prepare you for this, and so they didn’t.

GORE: [Laughs] But luckily, it was a great opportunity to marry our two skill sets. We say all the time what we made together is so much better than what either one of us could have done individually, and that was really very fun to experience. We have completely different brains but very similar instincts. And so we manage to meet.

KULASH: We just get there in different directions.

GORE: We get there in different directions.

KULASH: I start from the end and work towards, “How do we get to that?” She starts from the beginning. So we meet in the middle.

I love that. Speaking of that, I feel like there’s a really interesting and sort of tricky structure with this film because you jump around, obviously with perspective and also with time. I was curious, was that always going to be the structure? And how did you ensure that that was going to work? Because there are a lot of things to juggle with that.

KULASH: The point of the film, we hope, is not the Beanie Babies, and it’s not Ty’s story — it’s the story of the women. And what we found in the book that we read about the real phenomenon was that there is an interesting thing that happened. It’s a crazy thing that happened, but that in and of itself is mostly just a context for us that it was astonishing how the same cycle kept happening through this story. That this really universal cycle, the female relationship to the American dream, keeps happening. And we wanted to have all three women on the same emotional roller coaster ride, and if we had told it linearly over the course of these two decades, it would have just been three short stories. Or it would have been Ty’s story about gaining wealth, and that wasn’t interesting to us. What was interesting to us was that, over and over again, this same cycle keeps happening. It was important from the very beginning to structure it so that you would feel that same ride.

Image via Apple TV+

Yeah, absolutely. I think that really shines through. There’s a quote that Robbie says that I feel really relates to this film, which is that “it’s the perfect time to sell a little joy.” And I feel like this movie is so joyful, but it also doesn’t shy away from the darker, harder themes. How did you try and establish that tone where you are balancing the raw truth of it but also making a really fun watch experience?

GORE: We’re so glad that’s how it comes across. The only thing we ever want to make and consume is a sort of mixture of joy and meaning where you are exploring things that you really care about, but you’re having a good time with it, too. We sometimes talk about this movie as being like a funeral for the American dream, but a New Orleans-style, second-line parade through the French Quarter type of funeral where there’s some darkness, there’s dysfunction in the story, but it’s also a party. And for us, that was our North Star from the beginning. That’s, tonally, the only way we wanted to make it.

KULASH: And it’s such a small bullseye.

GORE: Yeah, so everything was structured around it just because that’s the only thing we know how to make. And so we’re happy that worked.

KULASH: That’s largely because we’re like, “We’re too tired, at the end of the day, to watch something that is really heavy and painful, even if we want to get into those serious things.” And we’re also too tired, at the end of the day, to watch something that’s super joyful but feel like we wasted our time and we’re not getting any meaning out of it. It’s what I’ve loved in pop music and what I’ve loved in podcasts — it’s like there are those times when you really can fall in love with something because it’s friendly and you love it and it can speak to you seriously. That’s truly, like [Kristin] said, the North Star for us.

And we’re so lucky we found it in this thing. Neither of us cared about Beanie Babies growing up, and no disrespect to him, but we basically still don’t — it’s just that it’s like a bubble of color and joy and absurdity. Really, truly crazy little facts about the weirdest things. That the first-ever, consumer-facing website was made by a first-generation — or, I guess, second-generation immigrant child — who is working as an intern and never got paid more than minimum wage. That such a dark, dark thing in such a bright, bright bubble. And that was what drew us to this in the first place.

Image via Apple TV+

You spoke about color, which is something that really struck me watching it: how bright it is. And then reading the production notes about these women’s very subtle but very clear color journeys was so interesting to me. Can you talk a little bit about establishing the color in those color journeys?

KULASH: We thought early on about two things: one, we didn’t want this to be a pastiche or a cliche of the eighties and nineties. We didn’t want to go into the garish colors of the time and make you feel like, “Oh, everybody’s wearing a Walkman.” We wanted it to be universal and slightly more organized and perfect than real life. We didn’t want anyone to notice that — just have it be slightly more filmic and big. Just have it feel like a fable of the time gone by. But also, we really wanted to differentiate the three storylines without, like…

GORE: Going into different aspect ratios. We didn’t want it to take you out of the story — we wanted it to feel a part of it.

KULASH: And we wanted the editing between them to accelerate so that we knew that, by the time we got to the end of this, we’d be jumping around the storyline so fast that we couldn’t have it be like, “This one’s on 16 mil and this one’s…” It couldn’t be really ridiculous like that. So we gave them all the same level of intensity but really restricted their palates so you’re not going between different color treatments like different cameras. Her world is just always red and the different things around it, and her world is always blue and the things around it. And, of course, we chose primary — we have red, yellow, and blue — so together, they build the whole universe, but you only see it one angle at a time.

GORE: And we had a massive spreadsheet of the breakdown of the whole movie with each character, with all the colors assigned to it going all the way through, and luckily ready and willing collaborators: our production designer and our cinematographer and our costume designer…

KULASH: Not something they normally run into, apparently. You don’t normally show up to a meeting with a giant spreadsheet going like, “Okay, in this scene, you’re allowed to use teal, yellow, and light purple. Nothing else.” And they’re like, “What?” But they hopped on board, and it really worked.

The Beanie Bubble will be available to stream on Apple TV+ July 28th.