Director Jeff Rowe hits the sweet spot with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. He made a Turtles movie loaded with nostalgia and Easter eggs, but also one that serves as an on-ramp for Ninja Turtles newcomers.

Mutant Mayhem marks the first time the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are actually played by teenagers. Nicolas Cantu voices Leonardo, Shamon Brown Jr. voices Michelangelo, Brady Noon is Raphael, and Micah Abbey is our Donatello. At the start of the film, Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan) insists that they stay out of sight, otherwise, humans might capture and milk them. (Yes, milk them.) However, given that the Turtles are teens, they’re eager to get out into the world, fit in, and make friends. How exactly can they do that given they’re mutants? By becoming heroes first!

With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem gearing up for its August 2nd nationwide release, I got the chance to have an extended chat with Rowe to learn all about how the story and characters evolved throughout the filmmaking process, why it was vital for the actors playing the Turtles to do their voice recording sessions together, how he figured out which characters would be part of Superfly’s (Ice Cube) crew and more!

Hear about it all for yourself straight from Rowe in the video interview at the top of this article or read the conversation in transcript form below.

Image via Paramount

PERRI NEMIROFF: I love hearing about how films evolve along the way, so what’s the biggest difference between draft one of this script and what people will ultimately see in the finished film?

JEFF ROWE: It’s so different! Draft one of the script they were in high school by the end of act one. It was like entirely a high school movie. Baxter Stockman was a teacher at the school. It was so wildly different, and it just didn’t work. [Laughs] So we had to massively change it.

Because you bring up Baxter, I’m curious, was there ever a draft of the script where you considered making Baxter Stockman Superfly?

ROWE: Yeah, that’s definitely — I’ll tell you a secret. The original design of Superfly was as a mutated version of Baxter Stockman, which is why the toys, which have a really long lead time, the Superfly toy has a sweater and a necktie which is not a thing appropriate at all for his character.

Oh, that’s so funny. I’m surprised I haven’t noticed that.

ROWE: [Laughs] Hopefully no one will. We’ll delete this!

So there’s one answer to this next question, but for all the other characters in the film, which character design changed the most from beginning to end?

ROWE: Honestly, somewhat uncommonly in animation, those are all pretty much what we got. Our character designer, Woodrow White, just hit a lot of home runs. Normally someone will design something and then you workshop it, and you workshop it, and you make it a better design, and you do that. And he would just do these drawings that were so expressive and fun and alive that we’re like, “That’s it. That’s the design. Commit to that! Make it all the way through!”

As you were answering that I started to think about Mitchells vs. the Machines and the evolution you might have experienced as a filmmaker. Can you tell me one thing about the process you used to make that film that you were able to reuse here, but then also the opposite, something that you did on that film and thought, “You know, I can evolve it on Turtles?”

ROWE: Yeah, I think the one thing I learned and continued to use is with Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord] films, they are endlessly iterative. You play to the buzzer, you keep changing things for as long as possible, all in service of making the best film possible. So it’s like, I went into this with an attitude of like, this is not gonna be a script-to-screen movie. We’re gonna storyboard it and put it up and change a bunch of things, and we will keep iterating and making it better until it’s physically ripped out of my hands.

But on Mitchells, Mike [Rianda] and I, I think were somewhat timid. We had never directed before and were like, ‘What if we made it look kind of cool, and we tried some things,’ but if someone would say, “Oh, that’s not technically possible,’ we’d be like, ‘Oh okay, I guess we won’t do that then.’ And on this film, I’m like, ‘No, I know it’s technologically possible. I will not compromise on the vision.”

I have so many follow-up questions. First I will say, it’s incredible that your first directing gig wound up being one of my top ten movies in 2021. I adore that movie so, so much.

ROWE: Thank you!

I have the little moose sitting on my desk, and it’s never going anywhere.

ROWE: Oh, great!

With that in mind, what is an example of something you do on Mutant Mayhem that might have made someone say, “That is not possible. Do not do that,” but you stuck to your guns, and now it’s in the finished film?

ROWE: All of these characters kind of have a line around them. It’s often subtle, you don’t see it, but it breaks up the silhouette of the characters. And Mitchells has that too sometimes, but not in all places. And that was the thing that we were told, “Lines around characters is difficult. We’re not gonna be able to pull that off or scale it across the entire production.” And then on this, the team found a way to make it happen, and it just really adds to the hand-drawn quality.

Image via Paramount

This might be more of a producing question, but I was just reading an article about how rigorous this particular style of animation can be. As the leader of the production, the director of the film, is there anything you can be doing in order to make sure all of your animators have the time, resources, and support they need to have a creatively fulfilling experience?

ROWE: I went to art school, I consider myself an artist, and I know how difficult and vulnerable it is to make art. And sometimes you try things and they don’t work, and really making it safe to fail, making it safe to experiment, and making it safe to try things is really essential. And I think we gave the artists a lot of freedom, and we tried to be nurturing through their experiments. And so many of those experiments just ended up on screen.

Can you give me some examples?

ROWE: There’s a joke about like, “Sign my baby,” that’s in the movie, and if you look at the baby design, it is the weirdest, most misshapen thing. I think one of the artists did that in like five minutes. We’re like, “We need a baby!” And he’s like, “Look, here’s what I can give you in five minutes,” And we’re like, “Wonderful!” He was ashamed, like, “I don’t know. Is this okay?” And we’re like, “Yes, that is perfect. It has to look like this.”

I cannot wait to see it again now just to get a better look at this baby.

ROWE: [Laughs] Yeah, get in there. Bring binoculars! Get in close to see it!

What do you think it is about this style of animation that’s really striking a chord with people? What is it about the 2D/CG hybrid format that creates such electrifying storytelling opportunities, and is also just plain old mesmerizing to look at?

ROWE: I think it’s because for 30 years, CG 3D animated films looked the same or was a continuing evolution of one style of filmmaking. And I think that that was moving towards realism and perfection, and I think people don’t feel perfect. We’re flawed, we’re individuals and to see that represented in characters and in design, and to also just see that much unmitigated artistic expression is thrilling because you feel the personality in it, and you feel like, “Oh, this was made by humans,” which is great.

Can confirm that personality shines through. It’s got a texture to it that I think other forms of animation don’t quite get the same way.

ROWE: Yeah, we really wanted that. We really wanted you to feel like the fingerprints of an artist on the film.

I have to ask you about the process of doing the voice recording on this movie too because I know you used an unusual technique where you had your actors in the sessions together. What does it take to make something like that happen? And can you ever go back to recording with your actors any other way?

ROWE: No, never. I’m like, you know, in the way certain directors become obsessed with — like Cassavetes, it’s improvisational and we keep it conversational, and I’m like, I never want to do a thing that’s scripted in that way or rigid in that way again. And there were technical limitations like sound bleeds over. It’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to clean up the audio. I think my hope is that if we do more of these, we can find a really good sound studio that can accommodate four to ten people talking over each other at the same time.

What is the biggest challenge when making something like that happen? Or rather, what is the main reason that every single animated movie doesn’t record its actors that way?

ROWE: The technical limitations of sound bleed and what that does to recordings. But also, for us, we’re like, no, that’s a feature. If you’re just taking the improv take and there’s an echo from a different character, that’s totally fine because we’re just taking all of them talking at once anyway. And then I think also — I blanked on my second answer.

The only other thing I would think of is scheduling.

ROWE: Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what I was gonna say! With four kids who are relatively unknown, they all have careers, but they’re not John Cena and Paul Rudd and Rose Byrne and they’re all in different cities and they’re all filming huge live-action projects. It was pretty easy to get them in a room together.

I feel like no matter who you have in your voice acting ensemble, it is so worth recording that way. The results are stellar in that respect in this film.

Images via AMC; Paramount

Speaking of your voice cast now, which character would you say changed the most depending on what the actor that you cast did in their sessions?

ROWE: I mean, the kids did somewhat just because we had the idea of who the Turtles were and then we met them and saw the way that they talked, and were like, “Okay, this is what the movie has to be now.” Superfly, Ice Cube, was so improv — he said so many things that we couldn’t use in the film. [Laughs] But I think with everyone, we started rewriting the characters to just the way people naturally spoke.

Is there any specific detail in the animation that maybe isn’t the biggest deal for the story or front and center in a frame, but it’s something you’re really proud of that you hope people look out for when they watch the film?

ROWE: Yeah, we did a thing that’s also really technically difficult to do in animation and isn’t done a lot where we just use long takes. And especially with four characters, you have to have an animator animate a shot that’s like 30 seconds long and has four characters moving. But it felt important because not cutting gives you time to hang out with the characters and feel connected to them and feel like you’re a fly on the wall of their interactions. But it also meant filling a lot of space. So there’s a lot of characters talking and then Donnie checking his phone while the others are talking. There’s so many great expressions that are not what you’re looking at when the other ones are talking, so I would just pay attention to the Turtles in the long takes and see all of the wonderful acting that the animators put in.

It makes the space feel real and full, and like it fully surrounds you. I love that quality of it.

I did want to ask you about the choice to either respect canon or do something different and make this movie your own. Can you give me an example of something in Ninja Turtles canon that you knew you absolutely had to uphold? But then also, what’s a time when you were like, “This is where we put our own original stamp on it and do something different?”

ROWE: Yeah, a great example would be the Turtles; they must maintain their personalities. A leader leads the team, does machines, cool but rude, party dude. We wanted them to feel like the characters that you’re familiar with. But, you know, Splinter has a different backstory in this film that has not been in other ones, which has changed in different projects. But that story didn’t necessarily make sense for a rat living in New York City. We just spent a lot of time trying to make everything make sense and invite in an audience that maybe wasn’t predisposed to like the Ninja Turtles. And we just always tried to operate from a place of relatability and character, and hopefully make them likable.

I’m always impressed by a new addition to a franchise that will satisfy longtime fans, but also serve as an on-ramp for newcomers, and you do that here.

Images via Lionsgate; Paramount

I also wanted to ask about Superfly’s team of mutants. Did you always know that was the specific group you were going with or was there ever any mixing and matching, or trying out another character?

ROWE: Yeah, there were a lot of things. Our character designer, Woodrow White, would do these cool designs and at some point, I was basically just asking him to do fan art where I’m like, “I wonder what a Woodrow drawing of Ray Fillet would look like. Hey, Woodrow! Draw Ray Fillet. Let’s pretend he’s in the movie,” and then he would do it and we’re like, “Man, that is such a cool design. Okay, I guess we gotta put Ray Fillet in the movie. Let’s figure it out.” And there were some characters like Scale Tail who’s a cobra, snake that we wanted to put in and the animation team was like, “Snakes are so difficult to rig. Do you have to have this character?” And we’re like, “Fine, we’ll change it out for a different one.”

Looking for more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem talk? Catch my chat with Ice Cube below: