Pirates pulls in the A-list and the powerful

Peter Lord chuckles in an eccentric professor kind of way when he recalls the visit to Aardman Studios’ Bristol base by Amy Pascal, chairman of Columbia Pictures.

Given that Ms Pascal is one of the most powerful women working in movies today, his remembrance of her is entirely whimsical, and a little bit sweet. Very far from Hollywood, in fact.

“Amy Pascal is the super boss of Columbia Pictures,” says Lord. “We pitched The Pirates by showing her the script and by showing her the Pirate Captain’s cabin, built as a miniature. And this woman who’s worth billions said ‘Aww, look at the little socks!’ Her enthusiasm [was like a child’s] for a doll’s house.”

People everywhere love Aardman and its creations. From Morph to Wallace and Gromit via Chicken Run and now The Pirates, based on the books by Gideon Defoe, Aardman has moulded its own Plasticine niche in the history of British movie-making. Lord was in at the beginning as co-founder of Aardman with David Sproxton. It was Lord and Sproxton who gave Nick Park a chance to finish his quirky stop-motion film A Grand Day Out in 1989. On completion it garnered an Oscar nomination and turned Park into a global phenomenon.

Park’s follow-up The Wrong Trousers won an Oscar, the first of four. Aardman has since won three more out of nine nominations. Not bad for a pair of blokes who began working on their table top.

Lord, 58, is an amiable mumbler who prefers not to be pinned down by Aardman’s success and worldwide appeal. But he’s clear on the appeal of the barmy world he, Sproxton and Park have created. Before them it was stop-motion maestro Ray (Jason and the Argonauts) Harryhausen with his own unique brand of fantasy. It comes down to the little things in life.

“It’s very interesting, isn’t it, because with Ray Harryhausen there’s no lying. In his day that was the only way that you could do it,” he muses. “Miniature work is profoundly attractive to people, certainly in the modern era. Kids grow up with toys. When they’re very small that’s a world that they can control and bring to life. We’ve all done it and that just seems to resonate with people.”

Lord is a throwback to a gentler age, and that is reflected in his films. They are populated with slightly dim or wickedly mischievous characters and laced with rude British humour. Such is their brand awareness that The Pirates picked up a cast headed by Hugh Grant as the Pirate Captain.

Then there is David Tennant as Charles Darwin. And Imelda Staunton. And Martin Freeman. And Brendan Gleeson. And Brian Blessed. Salma Hayek adds a touch of Latin spice as Cutlass Liz and Jeremy Piven is Black Bellamy.

Lord is no stranger to A-list stars – Mel Gibson was the hero of Chicken Run and Ralph Fiennes was the villainous toff in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit. But one senses that The Pirates is bigger than all the rest. He chuckles again. “I don’t know why animation scripts keep evolving for so long and in my experience, which is now 50 years, they always have done. Hugh Grant has certainly suffered from that a bit. You get a syndrome where the actor comes in and says ‘Haven’t I done this scene before...?’ and you say ‘It’s just a little bit different’. He suffered from that a lot. Assembling the darn thing is a massive part of it, and very astonishingly difficult, actually, because you haven’t recorded a live scene between two people.”

Stateside fans of Aardman style have likened their humour to that of Benny Hill.

“Amy Pascal said, ‘You’ve allowed yourself to tell any kind of joke’,” says Lord. “Which is exactly true but somehow, by good luck or great writing or serendipity we’ve allowed ourselves to tell some very, very complicated verbal jokes. There’s pure slapstick, there’s visual comedy... there’s a great range of comic styles. It does remind me – I hesitate to say this but I will risk it for once – of Monty Python [yet] nothing we’ve done I’ve ever thought was remotely like Monty Python humour at all.

“Charles Darwin is very, very badly treated. It’s quite shameful what we’ve done to him. Terrible. When they go to the Royal Society it’s very pompous and baroque. The camera pulls back and it says ‘The Royal Society – playing Gods since 1687’. You’re meant to follow the story, not chuckle at the background gags, but I am very proud when the pirates come to London docks and there is a golf sale man slumped in the corner...”