Peter Lord: The Way I See It

In a prolific career, co-founder and creative force at Aardman – the animation company that has racked up four Oscars and 10 nominations – Peter Lord has created iconic character Morph, steered groundbreaking projects such as Conversation Pieces and music videos for Nina Simone and Peter Gabriel, and directed much of Aardman’s work, including The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! Here he talks to Joe Lancaster about ignoring awards, being overshadowed by Nick Park and the importance of fortune.

I was born in Knowle in Bristol, England in 1953. My father worked in radio and then TV broadcasting, on the sales side. My mother was an art teacher.

My earliest memory is looking out of the window waiting for one of my parents to come home but I also remember being very young and playing with Plasticine with my mum in our basement kitchen after we’d moved to what is now ‘posh’ Clifton in Bristol. She made a ‘loaf’ of Plasticine and sliced it with a knife like bread. That was so cool to me. 

I was quite a good student at school. I enjoyed drawing and writing, telling stories. I met my business partner David Sproxton there when I was 12.

When we were about 15 or 16 we made a film, although that’s a rather pretentious word because it was just things moving around on a table, with Dave’s dad’s camera. We called it Trash, thinking it was a clever reference to Andy Warhol’s Flesh, then we found out he’d already made a film called Trash. There’s probably a copy of our Trash in my office somewhere.

Dave’s dad got us an introduction at the BBC and Vision On, a programme for deaf children, showed some of our films. Christ, that was lucky. I don’t know how other people ever got started then because it wasn’t like now, when you can put your stuff online and it be seen by millions of people.

When we left school Dave told the head teacher we were thinking of going into the film business and he just roared with laughter. There were no media courses out there and that [negativity] was more prevalent back then, so the background of having media parents helped.

Animating something is like being a god, especially when it’s a bit more sophisticated. You bring a character to life that wasn’t alive before and it’s very satisfying emotionally to make something happen that never happened. It’s very easy for kids to do it digitally these days and you see it in their eyes – that wonder, that amazement of the power of making something live.

We registered the name Aardman Animations in 1972 and started out doing drawn animation like the rest of the industry but our work was indifferent. Then we hit upon Plasticine and for several years we were the only people in the world doing it as far as we knew. Our goal was to make kids’ TV shows and then commercials but although we dreamed of making features we thought it was impossible.

We nearly quit Aardman in the 80s. We had done the Morph series for the BBC and we were proud of it but it hadn’t made any money. We’d hoped to get into the merchandising game but we were completely naïve, we didn’t do the sales thing and it didn’t work out. The BBC didn’t want a second series so we did anything; terrible, embarrassing stuff, educational stuff, scraps. We thought of giving up because it didn’t seem viable to continue.

By good luck - and I’m happy to credit good luck and good timing a lot - Channel 4 launched in a great fanfare of ambition and we were the perfect candidates to get some of their money. They commissioned us to make the series Conversation Pieces. They put it on prime time TV and from then things picked up for us significantly.

Conversation Pieces had a big effect on British animation – even a lot of stuff that you and I have never seen. Young filmmakers keep coming back to the same technique of juxtaposing the real, flat speech with accentuated comic effected animation.

Aardman has broken a lot of boundaries over the years but innovation has never been a conscious target except for when we made the world’s smallest and largest animated characters for two Nokia commercials in 2010 and 2011 [the smallest record has since been broken]. We always just tried to do good, different stuff that makes some money.

To keep a film company successful for 40 years you have to employ intelligent people behind the scenes who don’t get the director’s credit but are fundamental in keeping you steady. More crucial for me though is the value of creative – doing the job as well as you possibly can. To be personally fulfilled is as important as anything else. The more fulfilled people are the happier they are, the happier the better.

I’ve been friends with David Sproxton for nearly 50 years. We argue about little things but fundamentally the things we care about are the same, like our attitude to investing back in the company. Neither of us has a yacht or a sports car or a second home. We’re also both super-respectful of our staff and regard them as our biggest asset. The feeling is the same with Nick Park, our other partner.

I’m good on the creative side but in a meeting I’m rubbish. I don’t like meetings, I’m lazy and I want to avoid them. David does a lot of the heavy lifting in that kind of way, he runs the company and I do my thing which is fine and the thing I’m good at. Whatever that is, I do that.

When we released The Wrong Trousers in 1993 Nick Park, who had joined Aardman in 1985, became a household name because he directed it. Most people thought he owned Aardman and probably still do. To put it politely, I noticed that.

We were very successful before Nick joined but very rapidly our name just disappeared and Nick’s was the only one that everyone knew. I’m sure I worried about that in the past but not now, he’s brought so much to the company. I’m damn sure we’d have a successful business if he hadn’t joined but let’s be honest, without The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave we would never have got into feature films. That debt is deeply buried in the company but on the other hand, if I was going to big myself up I suppose that Nick perhaps only did what he did because of us, because he could see our work on TV and that inspired him to do what he did. He’s a very special talent.

Going to the Oscars is very nice but as you get older and wiser you realise that winning them makes very little difference. Especially in Hollywood, everyone knows it’s the most desirable thing but equally they’re all smart enough to know it doesn’t mean that much other than extra publicity, which is good.

I like it that animation has its own categories at awards shows because if it didn’t you wouldn’t stand a chance. But the best thing was when Curse Of The Were-Rabbit won Best British Film at the 2006 BAFTAs.

I still love stop-motion because it’s handmade and looks handmade. It’s the same way that you would value a live acoustic performance versus a studio performance where every note has been tweaked. I say without shame that you are valuing imperfection.

With stop-motion you start at A and work your way through to Z but when you start at A there’s no way you can know exactly where Z is, in the same way I’m speaking now but I don’t know exactly where the sentence is going to end. That’s life. Life is linear but computer animation is non-linear and that leads to fabulous perfection. I don’t knock CGI, we used it in places in Pirates! but I think stop-motion lends itself to detailed, intimate, gettable, counter performance.

I don’t immensely like watching ads but I love watching the good ones, who doesn’t? When one comes along it’s like a huge sigh of relief isn’t it?

Aardman makes about 75 commercials each year. I don’t think there’s a stigma attached to working in advertising in this country. When you’re in Hollywood no one will discuss it but that’s just because they’re thinking about something else.

My favourite ad that we didn’t work on was Citroën C4 Transformer, but even when I think of the ads I loved I’ve no idea what the product was, which is really embarrassing.

My favourite ads that we did work on were for Tennent’s lager because it was such a funny idea. Normally that is what I should say, I think; if you’re praising a thing surely it’s the idea that you really love more than the execution.

I worry that too many animated feature films are being made these days. Studios have realised that it’s the most fabulous cash cow and that Pixar, Disney and Blue Sky make a lot of money so everyone else leaps in on the act. It’s a bubble that has been growing for 20 years probably and I hope it doesn’t burst.

However, the digital and online stuff that we’re doing seems to promise great and fascinating things, like the fact there is evermore storytelling in games. Also the way you can integrate a TV campaign with an online campaign seems exciting to me.

Outside of work I have no life. I don’t have any hobbies. All my friends talk about retirement, which doesn’t interest me at all and one of the reasons is; what the hell would I do? Having said that I love life and I’m a restless soul so I never sit around at home doing nothing.

I love walking because it nicely means you’re doing something and nothing at the same time. Last year I walked across England from west to east over two weeks and then I did a long walk in Italy. But I’m not into suffering. I don’t want to get too tired, I don’t want to camp on the hard ground. I want to stay in a nice hotel and eat really well.

I also love Britain and I love history and I think history affects the way you enjoy the country you live in. The countryside is like a book you can read, if you know enough. I never know enough but it’s a book of which I can read bits. I love walking around the countryside and interpreting it. That sounds really pretentious, doesn’t it?

Quite often the fact you can’t time travel is the greatest injustice in the world. If I could do it once I would go back to about the 1900s. I’d like to be an English gentleman along the lines of Bertie Wooster and tramp around with a stick and a pipe and go fishing, and stuff like that in a day before cars.

Bullying makes me very angry, so does a lot of stuff in politics; the Daily Mail, Little England bigotry towards immigrants is horrible. The way that the poor ‘should be’ constantly punished – I don’t know how the hell the conversation got around to that. The demolition of the NHS makes me furious. In this country, we have something wonderful and then because we don’t value it properly we break it apart. I feel that the politicians will keep breaking it apart and bringing it down until it’s fractured and that will be a tragedy.

If I could change one thing about myself I would be more of a ‘finisher’. I met a bloke on an outdoors course who was a bit of a philosopher and he said ‘if there is something that worries you, why not just get rid of it?’ You can fret about things for decades when the effort to do it is so tiny compared to living with the worry of doing it. I’d like to just do a few things – look at my office, my brain is like my office; full of junk. Why don’t I just throw it away?

The best day of my career wasn’t winning an Oscar because that happens in a great flurry of other mad stuff that’s going on. After finishing Pirates! we had a screening in Leicester Square for family, friends and crew and five years’ work seemed to come together in this great, joyous noise with everyone together. In features animation it doesn’t happen often enough because the production is so damn slow.

The worst day of my career was when we closed down a film we’d started making called Tortoise And The Hare, which wasn’t shaping up well. It meant laying a lot of people off including close friends and it was just absolutely terrible, I mean really, so horrible, so painful, really awful. 

I am a CBE and I have the freedom of the city of Bristol. I’m into that and am very proud of it I must say, although I haven’t used the freedom to graze sheep and goats all over the place, which is apparently the only reason people care about it. 

I’m scared of heights. That thing about the walk to a teahouse in China that was on Facebook the other day [the Heavenly Steps to the top of Mt. Hua Shan]? I would die.

The greatest human invention? This is stupid but I bought an apple corer/peeler the other day which is absurdly pleasing. I tweeted it and many people have bought them as a result.

The worst human invention? I worry about the old internal combustion engine. When it came up of course everyone thought ‘what a splendid thing this is, what a great idea’, and it is a great idea, but no one ever signed on for the way it would transform our world. I was driving to Cardiff once on the three-lane motorway in lines of traffic in the rain and thought, ‘if a Medieval person saw you now, they’d think you were in Hell’. The lights, the tension, the danger.

I have three kids who are all adults. One son has gone to the dark side – he’s a CG modeller – my daughter is trying to be an illustrator and the other son is a musician and works at Aardman in the facilities department.

I think I’ll be remembered as the founder of a very successful animation company in the 20th century and then the rest of the article will be about Nick Park.

I’d like to be remembered as a person who made things possible for other people. I’m as proud of the studio as I am of the films we make and the fact that we’ve created a community and employed great people. I don’t take any credit for their greatness but we’ve given them all sorts of opportunities to express themselves and made it possible for them to be proud of themselves.

If I had to choose another profession to be equally successful in I’d be a stand-up comedian. What I’m so jealous about is that when you see a good stand-up, and they’ve earned it by being good for years, they’ve got the audience in the palm of their hands. They come on and people just love them. How great is that?

At the end of the day what really matters is being happy. Fortunately you don’t have to be successful, so how you get there is a matter of personality and luck.