Some parts I found interesting:
David Spade: It was me and Owen Wilson. We were going to switch jobs. I was an emperor and he was a peasant, and Carla Gugino was a princess. The first time I did my voice, I was naïvely saying, “What do you want? This kind of guy? A deep voice? Or an emperor like, ‘Ooh,’ a highfalutin guy?” And they said, “No, just your nasally, normal, annoying, sarcastic voice.”
David Spade would always do better if we had lights there and a camera crew — even if it wasn’t a real camera crew. The recording stage is kind of dark and dim. It’s like a music recording stage. He’s there with the microphone. He just didn’t have any energy. Then we would turn on some shooting lights and have a video camera, so he had somebody to perform to. I think when you’re a stand-up comic and you’re looking for a reaction, you benefit from having those lights and knowing you’re on. Eddie Murphy was the same way.
Sting wrote five or six songs, none of which made it into The Emperor’s New Groove because the tone of it was so different. I love the one he wrote for Yzma, “Snuff Out the Light,” where she goes down to the catacombs and has a song and dance with all the mummies.
Sting was a real mensch. When he saw the movie changing from the thing he signed up for, he sent a nice letter saying, “I didn’t sign up for this, good luck.” But Randy wasn’t going to let him resign. He was like, “Okay. We’ll talk next week and then we’ll send you the new assignment.” Sting would say, “No, you don’t understand.” Randy and Mark were persistent about keeping him involved. In the end he had some really great work in the movie. But I think it’s a difficult memory for him, because he wanted to do what Elton John did on Lion King.
It was a bumpy ride. He quit about five times, and I talked him into staying five times.
I remember people saying there’s too many elements in the movie. It was Prince and the Pauper. It was also the transformation of somebody into a llama. It was Yzma, who wants to raise the dead, snuff out the light, and have a world of darkness, but she also wants eternal youth and beauty. So it’s like, okay, but which one does she want?
I thought Kingdom of the Sun was great. It seemed more like a classic Disney thing. I thought that Sting had written a couple of songs which were some of his very best. They were incredibly moving and complex. It had this mythic element, with all the Incas, plus a love story. It was going to be a terrific film, in the same realm of Lion King. It was a shock when it all bit the dust.
I could have stayed on as a directing partner, but I just didn’t think I could do it. I had put so much into it. I mean, it was four years developing, and the movie was like one-third animated.
Sometimes I just think, Oh, just for curiosity’s sake they should just release it, to show people this song with Eartha Kitt as the Yzma character. It’s locked away in the archives somewhere. It kind of drives me crazy.
The Kingdom of the Sun became the movie that never was, an ambitious, magical project that now exists in its creators’ dreams and in work-in-progress cuts buried deep in the Disney vaults. The Sweatbox, meanwhile, has become the finished movie Disney doesn’t want you to see, transforming from what was supposed to be a promotional documentary to an intimate, hilarious, heartbreaking glimpse into what really happens behind the scenes of an animated project.
Tracey Miller-Zarneke (assistant production manager: story/publicity): I spent a lot of quality time with [the documentary crew], and then the movie changed, which was fascinating. Being with a documentary crew [who were] allowed in some of the very difficult meetings that were happening was unheard of. We were like, “I can’t believe we’re filming this.”
Williams: I really was not thrilled with the fact that they were doing the documentary. We had precious little time, and our story meetings were critical. But we would have these film crews running around behind us. A story meeting is a difficult thing, because people have to present their ideas. You’re making yourself vulnerable. It can be scary. I can see these moments where a story artist would start to say something, and then literally, a boom mic would swing across the room and hover over them.
I think all the people who do animation are fascinated by The Sweatbox, because it’s not your saccharine making-of documentary. It gets into the sweat and the grit of it all. Disney owns the thing. We don’t have any clout in terms of releasing it ourselves. I would love to have released it. It pops up online now and then, and the lawyers take it back immediately.
I swear, they probably had 150 hours of footage. The access was unheard of. I think Disney was mortified. So they pretty much buried The Sweatbox.
They gave Mark Dindal a small crew, and me a small crew, to come up with two different versions of the story. Which is just kind of awful to compete against each other.
We recognized that two things were really working well from Kingdom of the Sun: David Spade as Kuzco and Eartha Kitt as Yzma. “Well, what if we just started with those two things? Just hold on to those two things and build from them.”
So, by 1999, the epic Incan mythological adventure-romance-musical about a llama herder and a prince changing places while a megalomaniacal priestess attempts to plunge the world into darkness, had become a goofy, irreverent buddy comedy.
We had a year, literally, to put that whole thing together. There’s a deadline because we got a McDonald’s Happy Meal that has to come on a certain date, and there are big fines to pay if you don’t do that.
In a normal four-year process, you’ve got meetings, you’ve got development people going, “What if the girl was a boy? What if the bird was a flower?” And then you have to run all those ideas. But we didn’t have any time. They had to leave us alone. It was the greatest thing in the world.
I felt like, "A window is opening here at Disney Feature Animation that is not going to stay open very long".
Story rooms, often someone will pitch an idea almost as a joke and then someone else goes, “That’s funny. But what are we really going to do?” This was the only movie I worked on where someone pitched an idea like that and we went, “Let’s use that.”
I believe it was the wrap party that was the first time I saw [the finished film]. It was a little bit of, “Oh, we made that.” It’s like a Looney Tunes cartoon more than a Disney cartoon in some respects.
Somebody said they heard the leadership of the studio say, “We’ll never make that kind of movie again.”
The first and only draft of The Emperor’s New Groove was handed in two weeks after the movie was in theaters.
Just like the two movies that followed; Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Lilo & Stitch, The Emperor's New Groove is a movie that normally shouldn't exist at Disney, and only became possible because of the place Disney found itself in back then.
I`m glad this video had more clips with unfinished footage, especially when Manco shows his birthmark. And the creator of the video thanks Andreas Deja himself. So perhaps Andreas gave him/her access to the footage.
