Saving Bikini Bottom's Liza Johnson On Animated Debut, Expanding SpongeBob SquarePants & The Last Of Us

The world of SpongeBob SquarePants is growing in an exciting new direction with Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie. The Netflix film marks the fourth feature-length installment in the Nickelodeon franchise after 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, 2015's Sponge Out of Water, and 2020's Sponge on the Run. Saving Bikini Bottom puts Sandy at the forefront of the story as she and SpongeBob race to Galveston, Texas to save their friends after the titular town has been taken by the evil CEO of the science lab Sandy works for.

As they venture to Texas, audiences learn more about the titular scientist squirrel, including the fact she's actually a flying squirrel, which comes in handy multiple times during Sandy and SpongeBob's journey. Saving Bikini Bottom also introduces the extended members of the Cheeks family, who are a travelling circus act and have missed having the titular character around. The family includes the loving Pa Cheeks, the surprisingly nimble Granny Cheeks, the caring Ma Cheeks, the rodeo star brother Randy, and the thrill-seeking youngest siblings, Rowdy and Rosie.

Carolyn Lawrence returns to lead the ensemble Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie cast alongside fellow franchise vets Tom Kenny, Mr. Lawrence, Mary Jo Catlett, Clancy Brown, Bill Fagerbakke, Rodger Bumpass, Dee Bradley Baker, and newcomers Wanda Sykes as Sue Nahmee, Craig Robinson as Pa Cheeks, Johnny Knoxville as Randy Cheeks and Grey DeLisle as Ma Cheeks, Granny Cheeks, Rowdy Cheeks, and Rosie Cheeks. The movie hails from director Liza Johnson, well known for her work on Elvis & Nixon, What We Do in the Shadows, and HBO's The Last of Us.

Prior to the movie's release, Screen Rant interviewed Liza Johnson to discuss Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, making her animated directorial debut, how her experience on What We Do in the Shadows benefited the SpongeBob SquarePants spinoff, looking for the perfect people to play the Cheeks family, and reflecting on the backlash to her episode of The Last of Us.

What We Do in the Shadows Provided Some Unique Foundation For Johnson To Make Saving Bikini Bottom

While she has a wealth of directorial experience, executive producer Marc Ceccarelli previously revealed that part of the reason Johnson was hired to helm Saving Bikini Bottom was her work on What We Do in the Shadows season 2's "The Curse". When asked about this, Johnson admitted it was "new information" to her, but explained how her work on the beloved FX vampire comedy laid some helpful groundwork for her to make The Sandy Cheeks Movie:

Liza Johnson: I don't think so, I think you're telling me new information, but I find that highly believable. Marc has been a great colleague and a very warm person, but I'm not sure if I knew that. It's possible, also, that I didn't remember because I first read this script during the height of COVID, and that show was saving people's lives, because it was all these vampires trapped in a house for eternity together. I did actually really learn a lot from that show that I was able to use here, just because I got to see people who know more about comedy than me benefit from an ensemble that's been together, and knows how to respect each other and keep the wildness alive. I really love the wildness of that show, and I really, in general, love wildness.

So, I think there's things I learned about wildness that helped me, and I also think that this ensemble is very good at honoring its own wildness. When we record the voices, Tom is always there, and he's always encouraging everyone to take a shot at something they weren't planning to do. This script was the funniest script I've read in a long time. It didn't need to be funnier, but I think it's actually wonderful in animation. This was new to me, people are always like, "Let's plus that." In live-action, you put it in the can and that's what it is, and you can make it better, but it is what it is. In animation, you can always plus it, and I learned a lot about plussing.

Johnson Worked Closely With The Story Team To Create Intricate Storyboards

When previously speaking with Screen Rant for the movie, Lawrence praised the work Johnson did "mapping out" the entirety of Saving Bikini Bottom in storyboards, which better helped inform her performance. Johnson humorously admits she's "famous for being bad at drawing" and didn't draw "a single frame" of The Sandy Cheeks Movie, but did detail the close relationship she had with the story team to create these storyboards and keep the movie feeling fresh, while also staying true to "the traditions of the franchise":

Liza Johnson: We did. I actually didn't draw a single frame. I went to art school, but I'm famous for being bad at drawing. [Chuckles] But there's a story team that's good at drawing, and they're good at drawing in a certain style, and they know how the characters have been drawn historically. They know what the properties of the characters are, like, "How far can SpongeBob's arms stretch?" This was new, but it's not like they knew from history, they were able to design what it looks like when Sandy's wings are revealed, and just really knew the traditions of the franchise, but also tried to take it in a new direction, which I would say was different in the script.

I would love to take credit — I mean, I'll take some credit for it — but when I got the script, it was different from the other movies in that, usually, the characters stay in their world, and then there's a big Brechtian interruption where they have to swim on David Hasselhoff's butt or something, or like they're in a short-order fry hut with Antonio Banderas, and it's a break into a different world for a minute, and then you go back to the world. This was not written like that, it was written very integrated, so that actors and landscapes that were real and photographed, and needed to interact with characters who are animated.

So, I tried to learn as much as I could visually about the franchise, and then collaborate with the animators, using a kind of lingua franca from the movies to just be like, "Oh, okay, well, maybe that should be in the middle of the frame, like Kim Novak's bun in Vertigo or something," where the language of the frame is actually known to everyone from movies and animation. It's always going to be a frame, and I thought that a good way to navigate the project would be by using some things that I learned from when I worked for Barry Sonnenfeld, actually, on a different Netflix show, called A Series of Unfortunate Events, where he has this obsession with symmetry. It's just who he is, and I had to learn about it in order to shoot in his style.

I guess, maybe more than that, he has an obsession with the idea that the internal timing among voices in the frame is itself funny. It's not all about cross-covered dialogue, improvisation, it's like, "What would it look like if you were in the theater? And what would it look like if you couldn't edit?" And, of course, we can edit, and it was very important for us to make it so that we could edit, so we'd stay dynamic and fresh, and we are in the present. But, it also honors a whole vaudeville tradition, and Buster Keaton, and what can you find if you insist on the timing being funny in the wide shot, and then you cut it wherever you want.

But, if you find it in the wide shot, then you know that it's theatrically real and intact. And it is not identical to how this show has been drawn for 23 years, but it's also not the opposite. So, it was a style where I could take the world that we know, and shoot something that looks somewhat like it with a lens. It doesn't look identical, because that's not physics, but it gives an honor to the tradition of how the show has been drawn, even when it's not using a lens, I hope.

Directing An Animated Movie Was A Unique New Experience For Johnson

As previously mentioned, Johnson has been in the director's chair for a variety of genres on both the big and small screens, ranging from the biographical dramedy Elvis & Nixon to Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events adaptation, HBO's tech comedy Silicon Valley and Apple TV+'s Physical, among others. When it came to making her animated genre debut, Johnson recalls the unique experience of working with animator Piero Piluso to put Saving Bikini Bottom together, as well as directing the movie all while working on other projects:

Liza Johnson: That was in mind when I came to the project. I think it was just probably part of the plan and the agreement from the beginning when they agreed to partner with Netflix and what they were going to give them. I love, actually, how the animation turned out, and that's a real testament to Piero Piluso. I don't know if you're going to speak with him, but after I was done with everything I have the skills to do, he still had to make everyone three-dimensional, and do what I usually do with live-action actors, which is to make sure that everything about their physical work is supported and sublime, and he really did that.

It's not that I wasn't on the project, but I wasn't on it every day, and I continued to work in my field. I would just talk to the composers on the weekends or whatever, and do that which I couldn't do. Because I am not actually that useful in directing 3D animation. It turns out I can give notes, I can understand it enough, and I had a lot of guidance in that Marc and Vince [Waller] and Piero all have a really deep knowledge of what the franchise is. Everyone does, even people that worked at Nickelodeon for 23 years were like, "Oh, no, he's really porous." Everybody knows what's in the archive, so they were very generous about sharing that with me, and making sure that I was in the right universe, and that we were putting the right surfaces on all the characters and stuff like that.

Johnson Collaborated Closely With Netflix & Nickelodeon For Saving Bikini Bottom's Casting

Though the movie does benefit from having half of its cast being franchise regulars, Johnson got the opportunity to introduce new voices and faces to the world of SpongeBob SquarePants when building out the Saving Bikini Bottom roster, which she said was a "real collaboration" between Nickelodeon and herself. In reflecting on building out the Cheeks family, she recalls immediately feeling Randy should be voiced by Johnny Knoxville when reading the script, while also feeling that Craig Robinson "would be the perfect dad" and initially eyeing Grey DeLisle for one role before realizing her range made her perfect to play the others:

Liza Johnson: All of the casting was a real collaboration between the network and what seemed to me to be the creative aspects of the film. So, we would just collaborate on, "Oh, could it be this person, could it be that person?" And the network people would help me figure out who actually honors the tradition of this world, and this universe. As soon as I read the script, I was like, "Well, that's Johnny Knoxville," and I've had the good fortune to work with him before. I was also pretty sure he would do it, because he loves everything that Randy loves. I'm not sure even if the writers might have been thinking of him, because he loves a motorcycle, he loves physical comedy.

A colleague of mine, who by profession is the Chief Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, has said repeatedly that he thinks that Johnny and the Jackass guys are the true inheritors of the tradition of physical comedy that is one of the most important things our country ever did. Maybe they didn't invent it, but I'm just gonna go with that, I'm just gonna lay that down. I was right, he wanted to do it, which I thought he would, and I thought Craig would be the perfect dad, because he's literally the person you want to have be your squirrel dad.

He has a lot of range, but a lot of that range is very warm, and you wish he was your squirrel daddy. Grey is a person who is a really seasoned voice actor, who works a lot in the field of voice acting. And it turns out, she is also from Texas, so it actually was very confidence building. She came in just to do some temp track, and we fell in love with it, and we were like, "Grey is going to be Ma Cheeks, and about half of the other Cheeks". So, that's how we got her family.

When it came to finding the right star to play the movie's villain, Sue Nahmee, Johnson "really wanted to get" Wanda Sykes to play the part, feeling that she had "never seen her do anything like this", while also recalling how the two worked together with costume designer Dayna Pink to create the cartoonish design of a person whose "choices seem like what a fish would do":

Liza Johnson: And I really wanted to get Wanda, just because I have never seen her do anything like this. I really believe in her work, it's often so grounded, and maybe she's not playing herself, but she's playing a really grounded character and not the opposite of herself. It was a delight for me to see her just go for broke, and every take, we would just try to find the line of like, "When does it get to be too much?" Over many weeks of shooting, we only found that line like twice, and I just thought like, "What kind of courage is that to have someone who's so established and known for a thing, who's also willing to go for broke in a different thing?" That was really great for me. And Matty and Ilia are both people that I knew from other shows, and it was a delight for me to get to see them react to each other.

Because we were mostly in a world where there's not a huge ability to fully react, because half the characters are not actually there when you're shooting. It was really great for me to see them vibing with each other, but they really became a little duo. Wanda and I did it together with the costume designer, Dayna Pink, who's incredible, and who's done quite a lot of big, cartoonish live-action stuff. She's made a lot of big costumes, and when we first saw her design, it was very, very fish-looking.

We, together, kind of walked it back into being something that was more like a scientist would wear. A rich heiress scientist who wants to have a mad science lab where you can clone fish, and make them breathe air and stuff, but a scientist. So, I think we found this kind of really specific couture-looking suit that we built for her, and then we all worked together with this terrific hair and makeup team to make all her other choices seem like what a fish would do, or what you would do if you wanted a fish to love you.

Those Upset With The Last Of Us' "Left Behind" Episode Need To "Get Good Enough At The Game"

One of Johnson's more recent directorial efforts prior to Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie was that of The Last of Us season 1, episode 7, "Left Behind", based on the DLC of the same name for the Naughty Dog game. Much like episode 3, "Long, Long Time", the episode garnered widespread acclaim from critics, though backlash from toxic viewers towards the LGBTQ+ relationship featured between Bella Ramsey's Ellie and Storm Reid's Riley. In reflecting on this backlash, Johnson revealed she actually took past advice from Christie Lahti about avoiding reading reviews in general, and invited the toxic side of the show's fanbase to "get good enough at the game" to see how authentic the episode was:

Liza Johnson: Well, someone told me — it was the actress Christine Lahti, actually — "Just don't read your reviews, because if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones, or else you're crazy. So, just don't read them." And I was like, "Really?" Because that's not what Joan Didion says, she says, "It's like there's a dumpster fire burning out your window, and if you don't know it, it's dangerous." I took her advice, and I have taken it ever since she told it to me. What I think is that it's a really beautiful episode.

It's also what happens in the game, so it's not like adding new changes to make something different. Also, I couldn't be more delighted with the work of those two young women who were legit, like, very young. At most 20. I think, actually, they were 18 at the time. But, legit very young people who did performance work that was as sophisticated as any that I've ever seen. I think people really love that series, and when I went to the hair salon, the guy in the chair next to me was talking about how profound he experienced it, philosophically. I was sitting there texting Craig what he was saying.

I think it's a hit, and if there are some people that wish it was a different story, I would encourage them to just get good enough at the game so that you can get to the place where that chapter is, because that's just what happens. I just want everyone to love me. That's what I want, but the truth is, it's not bad for the work if it sparks controversy. It's not what I'm going for, but it's actually not bad for the work. I feel really optimistic, too, that [Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie] will be seen by a lot of people and that people will be able to find it. So, I'm really excited about that.

About Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie

When Bikini Bottom and all its denizens are suddenly scooped out of the ocean, Sandy Cheeks and SpongeBob SquarePants journey to Texas to save the town from a villainous plot.

Check out our other Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie interview with Carolyn Lawrence!

Source: Screen Rant Plus