‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Director on the Big Changes Made and the Storylines He Expanded for Live-Action Remake

When “How to Train Your Dragon” director Dean DeBlois received a call from Universal telling him they were considering a live-action reimaging of the animated feature, his first response was “I don’t want to see someone else’s version of this.”

DeBlois had never made a live-action film, but this was his baby, and of course, he felt protective. Back in 2010, he and Chris Sanders co-wrote and co-directed the fantastical animated feature that would spawn a trilogy. DeBlois pleaded with the studio. “I said, ‘If you’re going to do it, please consider me as the writer and director.’” He went on to tell them, “‘I do know where the heart is, and I know this world. I know these characters. So I pledge and promise that we will bring that over into this new medium, intact, and then expand wherever it was additive, you know, find a myriad of ways of giving a little more character depth, expanded mythology, make it more immersive, lean into the tools of live action, but always with the wonder and emotion intact.’”

And he did.

In bringing the film to life, DeBlois knew he had to honor what had come before. And while the live-action film features a lot of shot-for-shot moments, he also knew he had room to expand the world through storytelling.

The film stars Mason Thames as Hiccup, the young Viking boy whose village is under attack from dragons, and soon finds himself befriending one, Toothless. Together, they take flight and become best friends, but this friendship soon disrupts the community and opens up a world of possibilities for both the Vikings and dragons.

DeBlois spoke with Variety about honoring the animated feature, changes he made to the story, casting his characters and the film’s box office projections.

This is such a beloved franchise, and the first animated feature is special to people in different ways. What was important in adapting it, knowing how sacred it is?

I think recognizing that we have a devout, fervent and vocal fan base, I wanted to be able to honor them with a few moments that we all know are iconic to the entire franchise, and they happen to reside in this first movie.

There’s the moment where Hiccup and Toothless are befriending one another and drawing in the sand, which leads to the first touch. And then there was also the moment where Hiccup and Toothless are flying together above the clouds and testing out the flight rig, and they become detached. Both are set to beautiful pieces of music by John Powell, and they’re considered to be iconic moments of that friendship and that entire journey. So I thought it would be a fun and challenging task to try to recreate that in the medium of live action, shot for shot as possible. That was an homage to the fan base, and to that original source material, and also that might allow us to then play around a little bit elsewhere in the movie, and maybe omit a couple moments we no longer needed from the animated movie, and delve a little deeper into others that we that we felt might be beneficial in terms of deepening characters and relationships.

That touch scene was sacred. If that didn’t work, I guess nothing else would work. How long did you spend getting that right?

It was rehearsed and actually shot on one day. I credit our puppeteer team for a lot of it, because they had figured out the whole choreography of what the line work in the sand was going to be, and how Mason would be stepping around it. And Tom Wilton, the puppeteer who operated the Toothless head, is just amazing. He can make himself vanish on a set, and you just believe that the character is there. He had this foam head of Toothless with articulated ear plates, mouth, and he just breathed so much life into it. So, Mason had a dragon as a scene partner. Mason has a background in ballet, and so he was able to sort of match the choreography beautifully. We played John Powell’s music over the loudspeakers to make it that special.

You mentioned expanding the story. How did you explore those moments through your storytelling?

This version allowed us to go a little bit more nuanced with the performances. And I thought the father son relationship could benefit from knowing a little bit about a little bit more about Stoick’s (Gerard Butler) plight, seeing him as sort of a very public politician, in a sense, trying to keep his dispirited group together and motivated, remotivating them one more time to follow the objective and try to find the dragon’s nest after they’d been defeated yet again in a nighttime raid.

I loved the grandstanding of the persona that he puts on publicly and the vulnerability that he shows once the room is emptied out. That was a nice dimension to bring to Gerard Butler’s character, and then see that reflected in his relationship with Mason going forward. Every private conversation they have, right up until the very public blow-up, has a deeper sense of connection. And it brings an authenticity to the whole mix that I feel as a son who was a disappointment to my father. I feel that connection, and that push and pull of love and expectation, and it played out with much more authenticity.

In other places, there was the venturing with the warriors into the fog and reminding the audience that as Hiccup is befriending a dragon back on the island of Berk, elsewhere, they’re still very much a threat, and lives are being lost, and this is still a big issue that needs to be resolved that’s soon going to fall upon Hiccup’s shoulders.

I didn’t realize Gerard Butler could be so vulnerable and so emotional until I saw this and that chemistry with Mason. How did you know Gerard had that in him?

I’d seen a bunch of his lesser-known films like “Dear Frankie,” so on the heels of watching “300,” and I thought he could play the gamut. It is a combination of all of Gerard’s strengths that’s quite satisfying in terms of the arc of the character going from being so set in his ways and almost a villain in the story. It’s a story of redemption for him. He comes to see this disappointing failure of his son turn into a strength that is a who can take the tribe forward into an era of peace and there’s humility in that.

Let’s talk about the animation. Toothless and dragons are not real, but this film makes you believe. How did you make dragons feel believable, and what was the secret to that?

The secret was Framestore. They’re an amazing visual effects company with very talented animators. I married our Framestore team, led by Christian Manz, our visual effects supervisor, with a longtime friend of mine, Glen McIntosh, who comes from Industrial Light and Magic. He had worked on the “Jurassic Park” films as an animation supervisor. So he brings paleontology and the study of large creatures and subtle movement to the Framestore mix, where they specialize in whimsical character creation. It was the melding of those two things that meant we could have photoreal characters that still had a lot of personality. They had very specific personalities and attributes that we had gleaned from the animated movies, but in a setting where you completely believe them.

I was reading that Toothless was inspired by salamanders and black panthers. Can you talk about that?

That came from the days of the first animated film. We had a bunch of dragons that were designed in a reptilian sense. They’re beautifully designed by Nico Marley. They had cartoony proportions, and we needed to reinvent Toothless, because Toothless from the books is a small dog-sized dragon that talks. In our version, we needed Toothless to be big, impressive, and dangerous, and a legend within the Viking community. So we were looking around, and just one day, we saw a photograph of a black panther draped across a tree limb, and it was so elegant but so dangerous and had these piercing eyes. We thought, what if we lean into the mammalian side of it? So, he’s 75% black panther and 25% Salamander. But he has a lot of those feline qualities that we see reflected in our own pets. Toothless is intentionally meant to make you think of your dog and your cat at home, because there are so many funny YouTube videos of pets that have directly found their way into his behavior.

Have you seen people starting to post photos of their dogs and cats as Toothless?

Yes.

What was it about Mason that stood out in casting?

They had to be their version of these characters, true to the spirit, but not necessarily resembling those characters, nor acting like the animated counterparts. Lucy Bevan was our casting director. She brought lots of different options for every character. I was flying to London, and I had seen “The Black Phone” on the plane, and I thought, who is this kid? I was doing the math and thinking, he’s probably about 14 or 15, he might be perfect. We brought him in for auditions, and it was evident that he knew this character inside and out because he grew up with “How to Train Your Dragon,” and he dressed up as Hiccup for Halloween. This was a hero for him because he felt like an outsider. He could do the self-deprecating humor, but he could also play into the wounded nature of Hiccup and how he uses comedy as a defense. We started doing chemistry reads together with our favorite Astrids and our favorite Hiccups, and Nico Parker and Mason just rose to the top, almost eliminating the competition, simply by showing that when they were together, there was just an electricity between them that was undeniable.

Speaking of Nico, unfortunately, the internet being the way it is, she’s received backlash for her casting. Is there anything you want to address about that?

I mean, it bothered me in the beginning, and now I think that’s fading away, as I expected it would. Once people start seeing Nico Parker in the role, it just becomes obvious she is excellent as Astrid. She was cast because she was the best that came in, and within the context of this movie, and sort of the expanded mythology of the tribe, the whole idea that Astrid has to be white and blue-eyed and blonde goes away. It’s unfortunate that she had to hear any of that. But I guess people only know what they know until we start sort of informing them about the changes and how this movie, makes makes sense of all of it. What’s remarkable about Nico is that she was able to come in and deliver really harsh dialogue that I had written for her as a takedown of Hiccup, and she was the only young actor who would come in and do it without making it feel personal. She was always coming at it as though she were a sports team captain, holding everyone to a certain standard. And Hiccup was no different, and it wasn’t mean-spirited, and it wasn’t cruel, which made Nico unique in the role, and I felt confident in casting her in the role.

I spoke with John Powell, can you talk about bringing him back?

He was the first person I called. I said, “Please talk me out of this if you think it’s a bad idea.” But he came at it with the same angle that I saw it, which was, if we do it with love and respect and acknowledgement for the existing fans, this could feel llike this nostalgic hug to all of those people that have grown up with the How To Train Your Dragon films, but also expand it and open it up for a whole new audience. And he said, ‘If you’re in, I’m in.’ And that just gave me tremendous confidence going forward.

You talked about expanding the world, but there are also some scenes that you cut. Is there a scene that had to go because it didn’t work in live-action?

The scenes we cut were actually filmed. When Hiccup and Toothless are resting after the midpoint scene of what we call the “Test drive,” and they look to the sky together, they’re accosted by little terrors that try to steal their fish. Hiccup observes that dragons are not so fireproof. In the film, it felt like it was dragging the pace down, and it was delivering information that we were already getting. It was cute, but it wasn’t contributing anything, and if anything, it was actually causing it to sag in terms of its pacing. Similarly, another scene that we trimmed was a moment when Astrid nearly catches Hiccup red-handed. He’s snuck Toothless into the blacksmith stall, and it’s the middle of the night. Astrid finds him there, and he’s trying to cover up and dissuade her from investigating any further. Toothless is making a bunch of noise inside the blacksmith stall, and it was a near miss. It was a cute moment, another bit of Hiccup’s flawed flirting and Astrid’s aggression and suspicion. She wants to get to the bottom of what’s going on. But it was slowing the pace down, and so both scenes will exist as bonus content when we eventually put out the home video version of the movie.

The film is projected to open to around $67 to $77 million domestically and people are excited to see this. How do you feel when you hear that?

Boy, I didn’t even know that information. I didn’t know what the projections were. To be honest, I’ve just been on this press tour train, but I’m excited that people are looking forward to it. I fully anticipate that critically, it’ll be polarizing and that people will still think that it was an unnecessary remake and probably shouldn’t exist, and I anticipate some of that feedback, but for the most part, I feel like we delivered on our pledge to create a crowd pleasing movie that has the heart and soul intact. At the end of the day, we’re all proud of it, and that’s what counts most to me.