Early Man creator Nick Park talks fame and attention

“I need to spend some time with my wife,” smiles the film-maker, who married accountant Mags Connolly in September 2016, but has been busy making Early Man since then.

“She’s been very patient and she’s lovely and is excited about the film,” adds Nick, who tied the knot in the Lancashire village of Chipping not far from his home city of Preston.

“But we’ve had to forfeit holidays and all sorts, so I just want some time off to spend with Mags.”

Now living in Bristol, where the Aardman Animations company he helped make famous is based, Nick is in London when we meet – grabbing a coffee break as he puts the finishing touches to Early Man in a post-production studio.

He’s friendly but seems a bit frazzled, which is understandable given the fact that the 59 year old wrote the film, produced it and directed it, too.

After the Wallace and Gromit sagas, the farmyard comedy Chicken Run and the Shaun The Sheep movie, Early Man is Nick’s first historical film.

It’s a prehistoric adventure about a caveman named Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) who rouses his tribe to battle a bunch of Bronze Age baddies lead by Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) on the football pitch.

“It’s about a bunch of knucklehead underachieving cavemen who are lovable but inept. It’s the first underdog prehistoric sports movie,” Nick laughs.

“I saw there was a gap in that market. I’ve always loved the idea of cavemen, and I felt my style of animation would work well with the low brows moulded out of clay. The whole primal nature of football began to ring true in the context of a prehistoric story and ideas began to develop from there.”

Not that Nick is sporty himself. “Not really,” he smiles.

“I love the World Cup and I follow it when it’s on, but when I was young I was more drawn to volleyball and badminton and I like golf now. I’m not any good at it but I like playing it, not that I’ve had time to play anything in the last few months.”

He envisioned Dug as a sort of dishevelled teenager, which is about as far from the 36-year-old Cambridge-educated Redmayne as you can get.

“But I saw him in a film called Black Death where he played a novice monk and I loved how he was a bit dishevelled in that, not quite articulate and lacking in confidence. When he came in to test for the role, he asked how old Dug was and when I said, ‘Probably around 15,’ Eddie suddenly went very young. He was perfect.”

Also in the voice cast is Game Of Thrones star Maisie Williams as a rebel called Goona who comes to Dug’s aid.

“In many countries, football is as much a female sport as a male one, so it wouldn’t be right to not have a female hero in it,” says Nick of the feisty character, adding that he’s a Game Of Thrones fan rather than a fanatic so he didn’t geek out.

“But like everyone else, she’s brilliant in the film and brings so much to the character.”

I wonder if there’s any of Nick in the character of Dug?

The film-maker thinks for a moment, then concludes, “He’s a naive optimist really and if he’s got a flaw, it’s that he doesn’t really stop to think. I see something of myself in that, in how he always sees possibilities.”

That’s been true of Nick Park even since he was born into the happy home of his seamstress mother Mary and photographer father Roger.

The middle of five children, he traces the genesis of Early Man back to the work of stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen.

“I loved the film One Million Years BC because I had this obsession with dinosaurs,” Nick recalls.

Though not, he laughs, with Raquel Welch in her skimpy cave girl outfit. “I was a bit too young for that. My eyes were on the dinosaurs.”

Hooked on the idea of being a film-maker, he played around with dinosaur models and his parents’ cine camera. He also loved drawing cartoons, which is what led him more towards animation than live action.

Discovering that the cine camera could take single frames, he’d cut out characters in Fuzzy-Felt or mould them in plasticine, then cleverly combine each frame into mini stop-motion movies.

Nick hadn’t thought of movie-making as a job, more a hobby, until he was about 17 or 18 and his dad suggested he do an animation course or enrol in art school.

“He encouraged me to see it as a career and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m a boy from Preston and people from Preston don’t do that.’”

He landed a place on the communication arts course at Sheffield Polytechnic then attended the National Film and Television School – where his graduation project was a little something called A Grand Day Out featuring an eccentric inventor named Wallace and his loyal dog Gromit.

The short film, with its lead characters fashioned in clay, caught the attention of the Aardman bosses, who gave Nick a job.

The boy from Preston ended up competing with himself at the 1990 Oscars when A Grand Day Out lost the best animated short film trophy to Creature Comforts, his belovedITV mockumentary featuring animals talking about their lives.

He was back at the Oscars in 1994 and 1996, picking up more awards for the Wallace and Gromit shorts The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, and Nick recalls thinking, “What am I doing here for short films, in this massively glamorous world of Hollywood?”

Ten years later, having graduated to making full-length movies, he bagged another Oscar – this time for best animated feature Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. 

“That felt like being on another level, but you also realise that all the people there are just artists trying to do something right and like you, sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. It was a bit surreal because George Clooney came up and shook my hand. I sat next to Jennifer Lopez and chatted with Steven Spielberg, just having a nice chat really.”

Nick repaid his parents’ faith in him by inviting them to the Chicken Run premiere in Leicester Square. “It was a proper big event and a very glamorous occasion. They’d hardly ever been to London, except for a few times, and never of course to a premiere so they loved it.”

His father, who passed away not long after the 2001 premiere, was the original inspiration for Wallace because of his can-do spirit. He didn’t look like the inventor, who was modelled on a local postman.

“But Dad was quite proud of the comparison. He had a great sense of humour about it and he was very Lancashire with a similar attitude to Wallace.” 

Nick himself is more of a Gromit. “I’m fairly shy, quiet and always think too much about everything,” he says in his very soft-spoken Lancashire tones. “I’m quite sensitive.”

The success of his most beloved creations continues to amaze him. “They’re now shown every Christmas and on bank holidays,” he marvels about the four short films and one full-length feature to date.

“I often turn the telly on and there they are. It’s nice to be associated with holidays and good times.”

Nick’s happy that people know his work and maybe know his name but don’t recognise him in the street.

“Well, occasionally they do but I’m really pleased that I have the fame, so to speak, without any of the attention.”

That’s why he enjoyed playing himself on The Simpsons, though this 

most unassuming of Oscar-laden film-makers needs reminding of his 2011 cameo on the show.

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” he grins.

“But it was a great honour to be featured on one of the best animation shows in the world. I’ve always been a big fan of The Simpsons so to actually be on it was incredible, the most amazing accolade. It was great fun being a cartoon in Simpsons style and the great thing was I could just go in and do the voice.”

Nick is surprised that Aardman’s style of animation – which is a complicated blend of clay and plasticine, moulds and interchangeable mouths, fabric and faux hair – is still so popular when so many animated films rely on sophisticated CGI.

“Since Toy Story, we’ve been wondering, ‘Gosh, how long have we got?’ But now it’s what makes us different to everything else out there and as long as the stories are good and the characters are compelling, that’s the main thing.”

As for his characters’ particular appeal to young audiences, Nick’s not a father himself but notes: “Being a child once, I feel I have access to that. I remember what I loved as a child and I was very much in my imagination when I was young. It was a place I loved being and it still is.”

He smiles warmly. “That’s what I think we do at Aardman – we make films for the child that’s still in us.”