Filmmaker Pierre Coffin is the creator and chief practitioner of Minionese, but it’s a dialect - like most things Minions - that’s taken time to hone.
"I have this file on my phone of Indian dishes or weird words.” Coffin says. "People come up to me and say, ‘You should say that!’ and I write it down.”
"The hardest thing,” adds Coffin, "is just to find the melody.”
It’s been 16 years since Coffin co-directed Illumination's Despicable Me.
He has made three more movies in the franchise, directing Despicable Me 2, Despicable Me 3 and Minions.
But the Minions, like Coffin’s personal version of Frankenstein’s monster, have often remained a deviling, even mystifying force to him.
Coffin, a French Indonesian animator who lives in Paris, where Illumination productions are based, has struggled with both the dictates of Hollywood franchise-building and the strange narrative conundrums of movies based around a supervillain and gibberish-speaking henchmen.
"That’s why I kind of disappeared from the series,” Coffin said in a recent interview from Paris.
"I mean, the first one was really good. A bad guy becoming a good guy after contact with three little girls, I could see it. The second one was a little bit more shady because it was like: That guy who’s no longer a bad guy falls in love and there’s a marriage at the end.
"That’s literally how Chris (Meledandri) pitched it to me. My French sensibility threw up a little bit.”
If you can’t tell, Coffin - the still-mischievous 59-year-old son of a French diplomat and an Indonesian novelist - is unusually candid about the franchise he helped create. Even movies that he directed, he’s highly critical of.
The previous Minions spinoff, 2022’s Minions: The Rise Of Gru, Coffin won’t even talk about because, he says, "I don’t necessarily like it and it’s strange to me.”
Despicable Me 3, the 2017 sequel was the last movie Coffin directed, but he says he didn't even want to make it. Afterward, Coffin told Meledandri, the Illumination chief executive, that he was done.
"I told him: I got to move on. I did my trilogy, my prequel - I’m good. I can help with the voices, no problem. But I want to move on,” Coffin says. "I worked on separate things, but I always get pulled back by the Minions.”
The Minions have a way of manipulating their bosses, Coffin included. After walking away from them, he's back for Minions & Monsters, the third standalone feature for the "Banana!”-shouting little guys.
"All the other ones I had doubts about. I was guided into a direction that I did not necessarily like or understand,” says Coffin of the previous sequels.
"But the things were a huge success. I was humbled. OK, there has to be something I don’t understand.
"This one is horrible because I’m thinking I really like it,” Coffin says, laughing. "And I’m thinking, man, maybe I just killed the franchise.”
On the contrary, Minions & Monsters may be the best Minions movie yet. In it, the Minions turn filmmakers. Alongside Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, they try to make a monster movie in 1920s Hollywood.
Given that the Minions are impossible to understood, except for a word or two, they make for tricky protagonists.
Hand them over to a new boss, and you risk making the Minions second bananas again. At the same time, long sections of uninterrupted Minionese can grow tiresome without some human interpreter."
If it’s too long and annoying to the ear, we just kill it,” Coffin says. "All of these movies, we do until we find the little formula.”
Coffin can sound almost parental about the Minions. The characters he gave voice to aren’t just in the movies. They're like mascots for Illumination, generated billions in merchandising. Not every treatment nails their singular nature.
"I don’t want to criticize what the others have done with the Minions, but when someone else does something with the Minions, I feel that they’re considering them creatures,” Coffin says. "But they’re not creatures. They’re creatures with a spirit, with a personality.” – AP
Minions & Monsters is showing at cinemas nationwide.
