“From a little kid, I always loved animation so much and then I embraced it as my career,” says writer/ producer/ director Jim Capobianco (The Lion King, Ratatouille). He got his start in the story department at Disney drawing story boards, but he felt there was something lacking in the types of stories told in the animation medium.
“There was always cartoony feeling in them so, I wanted to touch on broader subjects and deeper storytelling in animated films.” Jim later took live action and dramatic structure classes at California City Arts to hone his writing craft.
At the time, animations were mainly musicals, so Jim set out to incorporate live action structure in his work. Veteran animator Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Toy Story, Coco) proffered this idea when he spoke at one of Capobianco’s classes. “Bird talked about making animated films like ‘Touch of Evil’ and ‘The Right Stuff.’” Jim took these comments on board, but ultimately, he wanted to tell a different kind of story.
During his stint at Pixar, he noted that their story department often referenced live action films. This resonated with this thinking. “So, we started talking in a deeper way about animated storytelling.”
Leonardo Da Vinci is The Inventor
Capobianco wanted to display another side of Da Vinci. “I wanted to explore him as a real human being and not only the genius that we always see him depicted as. He’s either the wise sage or the wacky inventor. I wanted to write about his struggles and how he was having trouble with his apprentices.” He had good days and bad ones, like all of us. Despite his eccentricities, Da Vinci was also lonely because he was a visionary and imagined things others could not.
The Inventor is ostensibly a biopic – a dramatization and fictionalization hybrid of Leonardo Da Vinci’s life. Capobianco focused on the aspect of his life that he found most fascinating – when he moved to France towards the end of his life to live in the free-thinking royal court. “To me it was interesting because he’s a sixty year old man during the Renaissance. He leaves Italy to move to another country and he took three months to get there. He’s not going to go back to Italy, so more than likely, he knows it’s one way trip.”
Jim Capobianco
As Jim delved further into the story, he enjoyed the idea of working with a young King Francis (Gauthier Battoue) and Princess Marguerite de Nevarre (Daisy Ridley) because it’s a little-known aspect of Da Vinci’s life.
Marguerite “was an historical figure who wrote her own books, she had artist salons and was a friend to Da Vinci. She was beloved by the people and she was even political in that she was able to keep the peace between the Protestants and Catholics during the Protestant Reformation.” She was often considered the first woman of the Renaissance.
The Main Character Triangle
Much of The Inventor centers on the relationships between King Francis, his sister Princess Marguerite, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Jim Capobianco pondered whether Leonardo may have had a bigger impact on her than the king and examined that relationship.
“That gave me this nice little triangle to work with, in dramatic terms, with the king represented as the royal, stuck in the past and those old ideas about castles and strength and power,” adds the filmmaker.
“Marguerite is a shadow in the shadows of all that, but a strong woman who’s trying to find her own voice and break out of being the caretaker and what we expect of a woman in that period.”
“And then he have Leonardo coming into this as the maestro confronting his own struggles.”
Princess Marguerite was Leonardo Da Vinci’s muse, guardian, inspiration. But she had to be loyal to the French court as well. Leonardo’s elevated reputation preceded him upon his arrival. “She is totally taken with his ideas and she’s the one who’s able to see his unique vision. He becomes a mentor of sorts to her because she has a more practical real world view of things. Leonardo has a view of the world that’s bigger than himself and he isn’t weighed down by reality or the strictures of the time. Marguerite loves the idea of Leonardo wanting to build a city and she knows how to put things together and use the court to get things done.” In this sense, she completes him and he completes her.
This character triad fuelled Capobianco to write the story. The king and princess’ mother Louise de Savoy (Marion Cotillard), who is introduced later, wants what’s best for the country, so she is a proxy for the Pope.
It’s all about power and dynamics of authority
Who Was Leonardo Da Vinci?
Da Vinci is widely known to have possessed three key character traits – curiosity, imagination, and knowledge.
“He really wanted to know how the world worked and how everything was integrated. He believed everything was interrelated,” states Capobianco. It speaks to a time when science was out of favor and people didn’t discuss the interconnection between systems. Da Vinci was an outlier, a heretic in that regard.
Da Vinci implemented his scientific curiosity by posing hypotheses and investigating them to add to his vast body of knowledge. “He would test a hypothesis, he would play around with it and try to figure it out, and then he would come to a conclusion based on his observations.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (Stephen Fry) Photo by Curiosity Studio
The Inventor explores everything from building flying machines to studying the human body. Da Vinci often dwelled on the intersection between science and art. He was a philosopher and dabbled in religion as he contemplated over the meaning of life. His free-thinking attitude was in constant conflict with the rigid mentality of the establishment. Da Vinci knew when to make strategic retreats when he realized that some of his ideas weren’t yet ready to be received by the public. Still, he wasn’t dissuaded.
“He’s obviously a genius, the smartest guy in the room, but he’s also be the loneliest guy in the room because he couldn’t tell anybody any of this stuff. They think he’s a wacko. So, the storytelling and writing was definitely in finding that you want to find those conflict points, and the characters are going to push against the protagonist’s ideals, especially the Pope who accused hi of pushing against God,” explains Capobianco.
Storytelling Meets Animation
The Inventor was created with stop motion and hand-drawn animation. There was a screenplay, some sketches, animatics, and test animations all of which shaped the story during the development stage. The writing process was a little easier for Jim Capobianco because he studied the format. “My training is in images. I’ll draw something or write out the script, but then I have to go into storyboarding it. Storyboarding in feature animation style is writing with images. So, it’s always part of the script writing process. I would go into storyboarding, I’d start to see ideas through the visuals, then I would then come back to the script to adjust it, and then I’d go back and storyboard.” The screenplay kept evolving through drawings.
Once all these drawings are complete, they are assembled into an animatic. “We watch it as a movie, and then it speaks to you in new ways. You go back and you re-work the script, re-storyboard, and then put it up again as a reel, and then you go through the process again.”
Capobianco cites how the scenes with Francesco Melzi (Angelino Sandri), one of Da Vinci’s apprentices, evolved during this process. Melzi originally opened the film when he was much older, conversing with painter Giorgio Vasari who was writing the first art history art book about Da Vinci. Through multiple storyboard iterations, these scenes were rewritten as Da Vinci’s grandson inheriting the sketches and drawings. He carelessly dispersed and sold them. When he died, Melzi took them to learn more about Da Vinci and preserve his legacy. It was a case of bending actual events for dramatic purposes. There were additional kings and princes in the original story that were trimmed back because they saturated the story and made it stall. So he rewrote it.
“It was a big lesson for me in economy and editing. And I think it’s a good lesson for any writer,” says the animator.
Did Leonardo Da Vinci ever answer his existential question on the meaning of life? “He is looking for that answer and he finds it was there in front of him the whole time. It wasn’t out there. It wasn’t something he had to search for anymore. It was about the process of inquiry. It was also about how many people’s lives you affect along the journey,” concludes the animator.
