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BROOKS (LEFT) AND GROENING
Lester Cohen

What took so damn long?
GROENING: Well, there were no hiatuses during which we could say, ''Okay, now's the time we should do the movie.'' We've been working on the show year-round for the last, whatever it's been, 18 years?
BROOKS: We had that key decision where we had an episode, [the season 4 opener] ''Kamp Krusty,'' that we knew could be a movie. But then we said, ''It's a great first episode.'' We've been open to it for a while.
GROENING: It's like running a marathon. Once you start running, you don't want to be one of those people on the sidelines, lying there, gasping.

How intimidating are the massive expectations?
GROENING: It was hard coming up with a title. [Laughs]
BROOKS: In this long process, it took us a year and a half of the hardest work to begin to look like we didn't give a s---, which is what the movie needs. The movie needs a loose feel, and yet we have to have the discipline.

You assembled an all-star team of current and former Simpsons producers and writers, as well as longtime director David Silverman, to work on the movie. What was that like?
BROOKS: It was a romantic notion and a good one to begin with: Just gather together anybody who was here at the very beginning or who ran the show.
GROENING: We have a shared vision, but everybody adds different kinds of jokes. And it's not a chorus by any means.
BROOKS: No, we have arguments. And one of the good things about a table is that nothing gets in unless the table laughs.
GROENING: I'm just amazed that we were able to order from the same pizza place for so many weeks.
BROOKS: Occasionally, it was an angry discussion.
GROENING: You're in a room with some of the most creative guys in the world, and they're ordering from the same pizza place every night. Come on!

There are oodles of secondary Simpsons characters, and everyone has a different favorite. How many of them can we expect to see?
BROOKS: We did sit here, looking at that forever. [He points to the famous yellow poster featuring 320 Simpsons characters.] It's impossible to do a crowd scene well in the show, just because of what it takes in animation, and we have memorable crowd scenes in the movie, and that's sort of thrilling for us.
GROENING: We tried to squeeze every character we could into the movie.
BROOKS: There are 94 speaking parts [so far]. And our animals don't speak.

There will be new characters in the movie, right?
BROOKS: At least one. If you count nonhuman, two.
GROENING: There's going to be some payoff after the fact on the series, but it's not going to change the Simpsons universe forever.

You held a test screening in Portland, Ore. How did that go?
GROENING: Big thing is we get to live a little longer. It was a bunch of random people who didn't know they were going to see this movie.
BROOKS: We were all a little paranoid. I think I was hallucinating — everybody looked to me like they were there to beat me up. They looked angry. But then you say, ''Please let them have goodwill leaving,'' and they did. [But] we changed a lot of jokes. We physically changed one character, and we basically rewrote that character and another.
GROENING: We learned that the audience is looking forward to seeing their favorite characters, but we still have to surprise them. It's not just seeing your old favorites come out and wave to the audience.... And we changed some language in the movie, because some people were bugged.

What do you mean by ''bugged''?
GROENING: They said we were going to hell.

Any last advice for those psycho fans in the theater who are quivering as they wait for the lights to dim?
BROOKS: Our fans don't quiver.
GROENING: If you're wearing a Marge Simpson wig, take it off out of courtesy to the other members of the audience.


Posted Apr 17, 2007 | Published in issue #931-932 Apr 27, 2007 | Order Article Reprints
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