Meet the Minion-Maker
“The challenge of making a ‘Minions’ movie is that it’s filled with Minions,” Pierre Coffin was saying, at a totally normal pitch, as he fiddled around in the open kitchen of a light-filled studio on the second floor of his Paris apartment. “It’s my chambre de bonne,” he said, cheerfully. “Like Gene Kelly!” Coffin is an animator, a writer, and an inadvertent voice actor: more than fifteen years ago, while working on “Despicable Me,” the film that débuted the Minions, he accidentally invented Minionese, the little yellow protagonists’ massively entertaining language. Now, nearly six billion dollars later, no one is eager to mess with a winning formula, so he continues burbling forth “bello”s and “big boss”s and “Hello, papaguena! Tu le bella comme le papaya”s. Coffin has co-directed four of the films, including the first three “Despicable Me”s, but “Minions & Monsters,” now in theatres, is his first solo effort. It took some persuading. “Someone in a meeting says, ‘Oh, let’s make that character blue,’ and it becomes blue, just because some guy said so in a meeting,” he said. “I didn’t want to make anything Minions-related unless there was a spark.”
Coffin found the inspiration he needed—where else?—at the movies. The latest installment takes the Minions to Jazz Age Hollywood, where, unhelped by the fact that not everyone can comprehend them, they catastrophically endeavor to make a talkie. The film is stuffed with references: Muybridge, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd. It also includes a few non-industry nods: one of the Minions is named Dick, after Coffin’s co-writer Brian Lynch’s dad. “You know those illustrated books for kids, like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ” Coffin said. “When we started ‘Minions,’ I really wanted it to be like that, for there to be lots of things happening everywhere.” The approach, he explained, adds depth and life to the Minions’ milieu, but it’s not exactly Chekhov’s gun for cartoons. “Sometimes we have people doing totally inappropriate stuff in the background,” he said. “People will see it or they won’t, but, if they do, they might think it’s funny.”
He was taking sips of what he called “my crappy instant coffee” from a mug someone had bought for him in the Basque country. A cat named Ziggy circulated quietly nearby. “I’m gonna have half a croissant,” Coffin said.
At first, Minionese “was all made out of ‘P’s and ‘T’s and exploding letters, but then it became something else.” He continued, “It’s not really a language. It’s a melody that I struggle to express. It starts off ‘Blah blah blah blah blah,’ or literally, like, ‘Blah blah blah,’ right?” (He was doing all the “blah”s with different intonations, and the emotions were coming through with surprising clarity.) “If I need to put the accent of anger, for instance, I need to find a three-syllable word that will illustrate the ‘Blah blah blah.’ ”
A visitor, watching “Minions & Monsters” a few days earlier, had been able to pick some croutons out of the word salad: Shinkansen, Mbappé, Control Z. She had read that Coffin sometimes plundered Indian-restaurant menus for vocabulary. Did he keep a running inventory?
Coffin handed over his phone. “I have two lists because one really got too big,” he said. There they were: the Book of Thoth of Minionese, the ars grammatica of the Banana Language. Tapioca, Patagonia, subito, slip, cacahuète, pistache, courgetti, paella, lasagna, asticot, Tapadaka. Placebo, loukoumi, kouglof, toda raba, Sharapova, tempura, cacao, platypus, shrub, castagnette, potato salada, potage piquant pékinois.
Minionese is a mélange of many tongues, including French, Italian, Spanish, and German (all which Coffin speaks, at least a little), and Tagalog, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian (which he doesn’t). The son of the French diplomat Yves Coffin and the Indonesian novelist Nh. Dini, he learned English as a ten-year-old in Detroit, where his father had been posted. “The first week we arrived, my dad was, like, ‘There’s this movie everybody’s raving about. We’ve got to see it,’ ” Coffin recalled. “So we end up in this huge theatre, and it was ‘Star Wars.’ Obviously, I didn’t understand a word, but I went home and started making sketches of all the ships and stuff.”
The visitor was struck by the image of a young Coffin in a dark theatre, straining to piece together a language that might as well have been gibberish. She posited that the experience might have had something to do with Minionese, but he said he didn’t really see it. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. ♦