An Interview with Ron Clements and John Musker, Writers/Directors of The Little Mermaid

Disney covered my travel expenses for the #LittleMermaidEvent & #DisneyPlanesPremiere event. All opinions are my own.

When I was in LA last month for the #LittleMermaidEvent, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in a roundtable interview with Ron Clements & John Musker. In addition to writing & directing The Little Mermaid {an impressive enough feat on its own}, the two of them have directed six Disney films in total, starting with 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective &leading up to 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. {The other films include Aladdin, Hercules, and Treasure Planet. They are also rumored to have a work in progress.}

It all started in 1981, during production of The Fox and the Hound. Ron Clements was a supervising animator on the movie & John Musker was a character animator working under him. They continued to bond while working together on The Black Cauldron, which they joke that they almost got kicked off of & replaced with a younger director because the veteran directors weren’t seeing eye to eye with them at that point.

“It was sort of a schism. Actually at that time Tim Burton, who I went to school with at Cal Arts, did some drawings for one of the characters who I looked like and I thought, ‘Oh this is cool’, and one of the earlier directors was like, ‘Ooh, too weird, Tim Burton.’ So that didn’t happen and then we wanted to do something more like the books, and the other director is like, no do it more like Star Wars, forget the books. &I went no-no-no, the books are good,” recalls Musker.

After working together on The Great Mouse Detective, Ron Clements asked John Musker if he’d like to help him write the script for The Little Mermaid. “It sounds weird, but most of the Disney films that were done under Walt Disney, they didn’t use scripts the way they’re used in live action,” starts Clements.

When Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg came to Disney, “they were from Paramount, they were used to reading scripts. And they weren’t going to be able to okay anything without a script. So they wanted to see a script on The Little Mermaid and I had written some scripts, and I knew John wrote, so I asked him if he was interested in collaborating on writing this script. And that’s really where we first started working together. We wrote the script together and Jeffrey actually liked the script a lot. So it made sense then that we would direct it since they liked the script. And then that went well so we just continued to work.”

&The rest was history! “I joke that I’ve been married to my real life wife for thirty-three years now, and I’ve been married to him for like twenty-eight or something. Really scary,” Musker says of their partnership.

While the two don’t often barbeque together, {“He’s a big dog person and I grew up allergic to dogs. He’s got two basset hounds and he is a total dog man,” Musker says. Agreeing, Clements adds, “My wife has been in basset rescue for years. So we have three now. But we’ve had more than that.”} they still enjoy their time together at work. “We have similar taste in movies and what makes us laugh and comedians and TV shows and films and things like that, so I think that helped.” Musker says.

As for how they work together so smoothly, he adds, “Ron’s more big on structure, and I’m a little bit more dialogue oriented. So we kind of dovetailed, a little. We weren’t doing exactly the same thing. Although certainly he wrote some very funny dialogue and I occasionally have a structural idea. But the sum is somewhat more than the parts.”

How do you get started writing films? “I think for anyone that’s interested, it really is sort of a tough road. You almost have to write a script and then find an agent who’s willing to represent you. So you’d have to go through like the Writer’s Guild. Because if you just ‘Here, I’m going to send my idea to Disney,’ they won’t read it because of legal reasons. They don’t want to get sued later. So it has to come through an agent. But it’s all sort of a Catch Twenty-Two; you can’t get an agent unless you’ve had something done. I would approach the Writer’s Guild if I were you. Write to the Writers Guild in Hollywood, talk to them, and see if you can get a list of agents who are willing to represent new writers and then send them a sample of what you’ve got and then you go from there,” Clements advises.

As for what the two of them want to be remembered for most? “I don’t know that we particularly want to be remembered. I think it’s nice if the work is remembered, that the the work is appreciated. Not everybody is like this, I know. But sometimes people will get into animation, and things have opened up from when I started, but it wasn’t something you sort of got into if necessarily you wanted to be well known. And in some cases, there is an appeal, if you’re kind of introverted or shy or whatever. Even as an animator, I’ve always thought it was fun, because an animator is really an actor. And we both started as animators. If you’re an animator, you’re sort of an actor but no one actually sees you, you’re performing out there on the screen, and if people like the character that you’re animating then they respond to that. It’s like you’re, you’re an anonymous actor. If they laugh at something you animated, you feel like you’ve performed that, and you feel good about that,” says Clements.

Musker adds, ‘I mean it’s apparent that the movies that we’ve done stand the test of time, that they live on beyond what we do. More so than my own name or something like that. The fact that the characters and the stories still resonate, I think that’s pretty satisfying. Steven Spielberg goes in a restaurant, you know, he can’t eat a decent meal, but we can eat plenty!”

“Yes, it’s like people don’t know who we are, but they know who Ariel is.” adds Clements.

Thank you to Ron & John for spending their time with us & sharing their insight! Meeting the men who brought to life one of my favorite movies of all time was truly a dream come true. &Be sure to check back next week for more from my behind-the-scenes look at The Little Mermaid!