Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee Frozen Interview

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Kristen was in it very early, actually. She was the very first person that auditioned for Anna. We went through a lot of different actresses, but she kind of set the bar. We loved what she added to it. She helped create Anna with us, she wanted to create that different female Disney character. Quirky, funny. She grew up on Disney and always wanted to be a Disney heroine. She’d sing Little Mermaid songs in her room. She’d record herself practising. But like me, she was - I talk too fast and I’m messy and I put on a dress and it’s stained within five minutes. Can that character also be inspirational? Can she resonate for people in a way that gives them something that lifts their lives. We think so. She’s also very funny. Working with her was such a pleasure. We all wanted to build this same dynamic, weird girl. Idina, obviously we knew from Broadway. That huge voice is just gorgeous. But again, the surprise to us was in the speaking role, her voice has a vulnerability to it, naturally. It was perfect for Elsa, a character who is bottling things up. But there’s so much there, and you feel for Elsa so much. She brought so much of that to it. I think they were so beautifully matched because there’s an optimism to Kristen Bell - when she sings, you feel it. And a power to Idina. You could feel the big sister and little sister. The one with superpowers and the one who didn’t, and they were perfectly matched. We were very fortunate. You just felt like they belonged. And then Josh Gad as Olaf. Josh was one of the first ones to come in for Olaf. You guys kept talking about him and I wasn’t there at the time, it was very early on. But then he wasn’t available for a while, he had a different project. But they had done an animation test with his voice as Olaf. And I was like, ‘Please can we get him,’ because it’s such a hard character to get right. In terms of balancing everything about him, the innocence, and that voice. Luckily, things worked out in his schedule. That first day he came in was one of the greatest days for me on the project. I wrote a couple of pages, and he did them, and we improv’d. We threw lines at him and we laughed, and that session is the session that you meet Olaf in the film. I knew who Olaf was from then, it was great. What we both like to do with the actors is work in the room with them, and really create the characters. I like to put a safety net there: we’re there to catch them, let them go too far, let them try whatever they want, let them create, and you come up with gold. And we’re in the room with them, we have to stifle ourselves from laughing. Some of the emotional scenes we would. We had Idina and Kristen together, particularly for the scene where Elsa’s powers reveal for the first time. When they’re in the palace. One of the great scenes we had together was between Hans and Anna, towards the end of the film. They did that together, and it really helps to look each other in the eye on those kinds of emotional scenes. We wanted to do more, but we worked over two years with them. People in New York, and people in L.A, it’s difficult ... Jonathan [Groff] and Kristen, we couldn’t get them together, but the wolf chase scene where they’re kind of bantering together, [we got them on the phone], she would listen to him, he was just going and rambling questions and hitting her. And she was responding and hitting back. That was fun, we tried something different there. So you could get that spontaneity, even though they weren’t together. Jonathan was another one, we thought originally Kristoff was going to have a gruffer mountain man voice - kind of a man of few words. He came in and auditioned, and I was reading lines with him and came back into the booth after we said goodbye to Jonathan. And everybody was there swooning, we had the women and the men swooning. They loved the voice, he’s just so charming. We rewrote the character for Jonathan.

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