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Hi, how's it going?
Donkey...
Donkey!
a...
A stallion, baby!
(SCREAMS)
EDDIE MURPHY: Donkey is such an optimist.
He's always looking at the bright side
of everything and trying to work it out.
Happy-go-lucky Donkey.
(EXCLAIMS) Hey! What's happening, everybody?
Donkey makes me laugh always.
I love that character as much as I love mine.
I don't feel any different.
I look any different?
You still look like an *** to me.
kass.
(LAUGHING)
a superfly,
but I bet you ain't never seen a donkey fly.
Insecurities, self-esteem issues, a donkey and talking
just makes for lots of fun.
(EXCLAIMING) It's hideous!
nice.
It's just a donkey.
Deep down, he is all about love. That's what he wants.
That's what he wants to give.
♪ You got to, got to try a little tenderness ♪
He doesn't take no for an answer.
He can't be insulted, he can't be shut up.
For five minutes, could you not be yourself?
(EXCLAIMS IN ANNOYANCE)
He's the funny one. He's really funny. (LAUGHING)
late, n' manly stories,
and in the mornin', I'm makin' waffles.
I've been making movies 28 years,
and I've done all different types
of pictures, and the Shrek series
is just some of the proudest work that I've been involved with.
Eddie Murphy is someone I have an over 20-year history with,
literally, from his first movie and for me,
when I was a really young executive
in the movie business at Paramount, 20 years ago.
Eddie and I me, became friends
and grew up in the business together,
and we always promised each other
we'd someday do an animated movie together.
MURPHY: Jeffrey called me up and was like, "You have to do this,
"and this is perfect for you." So I, kind of, just said yes.
Wow, it's gonna be champagne wishes
and caviar dreams from now on.
Eddie has done such brilliant work over the years,
and yet, to me, the greatest performance that he has ever given
is actually in Shrek.
This is love.
(LAUGHING)
Donkey is so pure Eddie Murphy. It's 110 proof Eddie Murphy.
.
He's a character that could have gone a million different ways,
and ended up going in the best possible way with Eddie.
,
just related directly to who that little donkey is.
You never really want the character to stay to the script.
The gold that you get in any of these movies,
particularly with comic talents like we have,
is what's not on the page.
Hey, wait a minute! I got a great idea! I'll stick with you.
You're a mean, green, fightin' machine.
And together, we'll scare the spit out of anybody that crosses us.
own it.
He can completely make it his own.
You'll go through a scene with him,
and he'll kind of read it to himself and he'll be very calm,
and he'll get in front of the microphone,
and it's like that line was never written.
It just came out of him,
and it came out in a way that you never
could have imagined writing it.
ek and Donkey, friends,
ind,
I love it!
I said, "I'm playing a donkey,"
so I said that I have to be a ***.
So, that's always at the core of any line,
I'm thinking, "You're a ***."
And I hope you all take note, that's over four movies.
I am focused four movies through
and never, ever, once do you sit and watch and think and go,
"He's not like a ***."
Each time I say something, you turn to whoever you with and say,
"He's a ***."
When somebody tuttis that frutti, I've got to shake my ***.
Then it is up to me.
(SCREAMING)
Uno, dos, quatro, hit it!
♪ Good morning Good morning
♪ Ain't no stopping us now
♪ On the road again
♪ Two can be as bad as one ♪
What did I say about singing?
No.
Can I hum it?
All right, hum it.
(HUMMING)
ng,
it's always been funny.
There's something funny about someone singing
that thinks that they can sing really good,
and they almost can sing but they can't.
There's just something funny about that.
Especially if you're looking like a donkey
and a tooth is missing on the side,
for some reason, that's just gold on screen.
I love hearing Eddie sing, and Eddie's a singer.
And it was really fun choosing the songs
that Donkey might want to sing,
and they're all beast of burden songs.
♪ 'Cause I'm all alone
♪
At a certain point in every film, now, he goes,
"Okay, when do you want me to sing?" And, "What are they?"
And he kind of wants to do them all at once.
it.
♪ These eyes have seen a lot of love
♪ But they never wanna see another one like they had with you ♪
Eddie takes his singing real seriously.
It's something that ves,
So getting him to be okay singing badly
was a really (LAUGHING) hard thing to do.
t it.
(GROANS)
h
And he understood, he is an annoying, singing, talking donkey,
and he had a great time with it.
And the most fun was, at the end of Shrek,
he breaks into a solo of I'm A Believer,
and we actually said to him, "Okay, so now you can sing great."
And we created this, sort of, gospel
version of the song for him to do,
and he just went nuts.
♪ I believe, I believe I believe, I believe
♪ I believe Hey! ♪
I actually think it's one of the most fun parts of the film.
♪ I'm in love
♪ I'm a believer
♪ I couldn't leave her if I tried ♪
MURPHY: I think they're mocking me.
I think they know that... You know, well it's like,
"Listen, he put some records out, and they were horrendous.
"And I think that's a soft spot for him.
"So let's make him sing in all these movies,
"and he'll be squirming in his chair."
(LAUGHING)
SHREK: You know, I think I preferred your humming.
Because the movie is so stylized,
it's important to achieve, within that stylization,
a level of realism so that the characters are convincing.
s move
are the hardest things to achieve.
In some ways, Donkey was the easiest character,
because no one's really seen a talking donkey.
No one knows what a talking donkey should look like.
It talks!
Yeah, it's getting him to shut up that's the trick.
It's been a really cool process.
onkey clearly went onkey
and the body that does stuff that donkeys don't do.
So, this kind of movement, we have Donkey doing it,
but we made it more anatomically correct.
He would raise his hoof, not turn it over like a hand.
We did go in and put more controls in
and the mouth, to allow us to get his performance more subtle
as he matured as a character.
Cool.
There's a lot of care and finesse, things that can go wrong.
It just takes a lot of time to get things to look right.
Everything's a case of trial and error.
For instance, we had shots of Donkey,
it was actually someone's first day in production,
and they made one change, which they
thought was an innocent change,
to the Donkey setup, and the next day,
we got back renders from about a half a dozen shots
with Donkey looking like a Chia pet.
It's just so adorable, we've saved those,
and we look back at them for a good laugh.
Before this is over, I'm gonna need
a whole lot of serious therapy. Look at my eye twitchin'.
o wonder 't have
Only a true friend would be that truly honest.
Donkey's this wonderful, Shakespearean, full of naivete,
that, as far as he's concerned,
when Shrek chased the soldiers away,
doing ons,
he rescued Donkey, and Donkey loves Shrek for that,
and he's just gonna attach himself
to his new friend and stay with him.
Can I stay with you?
What?
u, please?
He's impressed by Shrek. He loves everything that Shrek does.
istence
at finding cracks through Shrek's shell.
I think Shrek lets him in without
even really realizing he's doing it,
and Donkey just sticks with him and has that persistence.
Friends.
You know, Shrek 2, we wanted to see
their life beyond the first movie.
There was a need, both story-wise
and personally, to add to the cast.
Donkey was now the third wheel in this relationship.
He'd finally found a friend, and his friend went and got married,
people can rience.
So we already had this aspect of Donkey feeling threatened,
and we thought, "Wouldn't it be fun
"to spice that up a little bit more
"and have someone else vying for Shrek's attention,
"to threaten him even further?"
Hey, look, a little cat.
Look out, Sh he got a piece.
Donkey's a little jealous of *** in Boots.
Sorry, the position of annoying,
talking animal has already been taken.
I think that there's always a healthy rivalry
between insolent animal sidekicks.
I encourage that in a movie. It gives
Donkey an interesting competition.
Listen, if we need an expert on
licking ourselves, we'll give you a call.
In Shrek Forever After, in alternate reality,
he's working for the witches, he's a beast of burden,
and he's not very happy about that, but that's his job.
He's almost used like a radio,
where the witches are whipping him so he sings different songs,
and of course, he's a little bit more unkempt, a little hairier.
He had a patchiness to him that wasn't in the other Shreks.
His mange-ish look kind of worked a little bit. I liked it.
(LAUGHING)
Smell it, get it. Away you go.
Do I look like a bloodhound to you?
In case you haven't noticed, I'm a donkey, not a dog.
If I was a dog, they'd call me Dog, not Donkey.
He's kind of the same Donkey we know,
although he's lacking that one thing
that's so important to Donkey,
that really brightens him up, and that's friendship.
(WHIMPERS)
And of course, he meets Shrek all over again,
and he gets to be his friend all over again.
.
They're definitely best buddies,
and I think that Shrek is still incredibly impatient with Donkey,
but at the same time, you can tell
there's an underlying understanding
and, obviously, love, between the two of them.
"True love's kiss."
have to take me to dinner first.
People come up with their kids and they all say, like,
"My son has seen Shrek a hundred times,"
and the kid will be standing there and they'll say, like,
"Do a scene from Shrek!" And the little
kid would do a whole scene from Shrek,
and do the Donkey's lines and stuff,
and then they're looking at you,
and you go like...
I don't even think of it as Eddie Murphy anymore.
I'm a huge Eddie Murphy fan, but I just
really think of him as actually Donkey.
MURPHY: I always said that I really think that if I were to drop dead,
they'd put a picture of that Donkey in the paper and say,
"Eddie Murphy passed away today," and they'd show... (LAUGHS)
They would make that to be me. Donkey...
They want that to be me.
Oh, man, now I'm all emotional.