In an exclusive interview with The Direct's David Thompson, Swapped director Nathan Greno opened up about the making of his ambitious all-animal world, his reunion with John Lasseter, and how he secured Academy Award-winning Michael B. Jordan for the film's lead voice role. Greno, best known for helming Disney's beloved 2010 animated feature Tangled, walked through the movie's lengthy creative evolution and the many iterations it went through before reaching the screen. Swapped begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 1.
Swapped is an all-animal animated comedy starring Jordan, Juno Temple, and Tracy Morgan, following a Javan and a Pookoo, two natural sworn enemies of The Valley, who accidentally swap bodies after colliding with a magical plant.
The film first entered development back in 2018 as something almost unrecognizable from its final form. It wasn't until John Lasseter joined Skydance in 2019 that things truly shifted. Greno walked into Lasseter's office and told him plainly, "I think we're doing this wrong," and rather than getting thrown off the project, he got the green light to "blow it up" entirely.
From there, Greno and his team built The Valley from the ground up, a living, breathing ecosystem grounded in real-world research, and filled it with a cast anchored by Jordan, who Greno knew immediately was the right fit. "I knew that we had a character to make it emotionally believable and grounded, and that you'd feel something."
Greno also addressed the elephant in the room for some Disney fans, sharing an expected, yet still disappointing update on a potential Tangled sequel during the conversation.
Building the World of The Valley
"We Created a Working Ecosystem..."
- The Direct: "The animation is gorgeous, especially the opening shots above and below water. Can you talk about building the world of The Valley?"
Nathan Greno: We wanted to tell a story about empathy, and a story about transformation, in order to understand one another. And so we thought a real fresh way of doing that, that you haven't seen before, is maybe to have it all be animals, and this transformation story within a just strictly animal cast.
And then we needed a world to set it in, and to sort of contain that world, the idea of The Valley, we all live in The Valley together. So we created a working ecosystem. We did a lot of research, and really grounded this quite a bit, to the point that where the sun rises, where the water comes to, the snow melts in the mountains and comes down, and where's the river coming from.
None of that's spelled out in the movie, but we needed to understand that on a very deep level, and then create a very believable world in which to tell our story.
Reconnecting with John Lasseter: The Origins of Swapped
"I Think We're Doing This Wrong..."
- The Direct: "I read this was in development since 2018. What was that process like for an original story built from scratch?"
Nathan Greno: 100%. It started in 2018 in a very different way. The pitch I had, it was teenagers, and it was superpowers, from teenagers from different walks of life.
Then what happened was John Lasseter joined Skydance in 2019, and when he came in, I was like, 'Game on,' because I'd worked with John for 10 years before that.
At some point, the movie started Frankensteining into something else, so I went into his office one day, and I said, 'I think we're doing this wrong.' Now this is a way to get thrown off a movie. John said, 'Okay, why?' And I went through all of the research. This is a transformation story, and it should be about walking a mile in someone else's shoes.
John heard that and said, 'Great, what do you want to do?' And I said, 'I want to blow it up.'
So the movie really started mid-2019 from scratch. The one thing I brought up to John was, we've seen a human transform into an animal over and over and over. How do we do it in a fresh way? And John was the one who said, 'What if there's no humans in this at all?'
The Rise of Animal-Centered Animation
Because Everything's Been Done...How Do You Do It In A Unique Way?
- The Direct: "Films like The Wild Robot or Hoppers seem to be part of a growing sub-genre of animal-focused animation. Why does that work so well right now?"
Nathan Greno: One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was 'Bambi' and, and while there's humans in that movie, slightly, they cause a lot of problems, but there's something fun about like, taking animals and how much can you caricature but still keep it really grounded and believable that you're like, that feels like a deer. We wanted to do that with our own creatures.
Again, to kind of you go into a movie going like, 'What is this?' Just so audiences don't get ahead of it, and to go like, 'I don't know what these creatures are. I don't know what this situation is, but I like these little guys on this little island.'
And they're the smallest creatures in The Valley. They have to remain, as we all feel like, the kind of the smallest creature in our world.
Everything that we were doing was designed to tell this story specifically. And while there is overlap, like you're saying with other movies, I think there's a lot of fun with it in that within it's just then how do you tell your story? Because everything's been done, it's like, fine, but then how do you do it in a unique way? And then how do you tell us a deeply emotional story that resonates?
How Michael B. Jordan Joined Swapped
I Opened a Bottle of Wine With My Wife...
- The Direct: "What was it like landing Michael B. Jordan as Ollie, especially knowing he'd go on to win an Academy Award?"
Nathan Greno: I pitched to him over Zoom. He was in New York...The meeting went well. By the end of the meeting, we said, we'd reach out and he's like, 'No, I'm gonna do it. I want to do it.' And he, in that meeting, he said, 'We're doing this.'
And I went downstairs, I opened a bottle of wine with my wife...It was such a big moment because I knew that we had a character to make it emotionally believable and grounded, and that you'd feel something, and Mike could deliver that.
And I think sometimes, especially with protagonists in movies, I think people tend to go like, very safe, like, very safe performances. Don't have them get too angry, don't have them get too this or too that. And I was like, 'No, No, I get angry. People in this world get angry.' I think we want to see ourselves within these characters. That's how we relate to these characters. And so I knew Mike could deliver that.
On top of it, he had just done Saturday Night Live, and he was excited for this...Saturday Night Live was so fun for him because he said, 'I got to do something I don't usually get to do.' He was looking at this in the same way to do comedy...He's so damn good, but to do something very different for him, I thought was amazing.
Mythic Influences and Creature Design
"Make Everything About the Pookoo..."
- The Direct: "What were the key influences that inspired this world and its creatures?"
Nathan Greno: So we said, how can we make things so drastically different from one another? The smallest creature in The Valley, how in the world does that relate to a walking redwood tree that can't speak the same language? What do these things have in common with each other?
We were trying to do from the very beginning, and that was that plant to animal spectrum was to make everything about the Pookoo, seemingly from the very beginning, has nothing to do with anything else in this valley, like just stay on your island, stay in your bubble. That's where safety is.
Animal documentaries was a big one to capture that kind of scale and scope and all of that.
What's Next for Nathan Greno
"The Sky's the Limit..."
- The Direct: "Are there other worlds or ideas you'd like to explore after fairy tales and animal stories?"
Nathan Greno: Yes, I do have something I'm developing, and I'm really excited about. All I can say is it's completely different. This is the great thing about animation, you can go from this world to this world, to this time period to that time period. The sky's the limit.
I'm looking at this new film, and there is a thing in common with 'Tangled' and with 'Swapped', it's a character in a bubble that goes out into the world and gains perspective. The new film does that too, in a very, very different way.
