Fergal Reilly is an Irish film director, storyboard artist, voice actor and animator best known for directing the animated filmThe Angry Birds Movie.
Early life and career
Reilly was born in Ardee, Ireland, and moved to the United States at the age of nineteen. He started working at the Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles, and Dale Baer Animation as an animator and story board artist. He was a story artist on the Warner Brothers animated and hybrid movies The Iron Giant, Space Jam, and Osmosis Jones. He is an alumnus of Gormanston College a former boarding school in Ireland where he drew comics, cartoons and caricatures in lieu of any formal art classes. He attended the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology where he initially studied graphic design, but always suspected that he didn't want to spend his life “pushing type around reports for banks” Reilly spent a number of years bouncing between live-action and animated movies and was among the first animation artists to do so. He left Warner's to work with director Rob Minkoff on Stuart Little and The Haunted Mansion creating storyboards and concept art. In 2002 he was hired by director Sam Raimi to help visualize the action set pieces for Spiderman 2, including the train battle between Spiderman and Doc Ock in Spiderman 2. In 2003 he joined Sony Pictures new animation division and spent 10 years there as a Director, story artist and story supervisor helping develop projects for their family entertainment slate. He also worked with Jon Favreau and Richard Linklater as a story supervisor on special projects. In 2011 he was slated to direct The Familiars with Doug Sweetland and Sam Raimi producing for Sony/Columbia Pictures. The story was based on the series of children's fantasy books written by Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson. In 2012 Reilly was picked by the Irish Technology Leadership Group as one of the most influential Irish Americans influencing the worlds of entertainment and technology alongside Kathleen Kennedy producer of Star Wars The Force Awakens. Reilly made his feature film directing debut in 2013 with The Angry Birds Movie, which he co-directed with Clay Kaytis for Sony Pictures Entertainment. The film was based on the Rovio Entertainment's video gameAngry Birds. Jon Vitti wrote the screenplay for the film, which was released in the United States on May 20, 2016. In a 2016 interview for Collider, when asked about the challenge of turning a game app into a blockbuster animated movie he said " We didn’t think about the intimidation factor. There was a lot of noise about how do you turn an app into a movie. But, for us, as soon as we see the creative problem, we just start to focus on it. Both our trainings, I mean, we’ve spent our whole careers creating character. It’s an intense process, but that’s what we’ve done." The movie opened at number one in over 50 countries and the US, toppling Marvel's Civil War off the top spot and setting records for May. To date it's Sony's top grossing blockbuster of 2016 at the box office, grossing 353 million dollars on a 73 million dollar budget. It also opened number 1 in digital downloads on ITunes and on DVDs and Blu-ray. In 2019 it was announced in The Hollywood Reporter that Reilly would direct Pete and Goat, an R-rated, live-action dramedy. Mike Vukadinovich is behind the original screenplay. Daniel Dubiecki and Lara Alameddine will produce the pic under their Allegiance Theatre banner, with Stuart Ford's AGC Studios financing.
