“I’d love to sound like I knew what I was doing,” says a now-relaxed Bird, enjoying a sunny afternoon by the pool at a Hollywood hotel. “The truth is, I had two-thirds of it for a long time. I had the role-switch idea and the unexploded bomb of [infant] Jack-Jack, where the audience knew he had multiple powers and the family didn’t. But I didn’t have the sort of superhero/villain plot. Finally, I pitched it and everyone liked it and we got in gear. … Then they took a year off our production because our idea was a little better formed than [fellow Disney/Pixar production] ‘Toy Story 4’ at that point. Suddenly, it’s looming ahead of us. And then the villain story didn’t work; it was too complex and didn’t serve the role switch, which was the heart of the movie. I have a release date and a crew going, and all these expectations, and I don’t have that part of the story.
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times