From the outside, the life of a Hollywood director is glamorous, but just days before its $23 million opening weekend bow, Monster House
director Gil Kenan is calling from the doctor’s office, where, in
advance of his film’s big premiere later that night, he’s cramming in a
few interviews alongside a mandatory appointment for a full physical
that will allow him to embark upon an international press tour of three
weeks. We chat a bit about the competition his movie will be facing and
other films soon set to release — he’s eager to get the advance scoop
on Woody Allen’s Scoop — but soon Kenan’s name is called, for the moment cutting short our talk.

The next day Kenan calls back, and confirms what this past weekend’s
box office would corroborate: the 29-year-old is in fine shape. The
motion-capture animated Monster House,
which is deservedly getting great notices, tells the fun, engaging
story of a trio of tweeners who investigate and then do battle with an
anthropomorphized abode, and in a summer full of bloated and
disappointing fare it’s a streamlined winner, something kids, teens and
adults can all enjoy.

For Kenan, all the praise only fits in with what he readily admits
is a surprisingly stratospheric rise. “All kidding aside, I was really
certain that when I graduated from UCLA I would be making short films
in my kitchen for the next five years until I got a job doing something
on a movie and got a break,” says Kenan, a Tarzana, California native.
It was his graduate thesis short, a blend of live-action and animation
entitled The Lark, that put him on the path toward helming a Hollywood blockbuster straight out of film school. “Monster House
is the further embodiment of some of those same themes, one of which is
that houses play an emotional role in our lives,” says Kenan. “In The Lark that notion is much more subtly presented.”

“I was really stunned when the movie got noticed at its first
screening by Creative Artists Agency, and they signed me out of that
screening,” Kenan continues. “That was really shocking to me. I thought
that was as good as it was going to get, and then they started sending
the movie around and it ended up in the hands of Robert Zemeckis, who
thought it was cool. And then he passed it on to his friend Steven Spielberg…”

The rest, as they say, is history. Of course, Kenan still had a few
battles to fight in shepherding the film to the big screen, including
casting age-appropriate actors in the lead voice roles (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi, Jon Heder and others pop up in supporting roles). “That was a big deal for me,
actually,” recalls Kenan. “I had to fight hard to convince a lot of
people that we needed kids in this movie for it to have any shot at
emotional honesty, and for it to be at all valid as a coming-of-age
story. A lot of people would say, well, you don’t see the kids (on
screen) and their voices change (over production), but I knew in my
heart that the movie wouldn’t work without the kind of weirdness and
awkwardness and natural energy that the kids bring to their parts.”

Kenan’s happy, too, with the integrity of Monster House’s
PG rating, which he admits makes the movie probably a bit too
hard-edged for very young kids. Pointing out that its tension comes
from “good-natured scares,” Kenan notes, “One of the great things about
having Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg as your producers is that a lot of that nonsense that makes movies kind
of gutless goes away. They helped me make this movie the way it needs
to be, which is really scary for young kids.” If its opening weekend
and positive word-of-mouth are any indication, Monster House should be scaring up hearty audiences throughout the rest of the summer.