Paulie

Paulie (1998)

The bird is the word

Paulie, a talking parrot, recounts his travels looking for his original owner to a Russian janitor who helps him to the end of his journey.

Date of release
1998-04-17
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (565)
Runtime
1h 31m
Genres
Drama, Comedy, Family, Adventure
Director
John Roberts

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: BAFTA's Children & Young People Award - Feature Film

Paulie is a 1998 American adventure comedy-drama film directed by John Roberts and written by Laurie Craig. The film follows the adventurous story of a disobedient bird named Paulie, a talking parrot who is capable of communicating with humans. It stars Jay Mohr as the voice of the title character, alongside Gena Rowlands, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, and Bruce Davison. Paulie was the first collaboration between Rowlands and Cobbs.

Production

Paulie was one of the initial live-action scripts the new DreamWorks Pictures studio had in development, along with The Peacemaker, Amistad and Mouse Hunt, which were all released in late 1997. Paulie's eventual April 1998 release still predated the launch of the studio's animation division DreamWorks Animation, which started releasing films later in 1998, with Antz and The Prince of Egypt.

Filming for Paulie took place between July 1997 and October 1997 in California and Toronto, Canada. The film's production budget was $23 million.

Screenwriter Laurie Craig mentioned in an interview, "Paulie was an original story of mine. I was inspired by seeing a lone parrot in a cage and I wondered what it would be like if he could actually tell me his life story. Then I read about the amazing African Grey parrot named Alex who had a large vocabulary and was very bonded with his researcher."

During the production of the film, 14 trained blue-crowned conures were used to portray the titular character, with other conure species such as nanday, jenday and cherry-headed conures appearing in supporting roles.

Exterior shots of young Marie's house were filmed in Azusa, California, on the corner of N. Soldano Ave. and Sixth St. Unfortunately, the house was demolished a couple of years after production, and the lot was split up for smaller homes. The production team mailed thank you letters to the residents along the street for the inconvenience.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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