"A few great bodies? I can think of a few great bodies."
Kline ignores him and gives his own example: "Look at Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or don't."
Getting a straight answer out of these two actors was clearly going to be difficult, if not impossible. In an attempt to turn the conversation ever-so-slightly more erudite, we notes that their movie also was reminiscent of The Man Who Would Be King, because Tulio and Miguel, when they arrive in El Dorado, are mistaken for gods.
"Precisely!" Branagh says brightly. Then his expression turns wicked. "We were originally going to do it as Sean Connery and Michael Caine," he says. "You can do Sean Connery can't you?" he asks Kline. Both of them instantly launched into impressions of the stars of The Man Who Would Be King, and we are treated to a few seconds of dialogue that sound like the seeds of a Saturday Night Live sketch before Kline shrugs his shoulders and says, "But in the end, we decided to play our own humble, little stupid selves."
It is Branagh, or the director that he is, who briefly breaks through the kidding to comment on the unusual filmmaking process he and Kline experienced making The Road to El Dorado. He explains that they spent four years, on and off, recording the characters. "After watching these pencil drawings [of himself]," he says, "you start to see the color coming through with a little bit of your own gestures and the facial stuff." He notes that the animators captured quite a lot of his and Kline's personalities. "We do a lot of shtick together, and they went for a lot of the off-the-cuff stuff. They edited it very well. They had a very good sense of timing, didn't they?"
Kline, taking his cue, keeps a straight face for a moment and agrees. "When you're doing just the vocal performance, you are entrusting the animators with your comic timing. It's the physical stuff that gets as many laughs as the verbal stuff. You're really putting yourself into their hands, and they did a brilliant job."
As for "the verbal stuff," Branagh wastes no time complimenting his partner on his skill as an improviser, at which point Kline interrupts, saying, "Don't do that phony, false modesty, self-deprecating thing. He's a master, a master," Kline says of Branagh as they speak over each other for a solid thirty seconds, each trying to out-compliment the other.
