"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" Cast Talks "Ice Age" # 3 in 3D

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Press Conference

Queen Latifah: "For me, this go round was a lot easier than the last one because I just came onboard on the last film. It was kind of rough at first trying to figure out Ellie's voice and match it with the idea of what the character and what the animation was supposed to be, and just trying to find that whole thing and then I also perform. I sing. I do shows, and so sometimes I'm coming in and my voice is kind of hoarse.

And then I come back and do it again when my voice is better, so I'm always fighting that challenge of being in the right voice because I've been somewhere singing or rapping or whatever."
"For this one, once we found who the character was, it was pretty smooth. Ellie, she's sweet and she's funny and she's nurturing and she really cares about the big family, like she's part of this family. So back to her question, I didn't really need to watch the last movie because Ellie has grown so much since the last movie. She's married now. She's got a baby on the way."

John Leguizamo: "She got married? When did you guys get married?"

Queen Latifah: "Yeah, just assume that we're married. She's making it these days. I'm gonna go with tradition on this one. Say they got married first. It's mammoth style. Yeah, that's my baby daddy right there. But she grows so much between the last film and this one because the last one she thought she was a possum. She was kind of like a big kid. She wanted to play with her brothers all the time and she hung from a tree by her tail for that matter.

Now she's a little more mature, so it's really about kind of making sure she had that nurturing warmth in her voice. And she seems to be a voice of reason, really pushing him to go make up with Sid. If things are wrong, she's always trying to push people back together. So it was really just trying to bring that kind of love to the character."

Ray Romano: "What's funny is that the dynamic, not to bring up my show, but Everybody Loves Raymond, my show was like I was the voice of reason because there were crazy characters. The brother, the mother, they were all nuts, and I kind of had to keep that glue together. But then the wife was really the overall voice of reason because then I was the crazy one, which is kind of the same. I thought he was crazy. It was about me trying to keep him, but then you kind of reel us all in."

John Leguizamo: "Everybody Loves Manny."

What did you want to create differently about your dinosaurs, and casting Simon Pegg as Buck?

Carlos Saldanha: "Well, the dinosaur things, when we knew we were going to do a dinosaur, we always start with the same premise. 'Oh my God, there were no dinosaurs in the Ice Age, how are we going to make this dinosaur?' So when we went for the designs of them, we said, 'It needs to be an Ice Age design dinosaur.' We use the same character designer, Peter DeSève, who's an amazing artist who did all the characters for Ice Age. We brought him to try [to find] what would be a dinosaur for the Ice Age movies. What would be that design? And he came up with a bunch of fun designs, because we want it to be unique to us. We didn't want it to be just another dinosaur movie. It's an Ice Age with dinosaurs movie, so we wanted to make those characters come to life in our world we created. Also, we play a little bit [with] the dinosaurs in this movie. [It's] not so much just a creature, just coming in to destroy everything. We have mother dinosaur, we have the babies, and this whole thing about Simon Pegg as Buck and the white dinosaur, Rudy, which is sort of like the Ahab and the whale kind of thing. So there's a lot of stuff we tried to put into these dinosaurs that make them unique to our movie."

"Simon was a wonderful addition to the family. It's great because every movie that we make, like the first one we had this dysfunctional family that got together. We have like Sid, Manny and Diego coming together to become a family at the end of the movie. The second movie, we already had the family. Manny, Sid and Diego were buddies, were all there. The family got expanded with the addition of Ellie, Latifah and the possums, Crash and Eddie. So the family got expanded so now we've got a bigger family. So now we go to the third one, it's like, 'Okay, now we have a huge family. What's next?'"

"We brought in Buck, which was a great little character, a swashbuckling kind of fun [dude]. It was also dysfunctional, which was great because our families are this kind of odd 'no matter where you come from, who you are, you're part of the family.' We all embrace him and it was a wonderful cast choice. I love his movies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. I always love that, his comedic timing and his voice, the quality of his voice. His energy I think worked great with these guys. When we bring somebody into the family, it's like bringing your in-laws. You have to see how everybody feels around it, so we have to listen to all the voices with that voice in the middle to see if that voice belongs to the family, and he belonged."

Ray Romano: "It's tough for me when you bring the new guys in because I know they're going to get all the laughs. In the first movie, it's always the little guys. I'm like, 'Okay, Sid gets all the laughs.' In the second one, I go, 'There's two new, Crash and Eddie.' In the third one, there's another new little guy."

John Leguizamo: "If they're big, you know they're not going to take any material."

Carlos Saldanha: "I love all my children. I love you all."

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