‘Minions don’t age – sometimes I draw them like that for fun, but it looks weird’ … Coffin, who has directed five films in the franchise. Photograph: Aurore Marechal/Getty Images for Illumination and Universal Pictures View image in fullscreen ‘Minions don’t age – sometimes I draw them like that for fun, but it looks weird’ … Coffin, who has directed five films in the franchise. Photograph: Aurore Marechal/Getty Images for Illumination and Universal Pictures Film & Music reader interview Film Interview ‘A female Minion would be the beginning of the end’: Pierre Coffin on creepy memes, decoding Minionese and farting bananas As told to Catherine Shoard The French animator, director and voice of those lurid yellow assistants to the despicable answers your questions
Thu 2 Jul 2026 13.05 CEST Last modified on Thu 2 Jul 2026 19.59 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google Could we please have a Minions/Backrooms mashup movie? TaffRaffia I don’t know if it would work because it would be yellow against yellow. All you’d see would be eyes and even they would be hard to see. It would just be voices coming out of yellow.
Will there be a gritty “old man Minion” type story to round the franchise off? BatteredRingpiece Minions don’t age. I sometimes draw them like that for fun, but it just looks weird.
Do Minions live for ever? Unicornlover Yes.
Will we ever see a female Minion? How do they reproduce? BenderRodriguez I think a female Minion would be the beginning of the end. Universal would want to do it because they’d think it would please all the women out there. But I’m not convinced. If I were a woman, I’d think it was tokenistic. I’m not saying we’re not gonna do it or not try, but maybe it’s not meant to be. Or maybe it is! Who knows.
We did play around with the idea of having the Minions land on this island where there was another tribe who were all, apparently, female. But it didn’t go further than that. In my head, female Minions would look exactly the same as male ones. And in terms of how they breed: they don’t. They just are.
Minions & Monsters doesn’t follow along the chronology after Minions 2: The Rise of Gru , but goes a few decades back . What about this time period made it the right choice for this new instalment ? QueerAlien From the moment Chris Meledandri suggested making a Minion movie in which the Minions were making a movie I thought it would be cool to have it happen in that era everyone forgets, where cinema became an industry and people like Fritz Lang and Michael Curtiz were migrating from eastern Europe to build studios and create the best movies ever.
And the visuals of the time nod to the essence of the Minions. I love highly choreographed stuff and elaborate one-takes. We have nods to Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Chaplin and try to have fun with history by suggesting that certain scenes became iconic thanks to the Minions.
If you could remake a French New Wave film with Minions as the cast, which would you choose and why? laurasnapes Breathless. At the end of the new movie we show the minions throughout time screwing up classic movies. Like killing off one of the Eight Samurai, and crashing the editing room of Breathless, which is why it ended up a bit wobbly.
View image in fullscreen Me want banana! … Stuart, Kevin and Bob in Minions. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Allstar Do you like bananas in real life? Tim Delaney I’m not crazy about them. I have a couple a month. There are other fruits, and sometimes I…