Post your questions for Minions supremo Pierre Coffin

Bello! Next month sees the return of everyone’s favourite small, cute, bright yellow blob assistants who spout international gibberish, as Minions & Monsters is released in time to clean up over the US Independence Day box office weekend. It’s the seventh instalment in the Despicable Me franchise and the third standalone outing for Kevin, Stuart, Bob et al.

The series has so far earned £12.3bn globally, of which box office accounts for about half, with merchandise sales slightly outstripping it and DVD sales coming in at a mere $725m. Pierre Coffin has directed all but two of these films. He said 11 years ago they are all rigorously focus-grouped by his own children: he shows them early material, trusts their judgment and uses their reactions to decide whether scenes need reworking.

His approach is practical — if a comic moment fails, 'OK, back to the drawing board.' The son of a French diplomat and an Indonesian novelist, Coffin spent his childhood in Cambodia and Japan before the family settled in a Parisian suburb in the 1970s.

United States

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