How to Train Your Dragon has quickly become one of the best family films of the last several years. Its popularity spawned a kids TV series (Dreamworks’ Dragons) and a cinematic sequel hitting theatres this weekend.

Advanced buzz on the sequel has been so strong that Dreamworks Animation has already dated a third installment for 2016. The story of young Vikings growing up in a land filled with unique dragons has definitely become a huge hit with kids and adults alike.

Recently some of the key participants of How to Train Your Dragon 2 spoke to us about making the film and some of the things they have in store for the next chapter. Voice actors Jay Baruchel and America Ferrera play central characters Hiccup and Astrid and they were joined by the film’s director Dean DeBlois and producer Bonnie Arnold. The following is a transcription of that conversation.

Q: When you started making How to Train Your Dragon, did you think there would be a second one?

Dean DeBlois: The first one was kind of a Hail Mary. Chris Sanders and I came into it at the eleventh hour with 14 months before release. We had to do a page one reconceive so we were just trying to make the best movie we could in that time frame. Not really considering a franchise. But shortly thereafter we saw how much of a warm reception it received; people really liked it and it did well for the studio so there was talk of a sequel almost immediately. And that’s when I pitched that instead of the same animation sequel where it’s the same five or six characters, that this be the middle act of a larger three-act story. I was pitching a third movie in concept but that would inform the story of this second one. It seemed to be an idea that everyone sparked to.

Q: You’ve mentioned before that it takes three to plan out these movies but the third one is already scheduled to come out in two years. How far have you gotten in the process of planning How to Train Your Dragon 3?

DeBlois: You can’t take those release dates too literally. I think they throw a dart into the future and as we get closer and reality dawns we move it around. It will take about three years but we already have a lot of stuff already built so that will shave down some time.

Q: Do you already have the story conceived and mapped out?

DeBlois: I have a rough outline. I know where the big movements of the story are but I need to spend time with the characters and their individual storylines and a couple of big ideas still need to come into the mix.

Q: I was at the world premiere of this film at Cannes and it went great. However, that event was obviously tainted by a big security breach. As actors, what kind of measures do you feel you need to have in place to avoid those incidents in the future?

Jay Baruchel: It’s not our place, man. If somebody wants to do that they’ll find a way to do that and somebody should try and stop them, but our job is to go where people tell us to go.

DeBlois: I was confused; I thought it was someone trying to fluff up her dress. (laughs)

Ferrera: I think we were able to stay focused on what we were there for, which was sharing this project that we all love so much. We weren’t going to let anything take away from that.

Q: Jay and America, you both have dark hair and dark eyes but your avatars have different features. Did you ever want your avatars to resemble you a bit more?

Baruchel: We’re Vikings, no. (laughs) It was never a concern for me.

Ferrera: I was just so glad they were willing to cast against type. I never imagined that I’d get to play a Viking.

DeBlois: That’s the nice thing about animation. Once the voice is separated from the actor it takes on a life of its own. In the case of Drago, we had cast Djimon Hounsou and we had sent three different character designers away with nothing but the voice and we said, ‘Design a character based on this voice.’

Ferrera: Did you tell them who it was?

DeBlois: No, we just gave them the voice and told them it was a stranger from a strange land and they strangely all landed upon the same design. It was really interesting.

Q: Jay and America, how did you feel revisiting these characters after five years?

Ferrera: Well Jay and I have been recording the TV series (DreamWorks’ Dragons) for all the years in between so we now for seven consecutive years have been living with these characters. For me the TV series was a chance to explore different aspects of the character. There are episodes that are silly, so I got to explore Astrid’s silly side. In one of my favorite episodes another girl comes into the picture and she’s really jealous of this other girl. All that exploration played into the fifth film. Second film, sorry. It feels like the fifth film. (laughs)

Q: We’re hoping for the fifth film. (laughs)

Baruchel: So are we.

DeBlois: Jay and America bring such a voice of authority to the characters that in reading the first draft of the script they both had really strong ideas of what felt right and what needed to be pushed.

Bonnie Arnold: I can’t imagine Hiccup and Astrid without Jay and America. They really bring a lot to it. Not just Dean and I but our whole crew really appreciates what they bring to it. They’re part of our family, honestly.

DeBlois: It informs design too because we had to age up Hiccup and we were looking at Jay as a physical model because he’s got this cool James Dean-like quality to him, but at the same time he’s got a gangly quality to him. It’s so adorable and we wanted to channel that into Hiccup so that he doesn’t suddenly become a generic, strapping hero type. He’s still got a reliance on wit and his physical mis-match for the world of Berk where everyone’s 400 pounds and brawny.

Baruchel: I lost a lot of weight for the part. (laughs)

DeBlois: Bonnie forced us to increase Astrid’s bust line for this one.

Baruchel: I knew it!

Arnold: Well, she’s a twenty year old. She doesn’t necessarily have to be buxom but she has to have something. She’s more grown up. (laughs)

Ferrera: That’s just biology.

Baruchel: I get tits in the third one. That’s the working title of the third one, “Dragons 3: Tits” (laughs).

Q: My next question isn’t quite as light. I was really surprised by how dark the third-act turned. Were you ever concerned that you were pushing it too far and that you might lose some of your core audience?

DeBlois: There was some concern that we’d push it until it [broke], but for me, conceptually, I thought Hiccup and Toothless are that core relationship of the whole trilogy. We start with them being inseparable, bullet-proof, symbiotic, and the best of friends and the only way to carry a story [forward] narratively is to introduce conflict. To me, the extreme would be not only to wrench them apart, but to turn them into enemies. We pursued that to the gutsiest extreme, but with the challenge of making it sympathetic for Toothless, so that no one would blame Toothless at the end of the day. That was the trick. When we started testing the film, this idea holds water as long as we can be absolutely sure no one comes out if this with a tainted view of Toothless. He has to be the victim, the true victim in all this, no matter what happens. I think we succeeded. Everyone feels bad for him when he’s chased off…

Arnold: And I think the recovery from that moment… I mean, how do we recover from that? How do we bring it back? That was our challenge in act three and I feel that we go from that moment to utter joyousness in the end. We’re hopeful, excited, and happy for what you think might be in the future for them.

DeBlois: The rest of it is just classic right-of-passage, I think… A lot of us have gone through what Hiccup has gone through in this movie, myself included, at a young age. It’s in many ways a tribute.

Q: There’s definitely a Hero’s Journey element there…

DeBlois: I don’t think Hiccup could step into that role with the same conviction and without the crutch of what he lost.

Q: The new characters in How to Train Your Dragon 2 work really well – specifically Cate Blanchett’s character – were these characters planned from the start in the hopes of a trilogy or were they conceived afterward?

DeBlois: The latter. After the first film went well, we realized there were story threads we fully hadn’t explained, including what happened to Hiccup’s mother. Did she pass away? Was she taken?

Baruchel: We just know she wasn’t there in his childhood.

DeBlois: It was an opportunity to open that up. What if she was like Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall? What if she was living among dragons for twenty years? Being cut off from humanity and becoming a dragon herself, so attuned to living their way and learning their secrets that she actually represents in Hiccup’s restlessness the other half of his soul. No wonder he doesn’t feel like he can just step into his father’s boots and be trained to become the chief of Berk. He needs to meet this other side of him in order to learn who he is. That’s what she was designed to represent.

Q: All the dragons in How to Train Your Dragon 2 are unique. They’re like snowflakes. If you could bring in a cameo dragon from any other film, which one would you bring in?

Baruchel: I’d bring in Falkor from The Neverending Story.

DeBlois: Vermithrax?

Q: From Dragonslayer?

DeBlois: Yeah, that one.

Q: That was a cool dragon, old-school, stop-motion animation too.

Ferrera: I don’t know much about dragons. Sorry.

Baruchel: Sean Connery’s character from Dragonheart. (laughs)

Q: Smaug?

Baruchel: Smaug never shuts the f— up. (laughs)

Ferrera: Khaleesi needs help training her dragons.

Q: Since you’re getting a lot of questions on this press tour, is there one question you wish would go away?

Baruchel: Probably the one about the red carpet. (laughs) But they’re all great questions as long as people like the movie.

DeBlois: One question that keeps coming up a lot is, “Dragons are really hot right now, right?” and people forget that dragons were pretty stale. Eragon put a nail in that coffin for a while and we saw it as a handicap rather than a blessing. But we went back to the idea I had as a kid of wish fulfillment, having your own dragon and being able to fly it.

Arnold: If they’re hot we made them hot.

Q: They’re on fire! (laughs)

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is now playing in theatres nationwide.