Could we please have a Minions/Backrooms mashup movie? TaffRaffiaI 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? BatteredRingpieceMinions don’t age. I sometimes draw them like that for fun, but it just looks weird.Do Minions live for ever? UnicornloverYes.Will we ever see a female Minion? How do they reproduce? BenderRodriguezI 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? QueerAlienFrom 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? laurasnapesBreathless. 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.Me want banana! … Stuart, Kevin and Bob in Minions. Photograph: Universal Pictures/AllstarDo you like bananas in real life? Tim DelaneyI’m not crazy about them. I have a couple a month. There are other fruits, and sometimes I prefer salad. But there’s something very practical about bananas. They come with their own wrapper. I really wanted to give the Minions a craving, and it made total sense that it would be a banana, because of the colour.I love how the Minions have such distinct personalities – does it annoy you when people lump them together? steve__bayley There’s truth in both statements. In the first two Despicable Me movies, they’re just a group. But with Minions, we needed three really distinct characters, so we made Kevin, Stuart and Bob: authority, aloofness and naivety. After that we felt that we should no longer do the Smurf thing. So in the second Minions movie there’s this Minion called Otto, who’s one of those guys who you ask “How’s it going?” and he then suddenly bursts out with his whole life: “Oh, everything’s going fine. I love the weather. You won’t believe what happened to me today …” And if you left him to talk for 15 minutes without stopping, he would inevitably get around to Trump.So there are characters with arcs in the later movies, and I do feel protective and defensive towards them because they’re not critters. They’re not soulless. They’re not things. They are individuals. Sometimes, when I watch the movies I see a sequence where I messed up in this respect and that’s not good. I think what people recognise in them and why they might be successful is that while they look funny and cool and have a graphic quality to them, they do have souls.Pierre Coffin greets fans before the Minions & Monsters premiere in Los Angeles. Photograph: Savion Washington/Getty Images for Illumination And Universal PicturesWhich of the Minions do you think you most closely take after? Worcestershire WandererStuart, because we both play the ukulele. He’s aloof and not that talkative and I aspire to be a French nihilist.Is Minionese purely gibberish or does it have some kind of linguistic structure? If so, what is it, and do you adjust it for different countries? laurasnapesIt doesn’t have a linguistic structure. It has melody. If a Minion asks a question, it has a melody of a question. If it’s a joke, it has the rhythm of the joke. The secret of the Minionese language is to find the proper melody and add to that melody words to further understand what the sentence is about. Or add Indian dishes or famous singers just for the fun of it.I feel a little bit of a fraud, because it’s not a proper language. It’s gibberish. Just tricks to get people to understand stuff that is sometimes elaborate. Sometimes, we change the nature of the scene because I can’t find the right melody. That’s why the films take three years.When we finish the visuals, I do three weeks of audio recording in my house [Coffin voices the Minions in all territories except China]. The first week is just me redoing little words, because in some languages I always say a swear word or name a body part I shouldn’t. Then the other two weeks are spent on story points, trying to make them more local. Like big boss is gran jefe in South America.If you worked for Spielberg in 1993, how come you were based in London? bumble1I worked for a year for Spielberg’s Amblimation, where he did these traditional animated movies – An American Tail, We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story and Balto. Then he took lots of people back to the US and created DreamWorks.Amblimation was based in Acton [in west London] and I lived there with my girlfriend. The job was awesome because we could work on Disney-quality animated movies in Europe, which was a big thing, and that’s when I got hooked on computers. But although I loved the Chinese and Indian restaurants in Acton, the place was just a little bit strange to us French people. I’ve not been back. But I’m curious.Smell of success … the Ultimate Fart Blaster is one piece of merchandise Coffin has kept. Photograph: James Veysey/ShutterstockHow does it feel that the Minions have become a vehicle for some of the most surreal types of meme communication? IreallyneedteaI think it’s cool that people make the Minions their own. Sometimes, I find it really funny, sometimes very creepy. But even if it’s irreverent, even if it goes beyond the scope of children, it’s cool they’re part of pop culture.My house is swimming in Minions merch. Do you get it all free? bumble1Yes, but I just got so swamped I asked them to stop sending it. Now they make so much stuff that I’ve lost track, and lost a little bit of interest. But one thing I do have still is this sort of an evolved fart gun which makes a fart sound when you fire it and emits a sort of vapour that smells like banana. I love that. It’s very cool.