Writer-director Andrew Stanton got in on the ground floor at animation studio Pixar and apparently never looked back. He's been involved in virtually all things Pixar for the past decade and a half; he co-directed A Bug's Life (with John Lasseter) and Finding Nemo (with Lee Unkrich), collaborated on the scripts for the Toy Story movies, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo, and provided voices for almost all the above, plus Cars and The Incredibles. This year sees the release of his first solo writing-directing project, the Pixar picture WALL•E, about a trash-compacting robot still doing his job after 700 years alone on an abandoned Earth. The A.V. Club recently spoke with Stanton about the Pixar mentality, making live-action films in slow-motion, WALL•E's resemblance to another movie robot, and why WALL•E is so obsessed with the Barbra Streisand movie Hello, Dolly!
The A.V. Club: The first teaser ad for WALL•E focused on the idea that back in 1994, when Toy Story was being completed, Pixar's creative leads sat down for lunch and brainstormed the ideas that became A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and WALL•E. What do you remember about the very first ideas for those films? What form were they in when you left that lunch?
Andrew Stanton: Well, we were very careful with our wording, and we made sure we weren't saying we came up with all of those scripts. We had the ideas that inspired those movies. So we talked about subjects and scenarios like the ocean and facing your fears, and that's about the farthest it went. It's interesting to look back and realize that those settings stuck with us, and ended up going on with Nemo and Monsters. The bulk of the lunch was about A Bug's Life, in that we truly came up with a large chunk of that movie in that lunch. And probably the second most concrete idea that came out of that thing, though even then it was half-baked, was the conceit of the last robot on earth, just a machine left running, not knowing that it could stop doing what it was doing. And that was it. There was no name. There was no storyline. It was this character conceit. But it was so strong. We were in the middle of Toy Story at the time, and we had just come off of two hard years of banging our heads against the wall, trying to make our main character, Woody, really appealing. And it was so hard to do, and it was a lesson for us, to suddenly say a sentence like that and already care about this sort of anonymous character. It just kinda blew me away. And I think that's why it stuck around.
AVC: What kind of decisions went into deciding which ideas to develop into films?
AS: Well, the Bug's Life thing, we kept running with during the lunch. Pretty much the entire lunch became about that, and we walked away going "That's our next picture." But we're a director-driven studio, so these other things, these other initial sparks, were sort of out there in the ether, free to grab for any of us after that. It's really whatever inspires the director. We're not a collective think-tank that sits around and goes, "Hey, this is our grand design." It's more, "These are our directors. What does Pete Docter want to do next? What does Andrew Stanton want to do next? What does Brad Bird want to do next?"
AVC: Has that attitude been fairly consistent since the early days?
AS: Yeah. We looked long and hard at why Toy Story worked so well. We realized that one of the biggest reasons was that we were not in L.A., and that just with our guts, we could trick ourselves into thinking these movies were for ourselves. We're not trying to second-guess what the demographics are, or try to second-guess who our audience is. We're just going to make a movie we want to see. We feel like we go to the movies enough that we know what we want: Movies made by a singular vision. Made by a filmmaker who knew what he wanted. That's why I go to the movies—I go to see what those filmmakers want to make. I don't go to see what a studio wants. And so we've applied that ever since.
AVC: How much would you say Pixar has changed as a company since the era of that brainstorming lunch?
AS: It actually hasn't. It's weird. It's changed incredibly, and it hasn't changed at all. And what I mean by that is that it hasn't been the same place for more than a year and a half at a time. It has continually grown and grown and grown. When I started, there were less than 10 people in the animation department, and now there's a thousand. But the tone and attitude of how we work, and the kind of atmosphere we create to make it as artist-friendly and to encourage as much risk-taking as possible, has always existed, and it has adapted itself to work with this scale. And that, I am very impressed with. And shocked. I remember my dad, who formed his own company and went from 12 people to 200 people, the moment he saw us go to 200 people, he said, "Oh, it's all going to change." And he meant that in a negative, skeptical way. And it did change, but it only became more inviting. And I think some of that is because we had a mentality when we were young to hire people based on who they were, not based on their talents. They had to have the right requirements on their résumés, but the most important thing was, "Do I get along working with you? Can I work with you all night in the trenches? If you can get along with everyone in the group, then we'll see if you're the person with the best requirements for whatever the task is." And we've kind of kept that attitude ever since we've grown. It's almost this theory of "If you put a whole bunch of good apples in the barrel, the bad apples just can't stay."
AVC: At what point along the way was it decided that you personally were going to direct WALL•E?
AS: It went to the wayside very quickly after that lunch, because we didn't know what to do with it. And frankly, we knew right away, "You know, what would be cool is if it could be like [Pixar's animated-lamp mascot] Luxo Jr. or R2D2, this character that would speak based on the way it was built. Wouldn't it be cool to do a whole feature like that?" And we said, "That's so arty that no one will ever let us do it." We hadn't even finished Toy Story, so we said, "I'd see that, but I don't know if anyone else would let us make that." So it just died right there. So I think it was, basically, it took that many more years to become better filmmakers and to get that much more confidence in what we wanted to try doing, and also for the technology to advance. When I was in the middle of Nemo, I said, "Well, what do I want to do next?" 'Cause usually, I start writing whatever I want to do next while I'm finishing the feature I'm on. And that little guy came back into my head, and I think I had learned enough by then to realize, "Look, the thing I am attracted to is that it is the loneliest character I could have ever heard of. And the opposite of loneliness is love." I was just completely sparked by the idea that it was a love story in a sci-fi backdrop, and suddenly I just couldn't stop writing. And that's very rare for me. It's very arduous for me to write. And I just took that as a sign, "That's what I gotta to do next."
AVC: You've said you've been working full-time on WALL•E for about four years. At what point in the process did the animation actually start?
AS: We started doing early development testing probably in early 2005.
AVC: Did you have side projects during those four years? How do you stay sane working on just one project for four straight years?
AS: [Laughs.] No, it consumes me. Sadly, my hobby is what I do for work, so I don't go off and go fishing. I go home and veg, and then I go back to work. I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldn't get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.
AVC: You've complained about how it takes weeks to make any change to a Pixar CGI film, because of rendering times. Does the speed and processing power of computers these days make rendering animation any faster, or does the complexity of the animation balance that out?
AS: It does exactly what happens with your home computer. Once you've got more memory, then you just want to do more with it. And you end up feeling like it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes. It's the exact same thing with us. Our appetites have grown in the exact same proportion to the technology.
AVC: How much concern was there over having a lead character who essentially doesn't talk?
AS: None. Very early on, we were completely excited by the idea; we just didn't have the confidence to try it until later. That's what I love about Pixar; it's an artist-driven studio, so we never even think about whether it's commercial or demographic or anything like that. We really trust the filmgoer in ourselves, and go, "Lookit, I would love to see a movie like that." And if the rest of your buddies say "I would too," well, that's all it takes. And then we make it.
AVC: What did the script look like, with almost no dialogue for the first half-hour or so?
AS: Exactly like a regular script. Well, there was a slight difference. In my mind, WALL•E was going to speak. He's speaking from frame one, all the time. It's very conscious, the sounds we pick and what they mean. So I wrote every character as if they were speaking, and just put their dialogue in brackets, so I knew what I was having them say—that would be the intention of the line, and we would replace it with whatever noises would be a good surrogate. I remember reading the script for Alien—it was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description. He would do little four-to-eight-word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus. It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page. It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film. I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL•E. That's where the difference is. The rest of it was very conventional in the way that I have always written scripts.
AVC: Did you watch any silent movies, Chuck Jones-style dialogue-free cartoons, or similar sources for inspiration about silent comedy?
AS: Well, we're way too much the authorities on Chuck Jones, so we didn't need to watch those again. But we definitely felt like, "You know, we should look at the masters, because these guys had decades to become the best at telling stories without the dependency of dialogue. So we watched a [Charlie] Chaplin film and a [Buster] Keaton film and sometimes a Harold Lloyd film every day at lunch for almost a year and a half, the story crew and the animation crew. And became pretty much familiar with their entire bodies of work. You walk away from that thinking, "What can't you tell completely visually?" These guys were just everything seemed possible to convey. And you realized how much of that staging and legwork was actually lost when sound came in. People got lazy and just sort of relied on the dialogue to get stuff across.
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