World According to WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, Ben Burtt and the Cast
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Friday, June 27, 2008
The story of WALL-E is simple…a guy and a girl from two separate walks of life meet and fall in love. What isn’t so simple is the backdrop to their love story. WALL-E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) roams the earth completely alone (aside from his pet cockroach). Humans have abandoned the planet and the abundance of garbage they’ve created to live in space. WALL-E, the last operating robot, continues working over hundreds of years. Then one day his life is turned upside down when a probe drops off a space age bot named EVE sent by humans to seek out life on earth.
We caught up with writer/director Andrew Stanton, sound designer Ben Burtt and actors Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard and John Ratzenberg to find out more.
Andrew Stanton on creating the story:
“Actually there was this lunch we had during Toy Story around ’94 and we were batting around just any idea we could think of to try and come up with what the next movie would be. One of the sort of half brained sentences was ‘Hey, we could do a sci-fi. What if we did the last robot on Earth? Everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it can stop and it keeps doing it forever.’ And that’s really where it started. All the details weren’t there. There wasn’t even a name of the character. We didn’t even know what it would look like. It was just the loneliest scenario I’d ever heard and I just loved it. And I think that’s why it sort of stayed in the ether for so long.”
John Ratzenberg on the reason he’s involved with every Pixar movie:
“I’ve got Polaroids from a Christmas party under lock and key! Well no, that’s the question to ask Andrew Stanton or John Lasseter. If they call me, I show up. It’s as simple as that because I know every single time there’s a Pixar movie it’s part of history somehow. They’ve broken new ground. They could have rested on their laurels and their achievements a long time ago and just been a mediocre company that sends out mediocre product. They refused to do that. They try to outdo themselves every single project, and they do. They are their own competition.”