[IMG:L]Andrew Stanton admits it was a single lunch meeting that laid the groundwork for Pixar as we know it today. Back in 1994 he met up with John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft to knock around a few ideas. At the time the team was entrenched in Toy Story and ready to start looking at other projects. In the years that followed they released A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, but there was one concept that never made it to the big screen, one that Stanton has been day dreaming about for years. “What if mankind left earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?”
More than a decade later the writer and director finally gets to tell the story of Wall-E, a robot with the ability to save mankind. In Stanton’s futuristic world, the earth is overflowing with garbage and humans take off into space temporarily while robots clean up the mess. When the humans fail to return, the robots continue working for hundreds of years. As evolution takes its course one robot named Wall-E starts to develop a personality, feelings and a curiosity about the history of human kind and eventually leaves earth to seek out its former inhabitants.
Hollywood.com caught up with the Oscar winner to find out more about Wall-E.
Hollywood.com: So this is Pixar’s first major foray into science fiction?
Andrew Stanton: It is and I’m so glad I get to be the person to do it because I’m such a fan of that genre.
HW: You won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature for Finding Nemo, so how do you top that?
AW: You don’t try to. To be honest, I didn’t know how I did Finding Nemo. I mean every movie we’ve worked on has just been like, “God that’s a great idea! I would love to see that on the screen.” And that’s really your touchstone that gets you through because most of the time you spend on these films it’s in a puberty phase where it doesn’t look pretty, it doesn’t look like its going to work.
HW: What is Wall-E about?
AW: It’s just really about how a little robot makes the whole world go around. It’s got space adventure, it’s a love story. Its pretty much I don’t want to give too much away so that people enjoy it when they watch it.
HW: That also seems to echo the Burgess Meredith Twilight Zone episode. It is basically the last man – or in this case, robot – on Earth.
AW: Oh probably. I mean, who knows where you derive half this stuff from? Also I watched Omega Man as a kid and all those sort of things and I remember reading Robinson Crusoe…I remember Tom Hanks telling us that when we were recording for Toy Story 2 I think it was and he was in the middle of doing Cast Away. And he said, “The biggest fear that people have is loneliness.” And that stuck me I said, ‘I think you’re right.’ And I think that’s why those kinds of stories when done right really resonate with people.
HW: What one thing did you want to do in Wall-E that people haven’t seen before?
AW: I think that way from an audience standpoint. I’m going “Wow that’s a world I’ve never been in,” or “That’s a character I’ve never seen.” And it was kind of obvious I never felt like I’ve been in the sci-fi genre in a non-mocking way. In a very taking it seriously and respecting the worlds and the characters and just truly believing they exist out there. Because that’s really all I want when I’m watching a movie. Especially something of that genre. I just want to believe it’s really out there and that’s really happening.
[IMG:R]HW: People have seen a little bit of the initial image of Wall-E and say he looks like Number 5 from Short Circuit, do you think so?
AW: The funny thing is that that might be a human kind of response to those kind of eyes because I remember that movie. But I definitely will take credit that I was watching a baseball game with my friend’s binoculars, and I was knowing I wanted to make a movie that made you feel the same way when you watched Luxo [the Pixar mascot], doing the little lamp jumping around, that you did with a robot. But I said, “Well I can’t just do a single-eye character because you can only get so many expressions from just tipping your head.” And I said, “How am I going to carry an entire movie?” And I was honestly at the baseball game, I missed the whole inning because I suddenly pulled the binoculars away and I started doing this [mimes moving binoculars in and out] and I started realizing how many more extra expressions I’d get that way and that’s when I said, “That’s it! That’s got to be the face.” And then things were just sort of built off from there over about a year and a half, with a lot of other artists just drawing stuff. He didn’t come all at once.
HW: You mentioned you wanted to make a movie about R2-D2.
AW: I said I just wanted it to feel like R2-D2 The Movie. Because when I saw Star Wars and R2 went down in that trench of Tatooine and met the Jawas. I could care less if we went back to anywhere else in the movie. I was so engrossed. There was something so appealing about that, I said I want to feel like I’m watching a character like that.
HW: But it looks like R2 doesn’t talk.
AW: R2 talks all the time. He just doesn’t say English. There’s a big difference. I don’t want people going out there saying [Wall-E] is a silent movie. Everybody talks in this movie and there’s dialogue from the first frame to the end. They just don’t necessarily say words that you would necessarily say.
HW: Was that something you set out to do?
AW: No, we’ve been working with Luxo since day one. It’s so natural with the animator to know the power you can do with that. Its one of those intellectual exercises. You talk about it, you can convince yourself to death that, “Oh, that will be hard.” It’s easy, it’s innate and it comes naturally to every animator I know. And maybe that’s what makes animators ‘animators,’ because nobody had to be convinced at Pixar that that’s going to work.
HW: How do you tell the story with little dialogue?
AW: It kind of comes natural to animators. Animators are naturally puppeteers and they just do it with either pencil or with CG programs and stuff like that. But it’s ultimately putting a sock puppet on your hand and making it think it’s something. It’s just an innate thing. So I don’t think it feels like an extra challenge, it feels more like comfortable shoes. Like this is a place you like to play in, not “Crap, I got to write dialogue.” So its kind of reverse, it’s weird.
HW: What are the technological advances for this?
AW: You know that the other misnomer is that people think we go in with the desire to do a technological advancement. Its more like, wow now that we’re done from making the story, what do we have. Because we always go in with no idea how we’re going to make it. But then when the dust settles and we look back…I think we’re in a place now where if you can think of it, it can be done now. I think we’ve been that way for almost four or five years now. It’s kind of over. Its like you can imagine it, you can see it. Now it’s just all the colors of the rainbow or the palate had been found. Now it’s just up to how smart are you to be able to paint with those colors.
[IMG:L]HW: Did you look at some of the other great robot characters of the past?
AW: Oh we certaintly did…I kind of put it into two camps of people who did it wrong and people that did it right…It’s either just humans with metal skin or it’s an appliance with a character that you throw on it, as opposed to something that’s designed to look like a character…I definitely didn’t want to do was the world of the Tin Man, and that’s kind of where I kept using R2-D2, because I felt like he was the other camp. To me that’s a whole different place of appeal. I think that we pull from ourselves a different audience response depth when we look at a pet or we look at an infant. Because they don’t fill the whole equation and they can express to you exactly how they feel and they think. So you’re forced to pull from yourself, you’re memories, and apply what you think. “I think the baby’s sad, I think that dog is happy to see me.” And I think you start pulling from personal, emotional history to fill in those blanks, so you get a much more impactful response when you’re looking at an inanimate object that you’ve thrown character on…That’s gold when you can get somebody to invest that much of their own personal emotional history into watching a film. That’s why [Charlie] Chaplin is still huge. Anybody can watch it now, or [Buster] Keaton, and be completely affected.
