AVC: Were there stages where you considered making the story completely dialogue-free, or where you considered bringing in English dialogue in much earlier?
AS: No, I was always going to have nontraditional dialogue all through it for the main characters. That was part of the conceit from the beginning that we loved about it. But to me, that wasn't the point. I just loved the idea that you're being true to the integrity to each of the things in the movie. If it's a human, they're going to speak English. If it's a robot that's high-tech, it's going to have a certain kind of language. If it's a robot that's low-tech, it's going to have a different kind of language. And to me, that's what placed it in a very believable universe, is that you weren't thinking about how it was going to be received by the audience. You're thinking more like a documentary filmmaker that's finding this fictitious world, and that's just how the world works.
AVC: People keep talking about how much WALL•E resembles Johnny 5 from Short Circuit—
AS: You know, I was shocked to see that afterward. I never thought about it. I really didn't. And I'll own up to anything. I am trying to homage to HAL [from 2001] and all that, but I honestly never thought of Short Circuit. I can see the comparison, because it's the stereoscopic eyes. I personally got that idea from a pair of binoculars somebody handed to me at a baseball game. When I saw the inner hinge on them, and how you could kind of use it to make them look sad or stern or mad—I remember playing with my dad's binoculars, and that's when I got hooked on the idea. And I loved that his design had the simplicity of the cone lamp head of Luxo Jr. And that's where it came from.
AVC: You had co-directors in your first two movies, but not on this one. How was that different?
AS: Well, there was no grand design. Each film has its own ups and downs, and some of it was training grounds. John [Lasseter] always wanted to potentially see me or Pete [Docter] get a chance to direct. I was a sort of silent deputy or Robin to his Batman during Toy Story, and he just decided to legitimize that role by giving it a title. So we gave it this term, co-director, because we felt like it's not like I'm actually directing the film, I'm sort of his second in demand, and I'm there to further the vision, or be his counterpoint for stuff. But it was also a great little four-year training camp to see first-hand what it takes to be a director. So typically, that's why someone is a co-director.
AVC: How does that differ from the producer role you've had at Pixar?
AS: Well, executive producer can mean anything in the world of Hollywood, sadly. It can be a bought title in many instances. But what it means in our world is that you were the outside consultant/coach, that you're the person that helps things along from the outside if someone needs advice, or if they need an extra hand for a while, or a creative voice of objectivity. So it's a very creative role in our world.
AVC: It seems like Pixar still sort of revolves around that small corps of people who wear a lot of hats. Would you say that's true?
AS: I think because we were small, we got very good at multitasking and sort of a Renaissance style of doing stuff, because we didn't want to be larger than we had to be. It's like anything else. The more people it takes to do something, the more unwieldy it can get. The Telephone game can happen, and the more you are increasing the chances for things to go wrong. So the smaller you can stay, the smoother things go, especially in a creative endeavor. So we've always encouraged this sort of Renaissance style of having many talents, because it can keep the body count down. But it's not a rule or anything like that. It's a little loosey-goosey.
AVC: Does there tend to be competition for resources, particularly for senior staffers who can't be everywhere at once?
AS: Yeah. That's like anything else, there's definitely a list of people that everybody wants on their films, in all different departments.
AVC: The IMDB doesn't show actual animation credits for you since A Bug's Life. Have you changed your role as far as how hands-on you are with animation in your films?
AS: Actually, the last time I ever animated was on Toy Story. And I didn't even animate a shot on Toy Story, I animated development stuff for it. I went pretty much straight into storyboarding and screenwriting, and I think that's the last time I animated, sometime around 1992.
AVC: Why is that?
AS: Because I fell in love with writing. And I found I was good at it. And so everybody kept asking me to do it.
AVC: I was so delighted to find out that you were the writer-director of "A Story."
AS: [Laughs.] Oh really, do you know that? You're like the first person I've ever met that would know that, wow. Randy the Killer Clown. That was my irreverent response to growing up with H.R. Pufnstuf.
AVC: That short wasn't computer-assisted at all, was it? It was very early on, and it has a very loose hand-drawn feel.
AS: I had never touched a computer in my life before I came to Pixar. That just shows you how much John was a forward-thinker, in the sense that he said, "Lookit, we should hire people that are good at their talents. We can teach them programming or any kind of computer skills over a matter of months, but I can't teach them how to be a good entertainer, I can't teach them how to be good with timing, or with whatever creative talents they have."
AVC: So "A Story" was a student project?
AS: That was a student film. That was my third-year student film at Cal Arts. The Spike & Mike Festival bought that and my second-year student film, which was something in the Arctic about a polar bear being chased by three Eskimos. Which ironically, when I think back on it, was also characters who didn't speak English, who spoke in some weird gobbledygook. I think that's just sort of an animation convention, I don't know.
AVC: Is there anything you miss about hands-on cel animation?
AS: Well, I grew up being a huge fan of it, and I definitely went to school to learn it, and my first couple jobs were doing that, so I have a fondness for it. But I'm definitely a perfect candidate for computer graphics, in the sense that my draftsmanship skills were my weakest. There was always somebody that could draw better than me. And in 2D, that really can hold you back and be a glass ceiling for how good your animation can be. And once I moved to a medium that's more like puppeteering, and my draftsmanship skills weren't holding me back, I was a much better animator. It's funny, I would compare notes with John, and he had the same sort of revelation, because he would admit that he wasn't the greatest draftsman either, yet we seemed to have a great knack for timing. And it sort of freed us up. So even though I didn't have an aesthetic interest in CGI animation at the time, I really found I was a perfect candidate for it.
AVC: The old model for animated films is that the director is in there drawing the characters and showing people how they should move. How is a CGI animation director's role different?
AS: It's exactly like being a live-action director; it's just that all the tools everybody uses to do their job are computers. But I have the exact hierarchy that you would expect in live-action. I have a cinematographer, I have a production designer, I have a cadre of actors—some of them are literally actors, some of them are my animators—I have costume designers, prop masters, all that stuff. And the jobs that they do are the same, it's just that they use the computer and we don't get to meet at the set all at once and say "action" and "cut" and then we're done. We have to meet in individual meetings, and then arrange to have all the files they're working on all combined into one file, and then watch it on the big screen, and it's always a mess. It's like a game of Telephone. It takes several iterations, i.e. weeks, sometimes months, to get our shots to work right. But the lingo that we use, the manner that we're speaking, it's like making live-action in slow motion.
AVC: You do some very live-action-camera shots in WALL•E, like the hand-held, auto-focus shot where he's being chased by the shopping carts. What are you working toward there? What's your intent?
AS: Well the whole film, I wanted to have more of a believable sense. I wanted you to have this sort of sense that it's really happening, that you're a fly on the wall and it has a slight, subtle documentary sense to it. I wanted the physics of everything that was going on with the camera, the way it moved, the way the lenses worked, the way the lighting worked, to feel as familiar to reality as you could. I wasn't going for photorealistic; I was going for depth and believability. So that you just felt like that box is really sitting there in space, in air, on the dusty ground. And the more you believe that box is there, the more you're going to be charmed when it comes to life. And that's why I pushed it that far. I am not a geek to try and match reality, I'm a geek for being transported and believing that what I'm seeing is really going on for the hour or two hours that I'm in the theater.
AVC: We interviewed Brad Bird a few years ago when The Incredibles came out, and at the time, he said one of the hardest thing in CG was physical interaction between objects. He said you could blow up the world and the animators wouldn't bat an eye, but one character grabbing another's shirt sent them into fits.
AS: Yes, very true.
AVC: Is that still the hardest thing to do?
AS: It's not so much that it's hard, it's just the nature of the medium you're working with. Every thing that you approach—it's like saying I have to use a pen vs. a pencil. One, I have to sharpen all the time, the other one, I have to keep dipping into the inkwell; one, I can't erase. It's just the nature of the medium that you're working with, and just by the very basics of CG animation, it's not truly there, it's all virtual. So surfaces can't—the perception of a surface doesn't recognize the perception of another surface, naturally. They're just going to intersect and co-mingle unless you've created programs and algorithms that are going to simulate that it thinks it sees itself. And it gets all heady and weird and makes my mind hurt. But that's just the nature of the beast, of what you're working with.
AVC: Well, in WALL•E specifically, what would you say were the biggest technical hold-ups? What did you have to work hardest to do?
AS: It was the camera. My mandate was, I wanted it to feel like you found WALL•E in some film can somewhere, and it was made in the '70s during the height of all these great sci-fi films. And they used the same production values, the same kind of cameras, the same kind of lens packages and lighting aesthetics. And we just kind of found it and remastered the film. So we had to do a lot of analysis of what really simulated the accuracy and matched the physics of those kind of cameras, and what they did. And we found the math that's in our software for our virtual cameras wasn't matching that, the cameras were "broken," and we'd been working with broken software all this time. So we spent about six months fixing it all, and I really think in a subtle way, it helped the overall feel of the movie.
AVC: Around the time of Monsters, Inc., it seemed like everybody was talking about textures, how Pixar was miles ahead of anybody else in CGI when it came to making fur look realistic. Do you have a sense now for things that Pixar is working on improving in CGI, to stay ahead of the pack?
AS: No, this is some big myth that's come out from the press. We never go into these things thinking about what we're going to technologically solve. Because that's the least sexy thing that's going to make you work for four years. You don't go "Hey, let's go solve fur!" It's like, "Let's make a cool movie about monsters!" And invariably, when you make a story you haven't seen, or has things in it that you haven't done before, you're going to, by natural process, solve some things you haven't solved before. So it's really a post-analysis when we look back and go "Oh, hey, we solved fur." So it makes great sound bytes for these kinds of press things, but to be honest, it's not something we think about. It's not something we have some road map for. Frankly, I think it's all been solved. In my mind, it's like after the last five, six years, everything you want to see can be done. The paint and the canvas and the paintbrushes have been invented. Now it's just "How good of an artist are you using that stuff?"
I don't want to imply that we care about that stuff. We only care inasmuch as "Is it going to help me tell my story?" I don't think there's a list out there of things to solve. There used to be, I think, but honestly, ever since I saw Lord Of The Rings… I think it's been solved now. I think it's just "The camera's been invented, guys, how well can you use it?"
AVC: You've no doubt already been asked this a million times, but why Hello, Dolly! in particular?
AS: [Laughs.] I was going to say that before you said it, because I knew it was coming. In all honesty, when I came up with that idea, I turned to my wife and said "I'm going to get asked this question for the rest of my life, this is the weirdest idea I've ever had." But I couldn't drop it, it just worked. And what it was… I always loved the idea of putting an old-fashioned song against space. I always loved the idea of the future against the past juxtaposed, and I just thought that was a great intro to the movie. But there were so many choices for "What's an old song to put there?"
Eventually, it led me though my song searches to standards, and a lot of standards come from musicals. I'd done enough musical theatre that I knew some of the staples, Fiddler On The Roof, Guys And Dolls, and things like that. When I got to Hello, Dolly! and I played "Put On Your Sunday Clothes," and that first phrase "Out there…" came out, it just fit musically, I was just like "Wow, that kind of works, and I can't explain it." And I kept it private to myself, this little idea, because I said "This is weird, I don't know if I'm going to lose the confidence of my crew if they see me trying this." But I couldn't get rid of it, it kept working for me. So I finally realized, "You know what, this song is about two guys that are just so naïve, they've never left a small town, and they just wanna go out in the big city for one night and kiss a girl. That's my main character." And then my co-writer, Jim Reardon, said, "You know what, he could actually discover an old tape in the trash, and that's how he got inspired by it, and it's a great way to show that he's got a romantic slant." So we started looking at the movie, and when I found the other song, "It Only Takes A Moment," and saw the two lovers holding hands, I realized "That's a perfect way for my main character to express the phrase 'I love you' without being able to say it." So I took it as fate that I had to use it. And I am willing to pay the price of answering this question for the rest of my life. [Laughs.]
« Previous | 1 | 2
- Comments