RT Sees the First 30 Minutes of Wall-E!
We visit Pixar, and chat with director Andrew Stanton too.
You're clearly playing on sort of the cues in the film that trigger people's collective memory of what it is to be a robot in outer space, with the spaceships and stuff. I may be wrong but it seemed like there was some R2-D2 in Wall-E.
Andrew Stanton: We certainly make blatant homages every once in a while. You try and make everything as original as you can make it, but everything probably comes from the collective unconscious and things that influenced you, like anything else. It's all subconsciously quite incestuous.
Were there conscious things that you were going for?
Andrew Stanton: No. Everything tends to be just an accident. I have had a million things in other movies that I have worked on and people will go "you know, that's just like this" and you go "oh really?" (Laughs). I want everything to come from a sincere place, from a truthful place. Whether that ends up being a choice that seven other films made, I don't care, as long as that choice came for the right reasons.
The retrieving of live vegetation put me in a mind of Huey, Dewey, and Louie... and Silent Running.
Andrew Stanton: You know, all of those 70s films. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, definitely from the perspective of imbuing a personality on a machine, that affected me big when I was a kid, almost in the same way that Red Balloon did in terms of imbuing something on the red balloon. It's all from that same family. It's a very small pool to pull from, if you think cinematically, how often that's been done, then you cull that down to how often that's been done in sci-fi, it's a small pool.
Children don't need to be talked down to...
Andrew Stanton: I argue that kids are smarter than you think. Kids are wired up for the first 10 to 15 years of their life to figure everything out. So, they're watching you all the time; they maybe don't understand what you and Mom just talked about, but they're trying to glean anything out of the inflection, out of the timing, out of when it's happening, what peoples' faces look like... They're way more receptive to translate than our jaded adult selves.
You said you got the idea for Finding Nemo from your own child. Was there something from your life that gave rise to this idea?
Andrew Stanton: No, like I said, things came from different things for different movies, and this one just honestly was coming up with a situation of a robot left alone on a sort of Robinson Crusoe kind of situation, and that just evolved a ton. And the funny thing is that immediately, almost in the next sentence, I remember Pete Docter and I continued to talk about it after our lunch, was that without even any debate, we said, "Oh, you'd never want to have it speak. You'd want it be a real robot. You'd want it to have to speak with how it was built." That's the excitement about it.
Where did the use of live action come from?
Andrew Stanton: To be honest, it just came out of a logistical conceit that I knew I wanted to use footage from a musical, from a live-action movie. I felt I had the luxury of evolution on my side that we made up for the future for humans, so that we don't have to worry about matching. But any retro footage, I just felt you wouldn't be in the same world if you didn't... since we knew we were going to use footage from Hello, Dolly!
Was it always Hello, Dolly?
Andrew Stanton: I know this is the question I know I'm gonna get asked for the rest of my life is, "Why Hello, Dolly?" And the one thing I wanted to spill is I'm a fan of the movie. I just like to think that Wall-E has bad taste in musicals. But he's a romantic at heart, you know, he's not that discerning.
You know, every once in a while you do change something because somebody got there first. It was frustrating to be in the same year as Triplets of Belleville, because I loved that film when Finding Nemo came out. And I was already working on Wall-E. And Wall-E originally had a French '30s swing music at the beginning over stars, and I just loved the juxtaposition of that, the old and the new, I hadn't seen that. And then I saw Triplets of Belleville, which had French swing music over not a lot of speaking, and the last thing I wanted to be accused of was stealing from something.
And it wasn't hard fast and set in stone that it had to be that piece of music so I started opening my mind to other old-fashioned things, and to be honest the story wasn't fully complete at the time, just sort of parts of the story were. I had been in Hello, Dolly! the musical, and a lot of other musicals growing up in high school, and for some ironic reason--I don't know if you guys do this, I troll iTunes every once in a while because it has become Tower and you can't go to Tower anymore--and I remember stumbling through and going, "I remember this," and trying to remember the songs. I remember immediately going, "This is the most bizarre idea I've ever had, but it just might work." And I juxtaposed it against the opening, and it worked. It led to me figuring out more about what other songs were in the movie and stuff, and it really opened doors for me for other arrows in the quiver for how to tell the story without having to rely on dialogue, without giving plot away.
There is a part where Eve is flying through the air, freed from the ship. It was interesting and suggested that he feels a connection to her.
Andrew Stanton: Yeah, there's like an inkling of however he evolved, there's something in there for her for him to be attracted to. And also, frankly, she just needs to be there, I mean he's never seen another robot. It's impossible not to immediately make a very primal analogy to "love at first sight," and being able to use the sci-fi means at hands to express that. That's really all it was. That's pretty much been the road map for the whole movie.
It looks very distinctive and feels very real. What was your guiding principle in coming up with the look of the film?
Andrew Stanton: That's the bane of these kinds of movies. First of all, just a CG movie, you get nothing for free. If you see it in there, somebody had to plan it, somebody had to draw it, somebody had to paint it, somebody had to model it, or matte paint it or something. Nothing came by accident. Nobody was able to go to a thrift store, a prop shop, take a photo outside... So that's just overwhelming. It's daunting. You add on top of that a fantasy world where those no rules and you get to make up what you think the future looks like? You almost want to give up right away, because it's just too many decisions to make.
So you surround yourself with really talented people that have really strong opinions about how they like things to look, and you just start chipping away a day at a time until it doesn't seem so overwhelming. It's like that on every movie, but I gotta say, this movie and Monsters were probably the most burdensome on the art department historically here, just because of the fantasy world aspect, there's just that much more to have to come up with. You can't just go, "Oh, it's a dentist's office." So, the end result is very satisfying, but to get there iis truly daunting.
Was there a guiding principle or was it for whatever worked with the story?
Andrew Stanton: You know, if there was, I knew that I had to tell the story with the Earth. I had to tell a lot of history. I had to tell what's happened over 1,000 years. That almost dictated what everything was. You wanted a city that felt sort like, sort of what Shanghai's starting to feel like now, or Dubai. And then you had to have trash towers that were amongst that. Because you're telling a history that you haven't seen yet, and now you're also telling the demise of that history, and then the way to try to solve the problem of that past history, and now the sort of dystopian result of that, so it's so layered. It was a real brain-tease. Every shot counted. It was thrilling to solve it because every part of the buffalo is used on that. But that's really what drove everything. Just telling the story of that. But then we knew again we wanted the future to be cool.
We all are probably very similar because of our backgrounds here, that we all miss the Tomorrowland that was promised us from Tomorrow-and of the heyday of Disneyland, and that really said, "Well, that's the future I want to have seen us get to." You see it now. It's like, this may be adding more burden to my life, but it's so cool I can't resist. It's the seduction factor. It's too convenient, it's too cool, it's too whatever. And to me, all of Tomorrowland at Disneyland in the late 50s-60s design was like that, anything they promised of that look was so.... I'd say, "Yes, give it to me!" We turned it into the phrase of, "I just want it to have that, 'Where's my jetpack?' feel." So "Where's my jetpack?" became sort of the touchstone of any art direction for anything that was truly trying to tack on to the futuristic design of stuff.
One of your colleagues here [at Pixar] said that in five years we won't be able to tell the difference between live action and CG.
Andrew Stanton: That's a bold statement (laughs).
I think we're seeing an indication here of that here though...
Andrew Stanton: Well, there isn't a desire to be photo realistic. To make sure that that's not how that's interpreted. But there's a desire to just indulge and believing that you are where you are.
You mentioned at Comic-Con in being able to push the virtual camera department. How were you able to capture the looks of, the essence of many of those sci-fi films?
Andrew Stanton: You know, we've all been to film school since Toy Story. It's not like we came in as really, really knowledgeable filmmakers. We were too stupid to know we couldn't do it, and so we just kept working on it. We've gotten smarter as we go, wanna keep learning and try to get better at something, and I remember getting to a point at the end of Nemo, I got so seduced by the underwater feel we managed to get with it--this extra dimensional sense, and I said, "Can we do that in the air?" And then with a little more smarts we started to look at what other cameras were doing whenever I watched one of my favorite films, whenever they were racking focus, the barrel distortion, and the little ovals on the lights. And I would notice our stuff wasn't doing that exactly, or not at all on some things. Invariably, you would reach some guy who did the programming who would say, "No, the math's all right." And you'd go, "That doesn't answer it for me. I don't care if the math's right. It's not doing what it's supposed to be doing."
We actually hired Roger Deakins, the famous cinematographer, to just give us a crash-course on cinematography, and then liked him so much we asked him to stay another week or two. Because what we do is so foreign to how we approach it, we're trying to get the same end result. It happened to coincide with us deciding that we were going to rent actual air-flux 70mm cameras and shoot an stand-in even Wall-E, three-dimensional, with the grid on the atrium in here, and do all the things with the camera we wanted to do and expect it to do like lens flare and all that stuff, and then we would make a virtual set of exactly the same thing in our computer, and then compare to prove. And sure enough, they didn't match. That's all our computer engineers needed to see to get challenged and frustrated, and started to fix things. We've been able to now be able to play in a much more accurate grammar of what we've all sort of been unconsciously been used to seeing in a lot of our favorite sci-fi films.
Give us an example of what that does to the image.
Andrew Stanton: Well there's a scene where you see Wall-E looking at Eve while she's got the lighter, and all the Christmas lights turn into nice bright transparent circles over one another. That's achieved by a very narrow shallow lens that blows everything else into a distortion and blur, but the way it does becomes very magical and very romantic. And we weren't getting those kind of looks when we would rack focus at all. I was looking at a lot of Gus Van Sant movies, particularly things like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting and he likes to direct your eye with focus.There is an air of intimacy that you achieve by using that as part of your storytelling that I want to use. I want to use that in this film because it's such a cold, clinical, mechanical world, where do I get my intimacy from? How can I get it?
Can you talk about the sound design a little bit?
Andrew Stanton: Yes, Ben Burtt. Because I knew that, again, the dialogue from many characters generated by their own kind of style, I had to spend a lot of time with Ben Burtt just auditioning stuff. I'd talk about a character, show him the drawings, and he'd go off and come up with just a bevy of ideas of what that machine, that robot, that person would sound like. It's the huge buffet and I would sit there and sort of cull it down. Even after that, you would come away from something like 100 sounds that are in this sort of camp. My editor and I would find that as we worked, we would even want to limit the vocabulary down from that. It was sort of this natural process over two years.
The movie suggests that we might not have learned our lesson...
Andrew Stanton: Your hunches would be in the right direction. To be honest, for all the grandeur in the backdrop and all the fantastical things that'll continue to happen in the movie, it's a simple love story, and we try to keep it very much small on the massive backdrop.
zzzz on 04-8-2008 12:51 AM
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. This movie is going to be awesome, once again (I forget the slight misstep that was Cars).
Floor Man on 04-8-2008 01:22 AM
Seconded! This looks to be one of Pixar's most different and most artful (as if Pixar weren't already ;) ) films! :) I love Stanton...Pixar...and especially Ben Burrt. The man's a genius.
JUUUUUUUNE! Too far away. :(