It's been five years since Andrew Stanton has directed a feature film for Pixar Animation. That flick, 2003's Finding Nemo, not only defied Disney CEO Michael Eisner's prediction that "it's gonna be a major wake-up call for these guys" but still stands as the highest grossing Pixar film to date.
Which makes Stanton's latest film, WALL-E, even more of a risk. This movie about "the last robot left on Earth" features almost no dialogue for the first 1/3, with the main character rarely speaking in anything other than bleeps and bloops. It's a love story, but it's also a satire of our wasteful ways and how we're avoiding the satisfying messiness of human relationships.
In this first part of a roundtable interview, Stanton talks about how every Pixar film is unique, the kind of flick WALL-E is, and why he never thinks of the audience when he's making a movie.
Is WALL-E a departure for Pixar?
"We're always trying to be different with every movie. We're a director-driven studio and we're trying to encourage and support the (director's) vision so that every film will be unique, and have its own taste and slant.
"I knew this was more of a major unconventional film, even when we just had the character conceit in 1994 and nothing else. As artists, we thought that (WALL-E's concept) was the coolest thing, but the next sentence was ‘Nobody would ever let us do that’ and we put it away.
“And I’m glad that happened because I think it took 14 years for the technology to be better, for us to be better filmmakers, and for the audience to trust us enough.
“The big drive with (Pixar's first film, 1995's) Toy Story wasn’t ‘this is CGI.’ It was ‘It doesn’t have to be a musical, it doesn’t have to be a fairy tale, it can be something else.’ And so we’re way more proud that Toy Story is the type of movie that it is – the way the story is told, the manner of which it’s shot – than the fact that we used computers.
“I don’t go to a live-action movie thinking that it’s going to have a cop chase, or a long melodramatic scene. I don’t think that way and I don’t know why people do that when you’re using the medium of animation. It’s still just a movie: what’s the story, what’s it about, and how is the best way to tell it?
Do you think it’s because people always think of animation as being for children?
“Which nobody ever did at Pixar thought, from Day One, which is why I think it’s so good here.
“I don’t mean this in a negative way, but I don’t think of the audience at all, because I don’t go to see a movie hoping the filmmaker’s second-guessed what I want. I go to see what he wants, because I like his taste and style, and I want to see what he’s going to do next.
“The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we’re going to make bad choices. We’ve always holed ourselves up in a building for 4 years and ignored the rest of the world, because nobody are bigger movie geeks than we are, so we know exactly what we are dying to see with our family and kids. We don’t need other people to tell us that. We trust the audience member in ourselves.”
(In the next installment, Stanton discusses the role of Hello Dolly in the film, and his exploration of the sci-fi genre in WALL-E)
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