Christians in Cinema

Writer/Director – “Wall-E”

Andrew Stanton was one of the first Pixar animators, and had a part in most of Pixar’s mega-hits from the last several years. His roles have included writing, voicing, and character design, as well as directing and executive-producing.

Irrational love defeats life’s programming.

After the story idea first surfaced 14 years ago, “Wall-E” became his first solo writing/directing credit. With it he created a few Pixar “firsts,” including using a live person (Fred Willard) as a major supporting character.

Where did the main idea come from? Were you looking at your trash compactor one day, and just decided it would make a cute robot?

Andrew:  No. There was this lunch we had one day during “Toy Story.” It was in 1994, and we were batting around ideas to see what sort of movie we could come up with next. And somebody said, “Hey, what if we did the last robot left on earth? This machine doesn’t know it can stop, but it’s just there.”

None of the details were there, we didn’t know the name of the character; we didn’t know what it could do. It was the loneliest scenario I’ve ever heard, and I just loved it. I think that’s why it stayed in the incubator so long.

So many other animated robot movies are more humanoid. Is that cheating? Your robot was actually functional and had to work that way.

It’s funny. Being a sci-fi geek and going to the movies all my life, I had come to my own conclusion that there were two camps of robots have been designed. Either it’s the Tin Man which is a human with metal skin, or it’s R2-D2. It’s a machine that has a function and it’s designed based on that, and you read a character into it. That’s what really fascinated me.

The other thing that really motivated me, or even all of us, to do this, was…you know, John had made this other short called “Luxo,” about this little lamp that hops around. It’s just an appliance. It wasn’t made to look like a character.

By its own natural design, you can project a character onto it. That thing is powerful.  I’ve had to watch that thing about a thousand times, and before we put it on, I go “Oh, geez, I gotta watch this again.” But I always get caught up every time.

I thought, “There is some unique power about that type of bringing a machine to life than making a machine to look like a character.” And I’ve started to put it into the category of why we are so attracted to pets and infants. I think there’s something that’s already appealing about it. You’re charmed by it, but it can’t communicate fully.

You’re compelled, you can’t stop yourself from finishing the sentence, “Oh, I think it likes me.” “I think it’s hungry.” “I think it wants to go for a walk…”

I think what it does – I’m getting really geeky here, but it’s been in my head a really long time. I think you pull from your own emotional experiences to finish the sentence so it becomes twice as powerful.

I think that’s why love at first sight works in movies. Nobody says anything. The guy or the girl stares at the other person, that other person walks across the person, and you go racing back to when it happened to you. And you’re using that personal emotional experience to fuel that emotion in the movie.

So I thought, “Wow. What if you could get a character to do that through a whole movie, just like Luxo does for a minute or a minute and a half in the short.”

I think that’s the thing that from day one made us go, “That would be a really powerful movie. I don’t know how hard that would be to achieve, but it would be real powerful.”

So, in a weird way, we never questioned if we could succeed at it, we just wondered if we had the knowledge and the ability to.

How did you put expressions on something that wasn’t a face?

Andrew: That’s sort of what I’m coming into. It’s not like you put anything on it, but you have to go find a design that makes you put that emotion onto it. That’s what happened with John and the Luxo lamp. He didn’t put something on it, but I see it and tell myself, “I see a face on that.”

That’s what we did. I was at a baseball game and someone handed me binoculars. I was working on Wall-E. I knew he had to compact trash, and I knew he was going to be a box at its most basic. I knew that he was going to collapse to show that he was shy, and honestly, that’s all I had.

It’s a machine that has a function and it’s designed based on that, and you read a character into it. That’s what really fascinated me.

I was considering putting just a single cone lamp on there, because I loved how you read a face into the simplicity of Luxo, but I thought, “I don’t know if that’s going to hold for 90 minutes.”

Then when I got handed these binoculars at the game, I missed a whole inning. I kept turning it around. I started staring at it and making it go happy and sad, and I remembered doing that as a kid with my dad’s binoculars. I thought, “It’s all there.” There’s no nose, there’s no mouth, and it’s not trying to be a face. It just happens to ask that of me when I look at it. So I said, “That’s it. I can’t improve upon that,” and ran with it.

How did you decide on the evolution of the humans in the story? Most everybody has said they just evolved over 700 years. After seeing it, I thought it was Auto’s solution to his final command.

Andrew:  You read too much into it. Honestly, I knew what I wanted humanity to be, but I didn’t know how to express it at first. I wanted something to amplify what was going on with the main point of the story; the love story.

I’m not one of those people who comes up with a theme and then writes to it. I go with sort of natural things that seem to be firing and then somewhere about halfway I realize what the theme is.

I realize what I was pushing with these two robots was what the point of living is. It took these really irrational acts of love to discover it against sort of how they were built. I said, “That’s it. That’s the theme. It’s irrational love defeats life’s programming.”

I realized that’s a perfect metaphor for real life. We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts, and it’s what we actually use quite often. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we use it to avoid living. We try to avoid the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with the person next to us. It’s why we can all be in the same room with one another and all be on our cell phones, so we don’t have to deal with one another.

I thought it was a perfect amplification of the whole point of the movie. So I wanted to run with it, and let science logically project that. When I talked with John Hicks from NASA about the long-term effects of extended residency in space, he told me a few facts.

They are still arguing about how to correctly set it up so that when a human does go all the way to Mars and back, they won’t lose their bones. Disuse atrophy can set in if you don’t simulate gravity the whole time. It’s sort of a form of osteoporosis. You won’t get that back.

They’ve actually had arguments where they said, “If we don’t get this right, they’re going to be just a big blob.” I said, “Oh, my gosh, that’s perfect!”

To be honest, I didn’t want it to be off-putting. In an earlier version, I actually went to weird that I made them like big blobs of Jell-O. I thought it was funny because I love Jell-O. It was sort of a “Planet of the Apes” conceit, where they didn’t even know they weren’t humans any more, and they found it out.

It was so bizarre that I needed to pull back, because it needed some grounding. I thought that I didn’t want it to be offensive, but if you really had no reason to do anything any more, and everything had been figured out – health, regenerative food, all the other needs to get up – and technology made it unnecessary to ever get up. It’s kind of happening with my remote in my living room. So this could set in.

“Is that the best voice for the character?”

So I thought, “All right, I’ll make them big babies.” There’s actually a scientific term that Peter Gabriel told me about. It’s called “neotany.” There’s this belief that nature figures out that you don’t have to use these parts of yourself to survive any more, so why give it to you? Why let you grow any further?

I thought, “It’s perfect. Again, it’s a metaphor for it being time to get up and grow up again.”

Can you tell us about the voice of Eve?

Andrew: The one thing Ben Burtt (sound designer) couldn’t simulate was the female voice. If it needed to be neutral or male, it was easy for him to be the source for anything that had a human element to it, or needed an inflection.

Because we wanted a very obvious feminine source, fortunately Alyssa Knight was one of our in-house “Pixar Players,” for lack of a better term. Because we’re in San Francisco, we don’t always have access to actors that quickly. We’re re-writing stuff every day, so we use people in-house to do stand-in vocal stuff.

She’d been a stand-in for several movies, and is a pretty decent actress. So I called her in, and it worked so well. When Ben started effecting it, I said, “That is so good, I’m sorry, I’m not going to look for another actress to do this. She’s great.”

Frankly, that’s the methodology Pixar has had on all their movies. If you look at our movies, it’s all over the map. Whether we use A-list, or B-list, or employees, what’s consistent is the question, “Is that the best voice for the character?”

That’s why we choose who we do.

Can you talk about the political and environmental messages?

Andrew: I hate to not be able to fuel where you want to go, but that was not where I was coming from when I did that stuff. I knew I was going into territory that was basically the same stuff, but I don’t have a political bent, I don’t have an ecological message to push.

I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view, and it’s certainly a good-citizen way to be. Everything I wanted to do was based on the love story. “The last robot on earth,” that was the sentence we came up with in 1994. I have to get everybody off the planet. I have to do it in a way that you get it without any dialog.

You have to be able to get it visually in less than a minute. Trash did that. You look at it, and it’s a dump. You have to move it. Even a little kid understands that.

So it makes Wall-E the lowest of the totem pole, and it allows him to be able to sift through everything left on the planet to show that he’s interested in us. So I had to look at everything from the point of view of you have to get everything visually without using any dialog to describe stuff to you.

I had him find the plant before I knew really where the movie was going. The reason I loved that idea was because of the way dandelions push through the sidewalk. Reality is just forcing itself through all that manmade material to exist.

Everything I wanted to do was based on the love story.

I thought, “That’s Wall-E. He’s got more desire to live than the rest of the universe.” I felt like he was meeting himself, so I couldn’t get rid of this, even though I didn’t know where to go with it. It ended up being a great symbol of hope.

The most I do is recycle, and sometimes I’m pretty bad about that, you can ask my wife. That’s the only way I really push it.

I wasn’t trying to be “anti-“ anything. Too much of anything is a cautionary tale. So honestly, anything I did was in reverse. I’ve got to go with trash because I love what it does to my main character, and that was very clear. So then I went backward from that.

Why would there be too much trash? I thought it would be easy to get to us buying too much stuff, and it’s really easy to show that and not have to explain it. And it’s fun.

We all like to be satirical like that. We have that sort of Simpsons’ bent, so I went with what felt true. I think we all feel like we have to be sort of disciplined in that area.

It’s more than just a love story. You also have a sort of theme of moral responsibility when Eve saves the plant. Was it difficult to make the layered story?

Andrew: It’s difficult when you have multiple agendas. You’re going to confuse yourself  as a storyteller. But if you know you have just this one theme, and you happen to find something that parallels other things, or touches other subjects, then fine. But as long as I’m picking it for this one singular purpose, then everything else will fall into place.

I’ve had that sort of sense since the first movie. So him giving the plant back to her was a relationship choice. It was to personify that he finally learned the ultimate place to get to in a relationship with someone else: caring more about their needs than your own needs. And that’s what that represented.

Why did you choose music from “Hello Dolly” for theme music?

Andrew: It’s the weirdest choice I’ll ever make in filmmaking in my life. I’m not lying. When I had the idea of putting the song in at the beginning, I turned to my wife and said, “This is the weirdest idea I’ve ever had and I will be asked why I chose this for the rest of my life.” Honestly, she’ll tell you I said that.

By the time I had kind of come to terms with it on the analyst’s couch, I decided I was willing to put up with it for the rest of my life because I do think it’s the best choice.

One thing I always wanted, even early on, and it’s in the very first script (by then I had chosen that song), I knew that I wanted old-fashioned music against space. I wanted past and future juxtaposed. In the first frame that would not seem familiar, it would seem sort of fresh. You’d think, “This is not where I’m used to a movie being at this point, let alone an animated movie.”

It was almost like a firm footing that I wouldn’t be conventional. I started looking through stuff, and I thought, “Whoa, there’s so much old-fashioned stuff to choose from.” So I took it down to standards, and there’s so many old standards, which are from a lot of musicals.

I’ve done enough musicals to know what the staples are, you know: “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Annie,” “West Side Story,” and “Hello, Dolly.” I played the beginning of “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” and when that phrase “Out there,” came on, just viscerally, you know, I thought about it against stars. It kicks in, and it works.

I embraced the odd choice, and thought it was just mean to be.

Even not in that context against stars it works. Then I started thinking, you know, weird stuff. I just couldn’t drop it. So I kept putting it in and started showing it to a slightly larger circle of friends and asking them, “what do you think?”

It kind of worked, then I realized why. The song is about two nerdy guys who’ve never left their small town, and they just want to go into the big city for one night, see what life’s all about and kiss a girl.

I thought, “That’s my main character.” Then my co-writer, Jim Reardon, said, “You know, he should just find the movie, and that’s what will explain why he knows this.”

When I found that second song and saw those two lovers holding hands, a light went off, and I thought, “That’s how he can express ‘I love you’ without being able to say it.”

When you get that kind of gift falling on your lap when you’re doing your research, you don’t run away from it. You just embrace it. So I embraced the odd choice, and thought it was just mean to be.

Fortunately, it was really early on, around 2004, that I had this idea, so I started working on getting my producers to talk to Fox and said, “I don’t want to go too far with this idea and find out I can’t use it.”

Fortunately, there were a lot of close connections between people that knew each other and we could get through the red tape. They were very accommodating. They went to everybody that was involved to get the okay. It was all very properly done.

When John and Mary unplugged from their chairs, they changed from blue to red. What kind of meaning did that have?

Andrew: Everybody said, “Well, this is a political year. Was this a political statement?”

To me, it was like Mac preferences. On your computer, you can slowly set all your preferences until it’s the way you like it. But if you go all the way back to your default state, it’s reset.

[Fred Willard] is the most insincere used car salesman I could think of.

To me, red was the default setting. Everybody was making their own choices, but they were starting to like the same choices that were sort of dictated by consumerism. Again, it was driven by the idea, “Will you get it without much dialog?”

I picked it because they would be the only two red people in a sea of blue.

I’m curious about your choice to use Fred Willard as the only human being in the film.

Andrew: Well, he’s the most insincere used car salesman I could think of. He’s the most friendly insincere guy.

I hoped it would be a little more obvious, and I hope I succeeded. Once I chose an old movie for Wall-E to watch and it set a precedent. Any time you looked at old footage, there should be real human beings. I could get away with CG where humanity has changed in the present/future, but I thought it would be even weirder if I was all over the map with how I portrayed humans in old footage. I thought I should be more consistent.

That’s why I picked it, because it set a precedent.

What about the film, “John Carter of Mars.”

Andrew: I’m in the writing stage with my writing partner Mark Andrews. That’s all we’re doing right now. Everybody has asked if it’s going to be live action, but we’re not going to make the decision for about a year.

Were there more Mac and Apple references in this film?

Andrew: Well, we’re sort of bedfellows, so we can get away with it. And we’re huge fans. It kind of lent itself because we were dealing with machines, and they do the best designs of machines currently.

Has there been any discussion about a “Nemo II?”

Andrew: Not yet. But that’s because we haven’t heard a good story yet. If come up with a great story, then we’ll certainly pursue it.

Are there any Pixar references we should look for in the movie?

Andrew: Yes, but I’m not going to give all it away. T-Rex in the truck at the beginning. Mike Wazowski’s in there too, if you look hard enough.