Director Andrew Stanton – Wall-E

by Matt Goldberg

Wall-E is shaping up to be one of the biggest hits of 2008, both critically and financially.  Such success will be no stranger to Andrew Stanton who was Pixar's man behind 2003's Finding Nemo.  We recently sat down with Stanton to discuss his latest film and the challenges in bringing this adorable robot to life.

Every Pixar film seems to have a major technical hurdle, like Sully's fur in Monster's Inc. or Violet's hair in The Incredibles.  What was that hurdle in Wall-E?

The interesting thing I want to dispel is that we go in trying to solve a major technical hurdle.  That doesn't inspire us at all.  I think it's that we always try not to repeat ourselves and tell an original story that we're going to encounter something we've never done before.  It's not as sexy on this film.  Because I'm such a movie buff, I kept feeling that a real camera wouldn't do what our cameras were doing virtually and I wanted to play on a much more subtle range of focus and on light and how things get obstructed the same way I see in films.  And when we looked at the software, we saw that the math was wrong.  So we spent almost a year going into the bowels of some of the code and solving it.  So now when I do something like shallow-focus, you get the light circles you'd expect and you can really play with how subtle the plane of focus was on things and you can go into the foreground and it almost becomes see-through.  I mean this is all really geeky stuff but for me, I wanted to play with those lenses and be able to subtlety capture a world that's very cold, it's very dystopian, it's two metal things falling in love with each other, how do you get intimacy out of it?  I always wanted it to be as believable as possible.  The more you believe that the world is really there, the more charm it's going to have when it comes to life.  So frankly, there's no short answer because that's the big, lengthy technical thing we solved.

This is the first Pixar film to utilize live-action actors, albeit briefly and through "recorded footage".  How did you come to that decision?

It was a practical decision because I knew that Wall-E was going to watch Hello Dolly and that set a precedent that said, "Okay, anytime I look at pre-recorded anything, it should be real humans," because that shows "Well, humanity changes how it looks over 700 years, so I can get away with CG there but I can't with anything in the past,"  Fortunately, it wasn't a huge amount of footage and we could afford a first-time from a live-action standpoint which were pretty easy shoots.  A monkey could have done it. 

Sci-fi inherently has a social commentary aspect, it has to.

You're right!  You're the first person that knows that!  Everyone else is like "Why is there a message?"  Because it isn't science-fiction without making a comment on mankind! 

When making that commentary, how do you make it satirical and not just cynical?

It's a fine line and you have to keep pulling people back.  The guy I write with, Jim Reardon, he was a director on The Simpsons for about ten years.  I found that he would come up with these great gags that would just be too biting.  That was okay on The Simpsons but I would have to keep softening it up because it's not to turn people off.  It's just to make people think.  But I never wanted to do anything gratuitously because the last thing I want to be is some person with an agenda.  I just wanted it to support the bigger point of the story which was the relationship between Wall-E and EVE and that was "Irrational love defeat's life's programming,"  But it's such a metaphor for humans in that we can all fall into our routines and into our habits and be distracted 24/7 and never really advance relationships and I thought that was a thematic, subtle backdrop for what's happening with our main characters.  And the minute I found out the real scientific fact that the reason we don't send a man to Mars is because they haven't solved the gravity problem and if they don't solve it just right, then osteoporosis sets in and you start to lose your bones and you won't get them back, and they've seriously had this argument where if they send a man out to Mars, he'll turn into a blob of Jell-O.  And I thought, "Well, that's hysterical," and it parallels a future where what if you lived in a world where everything got solved?  Your health, food, everything—you'd have nothing to do.  It would just make us, what I felt was a more appealing way to show lethargy and lack of motivation: a big baby.  Because babies are round and babies are pleasing and that it's the best way of subtlety saying, "We need to grow up again,"