There isn't a studio in the business with a track record like Pixar, which released its first major picture, Toy Story only 13 years ago and has followed that with successes both popular and critical. WALL-E is the newest entry in the list of Pixar hits, and the movie's director and co-writer Andrew Stanton, a Pixar vet, spoke to reporters about where the studio gets its information, how the character of WALL-E developed and what's next in line for the magic-making studio.

Q: So let’s start at the beginning here. It’s probably really tough for you to remember given the journey involved, so you go in and someone says, "We’ve got a trash compacter and that’s gonna be the star of the new movie."

A: Yeah that’s actually not how it happened. What happened was we were at a lunch in ’94, while we were still making Toy Story, going, "Whoa, we’ve got to make another movie. We’re running out of time." We didn’t think we’d be making another movie after Toy Story for a while, so we came up with A Bug’s Life, but before we came up with that, during the lunch a couple things were thrown out and one idea was we could do sci-fi. 

[The movie] could be, what if it was the last robot on Earth? For some reason everybody leaves, and it just keeps doing its job forever, and that was the extent of it, just that conceit. And it was the loneliest little character I’ve ever heard of in my life, and I think it stuck around for so long because that’s so powerful.  I think we also immediately thought you should do it like R2D2. It should be a character where you sort of interpret it.  And we thought that would be the coolest movie, and nobody would ever let us make a movie like that. We hadn’t even proven ourselves with Toy Story. 

So you jump to many years later, many films later, and we’ve gotten much better at filmmaking, the technology has gotten better, and I’m finishing up on Nemo, and I’m feeling, I think the audience is ready for a movie like this.  And I certainly feel like I could take on a movie like that and do it right now.  I probably didn’t know better before, but now I do.  So it’s had a long time to gestate.  But the nice thing about the picture is it’s a director-driven studio, so it’s really about the ideas we want to bring to the table.

Q: The first 30 minutes or so is pretty dark and scary.

A: I don’t know. I never saw it as scary, but I always saw it as bleak. I’d say "bleak" is an accurate term.

Q: Could be just in my own head, you know, because I’m thinking of all the things that have built up to it.  My own reaction as a grown up guy is that this is really dark and the bleakness of it.

A: Well again, the conceit from the get-go was "the last robot on Earth," and you’re not going get a really charming, engaging, lonely character unless you make everybody get off the planet.

I mean, it’s not going to be because of some happy village situation. I mean it’s a sci-fi movie, so I tried to find the most logical reason that they would be gone, that would be gettable without a lot of dialog. And also making him a trash compactor robot made him lowly in status.  He gets to find stuff of our lives and show that he’s interested.  Every age is going to get trashed when they see it visually. It just was a really clear conceit for me.

Q: And also there is a fantastic dramatic tool in that film: there is finally some connection.  I think you may have one of the first cockroaches that you actually do something about it.

A: I know, but I think that WALL-E wouldn’t be as charming and you wouldn’t be as invested in this love story evolving if it wasn’t against such a bleak background.

Q: Talk a little bit about the development of WALL-E and where his voice came from?

A: Well he came in stages. I mean, it’s a combination of all these elements that I think makes him work so powerfully.  A lot is the design. I learned so much by watching John Lasseter’s short of Luxo Junior.  The design of that lamp looks like a lamp and you just see it as an appliance, but the minute it moves you throw a character onto it. 

And I said the design of WALL-E has to be like that. You have to see it as a machine, but the minute it moves you can’t help but throw character onto it.  So we spent a lot of time trying to just get that just right, and my biggest epiphany for the face was getting binoculars at a baseball game. And I missed a whole inning by turning the binoculars around and making them go sad and mad and stuff. 

Then I knew that I wanted him to talk unconventionally.  I wanted him to talk the way he was built, so that...the integrity of it would be kept. It would feel more real and the only person I ever knew that did anything like that was Ben Burtt, who had done R2D2 and all the other sounds from the Star Wars movies [and] Indiana Jones movies.  So we just went straight to the top and tried to hire the master to do all of the robot sounds, and thank goodness he said yes. I don’t think the movie would have worked without him.

Q: Looking at your credit list, I don’t see a credit for EVE.

A: Well EVE is actually a lot of Ben’s work. She started from the source of an employee named Alicia Knight, who did all the sort of vocalizations for us, so she gets credited for it, but so much of that is the start of all the stuff that Ben did for her. 

Q: Talk to us about Pixar and the deal with the Devil that clearly someone made.  You know the big thing is "Pixar hits home runs every single time."  Dissecting it is probably dangerous.

A: Yes, and honestly, we don’t think about it. If we start worrying about that, then you’re just going to start making mistakes. 

The thing that we always do is we look back to Toy Story, what made Toy Story.  At one point when it was really going south halfway through the making of that movie, out of desperation we pulled ourselves into a private room and just said, "Alright, screw it, we’re just gonna make what we would want to make because it looks like we’re going down anyway," and suddenly that saved the picture.  Suddenly listening to the filmmakers within ourselves, [we] just did what we would want to see, [and it] saved that picture. 

And so we realized after that, that is the key. We should be an environment at Pixar where we’re ignorant of the outside world. We can just trick ourselves into thinking that we’re making these movies just for movies' sake, because it seems to have a direct correlation to these movies being so good and not get swayed by statistics, track records, any of this stuff.  We can’t control that stuff, so what the heck good does it help us to know it?  So you just trick yourself into playing baseball for the love of the same, even though you have to hit home runs.

Q: Does it help to be outside of Hollywood do you think.

A: Absolutely. It’s a huge factor to why Toy Story succeeded, because we would get phone calls telling us what to do, and we’d say yes, and then we’d hang up and then we wouldn’t do it.  And then after a while they realized that’s what we were doing and they stopped calling. 

So being out of the whole thing really helps because honestly, for me, I go home, all my neighbors, all the people I’m friends with, very few of them work in the business, and it gives me a nice grounded, rounded sort of sensibility. And so when I come back to work everyday, I still realize what a privilege it is to make a movie. It’s not something that I feel that I’m expected to have an honor to do.

Q: Are you working on the next one?

A: Yes, I’m always working on the next one before I finish the other one.

Q: What can you tell us?

A: It’s sci-fi also, very different. It’s adapted from a book and it’s going take years.  So I have to give you something to talk about years later.