I’m looking forward to a chat with Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, writer and director of Wall-E, later this week.
But my favorite bit from The Boston Globe‘s conversation with Stanton is this:
Stanton says he’s gotten used to working on a four-year cycle.
“I rely on that now,” he admits. “I still work as fast as I freaking can. I have a motto: Be wrong as fast as you can. Which allows me to know that I’m just going to make a lot of mistakes, that it’s expected. It’s part of the process. But as long as I do it really fast I’m buying time on the back end to solve whatever I do wrong. So I rely on four years. I’ve never gotten anything right in under two years.”
Awesome.
Watch this: http://bvim-qt.vitalstream.com/WallE/Podcasts/WallE_PixarSpace_High.mov
Apparently they brought on Roger Deakins as an adviser.
Yeah, I’d read that at Ain’t It Cool, but I stopped watching Wall-E related videos a while ago, because I felt like the previews were starting to show too much. I want to save as many moments and characters as possible for my first viewing on the big screen. There aren’t many movies that can compare with Pixar’s films for those magical, transporting moments, and I don’t want eagerness to end up blunting the impact.
But that’s just me.
This is also a great article in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/movies/22onst.html
Mr. Stanton found the key to the robot’s infant-sweet appearance at a baseball game. While he played with binoculars, Wall-E sprang into his head: binoculars on a box with treads.
“I want you to project a face on it,” he said. “I wanted to evoke the audience’s participation. You need to actually see it as a machine. I kept saying, I’m trying to make ‘R2D2: The Movie.’ ”
To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script — “Hi, I’m Wall-E” — and Mr. Burtt essentially translated the dialogue into robot, something he calls “audio puppeteering.”