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Home > Blogs > Sir Critic on Cinema > Archives > 2009 > May > 27 > Entry
My interview with the director/producer of Pixar’s ‘Up’
Pixar Week continues on the blog, with the complete text of my interview with Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera, the director and producer, respectively of Pixar’s new film Up, opening Friday. The film tells the story of a man, Carl Fredricksen, who ties several balloons to his house to fly to South America, where he and his beloved late wife Ellie had always dreamed of going - but Carl picks up an accidental stowaway, a wilderness explorer named Russell.
Docter, who also directed Monsters Inc., and Rivera came to the University of Cincinnati last week for a press tour, and I was fortunate enough to be able to sit down wih them and talk about how Up came to be. You can watch an online video of some of my session, but here I present the complete, unabridged interview.
Robinette: I know the journey to this film started with the drawing of the balloons and the house. But where did that come from?
Docter: Bob Peterson, the co-director and writer of the show and I were sitting in a room just making drawings and all sorts of ideas. We started, actually, from an even more bizarre idea, of two brothers that lived in this floating city. And it was kind of like some weird other world. It was really intriguing but kind of so far out it didn’t have any grounding, so we kind of realized that the thing that was appealing about it was the idea of escaping. You can’t escape from everybody else if you’re up there with everybody in a city, so we shrunk it down to a house. And that doesn’t sound all that interesting, does it?
Rivera: I think it’s good.
Docter: You do?
Robinette: It’ll work. One thing I liked about the film when I saw it the other day was how it took so many left turns and always stayed on course. It’s almost like a bunch of different films crammed into one. You’ve got the sweet love story on the one hand. And it takes a detour into an almost sci-fi realm … tell me about some of the particular challenges you had getting this story together.
Docter: It did start with a little bit of our favorite things all glommed together, and we got a lot of criticism early on, as we showed it to (Pixar colleagues) Brad Bird and John Lasseter and everybody, that it felt a little too hodgepodge, and we really worked to unify it, to find a real reason for every element to relate to some other element, and that way weave the whole story together. It took some doing.
Rivera: It took three years or even longer, of workshopping and re-workshopping it.
Docter: Of the five years of production, it’s like three and a half years of just story, and then you get into production the last two. Sort of overlaps a little bit.
Robinette: One thing I noticed when I was taking it in, was, everybody in the film had a story. Everybody had a reason for doing what they were doing. With Russell, he’s not merely a wilderness explorer looking for his badge. He’s got an underlying motivation. Tell me how you weaved that in there to solve the story problems.
Docter: That’s part of the joy of working with a smaller cast. And that was really intentional from the get-go. Let’s do a film that doesn’t have so many characters we have to keep track of. Then we can plumb the depths a little bit more. Like you say, no character is there just as a prop. They all have needs and wants, and we really tried to unify them all in their being outcasts. Dug (a talking dog who befriends Russell and Carl) is the nerd of the pack. You get the sense that Russell’s not exactly Mr. Popularity. Carl is relegated to the outskirts of society, yet the story is about all these oddballs kind of coming together. Each character is able to provide something to the other characters. They each have a hole the other can help fill.
Robinette: They make each other whole.
Rivera: They first described Russell to me as “He’s the kid who gets picked last for baseball.”
Robinette: Ah, I can relate to that. Early in the film there is this terrific sequence which takes care of a lot of the backstory, basically played in pantomime, that tells Carl and his wife Ellie’s story, basically from when they get married to up until the end for them, and darn it, you guys had me in tears before the film was 10 minutes old. (Docter makes “thumbs up” motion). So how did you arrive at doing the sequence that way?
Docter: We kind of went backwards into that. We started with the idea of this guy floating his house off, and we thought “Why is he doing that?” We came up with this idea that he had some unfulfilled business We went back and created this whole story with the relationship, the loss there, and that’s what propels the whole story. So it’s really on those fumes of that sequence that the rest of the story has drive, we hope.
Robinette: What made it stand out was this was the story of yours that seemed to be most purely driven by the notion of romantic love. How do you guys think it’s unique in the Pixar canon?
Rivera: When Pete first pitched me the idea, I’d never heard anything like it. And this was without any visuals. And I just fell in love with the idea of that emotional core fueling this whole thing, where houses fly through the air, and lost worlds are found with exotic, flightless birds. I go to the movies to go places I’ve never been with characters I’ve never met. I want to see something new. And this just felt, even in its description, unlike anything.
Even the title of the film I liked early on because it didn’t tell me what it was. All of our films are either proper names, or you kind of know what they are. I liked that I had to go “What? What is this? That’s cool.” I just feel like even in its inception it was different than anything we’d ever done. And I hope that’s what’s fun for the audience as well.
(More after the jump)
Robinette: Tell me about how you arrived at the visual look of this. I noticed this kind of stylized way everybody appeared - almost comic strip in a sense but there’s a reality to these people that makes them very identifiable. How did you balance that?
Docter: That was one of the fun but challenging aspects of the film. We really tried to push the envelope. The computer has this ability to capture texture and lighting in this incredible, realistic-looking way. There are so many other directions you can go with animation as a medium. It’s just limitless. We were really trying to be more stylized to simplify shape. A lot of people were kind of suspicious of it, especially because we did have these emotional moments, and are you really going to feel for this character (Carl) who has a big box for a head? But I think it works, maybe even because of that. Because you’re kind of abstracting things a little bit, the audience is able to project more of themselves. I just had a real strong sense that this is what the story needed, this sense of style and whimsy. We need a world where it’s possible this house could float up in the air with balloons, If you tried to do that outside in reality, the audience would be going, “Really? I don’t know.”
Rivera: We did the math once to figure out how many balloons it would take, it was like 26 million balloons. Visually what we needed was to make it the canopy to the house, the same proportion as a hot air balloon because that’s what looked right. If you saw that in real life, you would go “It looks fake.” But in the context of our movie, with these kinds of shapes and colors it feels believable, we hope.
Docter: When you draw it, you can get away with even less balloons. As a drawing, the more abstract it gets, the more you’re able to forgive. We need to lay off a bit on the realism and yet have enough clues that really take you there so you can feel the wind in your face as you’re standing looking out into the South American jungles and all that.
Robinette: One of the things that’s being highlighted about this film is the fact that it’s in 3D. I saw the flat version of it, but I didn’t feel like I lost anything. So I have a feeling it works both ways. How do you make it do that?
Rivera: That was our goal. We knew not everyone would be able to see it in 3D ,but we didn’t want the 2D version to suffer. We didn’t change the way we worked. We laid the film out, we composed the shots. We cut the film as we always have, driven by the story and the characters. We used 3D to enhance it so it’s like a cherry on top if you get to see it. Philosophically what we do is we inversed 3D, really. We treated the screen like a window looking in … that felt right for this picture. It just felt like you were looking into a diorama. It’s more subtle.
Robinette: What do you want to give people with this film? When they’re coming out of their seats and heading out into the wide world after seeing this, what do you hope is floating through their heads?
Docter: First of all, hopefully they just had a great time at the theater, They had a great action ride and a lot of jokes and so on. But then at the root of it, I think what the film is really about is kind of redefining what’s important in life. A lot of times we have these great dreams of someday owning a business or running a marathon - these sort of lists of things we want to do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But along the way - I know this is true of me - I very easily stop paying attention to how incredibly lucky I am to have my amazing kids around me, and spending time with my wife, and looking forward to other stuff. Just stopping and paying attention to what we have around us right now - the little seemingly boring things in life, that’s what life is all about, and that’s what this film is about.
Robinette: When did the genesis for this film first start?
Docter: I was looking at some notes from spring of ‘04 and that was kind of the first inklings of what it was - about five years ago.
Robinette: So from spring of ‘04 to when you wrapped, how did this change you guys? What did you take away from it?
Docter: Hm, that’s a good question. It’s sort of undefinable exactly how this changed me but a bunch of us went down to South America to do research. It took us three days to get to this place way down in the jungles of South America. We hiked away from a little village up to this mountain and camped up there for three days, did a lot of drawings and really tried to study the terrain to capture for this film. In doing that, we sort of experience what Carl experiences in the film. We got to see what it’s like to be away from the rest of the world. That’s a really unique thing, It’s very seldom that we get away from civilization like that. It just made me appreciate how tentative everything is. One of the guys up there started to get sick. We weren’t sure whether it was altitude or what and you start to realize, boy, all of life is a lot more precarious and maybe we take it for granted.
Robinette: A lot of people talk about how you guys have the best track record of anybody in Hollywood, animated or otherwise. How do you guys deal with that?
Docter: We deal with it like this: (Puts fingers in ears) La-la-la-la-la!
Rivera: It’s a great problem to have. Pixar has been really successful. We’re very lucky and fortunate. We work really hard. We’re more self-competitive then we are competitive with anything out in the world. We just want to make the best films we can make. John Lasseter gives us one rule, which is, make a film you’d be proud to show your family. Make a film you’d be proud to see. That’s what we do. To some extent we do have to shut our ears and shut that off because it’ll make you go crazy if you start second-guessing yourself. You don’t want to do that. You just want to trust your gut, make the film you can make. We have a great infrastructure of support. No one - Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton, Brenda Chapman - no one’s going to let any one of us release a film that’s not up to par. We’re going to pound on each other until we get it where we want it.
Robinette: One thing I’ve liked about watching the making of materials of your various movies is, it’s always struck me how collaborative you guys are. There may be a person who sort of runs the ship but that person isn’t necessarily the be all and end all. It seems like good ideas come from everywhere in the company. Tell me how that informed Up.
Docter: The director is in charge of making the movie in terms of the creative decisions but that doesn’t mean I have all the answers. We have all these amazing people at every stage of the production - lighting, special effects, story for sure, animation - everybody has these amazing ideas they bring to the table. So my job is to provide them with enough context so that they know what is needed for what they’re doing. And then they bring the specific ideas. So instead of me saying “All right on frame 12 I want his arm here, and on frame 47 it should be here,” I’d say, “He’s just run a marathon, he’s exhausted, he wants that drink of water more than anything.”
Robinette: So what’s next in the pipeline for you guys in particular?
Docter: Sleep.
Rivera: Sleep. Chili dogs. We have a lot of work to get this film out, we go around the world, we’re going to follow it around and help it’s release and we’re going to go back into development. Hopefully Pete’s got a few up his sleeve and we’ll figure out how to get it going.
Robinette: Wonder if he can make something out of chili dogs or not?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Coming Attractions
Comments
By Susan
May 28, 2009 11:44 AM | Link to this
AWESOME interview — fantastic questions — can’t wait to see the movie!!By SRCputt
May 27, 2009 3:39 PM | Link to this
Rivera: It took three years or even longer, of workshopping and re-workshopping it. Any question of why Pixar is always so great are answered with that statement. I have this image of the writers of Terminator Salvation or Night of the Museum II stating “It took three minutes or even longer, of workshopping and re-workshopping it.”By Jerry Gutlon
May 27, 2009 11:33 AM | Link to this
Great stuff, Eric! Congrats!By Allie D.
May 27, 2009 11:07 AM | Link to this
GREAT interview! And fantastic questions! I’m really excited about seeing this movie. They seem like very cool people.