This interview is published in the May/June 2003 issue of SCREENTALK magazine.

Finding Nemo

Something Fishy Is Happening At Pixar

By Karen Gordon

I never imagined that it was possible for a grown woman to fall for a production company. But guess what? I have a major crush on Pixar. The innovative computer animation company has won my affection with movies like Toy Story 1 & 2, Monster’s Inc., A Bug’s Life and now Finding Nemo—movies that are so delightful, so full of whimsy, imagination and heart that I was smitten from the first frame.

Who ever thought that as a harried, tired, cynical adult I would not only root for, but be moved by the collaboration of a cowboy doll and a spaceman doll? That it would matter to me that they get home again? Or that the sight of a rainbow colored monster weeping because he has to send a little girl back to her home could make me cry in sympathy for his broken heart?

One of the people at the center of Pixar’s success is 37-year-old Andrew Stanton. Although he trained as a character animator, he’s become a driving force in the company, a creative whirlwind. In addition to his skills as an animator, he’s written or co-written all of the studio’s feature films, and co-directed A Bug’s Life. He was nominated for an Oscar® as part of the screenwriting team on Toy Story.

Andrew Stanton is the writer and director of the newest Pixar creation Finding Nemo.

One of the things that happens routinely on a feature film is that the screenplay constantly morphs—as producers, actors, directors, DOP’s, editors get a hold of the material. Is it different for you?

It is and it isn’t. If you take out the specifics, the details of the circuitous route that stories take till they get the to screen, and you look at the metamorphosis that it takes from concept to finish it’s about the same. It’s just what causes them and when they happen are different just because the entire beast of how they happen is slightly skewed from the live action world.

We have to make just as many rewrites and just as many changes based on casting and limitations of the set and all those kinds of things and executive opinions and all that stuff. It just kind of happens in a different kind of time line and at different points than people are more familiar with in live action.

That’s because you do the audio first?

No. I’m actually being a little bit broader about the whole thing. In our sense, the definition of production for us is a very, very loose term! We start probably much earlier. It would be almost like the screenwriter has invited the production crew to start considering casting and to find locations and to even consider starting to shoot before they’ve even got to what they would like to submit as their final draft to show to outside eyes. So it’s a very messy process on our end. And a very humbling process for the ego of the writer (laughs) because you’re basically showing your dirty laundry that you would never show to anyone else because we just have to start so much earlier than other people do to make a movie.

So is this innovative, or is it just in the tradition of Hollywood animation?

I’m guessing, but it seems like we have a little of the best of both worlds. We have sort of what everybody has learned from storytelling and screenwriting in the history of movie making. Animation kind of has a little bit of the old studio system, where you kept your directors and editors and every other department in house and they just moved on to the next job and you benefit from everybody’s collective know-how and familiarity with working with one another. So you can be very fast in some sense at correcting problems.

I think we can deal better with making a lot of mistakes and a lot of bad choices and save our ass (laughs) basically before anybody finds out that we made such bad choices which is kind of liberating. It allows you to just have the guts to try it again in the next round and just go ahead and start with an idea that’s not fully formed.

I guess considering how laborious the process of animation is you have to be pretty confident going in that you’ve got a good story. I feel like Pixar deliberately uses a very pure form of storytelling. Do you think that’s true?

I don’t know (laughs)! Again, no one is sitting in a room talking about things at such a fundamental level. I just think it’s one of those things where you luck out and you find yourself with a group of people that you just instinctually find yourself finishing each other’s sentences. You have similar tastes.

I think we all, if I had to somehow put it into words, seem to have a certain heightened ability to hold on to our childhood and what it felt like to be a kid. That’s not to say that we think we’re making things for kids. It’s just that we enjoy all the stuff we like in storytelling and in movies as an adult, but embrace and include all the things we loved and the innocence of being a child. That’s me saying that … I’ve never heard anyone say that out loud at the company … I just think it’s naturally, instinctually what we are.

Who are you making movies for?

Whenever I bring my kids to school, I always get parents saying, “You know what? My kids really loved that movie and you know what? I liked it too.” And I say, “Good, I wrote it for you. I didn’t write it for the kids.”

You have the ability now, to find anything you liked as a child and see it again on video or whatever. And a large portion of the stuff I liked as a kid was crap (laughs). Not all of it. It made me realize that kids don’t naturally have taste—it’s something that they acquire.

So, I don’t really worry about the kids. It’s more, what do I want to see that doesn’t exclude children? I think it’s why the Harry Potter books do so well. It’s not talking down, it’s not pedantic. It’s not offensive. You can almost always feel when you’re watching a movie that is “for kids,” or reading a book, you can always hear the voice of an adult saying, “How are you? What’s your name?” and it makes me want to smack ‘em.

Some of my favorite movies as a kid were Lawrence Of Arabia and Bridge Over The River Kwai. And movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters—I wouldn’t say were necessarily for kids, they seem to be all inclusive.

How does that work? I mean, when I think about Toy Story I can’t imagine sitting around a pitch meeting saying, “I know! We’ll make an animated movie about a bunch of toys and the little boy moves away. And oh, by the way, it’s for adults!”

I think that’s what the luxury of working here is. We don’t have to sell it to anybody. And we weren’t in that position even when we had to come up with Toy Story. So that probably freed us from having to put those limited thinking caps or blinders on.

I find myself with a group of people and say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if your toys were still alive when you were out of the room?” I always wished that when I was a kid. And then you think, “Well, okay great. If that’s such a universally felt thing then why not?” Then can we capitalize on that and make it something that is enjoyable as adults. Because if you can remember that, as an adult, it means you still have some fond feeling for it.

You started as an animator. Do you think that has had an impact on the way you write—that you didn’t start from the word but from the picture?

It freed me from thinking that I couldn’t be a writer, because if I came to it from the word [side of things], I’d have not tried. I didn’t do that well in school—I wasn’t great in English and I still have quite an impression of what I think a writer is supposed to be. But then, once I kind of reworded it as cinematic storytelling in my mind it kind of took the onus off of having to be this great writer in my mind.

I felt like I had the authority to then try a script because I’ve always had images in my mind of what I’d love to see on a screen. I’ve always had moments in film that I’ve imagined that I’d love to see that I’m not seeing. And if it’s simply jotting on paper what’s going on in my brain, then sure I’ll give it a shot. I think that’s what made me take a leap.

Where did the idea for Finding Nemo come from?

It was a bunch of separate ideas. Very early on, when I was new to Pixar and the whole computer 3-D look, I started to realize that underwater would be a great way to see in our medium. I remembered that there was a fish tank in my dentist’s office when I was a kid. I used to actually look forward to going to the dentist so that I could see all the wacky stuff in this fish tank.

I then started to think what a weird point of view that would be, if you were a fish, and put in this tank, that would be your first view of humans. Working on their teeth and all that kind of stuff. It would be like somebody going to Las Vegas and that was their first stop in America. It would be such a bizarre representation.

That got me going for a while and that sort of stewed in the back of my mind. Just the whole genre of CG, and that world underwater and all the things you could possibly do and then this weird juxtaposition of the human world. But meanwhile Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monster’s Inc., they all kind of had their time on the front burner of my brain.

Then I became a father. When my first child was five I was so busy with a movie I decided that when I got some free time I wanted to take him to the park. I spent the whole walk saying, “Don’t touch that.” “Careful, you’re too close to the curb. A car’s going to come by,” and “Hold my hand.” I stopped myself and realized that I was completely missing the entire moment being all over protective and fearful of what might happen to him.

It got me going about the premise of how fear can possibly deny a good parent from being one. I realized I had enough to really flesh out this sort of story. It had really been cooking in the back of my brain for years.

So, you have this fish-father/fish-son idea. What’s the next step at Pixar? Do you basically say I’ve an idea and they say, “Good! Go away and come back when it’s done so we can start making it?”

Well, screenwriters are going to hate me but yeah, that’s all it has ever been here. It’s just, “Do you have an idea? Quick, go think of one, we need a movie!” That’s pretty much how it has been (laughs!). I haven’t had to go through the route of trying to sell it or gloss it over, or sugar coat it so it works for a certain type of studio, or any of that kind of crap. For Finding Nemo, they let me do the first draft before I had to show it to anybody.

There is also an integrity, a whimsy and twists to your storytelling. It’s very fresh. How do you maintain that through the writing process?

I have no idea! I’m the last person to toot my own horn or any of that. I do know that you have tapped into one thing that I’ve seen expressed again, again and again at Pixar and that’s that we don’t like to do anything unless it seems truthful and honest.

You could be cynical and say that movies and storytelling itself is manipulation. But I think that if you pull back from that you can tell when you’re watching a movie and you’re trying to be manipulated and strings are swelling a little too much—the lens is fogged a little too much and you get angry. You feel like you’re being taken advantage of and that’s the kind of stuff we really, really, really try to stay away from.

I think that you’re just trusting in someone’s collective instinct about what’s the truth of something. I think we’re all fortunate that we don’t live in Hollywood. We don’t live, eat and breathe movies. We all go outside of these walls and we have a real life. A lot of us are family people and we have kids and loved ones and I think we’re just very in tune with stuff that matters to us. We’ll constantly use examples of something that we’ve experienced or something that our co-workers have experienced to make sure that we’re being truthful to it.

There’s also a wackiness to everything you do. I mean you can go away and have a movie about a nervous father and turn that into something very dark. A lot of comic books do that, but you guys don’t. Is that personality?

There are different shadings every time. I think Finding Nemo is going to be a little bit more intense emotionally than other movies we’ve done because of the subject matter. Some of that was out of desire. We’re not necessarily interested in telling exactly the same kind of story with exactly the same range of emotions that we have. You want it all to be good and to feel somewhat in the same camp, but ultimately no one wants to repeat themselves. We‘re all artists and we want to be challenged.

I’m sure as time passes we’ll look back and it seems obvious that because we’re at this state in our lives we did this kind of story. But it seems kind of hard to see the forest through the trees right now.

Obviously there are things you can do with animation that you can’t do with live action. Do you ever consider, as you’re writing, that the idea could also work in live action? Or does that not enter your thoughts?

It does enter your thoughts. But once we’ve committed to an overall idea, then we just forget that we’re making it with a computer. Then it’s all about making the story good and don’t worry about what we can and can’t do, and we don’t worry about whether it’s family or non-family material. Just make it good. That’s the first and foremost thing that it should always be.

Karen Gordon is a SCREENTALK Staff Writer. She is currently Head Writer for CBC-TV's "Hosted Prime," a film reviewer for CBC radio, and a media trainer in Toronto. Her previous cover stories for SCREENTALK include Tim Robbins, Hampton Fancher, Roger Rueff, Patricia Rozema and Academy Award® nominee Kenneth Lonergan.