| Up Interviews | |
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Tell us about your hiking research to Roraima – was that necessary, and were you scared?  Was Ed Asner always in mind? Docter: The way we work is we design the characters and then we grab little bits of dialogue from other films, and Ed’s voice fit perfectly. Rivera: Ed walked in when we met with him. We had a sculpture of the Carl character and Asner walked in and said ‘that doesn’t even look like me!’. We thought that was perfect, he’s already mad. What about the logistics of animating a 78 year old protagonist? And was James Whitmore a reference? Docter: That was the fun of it, you get to take all these conventions of what action heroes do, they have their swords and they fist fight and in the case of an old man he has his cane and his false teeth. That was fun. Rivera: And we did look at Whitmore, we looked at him and Walter Matthau and Spencer Tracy. All of our grandparents. Ever considered approaching him? Docter: I think we really were attracted more to Ed’s gruffness. We wanted somebody with that hard edge and yet somebody with that soft underside to him as well. Ed was our first choice and we were lucky enough that he said yes. How was it directing Asner in his vocal performance – did you have to be careful not to over tire him? Docter: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff, especially in the third act where he’s running and jumping and all this active stuff and we really made him sweat. But Ed is such a good sport that he said to bring it on. Rivera: He wouldn’t let us stop. Docter: We would volunteer to stop, we could see he was getting tired and we would be about to let him go home and he’d say ‘no, no, I still see pages there, let’s finish it up,’. And how was Jordan Nagai in the role of Russell? Rivera: He was funny, we did an open casting call looking for this kid to play Russell. I think we ended up listening to and or auditioning over 450 kids all across the country. We couldn’t find him, it was like a needle in a haystack. This kid came from southern California and we went down, Bob Peterson and I, and his brother had come to audition. He had done some performing and soforth, he had been in some commercials I think. He was really good, and then his little brother was just kind of playing with things and his mother asked if he could try. He wouldn’t read the script, he just talked about football practice and other things. ‘and then I got a black belt in karate, but my cousin has a brown belt, but then he wouldn’t listen to me so then I hit him, and my Mom said we couldn’t go,’ and we were like ‘that’s Russell,’. We called Pete and that kind of became who Russell was. He wasn’t an actor, we really wanted a kid who was authentic. When kids would come in with really good résumés and perfect attendance in the theatre and jazz hands, they didn’t sound real. So we were almost looking for a kid who couldn’t act, but it was a lot of work for Pete and our editors. You had to kind of make a method actor out of him. Any time we could we’d do physical stuff. So if he had to be struggling I would hold his arms down and say ‘now as you say the lines see if you can get your hands free at the same time,’. Or I’d tickle him if he had to laugh, anything we had to do, we’d get him to run around a lot. A lot of physical stuff. Docter: That’s right. We knew it was necessary to feel that loss for Carl, that that’s what was going to drive the rest of the film, this intense need that he has to fulfil this dream he and his wife never got to go on. That was a very necessary thing, and I think our approach, as it worked out, was to kind of step back from it and to present it to the audience. To try not to over-sentimentalise it, and in a sense strip away so the audience can input their own [emotion]. Basically it was silent, just with music. We didn’t even have sound effects in. I was equating it to my parents taking Super 8 film of us growing up, so that when you watch that there’s no sound at all. You just hear the flicker of the projector. It’s almost more emotional somehow, just having visuals only. So we took that kind of approach for the beginning there and Carl’s loss, but I think it was essential not only for the drive of the character but also we have so much comedy and wacky stuff, to balance it and have that bedrock of emotion on which it’s built. I know a lot of my favourite films, like Dumbo and It’s A Wonderful Life, often find that sort of balance. Are you focusing more on the adult audience here than having the younger viewer in mind? Docter: I think we do, as we’re writing. Very early on we found this basic theme, which is that Carl worries that he missed out on adventure in life, that he didn’t get down to South America with his wife, and have these fantastic trips and see things and animals that no-one else has seen. At the end he realises that he did get the most wonderful adventure of all, which is this relationship with this woman, and that became the theme of the film. Going back to the death question too, I think that is really the theme of the film. I love it when you go to movies that remind you how precious life is, and that it’s so easy to just walk through life and do things in a regular routine. Whenever you sort of get woken up to the fact that we’re only here for a short amount of time, and how amazing it is to get to work with these people, and have my wonderful family, that’s I think why you go to movies and want to experience art. That’s the stuff we’re going for first, and then you have all these other layers to things that will appeal to kids and other age groups. Will Pixar be moving in to live action films? Rivera: Pixar isn’t so much as some of the directors are embarking on making live action films. Andrew Stanton is making John Carter of Mars, and Brad Bird is making 1906, a live action film. But it’s not that the studio is moving in that direction. We’re planning on making more animated films and hopefully they’ll fall back in and make more. We love films, the thing is like brothers and sisters who are passionate for all things to do with movies. We have screenings every day at the studios of films animated and otherwise, so it’s just like a love letter to movies over there. We’re really excited for those guys. I think of what they’re doing as being like the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea stage of the Disney studio, which must have been really cool, or the Mary Poppins or something. We’re just really excited about it. What would you have done here that would have amazed you in the early years, pre-Toy Story? Docter: A lot of things. Fur, the fact that we had Doug’s fur and it’s able to move, we never would have been able to do that. Rivera: The cloth, Russell and Carl are two of the more complex characters with the cloth. Russell’s got his sash, his shirt, his backpack tethered to the house which has 10,000 balloon strings going through it and is tethered to that. We talked a lot about our love for the old Disney animated films, and Pete’s goal was to get caricature and graphic design infused in this. The natural tendency of the computer is to go photo real, we can make wine glasses in Ratatouille that look absolutely real, and in fact they’re doing all the right things that light does. So it was re-defining all those things we’ve developed and learned since Toy Story, and applying it to design, which was really fun. Depth of field caused by a deliberately out of focus spot in the frame? Docter: Right, there’s been a lot of advances in the camera, the virtual camera. Depth of field is one, even just the way it articulates on a virtual tripod, lens distortion, getting things squashed to the edge of it. That was mostly stuff they did on Wall.E. Rivera: Yeah, Andrew really pushed that with his DP, Jeremy Lasky. There’s a few examples in Wale. E where it even looks like the focus puller missed that we went through and camera polished. We had less of that as film grammar, that was more of the old Disney stuff, but it’s amazing the bag of tools that there is now is phenomenal. When was 3D mooted for this film, and how did it affect the film? Docter: It was about three years before we even talked about it. We developed it, and even started conceptualising some of the shots as 2D, just traditional. When John Lasseter asked us to take a look at how we could do this in 3D we went and watched a bunch of other movies. Rivera: John Lasseter has always loved 3D, even the lenticular covers for the ‘Art of’ books, and stuff. He made sure there was 17 cameras on those things – he even shot his wedding photos in 3D. He’s always been waiting for the technology to be able to do this – Luxo Jr was in 3D. He came back and had seen some of the stuff they had done at Disney on Bolt. He said it was looking great, and this was the movie to do it because of the subject matter, it felt right with the clouds and the canopy and flying and what not. But one of the things we decided was we didn’t want to change the way we made this film. We didn’t want to cut it any differently or compose it differently, we wanted to tell the story we wanted to tell. We ran a test with Ratatouille actually and we just took eight minutes of rats, and thought what if you just had a locked cut and just did a stereo pass on every shot. It worked and it looked great. So we assembled a team and decided to not let that get in the way of the story we wanted to tell, and we had them follow us. We set forth philosophies as opposed to technical boundaries. The philosophy was to not have it intrude on the audience, we don’t want to break the screen and point at you, we thought we’d treat the screen like a window, which was kind of a cool thing. We always thought of the screen like a window you’re looking into, so it’s literally a window. And have it be subtle. Pete came up with this idea, to use it like we use colour. We use the colour palettes to mimic the state of the character emotionally, greys come in when he’s down and red and magenta come back in and soforth later, in the second act. So we did a depth script. Every conversation we had was artistic as opposed to technical. The depth script was, where’s Carl in the story emotionally? That would drive how far we’d set the 3D effect. When Ellie’s gone and he’s alone in the house, if you took of your glasses there it’s flat, we pulled up to the screen. But then when Russell comes in and things start changing we slowly started pulling it and pulled as far as it can go when he fires the house up. Knowing my mother is never going to go to a film and go ‘wow, the depth is a beautiful metaphor for the emotional arc of the character,’ but like art direction or production design it’s all there to support the story we’re telling. So we were fine with it on that level, we thought that was actually a cool thing. Did Asner and Plummer work together at all? Rivera: They never met. Docter: It’s a bit funny, most of the characters we record are done individually. I don’t think Tom [Hanks] and Tim [Allen] on Toy Story ever worked together. Rivera: I don’t think so, it’s rare. How did you go about casting Christopher Plummer? Docter: We listened to a bunch of his more recent films, and he seemed to have this rugged strength to him that we were looking for. In the film, the part he plays, Muntz is even older than Carl and yet he needs to be stronger, physically. So we needed someone who could convey both those things. Rivera: He also loves dogs, Mr Plummer. So he loved that [aspect], I think that helped. Docter: He just said yes right away, which was great. And he was fantastic. The guy could read the phone book and make it sound interesting. Beautiful. What classic Disney clips do you cherish? Rivera: It would be Pinocchio, I think it would be the beginning of Pinocchio. The whole first act of that I think is absolutely incredible. The movie is almost like a lullaby to me, it’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. When I’m up at night doing stuff that’s what I always pop in and sit and wonder how they did it. Docter: I think I’d probably go Dumbo, because it’s so beautifully simple. The story is so basic, you could tell it in five minutes or less, but what that allows for is these wonderful moments of fun or humour or tenderness within it. It’s great. Rivera: And this debate will rage for our entire lives. Not ashamed to admit we laughed and cried ourselves watching Up... read the review here.
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The latest fantastic animation from Pixar is about to hit the screens in the UK this week. 
