Andrew Stanton earned an Academy Award for his work on Finding Nemo.
Now, the writer/director is back with this summer’s next Pixar hit, WALL•E. He recently spoke with ComingSoon.net about the animated feature, commenting on the origins of the main character:
Yeah, it was, well to get really picky, it was an original character that we came up with at that lunch. The story I didn’t start on until the “Nemo” years, but out of that lunch came just a quick little concept of like, sci-fi and robots and what if everyone left the planet and what if there was this one little robot left collecting all the garbage that just didn’t know it could stop doing its job.
Get to know WALL•E. on June 27.
And I thought that is such an exercise in futility, I could even buy a character that’s a machine, after seven hundred years of doing the same thing, finally asking the question “there’s got to be more to life than what I’m doing.” I just thought that that was great.
But it was such an abstract concept even then, before we’d even proven that we could do “Toy Story,” we were like, well no one would ever give us the money or the opportunity to do something like that, that was so out there.
So it got put on a shelf and we became much more experienced, much more involved in other pictures, much better filmmakers and so by the time “Nemo” came out I felt we were at a place where maybe I would internally get the okay to make a movie like that but maybe the outside world would be open to coming to a movie like that. So maybe in a weird way it was better, letting it simmer for so long.
