Toasted Rav Interviews The Director And Producer Of Disney/Pixar's Up

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Last week Peter Docter (pictured left) and Jonas Rivera (right) were in St. Louis.  Docter is the co-director of Disney/Pixar’s latest release Up and Rivera is it’s producer.  I was invited to participate in a round table discussion with the two.  (Toastedrav.com was the only website in St. Louis invited to take part.  Not to toot our own horn but…toot, toot.)  What follows is a fairly comprehensive of our conversation.

It takes years to produce a movie like Up.  Here’s Jonas Rivera on the what it’s like waiting for the film to finally open:

Jonas Rivera: Right now it comes out a week from today.  So we sort of feel like nervous parents.  You work so long on these things and you get so close to it.  The audiences have shown such enthusiasm and it’s gone really well.  But still, it’s like sending your kid off into the world or something.  You’re like, “God, I hope everyone likes her.  I hope she gets along with everybody”. 

On the pressure of living up to Pixar’s unprecedented track record of commercial and critical successes:

Peter Docter: I guess our approach so far has been; let’s try to make every film different.  Hopefully, each one is strong on its own.  That way people aren’t hopefully comparing them too closely.  I mean, it’s kind of inevitable to some degree.  Our hope is that every time you go see a Pixar movie you know that there’s going to be a high quality level but beyond that, you’re going to be surprised.  That’s part of the fun of going to the theater.  I think this film is quite a bit different than WALL-E.  It’s kind of different than anything we’ve really done.  Which is kind of the fun of making it.

On having already directed Monsters, Inc.:

PD: It helps me to have a little more confidence that what I’m doing and how I’m approaching it and that the chaos of the story development, which is really humbling…(laughs)…that is normal, right?  It also helps because the idea, the concept, is kind of really bizarre enough that I think that having proven ourselves the one time that…you know, we kind of ended up making a decent movie let’s try it again.  So that helped too.

But the whole process at Pixar is really great.  John (Lasseter) is very trusting.  And the whole idea of being able to just play around with a concept and mold it and shape it and cut parts off and so on, I think, is really integral to our success. 

Unlike other animated studios, Pixar doesn’t pepper their films with pop culture references.

PD: We were trying to make a bit of a tribute to our favorite films that we grew up with: Dumbo, Cinderella and Pinocchio.  Those films, I’m sure here and there, have a little references and nods to pop culture but they really stand the test of time.  They don’t rely on those things.  And that’s what we wanted to do as well. 

JR: To even go further, I personally go to movies to get away from that stuff.  That’s the stuff I kind of try to forget in the world.  It does date things.  You just want to take people away.  That’s our job.  For ninety minutes, let’s get out of here and go somewhere else. 

On centering a kid’s movie on a 78-year-old man:

JR: It’s sort of a love letter to our grandparents and that era.  We just loved our grandparents and loved hearing their stories.  And even the way people spoke.  It was just cool.  I call it an “old movie accent”.  I remember my grandfather on the phone (saying), “Hold the wire”.  When there was a call for grandma he would say, “Hold the wire”.  Did he get that from an operator when he was a kid?  It’s fun to think about that stuff.

PD: That was the attraction of the film: when we came up with “an action/adventure starring an old man”.  The idea of using all those conventions from that genre but twisting it in a way that, you know, what does this guy have to work with?  He’s got, like, a bottle of pills or his false teeth or his cane.  That was fun.

So many movies these days are thinly veiled toy commercials.  Clearly the children of American aren’t clamoring for an action figures based on the elderly.  What sort of pressure did you face from Disney regard to the obligatory merchandise lines:

PD: The cool thing was we don’t really approach things from a marketing or toy manufacturing kind of way.  We just think about story.  So all the comments that got from John and Andy Stanton and everybody else that was looking at the film in the early days was just about appeal and relatability to the character.  Which is the same as any of the other films.  I think if you star to put the cart before the horse, well, we know where that goes, right?  You can easily end up with some pretty bad movies in an effort to make good toys.  And I think that’s backwards.  For people to really enjoy and want a toy they have to have a great theater experience.  It’s like a souvenir from the movie. 

JR: That’s what’s so great about working at Pixar and with Disney; even Bob Iger - the head of the company, who could kill the film if wanted to – his note at an early screening was, “I didn’t quite understand Muntz.”  Cool!  Great note!  It was like any (other) creative note.  It wasn’t like go fix it or change it.  It was just his opinion, do whatever you want with it.  And it helped us kind of focus on what we needed to do.  And it made me have just that much more respect for him and the way the whole company is run.  Al l he cared about was us making a really good film.  That’s all he told us to do.  The (toy) idea never even came up.  Which I thought was really cool. 

The origin of the film:

PD: This one started with Bob Peterson, the head writer and co-director.  We were able to just sit and develop ideas for awhile.  And something I noticed we kept coming back to was this idea of escape; just getting away from everything.  So we had this visual of a house floating off and it just seemed very intriguing.  And then we started asking ourselves, “Who’s in the house? And why?  And where are they going?”  And sort of just following that path that led us to this film.  But there are no rules.  Every film is different.  It is always about story.  And usually, a lot of these stories end up putting us face to face with something we’ve never done before. 

In Monsters, Inc. we had fur.  In Finding Nemo we had water, which is really hard.  So we have to do this exhaustive research.  But it’s all story driven.  The cool part of making these movies is when you get to the research.  With Toy Story we got to go to the toy store with company credit card.  This one we got to go South America.  It took us three days just to get to this small village out in the middle of Venezuela.  We hiked up this mountain; it’s almost a mile high.  It’s called Mount Roraima.  It’s actually the mountain that when Westerners discovered it, it inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World because it is a completely separated land mass.  They thought it was unclimbable because the walls, when you’re at the top, you’re actually out over the bottom.  It turns out on this one (place), there is kind of a slope and that’s the way we hiked up.  We slept up there for three days.  We took a lot of photographs. We also drew a lot and painted.  It ended up influencing the film beyond just the look but some story ideas as well; experiencing what the characters do.  That was great.

On making Pixar’s first 3D movie:

PD: I love 3D, sort of like a toy.  Every time we come up with new technology it’s like, “Oh, cool.  How can we play with that and mess with it.”  The thing I always worried about, as we looked at 3D films and did the research on it was the idea of popping people out of the movie.  For me, when you do a really successful film, in my favorite movies, you sit in the theater and you get lost in it.  And it’s just like this dream.  You’re just so into it that you forget you’re sitting in a dark room with all these other people.  You’re just in this world and at the end you wake up and you go, “Wow!  That was so cool.”  But when 3D comes and goes, “booga-booga”…that makes you aware.  “Oh yeah, I’m sitting in a theater with the goofy glasses on.” 

We really made a concerted effort to not do the sort of gimmicks like that and to try to use 3D to become more immersive as opposed to off-putting. 

On 3D vs. 2D:

PD: I think it’s really up to the person.  It’s been really interesting talking to people.  Some people are really hostile…well “hostile” is the wrong word…not so intrigued by 3D.  When they see it they’re like, “Eh.  It sort of gives me a headache.  I didn’t like the glasses.  And I felt separated a little bit.”  Other people feel like it’s so much more immersive and rich.  So it must be like a physiological difference.  We tried to be more subtle about it. 

JR: We treated the screen like a window.  So, in a way, we inversed 3D.  Instead of things coming out at you, things recede.  Like you’re looking in.  So that seemed to help.  We think of it like a stage. 

On the character Russell, the child in the film:

PD: We were looking for some kid that was really authentic and sounded real.  Not like they were acting.  You know, like, “Jazz Hands”!  We just read kids.  And Jordan (Nagai) wasn’t even going to try out. 

JR: His brother came in, who had done some acting.  And he was good.  But he was a little older and then his mother said, “Well, Jordan wants to try.”  And he got up and instead of even reading from the script he just started talking about soccer practice and whatever.  And Bob Peterson and I were there and we started laughing.  And it just felt like, “This is the kid.”  He just sounded like we always envisioned this kid sounding. 

PD: He just had a real charm and an innocence to his voice. 

JR: Real sweet.  Almost a little kind of clunky, in a way. 

PD: We did have to do some work, just to get him to all the places we needed emotionally.  There’s a big range of extreme sort of pain and hurt and anger and all these range of things.  So we did lots of tricks.

JR: We made a method actor out of him.

As I mentioned in my review, there was some confusion regarding Russell’s parents.  Here they discuss that:

PD: We purposely didn’t spell everything out because, to me, that’s more real.  The idea is that his father is sort of separated from the family; whether he’s away on business a lot or he’s actually physically divorced or whatever, we sort of allude to…we don’t really answer all that.  Russell is hoping to, by getting all his badges, he’s trying to earn his father back.  And of course, that’s impossible.  It’s not something that this poor kid can deal with.  It’s his father’s issues.  In the process, what we found in dealing with all this is both characters have these holes and the other can help fill those holes. So Carl becomes a father and Russell gains a father through the course of the story.  

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