The Massie Twins recently got to sit down for an interview with Disney/Pixar's director Pete Docter for the new film Up, opening May 29th, 2009. He was joined by Up's producer Jonas Rivera.
Massie Twins: We got to see you guys at Comic-Con. How far along in the film were you at that point?
Pete Docter: When was that? July? We didn’t have much. I think we had one or two sequences done. Everything else was still to come.
Jonas Rivera: You get a lot of stuff about that time that’s half-baked and not presentable. It’s like 12 sequences but they’re in a funky looking layout and the characters don’t have clothes, which in some of the other films when the characters aren’t fully clothed it still looks alright. Cars didn’t matter and The Incredibles since they had these bodysuits on. But you didn’t want to see Up like that. Trust me. An old man and a kid. (laughs)
MT: How closely did you work with writer Bob Peterson? Did you have a lot of input on the screenplay and how did that story come about?
PD: Bob and I worked on Monsters Inc. and we hit it off well, so after that we talked about what we felt had potential as a story. We brainstormed a bunch of stuff and something that always seemed to come up was escape. Escaping the world is something a lot of animators probably fantasize about since we’re not really that socially adept (laughs). Both Bob and I had been fascinated by grouchy old-guy characters like George Booth cartoons and many examples in live action, and it seemed like it had a lot of possibilities. So we started developing the idea and we worked out what was going to happen, and then when we got to an actual sequence, Bob would go off and write the dialogue. He did most of the really good dialogue. But it was a very collaborative effort from the beginning.
(from left) Joel Massie, Jonas Rivera, Pete Docter, Mike
Massie
MT: The opening sequence that chronicles Carl’s life is utterly flawless. Whose idea was it to create the scene with virtually nothing but a score?
PD: I’m trying to remember and I think it was
Ronnie del Carmen, who is head of story. He’s like the closest
I know to being a superhero and his talent is drawing – and he
can draw anything quickly and beautifully. So he was in charge of bringing
this sequence to storyboards. We’d written it and Bob did a great
job putting it together – he even made John Lasseter cry with
just the pitch – and Ronnie was storyboarding it. But we kept
finding that it was too long and we were wondering how to compress it.
We were thinking about silent films and super 8 footage and how there’s
something almost more emotional about that without the sound. We initially
had sound effects, but then even stripped that out and just had music
– of course Michael Giacchino’s score is absolutely fantastic
there.
MT: In a lot of previous Pixar films,
computer programs had to be created to govern certain special effects
and animations. What kinds of programs did you have to create for this
one?
JR: There are some technical hurdles in the film for sure – all the films have presented something, whether it’s clothes or raytraced reflections or underwater simulations. In this film it became less about some new tool we needed and more about a different way to apply the tools we already had. We were really going for a caricatured look. We were inspired by a lot of the old Disney cartoons. So we had to figure out how to do that in CG without making it look fake or cheesy. So the production designer came up with the term “simplexity”. Here we had these computer scientists who’d figured out everything we’d thrown at them in the past, and they’d gotten things like cloth to work perfectly and realistically. And now we get to Up and we don’t want the cloth to work right. Now we want to preserve the line of action or animation, we don’t want to see a million folds, we want to see just one. So they had to re-think all the tools they had already created.
MT: What kind of research went into Carl? Any films that influenced the iconic old man?
PD. Oh yeah, tons. A couple seminal films were Going in Style with George Burns, and Cocoon and Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I love that bit where he’s ordering ice cream – they drive out and he finally gets the ice cream and he eats it and says “That’s not the stuff…but it’s not bad.” There’s just so much expression there.
JR: Shawshank Redemption’s James Whitmore and Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau.
PD: And then we found online some footage from the senior Olympics. That was an interesting challenge on this one: to capture things that don’t follow what is generally considered “good animation.” Things like fluid overlap and leading with the head when characters look – with Carl that doesn’t look right. He’s stiffer and when he turns his head, his neck is fused. So we had to re-train ourselves to animate “wrong”. Or right. (laughs). And there’s a very fine line between stiff bad animation and stiff good animation.
JR: I remember Scott did this one test of Carl early on where Carl goes to sit down and pulls up the legs of his trousers. And we were like “that feels like an old man!” Those tiny nuances.
MT: Was the decision to go to 3D on this
movie something you decided before you started it?
PD: It was not part of the plan to begin with. We just
started making the movie and focusing on story and characters –
which we did all the way through. But John Lasseter came to us and said
they’d love to do it in 3D, so we set up a group that would handle
that. They’d take a sequence when it was most of the way through
and start applying that. And we tried to use it artistically. We spoke
with them a lot about where we wanted things to feel claustrophobic
and shallow, and where we really wanted to feel depth and contrast.
But we didn’t change the way we approached things. The main focus
was still on storytelling.
JR: It didn’t cause us to re-engineer our pipeline. We have a movie about a flying house and there are jungles and such scenery, so it just fit. We treated the screen on this film more like a window looking in as opposed to things jumping out at you. We didn’t want to do anything that might pull you out of the story, so creating a window made it really feel immersive like you’re looking into this world.
MT: Did you guys sneak in any characters from other Pixar films into Up? Did WALL-E get a little cameo?
PD: There’s a character from Toy Story 3, but you won’t recognize him until that film comes out. (laughs).
- The Massie Twins
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