John Lasseter, Pixar executive and pioneering computer animation filmmaker talks Cars along with producer Darla K. Anderson.

Is it true that Cars is a particularly personal project for you, John?
John Lasseter: “I grew up in Los Angeles, California and if you haven’t heard we’re crazy about cars in LA. My father was a parts manager for a Chevrolet dealership all my life, and I grew up going to the dealership to look at all the latest new cars, and I got my love of cars from that. And also I live in Sonoma California, which is a kind of wine region of northern California, but we do have a raceway there in the town, a road course, and all the big race circuits come there so I’ve really grown to have a love of racing as well. My wife was the one that reminded me, she said ‘make this movie for me, your nieces and everybody else in the world who doesn’t like racing’. I didn’t know there were those kind of people out there, so through the making of the whole movie we had what we called the ‘ Nancy factor’. My wife’s name is Nancy, to remind us constantly that this movie is about story and characters and not just for ‘petrolheads’ like me.”

Has he converted you, Darla, to this love of all things automotive?
Darla Anderson: “I was with the Nancys. Now I love cars, because I’m engaged with the characters and I’ve gotten to meet a lot of designers and race car drivers and now I understand the sport. But coming into the project, I didn’t dislike them but I wasn’t even a little bit fanatical about them.”

John Lasseter: “And Darla was really one of the people who helped, when we were making the movie, to make sure it was about the story and the characters, when we were getting too geeky in the details she would go ‘I don’t get it’.”

You’ve cast Paul Newman in a key role, and he is a renowned car fan – how did you get him on board?
John Lasseter: “We were sort of nervous about asking him to do a voice in the movie, because he’s such a great actor. Knowing how good a race car driver and knowing how passionate he was about race car driving, when we finally got a chance to talk to him about the project he was quite intrigued because of the choice of car he was going to be. It’s a 1951 Hudson Hornet, which most people don’t know about, but those who do know about it know of its legendary nature. It was really way ahead of its time and dominated the stock car style of racing back then and was the fastest production car of its day being a six cylinder. It was a remarkable piece of machinery, and so he was very excited about that. And as we worked with Paul, he’s an amazing actor but he was also very passionate about getting the racing right. He really appreciated the dedication I had to making sure the details were correct.”

So you got to indulge your shared passion for cars then, did you?
John Lasseter: “It drove Darla crazy because we’d fly across the country to New York to record him, we had four hours and we spent most of the time just talking about racing. She’d be gesturing, like ‘John we have to get on’. But what’s interesting is in talking to him about the scenes and the racing and getting the terminology right he would talk about the way the communication would be between the it crew and the crew chief, and the race car driver and the terms they would use. In fact I gave him a ‘racing consultant’ credit because he helped so much with the movie.”

How much time is spent working with the voice cast?
John Lasseter: “We work with one of our main actors, like Owen Wilson or Paul Newman, over about a two or two and a half year period. We will get them in early to do a session, which is four hours long, we don’t really go longer than that because it takes a lot out of the actor. Tom Hanks always said that the hardest acting job he ever had was doing the voice of Woody [in Toy Story] because what actors normal do, on a movie set, is a page or a page and a half a day at most. But we will go through their entire performance in a four hour period. We tried to do it in chronological order to get the emotional arcs right, but we always withhold any loud screaming or anything like that until the end of the session.”

How much does an actor influence the storyline?
John Lasseter: “What we do is we always learn what our actors can and can’t do. We are inspired by our actors, we try to get actors who can ad lib and that evolves the character. At Pixar it’s never about just writing the script and then just making that movie. These movies take such a long time to develop. Each of our films is something we’ve created, they’re not based on any books or stories or anything else, we’re creating them ourselves. So we use the input from our actors, even just listening to their voices, before we start writing it. The evolution of each of these characters gets kind of closer to, or customised to them. We videotape every recording session for the animators, and the actors kind of learn this and they’ll start doing a little bit more physical acting in front of mike.”

Can you think of a specific example where it occurred on Cars?
John Lasseter: “What’s really neat about Paul Newman is there’s so much great acting in his face, and it’s very subtle. It worked well with his character, which has a big kind of chrome grille, and the more that chrome grille bent……….it would be bend too much and looked odd. We actually pulled the inspiration from Paul Newman’s facial acting to really keep the mouth shapes and the animation kind of minimal.”

What about other challenges you faced, like making the reflective surface of the cars look authentic?
John Lasseter: “Every time we do a movie at Pixar we start by choosing a subject matter which lends itself to our medium. And as soon as we start developing the story there’s things that come out that we don’t know how to do. And that’s part of the fun of working at Pixar, because inevitably we’ll go to someone and say ‘we don’t know how to do this, figure it out’. There’s a couple of things in Cars, you picked up on one. I always knew that the audience knows the way that cars look. You just know that driving along and seeing cars all the time that they reflect the world around them. It’s subtle. The chrome is like mirror reflection, but you also see it in the window and you see it in the paintwork, you don’t really notice it unless it’s not there or not correct. We wanted to make that accurate.”

It’s about keeping it true to the world you’ve created on screen, isn’t it?
John Lasseter: “I always believed that one of the things, in order to make a successful motion picture you’ve got to do three things really well. You have to tell a compelling story that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat; populate that story with really memorable, appealing characters and put that story and those characters in a believable world. It doesn’t have to be realistic, we make cartoons, we love making cartoons, we don’t ever expect the audience is looking up on screen thinking it was shot with a live action camera somewhere. But we like to make it believable.”

There is a subtext in the film, about the parts of America that were cast adrift when the motorways were built, isn’t there?
John Lasseter: “Doing our research about this movie and travelling on Route 66, we were standing looking at these towns and you see the history right before you. No-one has to tell you what happened to this town, you can see that it was vibrant and no-one has come here in a long time. Just by the faded signs, the rust, the dust, the grass growing up through the cracks in the driveways. You can tell that no-one has been here. I thought to myself that we’ve got to get this into our movie. That detail that you can capture on location with just setting up a camera, we had to put all that detail into the film ourselves. You get nothing for free with computer animation, but all that detail is very time consuming to do, because the computer likes to make things perfect, clean, antiseptic. All of this rich detail, the way things look, getting it done convincingly took a lot of time because it adds to the amount of data is in the scene.”

Did this cause any logistical problems?
John Lasseter: “At one point Darla and I were not sure we could get this film rendered in time because it was just so complex to do. But we really felt that this complexity was needed to make this town of Radiator Springs believable. What were some of the rendering times, it was like 50 hours per frame.”

Darla Anderson: “Some of them were 100.”

A cross country trip you took with your family a few years ago had an influence on what Cars is all about, didn’t it?
John Lasseter: “I decided to take the summer of 2000 off, we bought a big motor home, and piled the kids into it. We put our feet in the Pacific Ocean and turned east. We had two months and the only goal was to get to the Atlantic somewhere, put our feet in the Atlantic and turn round and come back. That’s it. For the first time in my life I was living every day just for the day, without even thinking about tomorrow. If we liked the place we’d stay, if we didn’t like it we’d move on. And we just enjoyed each other’s company and enjoyed the experiences that we had. I came back from that trip and I said now I knew what I wanted this movie to be about, what I just learned, that a journey in life is a reward. I was coming back, I wasn’t quitting, deciding to drive forever in this RV. But ever since then, even though my life has got busier since then I still take time to enjoy every moment a little bit more. That’s what this movie is about, when I talk about life and balance and what I wanted this story to be about. That’s also why I’d say this is a very personal story for me.”

Related Links:
Cars Review