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Andrew Stanton Directs WALL•E
By Fred Topel | Image property of Disney
WALL•E
Andrew Stanton Gives Direction to WALL•E
"Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to the movies all my life, I had come to my own conclusion that there were really kind of two camps of how robots had been designed," said Stanton. "It’s either the Tin Man which is a human with metal skin or it’s R2D2. It’s a machine that has a function and it’s designed based on that, and you read a character into it. I was very interested in going with the machine side because to me that was what was fascinating. There is some unique power to that type of bringing a machine to life than other kinds of machines that are designed to look like a character. I think there’s something about something that’s already appealing where you’re kind of charmed by it, but it can’t communicate fully. You want, you’re compelled, you almost can’t stop yourself from finishing the sentence. ‘Oh, I think it likes me. I think it’s hungry. I think it wants to go for a walk.’ And I think what it does, I’m getting really geeky here but this is really where my head was at for a long time, was I think you pull from your own emotional experiences to finish the sentence. So it becomes twice as powerful."
WALL•E also deals with what becomes of humans in the future. After centuries of having machines assist us in all functions, future people are just stationary blobs. "I realized that what I was pushing with these two programmed robots was their desire to try and figure out what the point of living was. It took these really irrational acts of love to sort of discover them, against how they were built. Irrational love defeats life’s programming and I realized that’s a perfect metaphor for real life. We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts, and they're actually used quite often consciously and unconsciously to avoid living, to avoid having to do the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with the person next to us. That’s why we can all be in a room and on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another. And I thought, ‘That’s a perfect amplification of the whole point of the movie.’"
But how do they reproduce in that state? "I leave that to your imagination but I did sort of go with Alex Huxley’s view of the future."
While the state of earth and humanity in the future could easily be read as a comment on the direction we are headed now, Stanton avoided thinking politically. Even the line "Stay the course" in the film is a coincidence. "It was just such a natural thing to say at the time, I said, ‘Screw it, it’s funny.’ I hate to not be able to fuel where you want to go, but that was not where I was coming from when I did that stuff. I knew I was going into territory that was basically the same stuff, but I don’t have a political bent. I don’t have an ecological message to push. I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view. It’s certainly a good citizen way to be. But everything I want to do was based on the love story. I wanted the last robot on earth. I have to get everybody off the planet. I have to do it in a way that you get it without any dialogue. You have to be able to get it visually in less than a minute, so trash did that. You look at it, you get it. It’s a dump and you’ve got to move that. Even a little kid understands that, and it makes WALL-E at the lowest of the totem pole and it allowed him to sift through everything that we’ve left on the planet to show you that he’s interested in us. So I had to look at everything from the point of view of what will you get visually without having dialogue describe stuff to you."
WALL•E opens to theaters on June
27th.
For the trailers, posters, stills, clips and more movie info, go the WALL•E
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Disney
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