AS: We're not as nervous, yeah!

When did you realise that the numbers were so huge?

AS: Well, first off we had a big opening weekend - a big opening weekend made you go 'Okay...'
LU: They were still predicting $200,000,000 by the opening weekend, so no one was expecting it.
AS: Yeah, by then you're really just breathing a sigh of relief that it's going to be able to hold it's head up along with the other films, and I didn't thing past that. Then I remember, my father - he's into figuring things out, his own little movie predictor - he was telling me 'It's going to beat the Lion King' and I was like 'Stop! You don't know what the hell you're talking about...', and who would have thought, it was very strange!
LU: We had the Matrix Reloaded coming out two weeks before us, and the Hulk was slated to come out two weeks after so we thought that at best, we had a little window and we'd just do as much business as we could in it, because that was it - we were going to get clobbered. So we were all completely floored by how much it took.

How long was it in the pipeline before it got made - did you have to wait for the technology to be ready?

AS: Well, yes and no. It really wasn't the technology that made me wait, it was the story, and also just being very busy on the other films. Up until recently we've been small enough that we've all worked on the other films in some capactity, and so you're always juggling more than one film at a time. I wanted to do something under water with computer graphics - I got the setting before I got the story, in 1992 while we were still developing Toy Story. I just knew there would be something very fascinating about that setting in CG - that you'd be able to truly capture the feel of being under water. But, you know, we were busy with all these other movies for the next five years, so it gave us a lot of time to not only think about something but learn how to write movies - I learned on Toy Story, and learned how to improve upon that for all the other pictures. So it really wasn't until we were finishing A Bugs Life and beginning Toy Story 2 that I felt that we had enough ingredients so I could go 'Okay, I think I know what this movie will be about' and that was Finding Nemo. So by the time I commited to doing it, which was probably in late 1999, I actually had to ask people involved in it technically to just help me out on it. I couldn't really care less whether or not they could do it - that's never been how Pixar works. Even when I came along and we worked on commercials, I was always impressed by how we would take a job on for a commercial, based on how good we felt the content was, and a lot of the time I'd be going 'Wow, we've never done this before, and we can't even generate this...' but they were like 'Hey, we'll figure it out!'. That's always been the methodology, let the quality of the idea motivate the technical directions.
LU: Although, that being said, we could not have made Finding Nemo back when we made Toy Story. It truly would have been impossible, just because the computers weren't fast enough. We maybe could have been able to make the movie, but it would have taken 10 years to get it finished.

The story goes that when Monsters Inc came out, John Lasseter approached you guys and told you 'You're not under any pressure now!'...?

AS: It was more like in the middle of the party to congratulate everyone on how well it had done, he turned to me and jokingly said 'No pressure or anything...'.
LU: Which we got to do to the guys on the next movie, The Incredibles, when we were having our celebratory party for Nemo.
AS: I think that because of the focus on the fact that we're 5 for 5, it makes people want to ask that question, but the truth is, that kind of pressure has always been with us - all we've ever known is working under extreme pressure. We've always had to go to the World Series and bat a home run every time. The first one was probably the only time when we didn't feel that enormous pressure, because we were too ignorant to realise what kind of pressure we were under! But every single film after that, we're had something successful to have to be behind, so we've learnt to just put up the blinders and concentrate on what's in hand. I think a lot of that is because we're not in LA, we're not bombarded by people outside telling us how great we are, so unless we want to go and seek that out, it's not really shoved in our face. We realised that that was what made Toy Story so great - a complete Naivety and ignorance. So every movie that we make, we have to find some way of re-creating that environment, because we know that's directly responsible for how good the movie's going to be.

How did you know that Under Water was the setting you wanted for this movie?

AS: You don't look for them specifically, it's not a requirement, but when you tap in to something that you feel is universally desired, you know there is something there that might produce a large audience. You sit there and you go 'I've always wondered what it would be like to be under water' - I've always been afraid of it and excited about it at the same time. You can never look back, you can never see too far ahead and things start to disappear straight away. I grew up by the water, and I remember having my little divers mask, and sitting under there staring into the shallows until I scared myself and had to stand up. I felt like that attraction and fascination is still there now, and I'm in my thirties, so it's got to be pretty universal. It wasn't that hard for me to think that it was a pretty universal compulsion.
LU: We'd never seen it done quite right - there'd been The Little Mermaid, and other films that had been set under water, but nothing that really captured that...
AS: I've never seen a film from a fantasy stand point that really captured what it might be like to have an entire story set in that environment...

Is it true that the structure of the story changed quite radically, in as much as initially you didn't show Marlin's loss of his family?

AS: Yeah, in the original script that was doled out in pieces, and aluded to in the beginning. From a linear stand point it was very interesting, and very cinematic, and it was a little different, which is probably what drove it in the first place. But one of the problems I was having for a while, which became a bigger problem, is that you weren't like the father. He never really got a good foot hold at the beginning, everybody thought he was neurotic and over-protective, and nervous - all the things he actually is in the final movie - people found him very off-putting. So Lee was the one who actually told me at the time, 'Try putting the whole back story in - tell it in real time, put it at the start of the movie and then jump on six years'. And it was amazing, the minute we did that, every single thing that was in there about the father was empathetical, you didn't mind it. Some times it was even endearing, as you relate to him - it was a real lesson...
LU: You're willing you cut him a lot of slack, as you knew what he'd been through - this whole tragedy, so he could be as neurotic as we want him to be, and you were okay with it.
AS: It was a little nervous at first - I think that's why I was resistant to even trying it - I wasn't sure I wanted to start the movie off with a tragedy, but then when I tried it in the privacy of my own editing room and watched it, two of the by-products that came out of it that were really helpful was that it did set off a sort of bitter-sweet tone that resonates through the whole picture, and never goes away, which is what I wanted really. And the bigger one of which was it set up the rules, right up at the front - it said 'This world is the world you know, in nature. It is a predatory world, and things are out there to eat you'. People got that straight away and through out the film, and I guess that helps.
LU: I think it's a tension that permeates the rest of the film, because you constantly have the sense that anything could be out there, anything could be in the murk, coming to get them at any moment.

Do you ever go outside Pixar when you're working through the ideas?

AS: Yeah, to shake it up - frankly you'll take ideas wherever they come, however they'll come.
LU: It's mostly under our roof, but we do occassionally screen the films down at Disney, mostly because we work on these things for so long - it takes four years to make a movie like this - and it's really easy to lose objectivity, when you've seen the same joke 500 times, and you've seen the movie over and over again. It's very difficult to know what's working and what's not working, and things you think are funny maybe aren't funny. The folks that we've worked with down at Disney, we've always trusted to be those objective eyes, so that we can go down there every six months and show them the movie we're working on and get their input. But beyond that, we've never eally gone out much - we do a test screening, towards the end of production, just to make sure we have all our ducks in a row, but you mostly have to trust yourselves, which is kind've scary.

On the end credits, it mentions the production babies - what's the story with them?

AS: It started right back at Toy Story, all the films have that credit. Basically, any baby that's born from the day that we start the production, by any of the employees, gets to have their name on it.
LU: We just want to prove to everyone that even though we all have to work really hard on the movie, we're still allowed conjugal visits!

Talking of which, Pixar gives every impression of being the precosious teenager living in Disney's house - is there any view as to moving out and getting a place of your own?

AS: On a creative stand point, and on a day to day stand point, there is nothing to complain about, and there hasn't been for about twelve years. Any rought spots we had were in the beginning when we were learning to work together, but when we finished that production we had got it all figured out. So there are no issues on our end - all the issues about money and ownership are dealt with by bigger guys, and we're kept out of it which we're happy about. Because then we don't have to answer this, because we don't know. I hope that they make it work out, because I think that we do make something better together than we do apart, and everyone's a little nervous about what the unknown would be like. Nobody wants to work in a disfunctional relationship either, so who knows.

I'm constantly surprised by the people you get to do voices in the films - is there anyone who you've wanted but haven't been able to get so far?

AS: Yes, but I would never tell you who, because then somebody else would use them! Some of the people in Nemo are people who I've wanted to work with since Toy Story, and either I couldn't get them, or more so the latter which was I didn't want to mis-use them - I wanted to wait until the right part came up.

Is that the same with Austin Pemdleton - do you think he's a natural?

AS: You know, we were nobodies when we were doing Toy Story, and suddenly we're being asked who we'd want doing voices for us. You suddenly have all this power, and we were like 'WOW!'. You start fantasising - first you make a list of people you've always wanted to meet. But then you get rational, and you start thinking 'I remember trying to sell John [Lasseter] on this idea', (the voices of Wallace Shawn and Austin Pemdleton) and saying 'None of these names you'd probably know, but you would recognise them if you saw them in one of the movies they've been in', and their voices are outstanding. And Wallace ended up sticking for him, for Rex [dinosaur in Toy Story], but Austin ended up staying up their on the shelf.
LU: But it's great, now that we've done these 5 films that everyone loves and have done really well, everyone returns our phone calls! We have run in to a few people over the years who don't want to do animation, but most of the people that we approached, we got.

Do you ever get people approaching you to ask if they can be in one of your films?

AS: To be honest, when we were smaller I was aware of every time that would happen - someone would walk in to the hallway and go 'OHMIGOSH, so and so just called and they wanted to be in the movie'. There were some actors, that shall remain nameless, that called once and said 'We love Toy Story, the only thing wrong was that I wasn't in it!' but that didn't really go down to well with us. But if we do get them now, I guess we're big enough that I don't get to hear about them.

Lee, how hard was it dealing with the cast member called Andrew Stanton?

LU: He was a pain in the ass, I would never work with him again! No, I'm kidding. Andrew does the voice of Crush, the sea turtle in the movie, and we didn't set out to have Andrew in the movie, but what happened was, when we make these films, we create these story reels, which is a rough draft of the movie using storyboards and temporary voices and sound effects - we can kind of watch the movie the way it would be. Then, until we've actually cast the voices for the film, we all provide the temporary 'Scratch' voices for the characters, and Andrew as doing Crush, just like he did Woody in Toy Story - we've all chipped in and done different parts in all the films. But when we set out to cast Crush, we couldn't find the right person - nobody was making us laugh like Andrew was, nobody was quite right. So we were in a bind, and we had to go ahead and animate it, and we animated a lot of it to [Andrew's] voice...
AS: And I was still hoping we'd find somebody, and just loop their dialogue...
LU: So we had a test screening of Nemo, and we still hadn't cast anybody, so they said 'Why don't you go ahead and screen it with Andrew's voice in it?', and then when we got the cards back at the end of the movie, Crush proved to be one of the stand-out characters in the film - everybody loved that character - so we weren't about to mess with a good thing...
AS: So I thought about it, then called myself back, and I had to talk myself in to it...!

A fish is not a naturally cuddly creature, was there any point when you were creating the character that you thought 'Maybe we've taken on too much here?'

AS: No, cuddly creatures are not a pre-requisite for me. For me it's more about setting the situation, and the characters that will be derived from those, and I thought of the situations and the perils of what a fish might have to go through, just to swim in the ocean, and it was perfectly applicable to dealing with the angst of being an over-protective parent. I work with so many great designers and animators - guys that are so much better at that stuff than I am - I could probably give them the most unappealing subject matter and they could make a character that you'd want to stare at for the whole movie, even if it isn't cuddly.

Now that you've cornered this particular market, how do you feel about one day moving out in to conventional film directing?

AS: We would love it - one of the things that we feel strongly about, is that because we've chosen this medium, and it's been so successful, and made a niche for itself, it gives the impression without anybody asking that it's the medium that got us in to this and that drives us. But the truth is that we love movies, we love storytelling and it doesn't get any more specific than that. If you ever catch us in any spare moment, talking about cinema, it's very rare that we're talking about animation. We just love great storytelling and great movies.
LU: We consider ourselves film makers first and foremost, we just happen to be working in animation.
AS: We talk about that a lot, and I think it's very consievable that we might do something together. But it's a big leap, it's a whole different system and procedure, and I think it will take a story that we really feel we should tell.

Spending four years making something that is going to last ninety minutes... how patient are you, in real life?

AS: You mean with other things? Probably not that patient! I think you probably use up all your patience just on the movie making. I found, building my house I was very good at. I had the patience of Job when it came to the contractor telling me it was going to take another year to finish my house, and that the costs were going to double - I just said 'I totally know this world!'
LU: You have no choice, it's like labour - 'You know what, it's going to be another five hours on the table!'. A lot of people hear the 4 years thing and think we must go out of our mind on the same project for that long, but these things are so hugely complicated that it's actually a happy thing that we have four years to make it rather than just two, it allows us to just pace ourselves, and slowly and meticulously work through all the issues and problems.
AS: It allows you to have a life! Out of those 3 to 4 years that you work, for two thirds of that you can pretty much have a 9-to-5 job. Whereas usually in the industry it's binge and purge, binge and purge - no life for the year. Another benefit of working on it for so long is that it affords us some freedom to go down some blind alleys - a lot of other film makers aren't given that luxury. They pretty much get a script, and you have to make that script work, whether it will work or not - 'cause that's the script that's been budgeted.
AS: We have time to make a lot of mistakes, and we also have the trust with our bosses I guess, or the people with the money, that just because we make mistakes, they don't lose faith in us, and say 'Ohmygosh, we should get a new writer in, or a director..'
LU: And they know that some times we come up with some really really great ideas at the 11th hour, and it's a little painful, because nobody in the company wants to release a movie knowing that somebody had a great idea that wasn't used.

Could you bare eating the cast this afternoon at lunch?

AS: We did have fish and chips today!
LU: They were showing Finding Nemo on the plane on the way here, and I was eating my Mahi Mahi. We spent the whole production wondering whether they were going to serve Sushi at our wrap party. And they did!

With so much pressure and such a long schedule, if one of your films flopped, would production on all the other movies be affected at all?

AS: No, it wouldn't stop - anything we're still filming would go on.
LU: At the beginning, when we made Toy Story, if A Bug's Life had been a big flop it would have been a big issue and could have pulled the whole studio down, but we've got to the point where we have so many films in various stages of production, and the films have all done so well...
AS: We're also a more stable company, and we can afford for one not to do as well.
LU: We didn't have that luxury until Nemo, or at least we didn't have to capitalise on it, but the first three films, everyone had to go out of the park or else, you know, we may not have a job again.
AS: Most of the people at Pixar realise how lucky we are - we get to make movies outside of LA, we get to live in San Francisco, which is 7 hours north. It's a completely different Geography, completely different environment. You pretty much feel like you have a normal life - there aren't waiter's trying to sell you scripts! And we really feel it has a direct effect on us, not taking for granted movie making, because it's a privelidge to make a movie, and we consider it so.

One word answer - Finding Nemo 2?

AS: Maybe.

So you've not even started it?

AS: Boy, that would be cheeky wouldn't it?
LU: After Toy Story came out, everyone asked if there would be a Toy Story 2, and I said 'No Way! Never!', as we have plenty more stories to tell yet.

All pictures © 2003 Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios
www.whereisnemo.co.uk