THE DEADBOLT: So, then the hand-holding [which Wall-E sees in Hello Dolly and becomes a major part of the screenplay] developed from that find?

STANTON: I found that song - "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" - I loved the phrase "Out there..." to kick off the movie. I realized that the subject of the song kind of fit the actual situation for Wall-E. It was just two guys wanting to go out on the town and kiss a girl. So, my co-writer Jim Reardon said "Maybe he could find that as a musical on a tape in the trash and that's why he knows it." So, we looked at the movie and I came across that other song. When we saw the two lovers holding hands, I thought, "Well, that's the EXACT way that he can try and express 'I love you' since he can't say it." All those epiphanies told me that I just have to use it and I just have to put up with answering questions about Hello Dolly for the rest of my life. "Why use such an out there choice?" (Laughs.) Wall-E just has bad taste musicals, okay.

THE DEADBOLT: Can you decode everything that Wall-E says? Does every beep and boop mean something to you?

STANTON: Yes. That was the intention. I was confident, and I think we were all along, that you could convey and confer everything that you'd ever want to with a different manner of electronic speaking. It was a question of how appealing and inviting we could make it. And Brad Bird was a master of that. But I actually wrote the script with all the dialogue in it just with brackets. I knew what the intention of every line was. "Okay, we have to find a sound or a series of sounds that conveys this."

THE DEADBOLT: A lot has been made about this but did anyone ever say "Maybe this is TOO ambitious. The beeping dialogue, the Hello Dolly..."?

STANTON: No, but everybody did admit that this was going to be hard work. Brad Bird, the first time he saw a screening, said, "MAN, you didn't make it easy for yourself." Very true. It was the toughest slog that I've had. I thought the other ones were hard. But it was expected. And it was not hard in the areas that I expected. I think the reason that we knew it would be is just because that it was uncharted territory. It didn't even have to get into specifics. But it didn't scare me. It invigorated me because the last time I felt that was Toy Story. That was exciting. It was so cool to know that you were doing something that hadn't been done before. For an artist, that's really exciting. Especially when you know there's something there that you really want to achieve.

THE DEADBOLT: How collaborative are you guys? Is Brad Bird giving dialogue advice? Is Pete Docter throwing out visual ideas?

STANTON: It's both ends of the spectrum. We know that what made Toy Story great was that we embraced John's [Lasseter] vision and made THAT film. But, he also taught us that he was going to make the best film by not being a dictator but by listening to everybody else's advice and then being the final say and making the final decision. The power of those two combined can make a pretty amazing film. So, that's pretty much how we do it here. It's a Brad Bird film - He's going to make the final decision, no matter what, but we try to build into the structure something that's very open to give advice, give suggestions, and try things without being asked. And we try to build in a system where those other filmmakers watch your film and give very constructive criticism. And it's not always easy to hear, but it's not a tribunal. It's not a judge-and-jury. They're not going to tell you what you have to do and you don't have to do what they say. They gain nothing by trying to put you down. They're here to say "Look, we're all movie geeks and we're all making movies ourselves and, if you really want to impress me, this is what's not working for me." It's hard to hear. It's not for the weak. But it always ends up leading to the answer or introducing the answer. It's worked for us from day one, so we sort of swear by it.

THE DEADBOLT: You've said that there are blatant homages in Wall-E to other films. Can you point out one that we might not catch the first time?

STANTON: We don't try to put too many in that are blatant because you don't want to draw people too much out of the picture. But the biggest two...what it is was that when we came up for the Captain's Wheel for the Auto-Pilot and the center bulls-eye design, we just said "A HAL eye [from 2001: A Space Odyssey] just looks so good on the center of this thing and the character is so cold and calculating. Screw it. Let's just let it feel like that kind of an eye." I can't think of anything more intimidating and scary. The other was getting Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the ship's computer. The sci-fi geek in me just loved that Ripley was now Mother.

THE DEADBOLT: John Carter From Mars. Can you tell us anything about it?

STANTON: That's what I'm hoping to do next. I'm in the middle of writing it with Mark Andrews, who was the head of story on Ratatouille and The Incredibles. We're just spending this year trying to write the best script possible and, if we get past that, the next year will be about how to do it. But we've decided to hold off on that discussion until we've made a worthy enough story or screenplay.

THE DEADBOLT: So, you don't even know the style? Could it be live-action?

STANTON: Our minds are open to anything. It could be anything. We're not closing any doors. One thing I've learned from Pixar is "Get the story right."

Andrew Stanton gets the story right with Wall-E opening everywhere on June 27th.