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'Up' and Away on Blu-ray with Up Director Pete Docter
by Reg Seeton
 After
applying his writing talents and animation supervision
to such animated hits as Toy Story, Toy Story
2, Monsters Inc. and Wall-E, plus serving as director
of Monsters Inc., Pete Docter stepped into the
Disney/Pixar director's chair for the 2009 hit,
Up. One of the Pixar heavyweights, Docter has
earned a reputation as a quality filmmaker and
innovator in the new generation of animated movies
to come out of the Disney/Pixar era.
With Up about to find its way to DVD and Blu-ray on November 10 after a $500 million worldwide take at the box-office, director Pete Docter opens up about his time at Pixar, the origins of Up, the challenges of bringing Up to animated life in 3D, and where Docter would go if he could fly anywhere in the world like Up characters Carl and Russell, voiced by Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai.
You’ve been with Pixar
since the beginning. What has that been like?
PETE DOCTER: I think of the keys to our success is that we grew up together as artists, working on the various commercials we did, and then Toy Story. John Lasseter [chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and principal creative advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering], Andrew Stanton [writer/director of WALL*E], and Joe Ranft [writer/co-director of Cars], who has since passed away - we all got to work with each other early on, and now that we’re split up, we still check in with each other. We speak a common language, we know each other’s strengths, and so on. That collaboration has been really key.
Tell me about the genesis
of UP.
DOCTER: Looking back I’m not even really sure where the idea came from - it was a very organic process. Bob Peterson (co-writer, co-director) and I came up with this concept of a floating house, and that was something that spoke to me. I’m really not much of an extrovert. As a director, by the end of the day, I’m exhausted from just talking to people. So there’s this great temptation just to escape and get away from everything and everyone... and it seemed really appealing to be able to float your house off into the sky. So we started thinking, "Who would be in there? Why are they doing it? Where are they going?" And it was answering questions like that that led us to this film.
What do you think UP
is about?
 DOCTER:
UP is the story of Carl Fredricksen, who ties
thousands of balloons to the roof of his house
and flies to South America to have an adventure.
On a more foundational level, it’s about discovering
what adventure really is. Carl and his wife,
Ellie, had always dreamed of exotic travel,
seeing wild beasts and plants that no one’s
ever seen before... but what Carl comes to discover
is that even though he and Ellie never got the
adventure they wanted, they had life’s greatest
adventure: a wonderful rich relationship. The
things that make life really special, our family
and friends, the little events that happen every
day... that’s what life is really about.
How would you describe
the film’s style, and what do you think are
the features of that style?
DOCTER: Up is a to caricatured world. We wanted to take advantage of what computer animation can do - rich textures and detail and lighting - but also to stylize the film to a place where you could believe that a house could float off with balloons. Most real people are about seven heads tall, if you use your own head size to measure height, and Carl is three. So he’s quite cartoon-y and caricatured. To me, the joy of animation is in simplicity and reduction, and by taking certain things away and bringing other things forward. A good analogy would be the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who with just a few lines could capture someone and make them look more like themselves than a photograph. He could distill them down to their essence, which is just amazing. Good animation can do that as well, in design as well as movement, and that’s what we were trying to do in this film.
Can you talk about your
main characters, and if there were any inspirations
or references for those characters?
 DOCTER:
Carl is largely inspired by our own grandparents,
and a few other folks as well. There have been
some people that I have met over my life who
have been older, and at first blush it would
seem kind of like a non sequitur that my wife
and I’d be friends with them. We met this man
named Mike Oznowicz who lived in Oakland, California.
He was a widower in his 70s, and though he clearly
had a huge gap in his life without his wife,
he was incredibly full of life. He surrounded
himself with young people. He’d always seen
every new movie before I did, every show, every
museum exhibit, was always looking for new ideas
and culture. He was just incredible, and he
taught me a lot about really engaging with the
world. It’s people like Mike that teach you
the way to live. He was like Carl at the end
of the movie.
At the beginning of the film, Carl is stuck in a box of his own making. His wife Ellie showed him how amazing life is and how much it has to offer, and after she died he just withdrew and went into that box. We tried to use squares in the designs of Carl and in the house, to symbolize Carl and his approach to life. You see a lot of him in framed, small, flat, confined spaces in the beginning of the film. And as he begins to open up, you get more rounded shapes, more open air -- kind of like Ellie is speaking through this other character, Russell.
Russell is the reincarnated spirit of Ellie. He’s that spirit of adventure - getting out there in the world and becoming interested in everything. He’s basically the opposite of Carl, and we designed him to pull Carl out of his shell. Carl is saddled with this kid, and in caring about him ends up re-engaging with the world in a more meaningful way. It’s mostly through Russell that that happens. We designed his basic shape to be like a spinning top, or a balloon. He’s always moving, and he’s relentless in his optimism and enthusiasm.
Dug the dog actually came from another project that Bob [Peterson, co-director / co-writer] and I developed. Those of us who have pets, we often end up making up dialog for them. Our dog will come up to my kids and stare at them, and I voice something like, "Could we go for a walk now, could we, could we, please, please?" And we thought of this unique approach to have these collars that translate what the dog is thinking, rather than have lip synced dialog. Bob wrote the dialogue for Dug and ended up voicing him - he channels dogs really well. Oh - also, Bob tells a story of being a camp counselor in High School, and this kid came up to him, gave him a big hug and said, "You are my counselor and I love you!" Dug is just a simple dog, he just wants to please people.
Muntz is a world traveler extraordinaire. He’s a combination of Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh, and a little bit of Walt Disney thrown in - these people who had taken these amazing risks and done things no one else had done. We looked at a lot of real life adventurers like Percy Faucett and Roy Chapman Andrews and combined them into one guy. For Carl and Ellie, Muntz represents what they want to do with their lives: "Someday, I want to be like this guy!"
UP is the first release
from Disney*Pixar authored in 3D, and you’d
just come off of directing the huge 2D hit,
Monsters, Inc. How different was the process
for you?
 DOCTER:
Well, 3D was not figured in from the beginning.
We came up with the story first, and 3D got
introduced along the way. I wanted to make sure
that the 3D did not get in the way for an audience.
A lot of times you go to a 3D movie and there
are things flying at you and the whole audience
is going, "Whoooooaaa! Look, it’s 3D!" And when
that happens, you get taken out of the story
- you’re more aware of the medium than the story.
Our goal was to draw you into this world, to
take you somewhere else, and let you lose yourself
for an hour and a half. For us to break that
spell for people by calling attention to the
3D is doing them a disservice. We tried to use
it more subtly, treating the screen like a window
you look into. So you still get the sense of
depth and perspective, but it’s not in your
face.
Your studio is known
for the amount of research that goes into a
film. Can you talk about the amazing research
trip you took that went into the creation of
UP?
DOCTER: Yeah, it was great! On Toy Story, we got to go to the toy store, on Bug’s Life we crawled around in the grass. But on this one, we got to go to South America, where the story takes place! We needed a location, story-wise, where Carl and Russell could go and end up stuck with no outside connection. We initially thought of a tropical island, but that’s been used so much. Then we discovered these tabletop mountains - they are almost like islands in the sky. It was difficult to find photos that had useful views of the unique plants and rocks. We decided that there was no other way to create this place believably than to go down there and experience it ourselves. And we did-there was a group of ten of us, and it took about three days just to get there, plane rides and jeeps and helicopters. We hiked up this mountain called Roraima [of the Venezuelan Tepuis], it inspired the book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World. When it was first discovered by westerners in the 1800s, they figured that these mountains had been separated from the rest of the world for so long that there might actually still be dinosaurs or undiscovered creatures up there! Unfortunately we didn’t see any, but it was a blast anyway.
Can you talk a little
about your working relationship with producer
Jonas Rivera?
DOCTER: Jonas and I first worked together
on Monsters, Inc. where Jonas was the manager
of the Art Department. To say both of us "like"
Disneyland is sort of like saying, "we like
to breathe." We bonded over our love for that
place, as well as our love for Disney movies.
It was a great pleasure working with him on
this film - he’s got such a passion for animation,
and though he claims he’s not an artist, he’s
got a deep understanding and appreciation for
what it takes to make these films. Plus he’s
such a nice guy, and he put together a great
team of talented people who were also just fun
to be around. Jonas and his team put our schedule
together in such a way that everybody didn’t
have to kill themselves to finished on time.
At the same time, I think we were still able
to push the artistic limits of what we have
done in the past. Quite amazing to be able to
do both. Jonas and I hope to continue working
together on more of these.
If there were such a
thing as an average day during film production,
what would that look like for you, the director,
who probably has to be three places at once
all the time?
 DOCTER:
The thing is - and again, this is Jonas and
the production team - they know what needs attention
when, and they balance it all out, which is
an impossible job. Usually, they would tell
me at the beginning of the week, "Well, we added
up all the requests for your time and it totals
700 hours, and we somehow have to fit that in
this week." So we decide where I’m needed most
and what sort of information the departments
need to finish their work on time. I’ll walk
in at the beginning of the day around 8am, and
my assistant Vic Manley hands me what they call
a "dance card" that has my schedule mapped out
down to five minute increments, usually until
7 or 8 pm. It’s mostly meetings and reviews.
Meanwhile, Jonas and the team are trying to
figure out how to deal with the stuff that I’m
not getting to and still finish on time. It’s
pretty crazy.
Given that, what were
your biggest challenges on this film-not necessarily
technical?
DOCTER: I think the biggest challenge was our doing something more caricatured than we had done before. I don’t want to make it sound like we haven’t done caricature. I think The Incredibles was a wonderful foray into that. But a lot of the computer scientists we work with start from a logical, reality-based approach. Clouds, for example. They’ll start by learning everything there is to know about how clouds form, where they come from, what is happening on a molecular level to create what we see, and then try to duplicate that in the computer. That’s where we want to start, but sometimes as artists, we want to push things to be more stylized, more interpreted. So for example, instead of getting these noodley, little filigreed edges to the cloud, we’ll want just nice, simple rounded shapes, like cotton puffs. We’ll want that because that’s how the scene feels to the character. And sometimes this simplifying is actually more difficult, because it’s not reality. Sometimes even communicating what we’re after is a challenge.
How do you think the
themes of UP will play internationally?
DOCTER: I think everybody has hopes and dreams, whether it’s owning a restaurant, winning a marathon, or traveling to exotic places. Yet we tend to take for granted the things we have, the people, our families... and it’s often not until those people are gone that you realize how lucky you are to have had them with us in our lives. That’s certainly true for me. And that’s what UP is really trying to shine a spotlight on.
You’ve come up through
and helped build a studio that has set the industry
standard for this type of film. Is that a source
of inspiration or pressure for you?
 DOCTER:
Inspiration, definitely. Everyone at Pixar looks
forward to pushing the envelope on the next
film. We really try to make every movie that
comes out as cool as possible, and then we think
about ways we could make one even more interesting
or cool or engaging or visually interesting.
What do you think are
your greatest triumphs on UP?
DOCTER: I think the thing I’m most proud of is the emotion in the film. We really tried to balance the comedy and adventure with emotion. As caricatured as this world and characters are, people watch the movie and tell me, "I cried five times!" To have elicited that reaction, with characters as stylized as they are, I’m really proud of that. Of course, everything you see on the screen is created. artificial, fake. Even down to the real actors-they aren’t even recording in the same room with each other, sometimes not even the same city! But you believe that they’re together having dinner, or having an argument. It’s all constructed. To use the word "artificial" maybe sounds negative, but to me the artifice is part of the magic. And when this made up world is believable to the point where you are drawn to tears, or to laugh... to me, there is something magic about that.
If you could fly a house
anywhere, other than your family, who would
you take and where would you head?
DOCTER: Wow, I don’t know. There are so many people that I just enjoy hanging out with on this film - Jonas and Bob and Ronnie [del Carmen, Head of Story], they’re just so much fun to be around. I would want to bring all the folks who worked on this movie. It’d have to be an awfully big house, I guess! And as far as destination, there are some days when I come in to work in the morning and see this long list of meetings, sometimes I fantasize about being marooned on a small island in the South Pacific. I like coconuts; I think I’d be fine.
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