The story of WALL-E is simple…a guy and a girl from two separate walks of life meet and fall in love. What isn’t so simple is the backdrop to their love story. WALL-E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) roams the earth completely alone (aside from his pet cockroach). Humans have abandoned the planet and the abundance of garbage they’ve created to live in space. WALL-E, the last operating robot, continues working over hundreds of years. Then one day his life is turned upside down when a probe drops off a space age bot named EVE sent by humans to seek out life on earth.
We caught up with writer/director Andrew Stanton, sound designer Ben Burtt and actors Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard and John Ratzenberg to find out more.
Andrew Stanton on creating the story:
“Actually there was this lunch we had during Toy Story around ’94 and we were batting around just any idea we could think of to try and come up with what the next movie would be. One of the sort of half brained sentences was ‘Hey, we could do a sci-fi. What if we did the last robot on Earth? Everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it can stop and it keeps doing it forever.’ And that’s really where it started. All the details weren’t there. There wasn’t even a name of the character. We didn’t even know what it would look like. It was just the loneliest scenario I’d ever heard and I just loved it. And I think that’s why it sort of stayed in the ether for so long.”
John Ratzenberg on the reason he’s involved with every Pixar movie:
“I’ve got Polaroids from a Christmas party under lock and key! Well no, that’s the question to ask Andrew Stanton or John Lasseter. If they call me, I show up. It’s as simple as that because I know every single time there’s a Pixar movie it’s part of history somehow. They’ve broken new ground. They could have rested on their laurels and their achievements a long time ago and just been a mediocre company that sends out mediocre product. They refused to do that. They try to outdo themselves every single project, and they do. They are their own competition.”
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Fred Willard on being the only non-animated character:
“As an actor I love it of course, because you don’t want to be anonymous. I’ve done voices in movies. Actually I was in Monster House and I looked at my character they drew for me and I said, ‘I like the character better than me. He’s more expressive.’ But it’s fun to be the only person.”
Ben Burtt on WALL-E’s sound props:
There were more sound files in WALL-E then any single feature film I’ve worked on, about 2500. Because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and dense activities. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – WALL-E’s treads, he drives around he goes different speeds, when he’s going slowly he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool and so where can I get one? I found one on ebay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of WALL-E. But that’s only good when WALL-E is going slow. When WALL-E is going fast he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again I went back to my memory of things. I had recorded Biplanes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s biplanes have an inertia starter, it is a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up, you do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I’m going to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a biplane into the studio but on ebay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, brought it in.
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Andrew Stanton on creating WALL-E’s facial expression:
“I got handed these binoculars at a baseball game, I missed the entire inning. I just turned the thing around and I started staring at it and I started making it go sad and then happy and then mad and then sad and I remembered doing that as a kid with my dad’s binoculars and I said, ‘It’s all there.’ There’s no nose, there’s no mouth, there’s nothing and it’s not trying to be a face. It just happens to ask that of me when I look at it and I said, ‘That’s it!’ I can’t improve upon that. So that’s why I ran with that.”
Jeff Garlin on voicing the Captain:
“They videotaped every voice session. I thought, initially that it was behind-the-scenes (footage). I thought it was for the DVD or something, until like the fourth session, I’d say, ‘Why so much behind-the-scenes crap?’ And they go, ‘no, no, no. This is for the animators who can watch the way you say things.’ When I was watching the movie, I said, that’s really something I’d do. But I don’t over-think, so I’m not that self-aware.”
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Fred Willard on where he drew inspiration for his character:
“I based him more on the pilot of an airplane. We get on an airplane and that very soothing voice, ‘We’ll be taking off very shortly. Flying time is 3 hours and 40 minutes. Get comfortable.’ And then you sit a long time and something’s up. ‘This is your captain speaking. Unfortunately we have a little delay. ‘ And then by the end it’s, ‘I have some bad news. We’re going back to the gate. The flight has been cancelled. We should have you on another plane in no time.’ That night you’re in a cheap motel waiting to fly out the next morning.”
Ben Burtt on creating EVE’s sound:
Eve is a very high-tech robot and so unlike the motors, squeaks and metallic sounds you have with WALL-E, EVE is held together with some sort of force field and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around. Sometimes she feels angry in scenes where she needs to be aggressive. Sometimes she’s very enchanting during a romantic moment.
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Andrew Stanton on using Hello Dolly in the film:
“When I had that weird idea of putting that song on at the beginning, I turned to my wife and said, ‘This is the weirdest idea I’ve ever had and I will be asked why I chose this for the rest of my life.’ Honestly, she’ll tell you I said that. But by the time I’d sort of come to terms on the analyst couch why I had done it, I realized okay, I’m willing to put up with answering this for the rest of my life because I really do think it’s the best choice. One thing I always wanted early, early on, and it’s even in the very first script, by then I’d chosen that song, I knew I wanted old fashioned music against space. I knew I loved the idea of future and past juxtaposed and that on the first frame that would not seem familiar.”
Jeff Garlin on working with Pixar:
“[The character] was in a Pixar movie, directed by Andrew Stanton. That’s all that appealed to me to make me go, ‘I’m in’…I’ve been an actor/comedian/writer for 26 years. Pixar works on their stories harder than any other place I’ve been around. (Pixar) will not move forward unless they have the story right. They have great constructive criticism amongst each other. Lastly, they’re really kind to one another.”
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John Ratzenberg on getting into a character who hovers around all day:
“I’ve got cousins [laughs]…You don’t really have to go too far to get into that headspace…It’s really scientific though, NASA tells us that if you’re in space for that long you’re going to lose bone density. So basically you just become a big baby. I think they went more for that than any kind of a cautionary tale.”
Ben Burtt on the basis for the sounds:
“Andrew if he’d wanted to I suppose could have hired actors and they stood in front of a mike and you record their voices and dub that in over character action but that would have of course not taken the whole idea or illusion very far that what he wanted was the illusion that these robot characters, the speech and sounds they made were really coming from their functions as machines that there was either a chip on board that synthesized the voice or the squeak of their motor would sound cute and that would indicate how they feel. The problem does go back, for me to the primal R2D2 idea, which was how do you have a character not speak words or in the case of WALL-E very few words, but you understand what is going on in their head and they also seem to have a depth of character.”
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Andrew Stanton on the ecological message:
“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 wanted to do was based on the love story. I wanted the last robot on earth. That was the sentence that we came up with in ’94. 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 gotta move it and even a little kid understands that. And that makes WALL-E at the lowest of the totem pole and allowed him to sift through everything that we’ve left on the planet to show you that he’s interested in us.”
