What took you so long to do a sequel to Finding Nemo?
I would blame Andrew first. Let's be honest, it's his fault.
How much did Ellen DeGeneres lobby to make a sequel?
Publicly she would do it on her show about once a month.
Was it nerve wracking to come back to it because a lot of Pixar sequels haven't been as beloved as some of the greats?
It was nerve wracking in a sense that anytime you embark on one of these films it's minimum of four years of work, so you have to go in with an understanding that the movie is going to haunt you. These characters will haunt you. There is no short cut through these.
How many hours of voice work did Ellen do for the role?
A lot, 60 hours or something, but that doesn't quite do it justice because it's non-stop. I think really what it felt like is that we saw her almost once a month, maybe once every other month for three years. And for somebody as busy as she is, you can imagine...
On other films you spend a lot of time not knowing who your actor is so you leave the recording until later, but we obviously knew this was going to be Ellen so we used her to test a lot of ideas.
If Ellen couldn't make it work, we knew something was wrong, we needed to change the writing because she brings such a charm to it. We kind of indulged in having her already cast.
Did you approach this story different after reports of the impact of the first film on how we think about the environment?
Andrew [Stanton, director] was never trying to preach about environmental stuff. It's not intentional. Nobody wants to go watch a movie that's making that first and foremost, it's all about the characters.
All we tried to do was base those in a reality that feels like what we know, it's the world we know and it feels like these are actual characters living in this reality. Hopefully whatever comes out of it feels like those are good lessons.
There's no greater respect than the respect we have for the ocean. If you're studying it the way we've been studying it for so many years, all you can do is just be respectful.
How tricky is it to manage the process where the actors will do something that will change the animation, then vice versa?
Yeah, a lot. We try hard to get all the recording right before we hand it off to the animators, so we do a lot of testing with the voices before we're actually locking the sequence and handing it over to them. It almost feels like the last year really is when the animators come in because we're trying to keep as much open as we can for that back and forth.
But what's always fun is when we go to the next session and play back some of what the actors just recorded with the thing they animated, there's such delight on their face at what the animators have done.
We videotape all of our sessions just for the animators to see the characteristics of the actors and see if there's any little things they can pick up on.
What's the job of a producer in an animated film? You're not doing scouting locations or all that stuff...
Andrew and have I worked together for a long time, so from the very get-go it's all about trying to figure out the vision he's got in his head, trying to get it out of him and strategise what it's going to take and the smartest way to get there.
The way he works is that it he needs to see things in context, and that's hard with animation because obviously nothing exists ahead of time. The process needs to adjust to that and we were very respectful of that at Pixar. We know he's going to find that last 10 or 15 percent in the last four or five months, he won't really find it earlier.
The only way he's going to find it is if we put 100 percent on the screen and then he goes 'okay, now I see what we're going to do'. So there's a certain amount of encouraging the crew to work a little bit differently so we can get that up there faster because we're going to make a lot of changes. It's a bit like asking how quick we can get to the dress rehearsal?
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