There are many great things about being a parent, but as both a father and a movie-lover, one of the best aspects is that I’ve gotten to see a ton of movies I never would have seen if it hadn’t been for my two sons when they were young. And the best of the bunch has to be the Pixar movies: Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters Inc (2001)Finding Nemo (2003) and The Incredibles (2004). These are well-crafted stories with strong high-concepts, great characters, witty dialogue, and a push-the-envelope sensibility toward plot complications and reversals (the final scene sequence in Toy Story, where Woody and Buzz try desperately to catch up with the family car has at least a dozen twists in it alone).

Pixar has had an amazing run. And what may be even more astonishing is that the ideas for A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and WALL-E emerged from a now legendary lunch in 1994!

Pixar writer-director Andrew Stanton discusses that lunch and lots more in this interview at Coming Soon.net, talking about his newest Pixar movie WALL-E, which opens June 27th. A couple of things in the interview leaped out at me including this:

For WALL•E, for instance, the idea came from the character and then I tried to find a story to put around. So often it’s the other way around, you try to think of a situation or a plot device or some sort of storyline and then you start to try and build up your characters to make them dimensional enough to follow. And this was so so the opposite. I already liked him, I already cared about him, and I didn’t know where this was going to go. So In a weird way I had the beginning before I had the end and it’s what I always tell people, it’s the first lesson in my lecture, know the punch line to your joke. And that’s nice if you have a say when you’re inspired, and sadly I was inspired the wrong way, and just made life hard for myself. So I did spend the first two of the four years just reworking and reworking versions of the movie until I found the ending that I knew was the right ending to the movie and then I went back and changed – even though we did all this work, I changed whatever I needed to change to make it all flow organically to the end. So it was hard. Story guys will tell you that.

I agree – it is harder to work from the character first, rather than a plot set-up because the plot concept will often indicate where the story will go, whereas starting with a character may not. I also find it interesting that Stanton is one of those writers who has to know the ending of the story before he can commit to writing the script. But now check out what Stanton had to say about the character WALL-E’s ‘dialogue’:

That’s what, well, he says two English words, but in my mind he’s got a vocabulary that’s quite extensive, and I know every beep and squawk that I would use to get a certain emotion and a certain statement. Because when I wrote the script I wrote all the dialogue and then I put it brackets and then I knew that’s what we had to convey. And then I hired Ben Burtt who had already invented languages for not only machines but for alien life forms and all that stuff in his history and I was sort of getting twenty years of experience right away, sort of jumping ahead with having that. So between knowing what the intention — what I wanted each character to say and when — and having someone who had the ability to give me that language, I never felt held back. I never felt I couldn’t convey something the way I would normally. The last thing — I didn’t want to do a silent picture. I wanted to do a picture that really played with the integrity of the character that it was, which was a machine. And I wanted it to feel like a machine because I was so smitten with the character of Luxo Jr. before I ever came to Pixar and I just loved how every ounce of you saw it as an appliance and then you imbued a character on it, which is a lot more impressive and engaging than seeing something that is designed to be a character and trying to make you throw that on it. So that was really wanted I to play in, that sort of range.

Stanton wrote out all the dialogue for a character who only knows two words of English. Of course, that makes perfect sense — how else would Stanton have known the fullness of that character’s experience, who WALL-E is unless he (Stanton) could ‘hear’ what WALL-E was saying.

Of all the movies this summer, this is the one I’ve been looking forward to most. I’ve probably seen the trailer now 10 times with my youngest son (he’s also a huge movie buff) and everything about it looks and feels great. And like Stanton did years ago, I already like the character WALL-E. How can you not, this lone figure left on Earth, just it and its curiosity. And then… well, you can wait until the movie opens next Friday.

By the way, to learn more, you can go to the official Pixar blog.