Monsters, Inc. Commentary

Monsters, Inc. commentary with Director Pete Docter, Co-director Lee Unkrich, Executive producer John Lasseter and Executive producer/Co-writer Andrew Stanton.

Transcript

 * (Theme song plays)
 * PETE DOCTER: Hi, I'm Pete Docter, the director of Monsters, Incorporated. Welcome to the commentary on the DVD.
 * ANDREW STANTON: Hi, I'm Andrew Stanton, and I'm screenwriter and co-executive producer.
 * JOHN LASSETER: Hi, I'm John Lasseter. I'm executive producer.
 * LEE UNKRICH: And I'm Lee Unkrich, co-director of Monsters, Inc. And welcome.
 * LASSETER: Even though Monsters, Incorporated is Pixar's fourth film, it's origins start back even before our first film Toy Story. Toy Story was the first computer animated feature film and Pixar's first feature. And Andrew and, and Pete and I, along with Joe Ranft, developed the story of that.
 * DOCTER: So one of the things I loved working on Toy Story was how many friends came up to me and said, "Oh, I totally believed that my toys came to life when I wasn't in the room." And I was looking around for other things like that we all experienced as a kid, a sort of a shared experience. So, I knew that monsters lived in my closet and were coming out to scare me at night, so I figured a lot of other people felt that way, too. The purpose of the title sequence here is basically to set the tone of the film. Without it, we actually had an earlier version where we start right in on the kid asleep in bed, and it becomes a much more spooky, dark, kind of scary tone that we're laying down. With the title sequence, we're hoping to tell people, "This is gonna be fun. It's gonna be colorful and upbeat." Geefwee Boedoe had designed it and also animated it along with Patrick Siemer.
 * LASSETER: What we always try to look for at Pixar is a... idea, a story or subject matter that really connects with the audience, that, that the audience can realte to. We kind of call it our foundation with the audience. Something that they go, "Yeah, I know that," or, "That happened to me as a kid." But when we show it to them in a way that they've never thought of before.
 * DOCTER: Growing up, I had this idea that the way animated films were made was that one night Walt would just sit upright in bed and say...
 * (SNAPS FINGERS)
 * DOCTER: "Dumbo," and from that point on it was just a matter of what was in his brain. This is not anywhere near the truth. These films really begin with an idea, and then they change and they grow and they envolve into something stronger and better. So, in this film, we boarded and re-boarded dozens of scenes, you know, dozens of times, as is the case on all our films, but this one sequence was somewhat of an exception. We boarded it early on. Nate Stanton, who's one of our top story guys on the show, boarded this, and it was the first in production. And it was...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah, this is the very first scene that we animated.
 * DOCTER: Pretty much un, unchanged. And his boards match very closely...
 * UNKRICH: Although ironically, while this was the very first scene to go in animation, it was actually the very last scene to, pretty much, to get completed, because we added the whole idea of the monster freaking out and destroying the room kind of at the 11th hour.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. Yeah. It was initially that it ended right about here where the monsters raises up, the kid screams, and the lights went on...
 * UNKRICH: Right at this point.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. And that was it. And what we found was that people were really indentifying with the kid. So we needed something to get back at the monster and, and turn the tables.
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. Again, it was a way to, like the title sequence, to say, "Yeah, we just scared you a little bit, but no, this is gonna be a really funny movie."
 * DOCTER: Right. So it really reinforces one of the key concepts that monsters are actually scared of the kids. This sequence here was a real bugger. We must've re-boarded it like 80 times. We even changed it again after we'd finished animating it.
 * UNKRICH: It was really hard to set up this world without being too expositional. And we had a... This is a world no one's ever seen before, and we wanted to get across a lot of ideas really, really quickly about the rules of the world, that the monsters were afraid of kids and that there's an energy crisis. And we were constantly playing this game of how this information is too much information, and...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...the same time we wanted people to know what was going on.
 * Ms. Flint: Right... ba ba ba ba.
 * UNKRICH: Bonnie Hunt plays fourth rant, the, the... the, the red kind of woman behind the console, and she used to actually have a much bigger part in the film, but in the course of developing the story she ended up getting cut back, unfortunately, because we love working with Bonnie and she always brings so much to the characters.
 * Ms. Flint: Oh! Mr. Waternoose.
 * Mr. Waternoose: There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child.
 * LASSETER: We came up with the idea that the reason monsters go in to kids' rooms and scare them is they, they, they collect the scream. The kids, you know, when they see a monster, they scream. They collect that and they refine it into a clean, efficient fuel. It's the fossil fuel of monsters' world.
 * DOCTER: That was somthing that Andrew really brought in your first draft.
 * STANTON: That, that, the scream thing just, just fit so well and had such visual potential, and it was fun. And then...
 * DOCTER: And then we really got to capitalize on the work situation.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * DOCTER: The fact that there's these slobbery, snarly beasts that clock in and clock out every day.
 * Mr. Waternoose: I need scarers like... Like James P. Sullivan.
 * DOCTER: Sulley's introduction was another tricky thing that we went over and over on. The original introduction was just him (IMITATING SULLEY) roaring into the camera.
 * UNKRICH: Right, we jumped, kind of, right into the... the exercise montage.
 * DOCTER: And then at the 11th hour, Bob Peterson, our head of story, had this idea for the radio announcer. I think it works really great. You get the reverse of Sulley having this big buildup from Waternoose, he's confident, tough and so on, and then he's asleep. Plus, you get Mike as a radio announcer, which tells us a lot about his character, guy who plays jokes, he always has something to say. And it also gave Billy Crystal a chance to play around a little bit.
 * UNKRICH: Right.
 * (Sulley roars)
 * DOCTER: Here with the exercise, we needed something to pick up the pace after all that exposition and the sleeping, as well as to tell us about Sulley and Mike as characters who they are. Besides being roommates and total scare fanatics, you know, that's just... this is the first thing they do in the morning. Is they hop into exercise.
 * Mike: Don't let him touch you!
 * (Sulley growls)
 * UNKRICH: This is also our first glimpse at the really cool architecture that was... that was created for the, for the film, the design of the film.
 * Mike: 118. Do you have 119? Do I see 120?
 * DOCTER: The commercial coming up here is a great way to sell even more exposition that we needed to tell the audience about, hopefully in a way that makes them laugh and be entertained, as well.
 * UNKRICH: We tried to, tried to make it like a, kind of a cheesy infomercial.
 * DOCTER: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. Yeah. We, we patterned it on all those wonderfully hokey power and ener, energy commercials that you see. And we really approached it as though we were selling a real company. A lot of us did commercials professionally at Pixar before we started on features, so we had some experience there.
 * UNKRICH: So we tried to make this as kinda awkwardly produced as possible.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHING)
 * Announcer: ...challenge. The window of innocence...
 * DOCTER: We found this great announcer, Jim Thornton, who... who we felt had this great, sort of, almost a '50s retro quality to this voice and real authentic. That image in the corner there of the kid being scared is an image that we, as animators, see on our screens.
 * UNKRICH: It's kind of like un, what the...
 * DOCTER: Animation.
 * UNKRICH: ...what the animation looks like when it doesn't have any lighting or shaders or anything on it.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * Announcer: We scare...
 * DOCTER: So as we started to develop the... the story and the characters, for Sullivan we needed someone with great strength and somebody who could be like the star quaterback but also a sensitivity and, and warmth to him. And as we hit on John Goodman that was just, seemed perfect. He has this real gruffness to his voice and a strength.
 * Mike: ...camera loves me.
 * DOCTER: For Mike, Billy Crystal was, again, as we, as we thought of him, was perfect. He's got this real upbeat, bubbly, sort of a Burgess Meredith-type character to...
 * UNKRICH: Right, and we knew we'd get a ton out of him in terms of improvisation, which is always great in animation. Since we do the voices before the animation, we can just let the actors cut loose and come up with great stuff, and, and that always just really livens up the animation and makes for some great performance.
 * LASSETER: We actually approached Billy to do the voice of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story way back when and he turned us down. And then we went on to, to hire Tim Allen, who did an amazing job. But Billy was telling us he was kicking himself ever since for turning that down.
 * Sulley: Not really.
 * Mike: To drive it. You know, on the street with the honk...
 * DOCTER: The city here, you can see, is, is was really one of the most challenging sets in the film. We wanted it to look really rich and detailed, but we didn't have a whole lot of time, screen time, so we couldn't justify spending tons of time to build it. So...
 * UNKRICH: So the whole thing ended up getting built really like a Hollywood backlot in terms of, you know, there's not, there's not a whole lot of city that was actually built but we really tried to maximize, you know, the use it.
 * (Fire-breathing monster sneezes)
 * Fire-breathing monster: Aw, nuts.
 * Tony: La-la-la.
 * UNKRICH: Tony, the Italian grocer here, we knew we wanted an Italian voice, and we had some actors do kind of a put-on Italian accent, but it just, it just wasn't making us laugh.
 * DOCTER: So we got one of our technical directors here, Guido Quaroni, who's actually Italian, and he actually did some of the more amazing effects work in the film.
 * Mike: Bada-bing.
 * (Gelatin monster screams)
 * DOCTER: Ted's roar here was originally a big loud roar from a famous movie monster, whom I won't mention here.
 * (Ted clucks)
 * DOCTER: We weren't able to get the rights to it. So instead we went the opposite way and put in this chicken. I think it really works. Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: We, we think it's funny. (LAUGHING) It's just kind of bizarre.
 * (music plays)
 * DOCTER: As we come in the lobby here we wanted it to have a grand, sort of institutional feel to it. Big tile paintings seemed like a logical choice.
 * UNKRICH: Just as a general design philosophy, it's great. I mean, Pete and I are both huge fans of, kind of, that culture and architecture and the look of the early 1960s. And I think it's really cool that it permeates this film.
 * Needleman: Hey, Mr. Sullivan.
 * DOCTER: So the geeks here, Needleman and Smitty are their names that we've referred to them, they're voiced by Dan Gerson, a writer on the show. He, of course, wrote all their lines, too. It was basically a case of... He did the scratch, the temporary dialog that we just work with...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah.
 * DOCTER: ...and we fell in love with it.
 * UNKRICH: It's becoming... It's becoming a pattern here at Pixar. Like more and more people who just work at Pixar who do the scratch voices end up just making us crack up, and we use them in the film.
 * DOCTER: Celia here, Harley Jessup, our production designer, came up with this idea of using snakes for hair, you know, basically pulling from Medusa. And we experienced with the idea that, that Mike sees all of her old boyfriends all turned to stone, which...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: ...puts the pressure on him rather to behave, but it didn't fit and it was kind of unappealing for her character.
 * Mike: I just got us...
 * UNKRICH: Jennifer Tilly does Celia's voice and she's just, just such a sweetheart and just brings such great character to Celia.
 * Mike: Not for googly...
 * DOCTER: So early on we had been recording, which is fairly typical, each of the actors on their own, Billy Crystal, John Goodman. And the film really called for them to be best friends since kindergarten, and they just knew each other so well that I had the idea to bring them both in, both the actors at the same time.
 * UNKRICH: To record in a session together in the same room, which... which wasn't typical.
 * DOCTER: Right. And that really gave us a lot of spontaneity. They really... They improv'd. They just brought everything, the energy level up. It was really great. This is Randall's introduction here. We wanted something that would also introduce his ability to camouflage, as well as his character.
 * Mike: I wasn't scared.
 * UNKRICH: He's voiced by Steve Buscemi.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. Actually, when we showed him the character design, he said, "Hey, you're typecasting me."
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: "There's... There's somewhat of a physical resemblance."
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHING)
 * UNKRICH: Oh. He has six arms, anyway.
 * DOCTER: (LAUGHS) Yeah.
 * Mike: That should make it more humiliating when we break the record first. Ha, ha!
 * Randall: (SUSHING) Do you hear that? It's the winds of change.
 * DOCTER: I always thought of him as sort of one of those guys in junior high that just would push you for no real reason.
 * UNKRICH: Yeah, he was probably a real bully and a jerk in junior high school...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and he's just kind of stayed that way.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. Coming up here on Roz, she's voiced by Bob Peterson, our head of story. And she was actually... Originally, she was the orientation manager at Monsters, Inc. She was such as great character then when that part got cut out, we recast her as the dispatch manager.
 * UNKRICH: I sound like a broken record here, but same deal again. We, you know, we just... We couldn't find anybody who made us laugh as much as Bob, so we ended up...
 * DOCTER: And we tried.
 * UNKRICH: ...going with Bob. We just... Yeah, we tried really hard...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: We ended up just pitching Bob up a little bit, and he's Roz.
 * Roz: Wazowski. Always watching.
 * DOCTER: The scare floor here, a day in the life of the scare floor, it's just so cool. I, I love the way this worked out. Lee worked really closely with David Silverman to, to board the whole thing and then with the layout folks to put this really cool montage together.
 * UNKRICH: We just had this idea of the camera constantly moving and making it feel like those great montages from films of the '30s, kind of WPA progress, you know, teamwork, everybody working together. And, and Randy Newman's great music is really the icing on the cake...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...in the sequence here.
 * DOCTER: What I love about it is how it's basically all visual exposition about the, the operation of the place, but it's so exhilarating to watch, and it gets you really pumped up.
 * UNKRICH: Bob Pauley and Gary Schultz were really the two responsible for desiging all these door stations and the mechanics of everything. And they're, they're just such freaks for the details...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and making sure everything actually could work. You almost feel like you could take their designs and, and hand them to a company and they could really build these things.
 * DOCTER: Bob has big airplane parts sitting around in his office. He's just a fan of industrial design.
 * UNKRICH: This little bit here, of course, inspired by that classic shot from The Right Stuff, with the astronauts walking down the hall.
 * DOCTER: Which weirdly enough, you show it to a lot of people, especially young people today, and they say, "Ooh, Armageddon."
 * (BOTH LAUGHING)
 * Needleman: ...awesome.
 * DOCTER: So one of the problems in, in this whole set was the idea of the door stations. We wanted to follow the logic that when a monster's in a kid's room, the kid would sit up and we didn't want them to see back onto the scare floor, so we thought, "What if we do it like a voting booth where you have this curtain that pulls around?" But then the problem is the audience can't see the coolness of this, you know, from the scare floor looking back into the kid's room. So, that didn't work. And we thought... There's actually these weird things in computer graphics, you can have a light that sucks away light. It's like a negative light. So we were playing around with having one of those.
 * UNKRICH: But that ended up looking just kind of bizarre.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, you couldn't read it. Your brain didn't get that. So we ended up just ignoring it, and maybe the kids do see onto the scare floor, I don't know. So the sign wall was really difficult, because it had... we had to track it from shot to shot, make sure that it all made sense.
 * UNKRICH: Again, people probably won't, won't even notice or care whether the numbers are correct, but we spent a long time figuring them all out and making sure they were tracking correctly.
 * DOCTER: So we worked backwards from the idea that Sulley breaks 100,000 this day. And figuring that, that means he averages about 445.9 scream units per day, back-of-the-envelope calculation. This is...
 * UNKRICH: Just off the top of your head.
 * DOCTER: This is a particularly good day. So, we start Sulley at 99,479. You'll notice at the end of the list, in the very bottom, is Gerson, who's named after Dan Gerson, and his... at the end of the day, his totals go up one scream unit, pathetic.
 * Fungus: ...Randall. You know, maybe I should realign...
 * UNKRICH: A lot of the kids' screams in this sequence are actually our own kids that we brought in tro scream. Probably made their lives, to be able to stand there and have their parents actually order them to scream at the top of their lungs.
 * (kids screaming)
 * UNKRICH: This shot coming up here with the cart was inspired by Terry Gilliam's great film Brazil. We just... We always knew we wanted to find a place to put this shot idea into the sequence.
 * DOCTER: Here comes Henry Waternoose again. He was voiced by James Coburn, and he brought this great warmth and vulnerability really to the character. I'd always thought of him as a hard-hitting businessman, yeah! And Coburn had this sort of sensitive underbelly. You really feel like the weight of the world, this factory that's, that's not doing so well now is resting squarely on his shoulders.
 * Claws: I could have...
 * DOCTER: You feel a little bad for him.
 * UNKRICH: Anyway, he has such a great warmth, like, you trust him.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: You trust that voice, which makes it great later in the film...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...when we turn the tables and reveal that he's not such a great guy.
 * DOCTER: Shh. Don't tell them.
 * UNKRICH: Oh.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: Well, if this is the first time you're watching the movie, stop it now and turn us off.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * Mr. Waternoose: Kids these days. They just don't get scared like they used to.
 * Needleman: Let her rip.
 * DOCTER: This... The idea that the door must be shredded once the kids aren't scared anymore was really meant to be a setup for why Sullivan can't see Boo again at the end. And it makes sense, too, that they wouldn't bother keeping these things around if they're no use anymore. Randall's assistant, Fungus, is voiced by Frank Oz, who's one of my heroes growing up as a performer and now as a director.
 * UNKRICH: Of course, the voice of Miss Piggy and...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH ...Grover and a million other great characters.
 * (Sulley cracking his kunckles)
 * Sulley: Slumber party. Ha-ha.
 * Mike: Whoo!
 * (numbers beeping)
 * Celia on PA: Never mind.
 * (assistants cheering)
 * Randall: Hey, watch it.
 * DOCTER: I love this where he gives them five. Hand-Eye was actually inspired sort of by puppetry. The fact that he's just a hand with eyes on the ends of his fingers, it's just a funny idea.
 * Randall: If I don't see a new door in my station...
 * DOCTER: We had some great concept sketches of how he carries things and how does he operate stuff, you know, by using his eyeballs?
 * UNKRICH: One last great Pixar cameo coming up here, George, the orange, furry guy who gets abused throughout the film, is voiced by Sam Black, who's one of our programmers here.
 * Charlie: ...guy.
 * George: Keep the doors coming, Charlie.
 * UNKRICH: We just, just think his voice is incredibly funny.
 * DOCTER: He came in to read for scratch dialog for Mike, scratch is what we do temorarily while we're building the reels, and I could barely restrain myself from just snickering and laughing through the whole thing.
 * UNKRICH: So we never, we never tried to find anybody else for him. We knew Sam had the part from day one.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: This is the birth of the CDA, the Child Detection Agency. Now, after one screening, we were looking at it, and we realized we were just talking about how dangerous kids were and we needed to show it.
 * STANTON: Yeah. And I think we had to turn this around in, like, a day or something like that, if I remember correctly, and Ted Mathot and Nathan Stanton, me brother, they had to... they boarded up, they came up with this sort of storm-trooper-esque idea. And it just sold like a million bucks.
 * LASSETER: That was amazing.
 * UNKRICH: Just we wanted to show just like to a ridiculous point how extreme the idea, how dangerous the idea of a kid or any element from, from a kid's world getting into monster world was.
 * DOCTER: I love this sock just 'cause it's so tiny and insignificant and they take it so seriously.
 * UNKRICH: So if they take it this seriously, you know, imagine if a kid ever got in. It'd be the worst thing ever, so. Of course, that's exactly what happens.
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * George: Thanks, guys, that was a close one.
 * CDA Agent 1: Okay.
 * DOCTER: This shaving thing was a pretty hairy...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: ...technical problem, no pun intended. But I think it worked out really great. In fact, if you can see on the floor, when the CDA back up, their foot scrapes away some of the hair and that all reacts. It's really cool.
 * UNKRICH: It's the details that count at Pixar Animation Studios. As John Lasseter likes to say, "We sand the undersides of the drawers."
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: There were things in Monsters, Incorporated that we could not have possibly done in, on Toy Story, A Bug's Life, or even Toy Story 2. One of the things that, that happens here at Pixar is that the, the technical development is really driven by the needs of the story. And I think in, in Monsters, Incorporated, one of the, the big things was to have furry monsters. And we started looking at real animals like, like gorillas, orangutans...
 * STANTON: Some bison and bears.
 * LASSETER: Yeah. And so we started thinking, "You know, I think it's time to maybe adress this." Typically, the, the more orgnaic something is in the way it looks or moves the more difficult it is to do, to do with computer animation.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Oh, ooh. Now that's my boy.
 * LASSETER: And so, with this one, we wanted these, these creatures, even thought they are monsters, they're completely made-up, we wanted to have it grounded in, in a sort of reality, a reality of the monster world. And we started looking at real animals and pulled, you know, textures and, and, and surfaces and so on from the real animal world. But then we combined it, which I think was one of, one of your...
 * STANTON: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: ...your big, big ideas, was the color.
 * STANTON: What comes out of your closet is the figments of your imagination, and so I started to go, "Well, wait a minute. How would a kid... What would a kid think his monsters look like?" And they tend to have a little bit of a fantastical quality to them.
 * Mike: Again? You know, there's more to life than scaring.
 * DOCTER: That shot there, as Mike sniffs his armpits, that was amazing to me. He can't turn his head.
 * UNKRICH: He has no... There's no neck. Yeah.
 * DOCTER: And he has no nose.
 * UNKRICH: And we needed to sniff his armpit...
 * DOCTER: Yeah
 * UNKRICH: ...but animator Andrew Gordon did a great job of pulling it off.
 * DOCTER: Figuring that out.
 * (Ranft growls)
 * Mike: You know, I am so romantic sometimes I think I should just marry myself.
 * Sulley: Give me a break, Mike.
 * Mike: What a night of...
 * DOCTER: So this whole sequence was originally staged to be in the parking lot with Roz in this hotrod. You know, she had this really fast-moving car in contrast to her slug nature, you know, and Sulley and Mike were waiting for the bus to go home. But we couldn't afford to build the exterior and the bus, so we restaged the whole idea with pretty much the same story beats in the lobby, which is cool anyway because you get to see it again.
 * UNKRICH: One of the tough things about computer graphics, unlike hand-drawn animation, is if we want a hotrod, we can't just draw it. We have to spend a long time actually building it, and if it's gonna end up just being in one shot it's hard to justify spending all that effort.
 * Celia: Want to get goin?
 * Mike: Do I ever. It's just...
 * Celia: What?
 * Mike: It... A small...
 * Celia: I don't understand.
 * Sulley: It's just I forgot...
 * DOCTER: This is one of the many little improvs by Jennifer Tilly, "It's just... I don't understand." You know, just this great little thing she would throw out, and we would use, and peppered throughout.
 * UNKRICH: She had just this great coy, natural quality...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...we fell in love with.
 * Mike: ...go to Roz. (gasps) Leave the puce.
 * Sulley: Pink copies go to accounting, fuchia ones go to Roz.
 * LASSETER: This scene where Sulley lets the, the little girl into monster world has been there, really, kind of from the beginning.
 * STANTON: Yeah, it's sort of the pivotal idea was monsters and kids, and very early on we always thought, "What if you brought a kid into the world of monsters rather than staying in the human world?", which we'd have to mimic.
 * LASSETER: And have, have the main character let in what the monsters fear the most.
 * STANTON: A matter of fact, I think it even drove that idea. We thought if a little kid came in the monster world wouldn't that be the humor of everybody's more scared of it just as if there was a monster in our world. And that sort of drove us to think of the movie like that.
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: We had to come up with the right plot machinations.
 * LASSETER: And that great, that great twist that monsters are more scared of kids than kids are...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...of, of monsters.
 * STANTON: You never know where those big ideas are gonna come from, and that really kind of drove it. But every... You know, once that was in there, this scene has pretty much stayed the same for a long time. It's always been late at night, accidently, coming into an active door.
 * (thumping noise)
 * DOCTER: This was one the things that stayed unchanged was the idea that Sulley responds to this thumping noise, looks down and there's Boo. Boo was voiced by Mary Gibbs, who's the daughter of Rob Gibbs, one of our story artists, our really great story artist.
 * UNKRICH: She was about two and a half, right?
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: When we first started recording her. She had like... She was at that great age where she was right on the cusp of language acquisition where, you know, she, she...
 * DOCTER: Her parents could understand her buy nobody else could.
 * UNKRICH: Right, she felt like she was talking and had things to say, but you couldn't understand what she was saying. There was a lot of debate early on about how to deal with Boo's... Boo's language. You know, we kind of vacillated between going this route, which is just that people can't understand what she's saying and actually setting up this whole idea that in monster world humans just sound like gibberish.
 * DOCTER: Right.
 * UNKRICH: And that ended up being a really complicated thing to get across.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, and I'm not sure how necessary. We had a shot were Sulley was saying, "Do you understand..." And then you cut to Boo's point of view, and he's going... (SPEAKING GIBBERISH) And so on.
 * UNKRICH: That ended up being cuter just to have her be kind of unintelligible and innocent.
 * DOCTER: I think in earlier drafts she was about six in the, in the, in the film. And as we developed it, we realized the... the younger she is the more dependent she is on, on Sullivan and, and therefore really needs his help.
 * UNKRICH: Back there were what we believe to be the first shots in computer-generated films of toilets.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: We're very proud. We actually have several shots of toilets in this film.
 * DOCTER: Another Pixar first.
 * (Sulley sighs)
 * DOCTER: This here, this turn with Boo on his back, that was another thing that was early on a real tent pole thing that, that we stayed with and people love it. We've had screenings were people shriek.
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. At our very first preview...
 * DOCTER: Shriek.
 * UNKRICH: ...this woman actually let out a huge shriek at that moment, and we knew we had pulled off the moment.
 * DOCTER: "Kitty" was one of the three words that Boo has to say in the film. It was just an idea that we had that she would... The absurdity of the idea that, you know, she sees this big huge, 8-foot tall, 1,000 pound guy and calls it, "Kitty."
 * (Boo mumbling)
 * DOCTER: I think there was some difficulty here in, in stuffing Boo into the bag and just feeling uncomfortable with that idea that, that our main character is stuffing this kid into this little thing, but it, it came out okay because she has these little...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah, we cut in some dialog of her still just having a good time in there even though she's muffled.
 * (Boo squeals)
 * DOCTER: This is a fake-out. Worked out pretty well.
 * UNKRICH: I always felt like that was a setup for Randall being allergic to kids.
 * (DOCTER LAUHGS)
 * UNKRICH: But it's not.
 * DOCTER: Of course, Sulley can't send the kid home, so he has to take her with him.
 * UNKRICH: Where does he go? Go find Mike.
 * DOCTER: That's right. So... The sushi restaurant, actually, initially, Harley Jessup, our production designer, one of the two production designers, had designed it more like a kitschy Trader Vic's, with colored lights and big, thick pillars and a big sloping roof with a neon sign on the top. And it would've been really cool, but it would've been very expensive to build and not nearly as upscale. I mean, this is supposed to be one of the nicer places in town that Mike takes Celia.
 * UNKRICH: This shot has one of the most disturbing images, I think, in the entire film, for me, personally. Is the, the toothpick skewering the eyeball on a tray in front of them.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: In an earlier version of the story, Mike was gonna propose to Celia, and Sulley shows up and, of course, ruins the whole moment. You know, I can't remember why we dumped that. Maybe... You know what? Let's call Dan Gerson. Let's see if I can get him on the phone right now.
 * (DIAL TONE HUMMING)
 * (DIALING PHONE)
 * DOCTER: Let's see what he says.
 * Celia: ...sense?
 * (PHONE RINGING)
 * Sulley: Hi, guys. What a coincidence, running into you.
 * DAN GERSON: Hello?
 * DOCTER: Hi, Dan?
 * GERSON: Yeah.
 * DOCTER: This is Pete.
 * GERSON: Hey, Pete. What's going on?
 * DOCTER: How's... How's it going? I'm calling from Pixar. We're doing the commentary for the DVD, and I had a question for you. You ready?
 * GERSON: Shoot. I'm ready.
 * DOCTER: Okay.
 * GERSON: Shoot.
 * DOCTER: So you know, we have Harryhausen's, and Mike and Celia are there, and it's her birthday, in an earlier draft we had it that Mike was gonna propose to Celia.
 * GERSON: Right.
 * DOCTER: Do you remember why we took that out?
 * GERSON: Huh. I... Ah, I know! When we were starting to work on the sequence, we realized that if Mike was gonna ask Celia to marry him, it implied that there was already sort of a split happening in his relationship with Sulley. These two guys were best friends. We wanted the split between them to happen when Boo came into their world. We wanted Boo to be the thing that potentially caused a rift. So we, we took out the, the marriage proposal, because it would've stepped on that.
 * DOCTER: Genius.
 * GERSON: Makes sense?
 * DOCTER: Makes sense. All right, thanks.
 * GERSON: Talk to you guys later.
 * DOCTER: Thanks, Dan.
 * GERSON: Bye.
 * (PHONE HANGS UP)
 * Sushi Chef: A kid!
 * DOCTER: So, Harryhausen's, the name of the restaurant, is, obviously, a reference to Ray Harryhausen, the great stop motion animator of Jason and the Argonauts.
 * UNKRICH: The Sinbad movies.
 * DOCTER: Right. And he was just a great influence on, I think, most of us, growing up. We'd stay up late and see those cool movies on TV where he's fighting the skeletons.
 * UNKRICH: And, and, you know, of all other forms of animation, stop motion is kind of the closest to what we do now in computer-animated films.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * (police siren wails)
 * UNKRICH: This whole... Having the CDA show up here is, again, just to up the ante and show how incredibly dangerous it, it was for Boo to have be, been let into the world.
 * CDA Agent 2: Only clear. Ready for decontamination.
 * UNKRICH: That's our director, Pete Docter, there.
 * DOCTER: This hallway... Or this alleyway here is actually right next to Mike and Sulley's apartment. We redressed it with more fire escapes, squished the buildings closer together to make it feel more like an alley. This TV news, we've actually... we've shown it to a bunch of reporters and journalists, and they were amazed how (BOTH LAUGH) dead on we got them.
 * UNKRICH: It was fun with the lighting and everything. We wanted to make it feel like these characters were all getting blasted in the face with little remote, little sun guns.
 * DOCTER: I love the background animation. I think this was Pete Nash who did this shot. Little characters waving and so on. Really cool. These guys, neither of them have legs, 'cause we never see them. We just modeled the, the sphere with the arms and so on.
 * UNKRICH: But do any newscasters really have legs?
 * (DOCTER LAUGHING)
 * DOCTER: Well, when they made the toys, the toys don't have legs, either. So if you buy the toys...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHING)
 * UNKRICH: That's... That's why they don't have legs.
 * DOCTER: This whole sequence was another one that came together pretty early on the boards, and I think the whole concept of these two huge guys scared out of their gourds as this innocent little girl walks around destroying their apartment is just inherently funny.
 * (Boo spits)
 * (Mike screams)
 * DOCTER: Rob Gibbs was the guy who boarded a lot of this.
 * UNKRICH: This... This sequence was actually really seminal in terms of nailing down Sulley's physical acting...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and animation, right?
 * DOCTER: Yeah. Early on we had him moving much slower. Because he's so big, our thought was, "Okay, these big huge guys, they can't really... To sell the weight, we have to, we have to slow them down." And what it was doing was actually slowing down the pacing of the whole film. So we found out that, you know, you could actually have them move pretty quick and still retain that feeling of weight. This crying... I actually videotaped my own kids. Which, you know, you don't have to wait around too long. If you have kids, you know.
 * UNKRICH: You got toddlers.
 * DOCTER: That's right. Just wait about 5, 10 minutes...
 * UNKRICH: It's like waiting for a subway train.
 * DOCTER: Sure enough, off somebody goes, so... Actually, the first pass through, we didn't have the snot. And as I was watching my daughter, I realized, "Okay, we need the snot." That's just one of those things...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHING)
 * DOCTER: ...that's gonna round out... It's gonna keep her from becoming just sappy, cute character, is to have that snot dripping down from her nose.
 * UNKRICH: At the end of the scene here, we knew we wanted Boo to laugh and to have everything, just all the power blow out to show how powerful her laugh was. And one of my rules in films is, you can't have a character laughing at something if the audience doesn't think it's funny. So we spent a long time coming up with a really, really funny gag that would actually get the audience to laugh along with Boo at that moment.
 * Mike: ...do it again.
 * (Boo laughs)
 * (Sulley sushing)
 * Boo: Shh!
 * (Sulley sushes quietly)
 * (Boo sushes)
 * DOCTER: This candlelit lighting was very tricky to do, and it was actually one of the earlier things that we did in lighting. We looked at a lot of renaissance paintings and, and Barry Lyndon...
 * UNKRICH: The Stanley Kubrick film.
 * DOCTER: Right. Which was actually lit by candles. They didn't even have any practical lights on the set. And in this film, you can see that each flame has a slight pulse and flicker to it to really get that candle feel, and the problem was that we animated that, you couldn't see it until it was rendered. So you'd have to do this animation, wait a day or two for the turnaround of the pulsing of the lights. And it drove Janet Lucroy and Joyce Powell, the two lighting leads on this sequence... They just, they were just going crazy. The drawing here that Boo has was actually drawn, initially, by Harley Jessup, the production designer. He took it home to his 5-year-old son, Graham, who then copied it. So we have that authentic kid line quality. Here you can see, too, Sullivan's hands actually dent the chair. That was something that we spent quite a bit of time on, which I'm not sure, in retrospect, we should have. I mean, it's a cool thing. It adds a lot of...
 * UNKRICH: It's...
 * DOCTER: ...you know, just contact. It's that extra mile.
 * UNKRICH: We sand the underside of the drawers.
 * DOCTER: That's right. This was an idea we had early on I, I, I really like. The idea that Sulley creates a little trail, and he's gonna have Boo sleep over on this pile of newspaper, like you would a puppy, you know, in case she goes to the bathroom or anything.
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: And the cereal pouring out of the box was actually hand animated by, by frame by frame, as opposed to a dynamic simulation. It was animated by Dylan Brown.
 * (Boo cries out)
 * Boo: Ow!
 * UNKRICH: Coming up here is some great Randy Newman music. It was, kind of, the first opportunity in the film for him to play a Boo theme, which we knew was very critical, not only as a turning point emotionally for Sulley starting to bond with Boo, but we knew that it was going to be a theme that we would likely revisit and the end of the film when he has to say goodbye to her.
 * Sulley: See?
 * (Boo screams)
 * Sulley: No monster in here. Well, now there is. I'm not gonna...
 * DOCTER: Here at this scene, we were really thinking of Sullivan as, sort of, a Walter Matthau type of guy. He's just... (IMITATING SULLEY) Grumble, grumble. I like the idea that he, he effortlessly scrapes these huge bricks...
 * UNKRICH: Cinderblocks.
 * DOCTER: ...cinderblocks over there and just kinda does it without even thinking. Just nudges it with his fingers. Shows his strength.
 * Sulley: You, go, 2...
 * UNKRICH: We had to animate an alternate version of that shot John, John Kahrs did for the international market, since it's so tied to kinda the English with him...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...holding up the two fingers.
 * DOCTER: Boo falling right asleep was an idea that we had in, in story. And as we went to animation, I was worried initially that it would be... She would read as she was narcoleptic or something, so we animated this whole, kind of, sleepy, slowly eyelid drooping thing, which was really appealing but didn't have the punch that this does, so we went back to it.
 * Sulley: Hey, Mike. This might sound crazy, bud I don't think that kid's dangerous.
 * Mike: Really? Well, in that case, let's keep it. I always...
 * DOCTER: Randy was a really great collaborator on this show, and brought a lot of richness to the film in his orchestration, in his, his musical ideas. As usual, one of the things Randy does so great is these musical themes that you tie to the characters or to, to different emotional ideas. And as Lee was saying, we used that same Boo's theme throughout the film. We come back to it.
 * UNKRICH: Sometimes on a solo piano, sometimes with full orchestration, and it really just pulls your heartstrings.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. This right here, the set, exterior set, about all that really exists is this foreground building. The one that says, "We scare because we care." The background is, is a matte painting, the giant door vault back there.
 * Sulley: Hey. How you doing, Frank?
 * Frank: Hey, guys.
 * Sulley: Everything's going to be okay.
 * (gasps)
 * (CDA's devices whirring)
 * DOCTER: Mike as a character came together pretty quickly, actually, compared to all the other guys. Ricky Nierva had drawn a little doodle of a guy with one eye, a little round character with one eye, and everybody just loved it, so... Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz, I think, were the two guys who boarded this, sort of, test scene. We didn't even have any actual bit of the film to board. And they came up with this little gag of Mike helping Sulley choose a tie that he's gonna wear to work, and it really defined his character very quickly.
 * UNKRICH: He actually didn't have arms originally, right? He was just a big eyeball and a pair of legs.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, he just had two appendages, which we thought he could use as legs and arms, which was still a cool idea, but it was rather limiting and somewhat off-putting.