Meet the Director of Meet the Robinsons

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"Meet the Robinsons" was the second all-CGI film to come out of Disney animation--the first being "Chicken Little." At the helm for this feature was Stephen Anderson, who began with Disney as a story artist on "Tarzan" (1999), then moved up to serve as story supervisor on "The Emperor's New Groove" (2000) and "Brother Bear" (2003). "Meet the Robinsons" is a wacky tale about a twelve-year-old orphan who's a genius inventor. Things don't always go right with his experiments, so families aren't exactly lining up to adopt him. So young Lewis decides to look for the mother who abandoned him by building a memory scanner to dig deep into his own memory. Instead, he gets involved with the wacky Robinson family in the future (2037), and a demented character who's trying to steal the inventions for himself.

We had the chance to interview Stephen Anderson for DVD Town, and thought readers might find it interesting. Here's how the phone conversation went today:

Plath: I have to tell you, I'm jealous--not so much because you directed a Disney animated feature, but because you did three of the character voices. That's always been a secret dream of mine. So did you practice on your wife and son?

Anderson: I always do voices, you know? Especially with my son, when we play around. I've enjoyed doing voices ever since I was a kid, just kind of clowning around with friends in my room and all that. And I've done temporary voices here at the studio, too, for years, so it's very comfortable for me to do it.

Plath: [Laughs] It was a casting no-brainer.

Anderson: Well, I don't know about that. It was certainly an honor that people responded so well to the temp voice that I did early on, and it was really cool to be able to do the final thing.

Plath: If you're the director, how do you know when you're stinking if you're also doing the voices?

Anderson: I can't even begin to be objective about my own performance, so I have a very trusted colleague of mine, Don Hall (who's also our story supervisor on "Meet the Robinsons") and he was my director. He would direct me and give me places to go or ways to adjust the performance. I need somebody else to do that.

Plath: Now, you were a story artist on "Tarzan," and a story supervisor on "The Emperor's New Groove" and "Brother Bear." I'm curious. When you moved up to directing, was there anything in the back of your mind that you thought, along the way, When I get to direct an animated Disney full-length feature, I'm going to do this or include that? And were you able to do that with this film, or is it still coming?

Anderson: I think so, because I for me it was less about the actual movie that I thought about over the years and more about the process, how to make the movies. And for me, being on all different kinds of crews with all different kinds of leadership, I wanted to create an environment of fearlessness . . . of freedom for people to be able to create without any fear of censorship or being told that that was a dumb idea, or that they have to be afraid to even speak up at all. I've been in situations like that, I've seen other crew members feel like that, and it's not a healthy thing. You can't create in an environment like that. For me, my goal was more about when I become a director I'm going to set the tone for the crew and I want a crew to have the freedom to speak up and critique and analyze and deconstruct and suggest new things.

Plath: Were there any tricks that you used in order to set the stage for that, to cultivate that sort of atmosphere?

Anderson: For me, it was just about listening to people, and just letting them know you're going to be listened to when you speak, you're not going to be judged, you're not going to be told, "You have no place speaking up in this room." They're going to see that I receive and all the leadership will then receive comments and ideas and suggestions freely, with a lot of trust or with open ears. But at the same time, ultimately, I'm going to be the final say and I want to hear everything that's in the room, and then I'll be the one to decide on what path we take. So it isn't just a free-for-all. The crew does know that it's not just everybody throwing out ideas and nothing's going to get decided upon. I think that's an important part of it too.

Plath: Am I correct in understanding that more than half the film was redone in some way after the first test screening?

Anderson: Yeah. It was actually the result of John Lasseter and the Pixar group coming into the studio and looking at the movie fresh for the first time and giving us some really great notes, some notes that we hadn't heard before, some great feedback on how to strengthen the movie--make it more emotional, make it funnier, make it clearer--and so we luckily had just enough time to figure out how to address those notes and get them back in the movie. So we redid about 60 percent of the film--some changes greater than others--and it was just about trying to make the movie better. That's what John was all about. Let's use every single minute that we have left to work on this movie, on this production, to make it better. And that's what happened.

Plath: I write, and every time you write something, what you really hope for is praise. You never hope for criticism or a negative reaction--"let's make this better" or "this is what we can do to tweak it." But when you're put in that position and you're told that more than 50 percent of the film could be better, who would you want to be at that point. Would you want to be the director? Would you want to revert back and be the story artist? Or would you want to be the story supervisor? When you're put in a difficult position like that, where's the comfort zone? I guess there is none, but where would you want to be?

Anderson: Yeah, I certainly did want to run and hide for a little bit. You need that time to process, sometimes, and your first reaction when you get a note is to react emotionally. And the best thing is to hold the emotions in, go back, sit, think, mull, and then you can react through rational means, rather than just emotional outbursts. For me, I think, I would probably choose the story artist as the place I wish I could have been, because story artists are their to help make the movie great, but it doesn't rest on their shoulders. So I certainly did have . . . initially, it was hard. It was a very hard day when we got those notes because, like you said, to receive that kind of criticism it can be quite a challenge to make your way through that. But they were so gracious in the way that they ended the note session, in that John sat me down and said, "You've heard the notes. Now it's up to you to decide what notes are gonna make your movie better, and what notes are not gonna make your movie bertter." So, all the responsibility, then, went to me to make the decisions and to find the things that were gonna make it better. It wasn't them saying, "You're gonna do x, y, and z, because that's what we said you're gonna do." And that, to me, was really what made the difference. We weren't being dictated to. We were being given a lot of input, and then we could choose how to implement those notes. That was very freeing, and really put a positive punctuation to the whole day.

Plath: One thing that struck me, as I watched the film, is that "Meet the Robinsons" is actually riskier than it seems, insomuch as the Disney villain of old, the historical Disney villain, has REALLY been villainous. And as you indicated on the commentary track, your hero and villain "have the same issue and the same lesson to learn." You even went so far as to call it a kind of dual-protagonist story. Were there concerns that the Bowler Hat/Snidley Whiplash-type guy wasn't evil enough, and if so, what sort of things did you do to tweak him along the way to try to accentuate the evil?

Anderson: Yes, that was actually one of the big notes from the Pixar group. The original Bowler Hat-I'll try to say this succinctly, because it's a big thing-the original way we portrayed him, there was Bowler Hat Guy and there was Doris. And Bowler Hat Guy was the buffoon, and Doris was his henchman, and the relationship was actually that Bowler Hat Guy was the dominant and Doris was the subordinate. She was smarter than him, but she sort of went along with it and did his bidding, whatever he said. So Bowler Guy played both the buffoon and the villainous threat, simultaneously. And Pixar had an interesting read on that. They said it's very hard to believe any of the threatening part of this character because he's such an idiot. How could he be a very serious threat? Do we take him seriously in those moments? It was interesting, and so it kind of led to us keeping Bowler Hat Guy's persona-not changing him to make him pure evil-keeping his buffoonish nature and then making Doris the serious threat. So she could then play those threatening moments, the villainous moments, and we could keep the Bowler Hat Guy the way he was. And then that gave us a new element, which was she's the mastermind behind the whole thing, he's being used, he's the patsy in their relationship, and it gave an interesting twist to the end when he realizes that. And I think even more so, you felt for that character than you felt for Bowler Hat Guy. So it actually really helped, I think, to strengthen the emotion of that character, as well as give us a stronger villainous presence throughout the film.

Plath: Was there any criticism from the Pixar group--major criticism--where you just decided, "I'm gonna go with my gut feeling and leave it at that"?

Anderson: Um, no. The major ones, while we may not have taken their solutions that they threw out, the major notes, the spirit of those notes, we definitely paid attention to and tried to find our own way of addressing them, which was really what John encouraged. You'll get a note, people will throw out ten different ways that you could actually solve that note . . . . It's up to you to find the eleventh way to solve that note, (which is your own way). So there's minor things that I said "I'd like to hold on to this," but the bigger, global notes, in some way or another, we addressed.

Plath: You said in the commentary that you wanted to "boost the emotional through-line and establish a theme that would keep everything together." It sounded like such a profound thing when you said it, and I thought about it. And I thought to myself, you know what? I loved the first third because of that emotional through-line. I loved the last third because of that emotional through-line. But I think I lost a little bit of it in the middle third. Am I alone here, or have other people commented that maybe there were a few too many zany characters zipping here and there that kind of took away from that through-line?

Anderson: Yeah, I've heard that. Some people have said that. I think the bottom line is that Lewis's journey is to find a family, obviously, and we are saying that he finds a perfect family in the future, and the perfect family sees the world in as unique a perspective as Lewis does. So we wanted to take the time to be able to introduce this world to the audience, these characters to the audience, through Lewis's point-of-view as well. So initially they come off as being very insane. You're just seeing the surface of these characters--you don't see any of their humanity, you just see their surface nuttiness. You spend more time with them, as Lewis does, and you start to see that there's dimension to them: they care about people, they welcome strangers into their home. To me, it's all in service of that greater emotional through-line of finding a family. We needed to spend time with the family, as much as we could, and the choice was that the family was going to have a unique perspective on things and have this freedom about the world. Lewis has never met people before who saw the world that way, so we found it very important to spend that time and to switch the tone a little bit so that it's satisfying when you go back to the emotional tone. I think you need contrast, and you need modulation in movies, so the beginning of our Act Two very intentionally took a slightly different course, a different tone for a while.

Plath: Thematically, I thought that the Walt Disney quote that you pulled out and used as the motto for Lewis, that gave me a chill, actually. Was that designed from the very beginning, or did that get added on during that 60 percent rewrite?

Anderson: Well, it's funny, because we had come up with our thematic statement, "Keep moving forward," very early on--within the first few months of really developing the script, throughout 2003. I didn't find that quote from Walt Disney, I think, until I think late 2005. And it floored me, the fact that he actually said those three words, "Keep moving forward." When I shared it with our producer and some other people, everybody said, we've got to find some way to put it in the movie. It broadens the scope of the movie even more. So it was a weird coincidence, but it really fit, and I think it sort of validated everything we did up until that point. It was later in the game, it actually wasn't part of the 60 percent re-do--we had it before Pixar came in--but it just felt like it was in the cards.

Plath: Yeah, and it really resonated at the end of the film. It just made the whole thing have a super pay-off.

Anderson: Good, good.

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