isney/Pixar—the team that delighted audiences with A Bug's Life and Toy Story 1 and 2—hope to scare up new audiences with Monsters, Inc., their latest fantasy opus. Monsters, Inc. features the voices of Billy Crystal (who once publicly regretted turning down Toy Story 2) and John Goodman as a pair of not-so-scary creatures who dwell in an otherworldly industrial town called Monstropolis.
Crystal plays green, one-eyed Mike Wazowski; Goodman voices his best friend, the furry blue-and-purple beast James P. "Sulley" Sullivan. Wazowski is the faithful assistant to Sulley, who is Monsters, Inc.'s top "scarer"—a creature that sneaks into the closets of unsuspecting children, spooks them and harvests their cries of fright to power Monstropolis. But the monsters' secret is that they are actually as frightened of children as the kids are of them—and when a little girl, Boo, finds her way back to Monstropolis, all heck breaks loose.
Monsters, Inc. is the creative brainchild of director Pete Docter (part of the Oscar-winning team that produced Toy Story) and producer John Lasseter, director of A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, who also won a special achievement Academy Award for helming the first Toy Story. Crystal, Docter and Lasseter took a few minutes recently to talk with Science Fiction Weekly about Monsters, Inc., which took five years to create. Monsters, Inc. is now playing.
Billy Crystal, you talked a little bit about how you were offered a part in Toy Story 2, and you turned it down, and lived to regret it. Having done this movie, do you feel better about it?
Crystal: [Mike's a much] better character for me. Oh, yeah. No problem at all. I love this guy. This is one of my favorite characters I've ever played. He's crazy. He's funny. He's nuts. He's romantic. He drives the action a lot. Frustrated, angry. I get to sing a couple of times in the movie. ... There was some other stuff that they cut out. I sang more. I love this guy.
The character has a lot of your personality.
Crystal: Yeah. I kept pushing it. Just amping him up. Making him more excited and energized. That's what I liked about him. ... I haven't played a character like this in a regular movie. A "skin" movie. Just to do this guy, I just loved him.
Did you base him on anybody?
Crystal: No. But the voice was a borrow of a character that I did on Saturday Night Live. His name was Willie. He was a masochist. With Chris Guest. [Lapses into high voice:] "Aahh, I hate when that happens." He was a little messenger. That was his job. He was a messenger and delivery guy. He used to like to hurt himself, and then go, "Aahh, I hate when I do that." So it was that kind of sound, but amped up and crazy and caffeined and filled with too much Starbuck's. And frustrated. But he loves his roommate, and he loves this girl. And the luck of the DNA didn't give him size and power and that, so he can make his friend better. So, I loved him. I just thought he was just really a dumb genius.
When you were recording the voice parts, they basically wound you guys up and let you loose?
Crystal: All the time. A lot of it [ends up in the movie]. What was good was, John [Goodman] and I worked together. I did the first session alone, the first two, I think, and I said, "You know, this is terrible." ... Pete [Docter] kept wanting all different line readings of the same line. "Oh, do one as a question." I go, "Why? It's a statement. Why am I doing all of these?" He said, "Well, in case I change the scene around, and I'll get John to do it." I said, "Isn't that just silly? When we can be together and do it together and play the scenes?" And that's what we did. They brought him in. And for whatever reasons, they'd never done it before. And it was great, because then we were really acting with each other. And then they videotaped us. And so, John and I are looking at each other, and playing, like actors. So then, the animators, as genius as they are, are able to take our faces, and put that real emotion into these characters, and then you give a performance. I never felt I was giving a voiceover job. I felt I was acting. And then when you see the movie, and you're moved by it, if you were, it's because the acting comes through these faces. It's an extraordinary compliment to them that they can do that ... and grab how good your acting can be, and you're not losing anything.
Your own performance feeds off the laughs that you get. Did you notice that in the studio, from the technicians?
Crystal: Yeah, you hear them in the back, and you see them in the glass room, just going nuts sometimes. And some of the stuff ended up in the movie, and some of the stuff didn't.
What kind of stuff didn't?
Crystal: It got a little rougher sometimes. ... You do one for the band, you know [laughs]? I kept telling them, "Come on, put it in. Get edgier. Get edgier. It's a new Disney! You can have nipples!" ... I don't remember what they were. Half the time ... they'd play back something, I'd go, "I don't remember doing that."
How'd you sustain the level of performance? These voice recordings are done over months and years.
Crystal: About a year and a half, I think, I worked on it. They play back. They show you stuff. It takes about two or three months to do a little bit of segment, sometimes a minute. You'll spend six hours on it, doing all different kinds of things, and then, two months later, you see a little piece of it, and you go, "Oh, I get it now." And after a while, I go, "What did I sound like?" ... When you get on a roll with it, the nuances, the little kind of stutters, the coughs or tics or stuff that makes a performance more real and an animator really happy, because he gets an eye movement. He gets something off the page, in the middle. You fill it up with a cough or spit or a [clears his throat], "let me tell you something." Gives them a little eye movement, and they get crazy like that. I'd get letters from them, "Thank you for that little eye thing."
What was your first reaction when you saw Mike, when you first saw this little green guy?
Crystal: When I first saw him, he was all gray. The little plastic [maquette] was all gray. But first of all, I thought he just like wild. And then he had a little goatee, which is not in the movie. ... I looked like Dizzy Gillespie. ... And then, John and Pete brought over 30 seconds, 45 seconds, of him animated, using lines ... of me speaking. And it was him walking around, captured a lot of stuff with me. But then, I said to them, ... "[If] we use my own voice, ... I think it'll be dull. And I won't feel as free. But if I can get it up [uses high voice] to this"—and I showed them this guy, this "I hate when it happens" guy—and I said, "But I'll amp it up." And then we did it, and they loved it. And it freed me up.
John and I ... we both felt, once you get the headsets on, I was this guy, and he was that guy. ... That's what it felt like.
How much of your scenes with John did you do both of you in the same room?
Crystal: Almost all of the stuff, everything, yeah. It didn't start out that way. ... Obviously, he does stuff with the girl [toddler Mary Gibbs, who voices Boo], I don't know if they did it together. But our stuff was so important to do it together. And it gives it a reality. It's wild.
What is it about Pixar movies that made you say, whatever they offer me, I'll do it.?
Crystal: The thought ... that you're going to be in something that's just forever. That's what it is. It's being part of the legacy. ... I saw the movie Friday afternoon. Five of us, six of us. The first time I'd seen it all complete. So when lights go down, I still always get excited anyway. And then it comes up and it says, "Walt Disney Presents." I went, "Oh!" I got a little choked up about it. My wife said, "What's the matter?" I said, "It's Walt Disney. It's important." He's dead 25 years, whatever it is, but I'm part of the legacy of his work and how he cared about kids. ... So when I saw it, it hit me hard. And then, the thought that, you know, this is an extraordinary movie to me, it was great fun.
John Lasseter, Pete Docter: What is it about animation that keeps you guys so young?
Lasseter: To have chosen, when we were younger, to want to work in animation ... even early on, [we were] willing to admit that we are [still] kids. We like kids' stuff. And we refuse to grow up. And I think that people who work in animation, there is something about that. They're kids who don't want to grow up. ... I think we all collect toys, and like to play with toys and so on.
Docter: And just a natural curiosity about the world, you know. It's a fascinating place to be. With our job, it's like what's so great about it. Our fascination with toys. We then get to go to the toy store and do all this research. And Monsters was great, because we had the world of texture. ... We went and looked at this great Kodiak bear at the San Francisco Zoo, and we'd watch him walk, and every time he'd step, there'd be the fat jiggling and the fur moving. And just fascinating stuff that you can then take, learn from and apply to what we're doing in film. So that we're always breaking new ground and doing new things.
Lasseter: I believe in research. I believe you cannot do enough research for all of these. And even when you're making up a mythical world, like Monstropolis, we did a lot of research. We sent a team back to Pittsburgh, PA ... because we were always imagining that Monstropolis would be kind of an industry town, near the factory. So they went back and looked at the old neighborhoods, and how close they were to the factory. Went and saw factories and stuff.
Docter: Even next door to Pixar was Chevron, and got a tour there. And a steel mill. And just did a lot of research about "What are factories like?"
Lasseter: Right next to Pixar was a big Ford center for their parts department ... and we went in there and saw how they catalogued things.
Docter: That actually inspired a lot of stuff with the doors. Because they had this system with these baskets on these tracks, and all the parts would be accessible by computer. You want Part C/753, and then bzzzt, the basket would come down, and that's the way we developed the door system.
Lasseter: It's all about making something familiar to the audience on one level, then show it to them in a way that they've never seen before. Our goal was, with Monsters, Inc., in a real fun way, just say, "Yeah, this is a world inhabited only by monsters, but ... " Public buildings in our world have to be handicap-accessible. ... In a monster world, a door has to handle little monsters and big monsters at the same time. Telephones, cars. All these things. And that's why it's kind of fun to think about that.
What about creating the monsters?
Docter: We did talk to kids. And then we thought like kids. And then we combined that sort of child-like approach with the thing that the computer does really well, which is realistic textures. So we looked at a lot of real animals. Sullivan was based on bear fur and llama.
Lasseter: Waternoose [voiced by James Coburn] is like a crab, a crustacean. So we had to go have a lobster and crab dinner for research [laughs]. Trust me, we milked it as much as we could get.
Docter: And Randall [Steve Buscemi] is sort of chameleon, and we kind of stole the idea that the eyes can look different places from a chameleon. And a lot of the textures of the skin.
Lasseter: So we did a lot of research in the animal, insect, you know, underwater world for that thing. But then we thought like kids, and said, "Well, but they would be colored more fancifully." ... There was one time when we were getting the coloration to be a little more animal-like, and they just started looking like animals, right? So we then took a step back. ... It's like, turquoise and big purple polka dots. Yet the fur, it looks like a bear fur, and it moves like it. ... So it's finding that fun balance. And what I love is, of course, we have the two main characters, because Mike Wazowski's skin ... was inspired from a tree frog, had a little bit of a reptilian look, though he has horns and stuff like that. And Sulley's, the fur we talked about.
We had to populate the world. This is a big ... company with lots of employees, they live in this city, and all this stuff. So they came up with those whole set of miscellaneous monsters. It was pretty funny. It was almost like an animated digital version of a Tinker Toy set or Lego or something, where we had a bunch of different eye sets. A bunch of different bodies. A bunch of different legs. A bunch of different arms. That we could combine together in different, funny ways. ... If you watch it again, ... it's not the exact same monster, but there's some parts that are sort of similar to others.
Docter: There's one guy who's an eyestalk, and he actually has Waternoose's legs, scaled way down.
To come up with the characterizations, you allowed the actors to improvise off the script?
Lasseter: Quite a bit. I mean, we would start out by creating the characters, kind of, on our own. And once we cast the characters, we really do rely heavily on, and encourage, improvisation. We hire our actors, not for how big of a name they are, but, for, one, how good of an actor they are, and two, we like to get actors who can improv. Because, you know, making a movie that takes four years to make, it actually is like, you can get really, really close to something, and we strive to maintain the spontaneity. And that's where getting the actors to do improv, to make it their own, come up with things you don't expect, and make us laugh, basically, is good. That's why we always record the dialogue before we do the animation, so it gives us room to be able to do that ... especially when you deal with people like John Goodman and Billy Crystal, who are so amazing at it.
Docter: We'd bring in a script. We always have a script to work from. And the film would be pretty good just right off the script. But, you know, Billy and John would [say], "Let me try something here." And give us 20 different variations.
What sort of things ended up in the film?
Lasseter: Their characters were always meant to be, they are best friends since kindergarten. They share the same apartment together. They went through school together. They work together. They know each other so well, better than brothers. And they love each other. But of course, they're going to rib each other. They're guys, right? ... That was something that's really hard to get, that kind of close of a connection, when you're recording Billy in New York and a few weeks later, you're recording John in New Orleans, and then you come back and cut it together in Emeryville, [Calif.] So, Pete had the idea to bring them together. And, a couple of scenes, when they're walking to work ... we had some ideas for them, but they're just walking, and it's all about, you know, complaining that I want to drive my cool car to work.
Docter: "You know why I bought the car, huh? To drive it. You know, like on the street?"
Lasseter: And he's going, "Wah, wah, wah. Come one, butterball." "Butterball?!? You—look at you, you got your own climate!" You know, and that's all that stuff, they just go on. ... It's all about finishing each other's sentences, stepping on each other's lines, in a natural way.
Docter: They would do two or three runs of a scene like that, just a little section.
Lasseter: And we'd piece things together.
Docter: The odorant [scene]. We started with some specific gags, but then they just went off and came up with all these other revolting smells.
Lasseter: "Low tide. Wet dog."
Docter: And then it was almost like a little bit of a competition. Who could be funnier?
Lasseter: And then there was a number of them we couldn't possibly use.
Docter: Yeah. They crossed the line [laughs].
Was it hard to animate Boo?
Lasseter: Humans are really tough to do. ... You can animate a lime-green ball with one eye walking around much easier than you can a human, because we all look at humans every day. What we always want to do is to caricature the humans. We never want to do a realistic human, because there's really no point to do it. You just photograph it. ... But of course, this story required it. Monsters go into human kids' rooms and scare them, right? It's an important thing. So we knew we had to do it. ... Pete's done short films, and a couple of them deal with animated kids, and they're the best animated kids I've ever seen. Because they're charming, they're cute, and they have pure kid essence, without being sappy sweet, which is nice.
Choosing it to be a little girl instead of a little boy was great.
Docter: We were just going for contrast there. You've got this big, masculine, eight-foot, two-ton guy, Sullivan, hairy beast, and then you've got this cute, little innocent girl with an oversized shirt. ... And I think one of the keys to capturing kids is, of course, observations. And we did a lot of videotaping and just watching kids.
Lasseter: Well, he has a daughter. And you videotaped your daughter.
Docter: For the scene where Mike takes away the teddy bear, and she starts to cry, I knew that if I just turned on the camera and wait about 10 minutes, one of my two kids is going to have a fit about something. They're good kids, don't get me wrong, but that's just the way kids are. So, the reddening, and then the crying, and the snot coming down. Those are things that round out the picture of the kid, so that it doesn't become saccharine sweet. You tell the truth about kids.
Boo's voice must have been really difficult to do. Initially, you were working with a two-and-a-half year old baby.
Lasseter: In the beginning, we always do story development, where we work and rework the story on storyboards. We always put our own voices in, temporarily, before we get the actors' voices. ... And so, then Boo is going on. And originally, we started with getting like a woman to do the voice. ... And it was just grating. It sounded like what you hear all the time on TV. And it wasn't working.
Docter: One of our top story guys, his daughter [Mary Gibbs] came in. And at first, I was under the delusion that you could actually get her to act in front of a microphone. So, we had a microphone, and we had the script, "Now, pretend like your scared, OK?"
Lasseter: And she'd [go] like this [gets up from his chair, wanders around the room].
Docter: So, what we did was take the microphone and followed her. And we ended up just playing. We had toys, we had puppets, and we would just play around. And whatever noises she makes [we used].
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