ANDREW: Hi. This is Andrew Stanton, the director of Finding Dory.
ANGUS: Hi. I'm Angus MacLane, I'm the co-director of Finding Dory.
LINDSEY: And I'm Lindsey Collins, the producer of Finding Dory.
ANDREW: Maybe start with why Finding Dory now, so many years later?
And that was because after we finished Finding Nemo, 13 years ago,
um, we were kind of done with fish, thought that the story was complete,
self-standing, sort of a closed circuit.
And you watch these movies a lot when you finish,
and then you don't want to watch them again for a while.
So we didn't watch it again until early 2011,
'cause we wanted to release it in 3D.
And I had some objectivity then.
I was able to watch it and sort of see it,
as close as I could, as an audience member.
And that's when I walked out of that theatre going,
"Wow, I'm really worried about Dory.
"I'm really worried she might forget Marlin and Nemo and not find them."
This movie did not start the way it does now.
Uh, at the very, very beginning,
we used to start on one of our first tries
with just showing a scene
from Finding Nemo of Marlin chasing the boat
and then bumping into Dory.
And that only lasted, I think, for a couple months,
and then we realised
- it's too much of Marlin's story that way. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: You don't feel like you're with Dory.
LINDSEY: It wasn't, frankly, until almost, like, a year,
a year and a half into this process
where you kind of brought up in a story meeting
that you always thought of Dory,
and wrote Dory, as a tragic character.
Because you knew that she had been alone for so long...
ANDREW: Yep. LINDSEY: And had lost her family.
And it...
I remember it being surprising to everybody,
being like, "Wait, that's the backstory?"
And kind of like, "Well, shouldn't we show some of that, then?"
ANDREW: Yeah, the fact that half my crew didn't even have any hint of that,
'cause they hadn't been on the first movie,
I was like, "Oh, so that means the entire audience won't know this.
"So we have to teach the audience Dory's history."
And I have this card up on my wall where I write,
and it just says two words. It says, "Meet character."
And I'm always realising that's the most engaging story.
Somehow, someway, right away,
whether it's action or subtle or quiet,
you're meeting a character, not a plot.
And I thought, "Well, you know, let's...
"Why don't we just literally do that? Why don't we kind of..."
I kept thinking of Annie Hall,
like, what if we just cut to a face, and they just say who they are,
and we suddenly are dropped into a scene?
And it just kind of worked right away.
ANGUS: Yeah, and I think we also wanted to find a way
to show the parents as characters early on.
So that the audience was invested in getting back to them.
- LINDSEY: That's right. - I know that that was a real challenge.
We don't have any baggage of the parents,
and we needed to establish them as characters.
Then also we learned as we were making the film
that we needed to have them as much as possible.
And that's where the flashbacks came in.
Because we wanted more of an opportunity to meet them,
and enjoy them and feel that the goal of finding, uh, the parents
was always paramount in the mind of Dory
and in the mind of the audience.
LINDSEY: Yeah, that we longed for that relationship,
that the audience was longing
for that relationship to be kind of reconciled and reunited.
And so we didn't have that for a long time.
And we felt like we needed to show some moment in time, basically.
ANDREW: Yeah.
The key is, it has to be endearing.
It has to be a memory
that you are fond of as an audience member,
- that made you feel good, too. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: So that you project that onto the character.
And then one of the things that kind of fell naturally
for going this direction was, (LAUGHS)
for me, was indulging in the loss.
Like, indulging in what it was probably like for her
to wander for so many years.
And it's very sad, it's very bittersweet.
But it actually matches, sort of, the tone
that we started with on the first movie.
You're given the rules very quickly of, like,
this is not just a happy-go-lucky animated film.
This is real fish in the water
that have to deal with all the things that might possibly happen.
There's things trying to eat you.
There's ways that you could easily get lost and stray.
And that was something that helps
kind of be an undertone through the whole film.
So that even when you're laughing,
even when you're in the funniest moments,
you kind of know that it's possible something could go dark.
Or something could go very tragic, that the stakes are high, basically...
- LINDSEY: Right. - ...I guess, is the simple way to put it.
LINDSEY: I think because of Dory and her short-term memory loss,
it didn't feel farfetched to believe that she would wander off,
even if people were trying to help her when she was young and lost.
That she would turn around and forget
what she was doing and swim away.
And so that never felt like it was a reach,
just simply because that's kind of what she does and who she is.
ANDREW: Real quick, that was Bill Hader and Kate McKinnon
playing the couple fish that found her.
ANGUS: They're very helpful fish.
Whereas some of these other fish
- are completely unhelpful. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
And I think affectionately on the production,
- we referred to them as jerk fish. - ANDREW: (CHUCKLES) Yeah.
LINDSEY: So whenever we were being unhelpful
to one another on the production,
one of us would mumble "jerk fish" to each other.
ANGUS: "Jerk fish, he's a jerk fish." ANDREW: We still do it.
LINDSEY: Still do it. Term of affection.
ANDREW: It'll come up before this commentary is over.
(LINDSEY LAUGHS)
LINDSEY: This was just an opportunity, really,
'cause we don't spend a lot of time in the ocean travelling.
This sequence was really an opportunity
to showcase some of the beauty of so much of the concept artwork
that was done by our production designer
and our art department,
in terms of the opportunities for different settings.
ANDREW: Steve Pilcher is his name.
And it was... I kind of think we, if I remember correctly...
He showed us all these pastels.
And it... We kind of just said yes.
- (LINDSEY LAUGHS) - And then it was actually,
if anything, we had to take a couple away just to fit the time.
LINDSEY: Yeah, 'cause we had to...
ANDREW: But you're almost literally seeing what he drew.
LINDSEY: Yeah, that's right.
Also it was just musically...
This was an opportunity to kind of set a theme for Dory
and for her kind of longing and loss, and being alone.
So Tom Newman, this was one of the first scenes we actually scored
and he talked about wanting to score.
Frankly, it was to try to find a theme for her
that kind of made you feel her loss and loneliness.
ANDREW: And he actually gave us two. LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: And the one that you're hearing under her being lost,
of course, we chose for that.
And the other one we picked and used earlier under the title.
And that became her sort of larger theme
that we reprise at the very end of the movie.
So it was nice that we didn't have to lose one of them.
ANGUS: On a technical level,
this scene that we see that is a reprise of Finding Nemo
is actually fully redone and re-rendered.
ANDREW: That's true.
ANGUS: (LAUGHS) We were not able to get that footage for free.
But we did build off of what had been done in the first film.
ANDREW: So the first act on this movie was done many different ways.
I think there'll be a deleted scenes section on the DVD,
if you're watching the DVD, or whatever you watch these days.
ANGUS: I don't think you're supposed to say "DVD," I don't think.
ANDREW: Okay.
ANGUS: I think you're supposed to say, "feature format."
- ANDREW: Jerk fish. - (LINDSEY LAUGHS)
ANGUS: I'm just... ANDREW: All right. And so...
LINDSEY: I like that he called you that first.
ANGUS: That's just the rule, that's what they tell you.
LINDSEY: I like that you got the first "jerk fish."
ANDREW: (LAUGHS) And it won't be the last.
But we had the hardest time figuring out
how to get Dory to remember her parents.
And, bigger than that was, how does she know where to go?
And how to get her wherever that is.
LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: And it seemed logical at the time,
and I think you would fall into this pattern of thinking,
"Well, it's a fish. Is it like a bird?
"Is it... Does it have homing instincts?
"Does it have sort of migration instincts?
"And would it be more that just nature
"would tell you where to go if you were put on automatic pilot?"
And that actually made so much sense to us.
We played many versions that did that to get us into Act 2,
and to finally get us this story going.
And we're talking, again, a year, a year and a half,
maybe even two years, we finally realised,
"You know what,
"you're kind of robbing the main character of having that choice."
And you're kind of saying,
no matter where they are as a person or as a character,
they're just going to find them anyway.
LINDSEY: Right. ANDREW: And in other words,
there's nothing universal that a human can take from that,
that we can take from it and apply to ourselves.
We're not a bird, we're not a fish.
And so it became more of an obstacle after a while, and we got rid of it.
ANGUS: She felt too passive, too.
She went into a trance-like state and trusted her homing instincts,
which made sense as far as a relatable,
like you were saying, a relatable biological idea.
But it made her just less active in her choices and her goal,
which was constantly a struggle in this film,
was for a character with short-term memory loss
to restate their goal and communicate
to the audience what they remembered,
and what they were interested in getting.
ANDREW: We call that self-reflection.
And she just, we realised again, this is in hindsight,
she can't self-reflect enough
uh, to be able to allow you to sort of
take her temperature through the course of the movie,
and understand how she's progressing inside her mind and her heart.
And so we came up with a lot of devices to do that.
LINDSEY: This is one of my favourite scenes,
because we always have this when we go back to sequels,
is the scene that makes everybody smile when they watch it.
Because it's so kind of emblematic of what we loved about the first film.
ANDREW: Hmm.
LINDSEY: And it was with Marlin doing his
kind of um, awkward, stuttery, kind of trying to convince,
trying to say something without really saying it to Dory,
and Dory completely missing the point.
It reminds me a lot of Finding Nemo.
- And it's, there's such... - ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: The charm of those characters and those actors, really,
finding the ability to play that scene.
ANDREW: I think we always... Well, not always,
but from very early on
had an idea of the stingray migration,
because a lot of things that were pulled for Nemo
were just cool stuff that we learned about the ocean
or we had witnessed or something.
And you just kind of find a way to weave it in.
And I'd seen a photo, I think, of migrating stingrays.
And it looks very much like what we put in this film.
There are just hundreds,
if not thousands of them all flocking like birds underwater.
And it's the most arresting sight.
LINDSEY: Do you remember that we used to call it
the manta ray migration,
and then the characters guys were like,
(LAUGHING) "Um, you know that Mr. Ray is a stingray, right?"
ANGUS: (LAUGHS) I didn't know.
LINDSEY: And we were like, "Oh..."
And they're like, "Do you want us to change them all?"
ANGUS: "No, it's fine." LINDSEY: And we're like,
"Why don't we just call them stingrays?"
- ANGUS: Yeah. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANGUS: Originally, the ray parade,
it was a chance to show that Dory was not competent.
She was asking to take Nemo to the parade.
ANDREW: Yeah, on her own, unchaperoned.
ANGUS: Yeah, and then she...
ANDREW: To show that she could do something.
ANGUS: And then she ended up forgetting it,
which led to a funny scene,
but ultimately we ended up jettisoning that.
ANDREW: Well, and I was trying to remember why.
And, of course, a lot of things change in different orders.
And it's not as logical as it is now to look back on.
But I think it's because it was a bit of a hat on a hat.
We didn't really need a new problem
to show that she had a point of view
about herself that needed changing.
What would run deeper is a point of view
that she has carried since she was little.
That she has always seen herself,
since the day she can remember, as somebody with a problem.
LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: And fortunately, she has a wonderful disposition,
and wonderful, loving parents,
and wonderful people that have helped her over time,
all the way up to Marlin and Nemo, to counter that.
But it's still something that deep down,
when things are low and everything is not working right,
she's going to beat herself up about.
And I think that in trying to create
a whole new present-day problem
that was so strong that you felt like that overrode the issue,
I think that was,
in a weird way, blocking our view.
ANGUS: Well, but then the goal of that movie would be
at the end of the movie she takes Nemo to the parade.
- Which is not ultimately what we want. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
LINDSEY: The goal. Right.
ANGUS: She finally learned to chaperone.
LINDSEY: It wasn't like, "One day, she screwed up."
You know, it was like, "No, no, no, this is a deeper problem."
ANDREW: I mean, all of them are attempts
to just figure your character out.
And it's fascinating how much,
what everybody leaves with Dory from the first movie,
and just when they think about her, is how much she makes them happy.
And how much they like her, and how...
And nobody wants her to be changing or be different.
But the funny thing is,
is that she's always had this tragic,
sad, apologetic side to her that's under the hood.
- And it just is not the takeaway. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: So it took a lot for us to understand how to dramatise that.
And without making it look like we were changing
who the character was that everybody remembers.
LINDSEY: Right.
ANGUS: Well, I think what you said was she's a people pleaser.
ANDREW: Mmm-hmm. ANGUS: And that the reason
why she's a people pleaser,
it's her way of apologising proactively
to kind of cover up for her insecurities.
Which I always felt like was a great way to think about it.
LINDSEY: And then, yeah, like, this last scene
was one of the more technical challenges.
It was one of the earlier scenes we did
with the ray migration and the grass.
But it's a lot of technical crowd work
and simulation work
and set work to make that look as beautiful.
And I think it was one of the first proving shots of the movie
in terms of, like, "Can we do this?
"And can we make it look that much better than the original?"
And I think that was one of the first scenes we did
to kind of prove that to ourselves.
ANDREW: There's a scene we cut out here
that actually made it all the way to animation,
finished, even was scored.
And we called that sequence "Sleep Swimming."
And we had overthought the equation
that we thought Dory had to have
to be able to have enough ammunition to go off the reef,
was that she would get a spark of an idea
of a notion in her head
from being sucked into the undertow of the stingrays.
Then she would have a restless night's sleep,
and Nemo would hear whatever,
something, she was mumbling in her sleep.
And then he would say it to her out loud the next morning,
- and she'd get a flood of memories. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: And it wasn't until our editor, Axel Geddes,
sort of at the last minute said,
"Wait a minute, why can't she just mumble that
"the minute she has that first time she's sucked into the stingrays
"and everybody's checking on her?"
And we're like, "Oh, my gosh, you're right.
"We did an extra step that we didn't need to do."
LINDSEY: So we cut out, like, two minutes of the movie right there.
ANDREW: But that's how far along that was,
and it actually made it into one of our first trailers,
- scenes from that. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANGUS: Because that's what was finished.
- And we put that in the trailer. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANDREW: That was one of the first things we finished, you're right.
LINDSEY: So now we can just make marketing pay for that.
- (ANDREW CHUCKLES) - LINDSEY: Kidding.
ANDREW: I remember, Angus, it was you that had been pitching for a while,
and it took... I think it took a while for me to catch up to,
because we had so many different ways
to get her across the ocean, and it was...
Now, I look back, and they were all a little overly complicated.
And it took a lot of screen time.
And you, I think, out of frustration, you sort of suggested this.
ANGUS: No, what happened was I... For a long time, I was like,
"I think we need to have Crush in this movie somehow."
And, of course, Andrew does the voice of Crush.
And you were like, "Oh, I don't know,
"it seems like pandering sequel stuff."
And coincidentally, I had, like, a week later,
I ended up taking a trip to Disneyland with my family.
And I'd never been to Turtle Talk,
the exhibit where... The thing where you meet Crush.
And I saw the way that the audience reacted to Crush,
and I could tell that the fans of Nemo
would be very upset
- if there was not any Crush. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANDREW: There would be a lynching.
ANGUS: He had taken on this new, like, this extra persona of this place.
It was like a church that people were worshipping at.
And so, when I came back, I'm like, "Dude, you don't understand.
"Like, out there, they love you as this turtle."
So, if we could figure out a way to do that.
And I think it was riffing on, how do we get across the ocean?
And then the idea of, "Oh, I know a guy." And then that being Crush.
LINDSEY: Because you were so, so specific from early on, both of you,
of not wanting to repeat
this long, drawn-out journey across the ocean.
So, we had to do a shorthand of it...
ANDREW: Even doing it short, it was too long.
LINDSEY: It was too long, yeah.
And then, it was like, "Well, let's just get Crush to do it."
ANDREW: (LAUGHS) And just be at the other end of the highway.
Basically, we grabbed on Route 66,
and suddenly we're at the other end, you know?
ANGUS: Well, I think what's neat about that,
the journey of figuring out this particular problem is,
for a long time, Dory had,
and Marlin and Nemo had to get across 7,000 miles of ocean.
And we made such a big deal of it
that it kind of highlighted the ridiculous nature of it.
ANDREW: Right.
ANGUS: But once we had Crush, then you didn't think about it.
And it made more sense that,
yeah, they could travel that distance
if they used something we'd already established.
ANDREW: Yeah, and we're not going to show you the boring 7,000-mile trip
where nothing happened.
- You know? - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: But that's a reason why the set piece
that they land on is what we call the shipping lanes.
I was surprised to find out this actually does exist.
I just used sort of logic, I said,
"I bet you with all the shipping lanes,
"and all the traffic that happens with boats and all the cargo,
"and all the storms,
"there must be stuff that falls overboard all the time."
And it must leave this weird, sort of, broken,
almost yellow-brick-road trail
that goes from east to west
or west to east, of all these cargo containers.
- And sure enough, that's kind of true. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: So, for a while we thought we needed
a yellow-brick-road kind of pathway
to follow for a while, just at the head of Act 2.
But the set piece was already starting to be built.
And we liked it so much, and it's so memorable,
that we thought, "Okay," and it helps you feel not safe,
and that we're not home any more.
LINDSEY: And we loved the hermit crab characters.
We had already kind of built those.
And we loved the concept of these guys
that all had different items
that had fallen out of the container ships as their homes.
ANDREW: So, it was like, "Let's reutilize all of it."
It's a much, much shorter version of what was originally here.
And we used to have Marlin and Nemo
get separated from Dory right here,
and had them go on an entirely different sub-plot journey
before they ever found Dory again.
And it was when they met the Tank Gang.
And that was a hard one for me to cut.
We lived with the Tank Gang for a year and a half, maybe two years.
And it was about six sequences, maybe about 20 minutes of the movie.
ANGUS: But the problem with it was that
it was taking on greater importance than Dory's story.
ANDREW: Yes, yes.
ANGUS: So we trimmed it back to Dory's story.
'Cause this... The whole shipping lanes
used to be in the centre of the ocean,
- instead of right next to... - ANDREW: Right next to California.
ANGUS: ...Marine Life Institute.
Which really helped us shore up that idea.
But originally, as you'll see hopefully in the deleted scenes,
the extra story with the Tank Gang.
ANDREW: The Tank Gang was like a Mission: Impossible crack crew
that could get out of anything. They'd been everywhere.
ANGUS: And there was tension between Marlin and Gill
over the affections for Nemo
that was very interesting.
ANDREW: Who was the most travelled? Who was the most experienced?
LINDSEY: But again, all of that was everybody hiding from the...
Like not being able to solve how to keep it Dory.
So, we're like, "What if we make this really entertaining sub-plot?"
ANGUS: It was a wonderful exploration
of Marlin and Nemo's father-son relationship.
ANDREW: But it's also a real lesson in, like,
you know, you've got to be able to
throw out some of the gold to find other gold.
And we would have never come up with lazy sea lions hanging out
with Gerald on the outdoor rocks.
We would have never come up with Becky as a surrogate Dory
that Marlin and Nemo had to work with to get inside the park.
Um, we wouldn't even have come up with some of the simple statements
and conversations that happened between Nemo and Marlin
for being stuck alone in the middle of the park,
had we not taken out all the sort of sexy spectacle that went on,
and goofiness that went on with the Tank Gang.
LINDSEY: Yeah, kind of... Sorry, go ahead.
ANGUS: I was going to say, one bit of gold we lost,
I got to say, just to highlight it, was the squid used to be called Gary
- and he used to have a voice... - ANDREW: A voice.
- ...that Bob Peterson did the voice for. - LINDSEY: Oh, that's right.
ANGUS: It was super hilarious.
But ultimately, we settled on making the squid more of a force of nature.
LINDSEY: Super scary.
ANDREW: And one of the things...
I wish I could take credit for this during the making of this movie,
but I've now come to appreciate it after watching it a lot,
as we finish it up and starting to have to talk about it is...
I now realise...
I thought the kelp forest was just there
as an interesting environment...
LINDSEY: A beauty, yeah. ANDREW: ...that we hadn't
tackled in the first movie, because it just...
There was no geographical excuse to have that over in Australia.
But I now realise it's sort of...
We wandered the open water for so much of the first movie.
It's like being in the desert, but underwater.
And it evokes so much about loss, and things being lost.
LINDSEY: And vast.
ANDREW: And discovering yourself again.
And this is the woods.
This is another environment that basically it's, you know...
So many fairytales are told in the woods, things are hidden in there.
Secrets are there, things are discovered.
You come out of it reborn a bit.
And I now realise why we kept coming back to it throughout the story.
It's not just there for one moment.
- It's used quite a bit. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: This is where we introduce another character,
Sigourney Weaver as herself.
LINDSEY: I felt like every time we screened this movie,
or redid the movie,
we always put in a joke or two that we never thought was going to last.
And it was always kind of for ourselves, 'cause it made us laugh.
ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: And then the ode to Sigourney Weaver
was one that in every screening people responded so well to the kind of
weird, meta statement of Sigourney Weaver playing herself
that we ended up just kind of leaning into it.
And it kept getting, kind of, used again and again.
And then it became like, "Okay, what if we just keep saying her name,
"Sigourney Weaver," not only because it's such a great name
that's so specific to a person,
um, but because her voice... We love the kind of wink that her voice...
She kind of lends her voice a lot to nature documentaries.
And she's got this kind of educated, soothing tone to her voice.
ANDREW: She's even a voice here
in San Francisco at the Academy of Sciences.
LINDSEY: Yeah. So, it just, and you know,
it just became this kind of joke
that, eventually, we waited and waited and waited
before we went and talked to Sigourney
because we were like, "I don't know, is this going to be so weird that..."
ANDREW: I mean, for fans of her, of course,
she was the voice of the mothership computer in WALL-E.
And I thought, "Here I am asking her to be a voice again."
But it was so good.
I said, "Only if for sure it's going to be in
"are we going to try and pull that favour."
And I remember saying to her, like, "You realise that if this stays in,"
and it has, and it's just as great as we thought it would be,
"kids are going to know your name forever."
LINDSEY: Yeah. ANDREW: (LAUGHS) You know?
Now the introduction of Hank.
Hank was an idea of our writer, Victoria Strouse.
I remember we were trying to figure out how to, kind of,
get Dory not to just be in this weird,
sort of, purgatory state through the middle of the story
where she just kept forgetting all the time,
and having to have just different people
kind of meet and repeat themselves.
And it was at the same time that we were doing some research,
and we did our first field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
and we got introduced to the octopuses there.
And it just was like this perfect kismet, like, of
not only how to come up with this cantankerous character
that can sort of be a surrogate Marlin, be this sort of cranky guy
that really doesn't want to be attached to her.
It's just like Marlin was in the first film.
But octopuses can get in anywhere.
They can crawl on land and in sea.
They can squeeze down and get into small spaces.
LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: He can be acrobatic. It was just, kind of,
ticked off all these needs.
And I don't think we ever had difficulty with his voice. (CHUCKLES)
LINDSEY: No, I think Ed O'Neill was literally,
I believe, the first person we ever said, and...
ANDREW: But even in the writing of his voice...
LINDSEY: Oh, yeah.
ANDREW: I think we had never even had a problem,
like, we never had to repurpose him.
ANGUS: It was the grumpy old guy.
ANDREW: Grumpy old guy with a secret heart of gold
just worked from right out the gate.
LINDSEY: Yeah, it's true.
I mean, the other thing is that we had a lot of versions of this movie
where Dory was lost.
Because the only way we could get her around without somebody like Hank
- was through the pipes. - ANDREW: Through the pipes, yeah.
LINDSEY: And nothing could fit in the pipes except for her.
All of the people, all of the kind of characters we'd come up with thus far.
ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: And so it was like a lot of her...
There were a lot of scenes of her by herself getting lost in pipes.
ANDREW: It's the human equivalent of, like,
people keep walking down hallways,
like The West Wing or something. (LAUGHS)
LINDSEY: Yeah, and it felt like we over...
We, like, overstayed our welcome tenfold, I think.
And so, having Hank with her and be able to not only be with her,
obviously, in small spaces,
but also be able to kind of move her in the human world, if you will,
outside of water from place to place was, like, a huge win.
ANDREW: And to go visual a little bit...
Technically, there is so much going on in this simple scene with the water
and the refractions and the reflections and the movement of the water,
and the reactions to that
we had barely touched on the first movie, on Finding Nemo.
- Or it would have cost us so much. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
I mean, if you watch Finding Nemo again,
you look at the dentist office scenes,
and we probably played with having the camera outside of that glass,
and seeing refraction, um, outside of that glass,
- like less than 10 shots, I would say. - ANDREW: Way less, yeah.
LINDSEY: Because we just technically couldn't do it.
So, this movie was, you know,
provided not only a huge technical challenge,
but an opportunity for us to really play around with that.
ANDREW: I mean, even the fact that the underside of the water,
when you're in these tanks
or in these pools, is reflecting back on them.
We didn't do that in the first movie. It just was too much.
So, even a shot like this where you're with the...
You're going from a topside to below the water with that sea lion that...
LINDSEY: Yeah, you weren't allowed to do that on the first film.
ANDREW: No, and all this floating kelp, I mean, it's just kind of crazy.
Like the entire, it feels like the entire budget of the first movie
would have been this shot right now.
LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, it was almost the entire budget of this movie.
(ALL LAUGH)
ANDREW: Spoken like a producer.
LINDSEY: Do you want to talk about the sea lions?
You should talk about the sea lions.
ANGUS: Uh, well, the sea lions...
ANDREW: Well, I realise we've never said their names in the movie.
So you probably should say who's who.
ANGUS: Oh, yeah, well, there's Fluke. He's the large one.
And Rudder is the small one.
Fluke is portrayed by Idris Elba in English-speaking markets.
And Rudder is portrayed by Dominic West.
- Because we're huge Wire fans. - (ANDREW CHUCKLES)
And somehow we got the okay to do that.
- And they said yes. Yeah. - LINDSEY: We justified it to ourselves.
ANGUS: I think we wanted something kind of...
We wanted something kind of original,
uh, just kind of a relationship between the two of them.
And they had kind of a natural, I don't know, just rapport
that really comes across onscreen.
ANDREW: Yeah, and I thought, "Why not international waters?
"Let 'em have, I mean, more of a Brit background," you know.
ANGUS: We liked the idea that they were, uh...
They're lazier than they are hungry.
- (ANDREW LAUGHS) - So they...
They're able to deliver some exposition
without a tremendous amount of threat for Marlin and Nemo.
ANDREW: Yeah, 'cause you could go down the whole predatory direction.
We just didn't want to with them.
LINDSEY: Late in the game, we came up...
I think it was John's idea to come up with having them
be from, kind of, inside the institute at one point,
um, so that they could speak with some authority about it,
not just having lived outside.
And that's why we gave them tags,
and kind of made them rehabilitated characters.
ANDREW: Bob Peterson came up with Gerald,
the nerdy sea lion that can never get on the rock.
- And it's our editor... - ANGUS: Torbin.
ANDREW: One of our editors, uh, Torbin Bullock,
- who did the voice for Gerald and Becky. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: In a pinch, late at night. And it was so funny.
We were like, "We're never changing it!"
LINDSEY: Yeah, it's like, I don't even know what inspired him,
- but it was something great. - (ANDREW LAUGHING)
ANGUS: Originally, the first people we met were otters outside.
And we had a hard time making the otters expositional characters
that were then going to give the information needed.
And the sea lions ended up taking over that story.
ANDREW: Yeah.
Because we stopped being able to use them indoors, inside the park.
- They started out inside the park. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
And then we eventually migrated them out
'cause we're like, "Wait a minute, they're out everywhere
"on the coastline where we live."
ANGUS: You want to give the audience something...
"Oh, I can relate to that.
"I'm used to seeing the sea lions out there." Let's not fight that.
ANDREW: So, maybe the thing to talk about here is the use of
what we would call flashbacks for Dory
remembering bits and pieces of her past
with her parents as she moves along in the park.
This was, sort of, a last... Not a last-minute,
but one of the last big ideas in the last year of making this movie.
The history on Finding Nemo was that
the, uh, tragedy that you see at the beginning,
where the mom and the rest of the family
and the eggs are all sort of taken away by the barracuda,
was actually doled out in flashbacks throughout the movie.
And the worst part of it was sort of intercut with the fishing net.
And it stayed that way for three years.
And we always had this problem with people not really liking Marlin
and really being able to relate to him.
They found him off-putting and whiny and complain-y.
And it was finally my editor on that film, Lee Unkrich, who just said,
"Why don't you just put all those flashbacks,
"and just tell it as one thing right up front?"
And when we did that, um, you know, again we thought,
"God, it's so tragic, it's so scary."
Um, but it worked,
and it also made everything that people
were complaining about with Marlin,
suddenly, they didn't mind it.
- They totally related to him. - LINDSEY: They understood it. Yeah.
ANDREW: So, we walked away from that going,
"Never do flashbacks again, never do flashbacks."
And so, never even considered it on this film.
- And I think it was John. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: Uh, John Lasseter, in one of our Brain Trust meetings,
when we were still kind of bumping against
tracking this movie as emotionally as we could with Dory.
And he said, "You know what, it's not so much
"a conventional cinematic thing to do a flashback here."
It's actually her skill that she's, you know, being...
LINDSEY: She's remembering.
ANDREW: She's basically measuring herself
and grading herself based on her memory.
And this was something that Vic had been saying for about two years
that I just never really understood.
It's like, it's how she, it's how you reflect back on how she's doing.
And so, as she got farther along and started to, like, remember something,
then you give what we would call a conventional flashback.
But then, suddenly, you're going along with Dory.
You're suddenly knowing as much as she does.
And you're gaining a little bit more hope with each time emotionally.
Not only are you gaining a fond memory that you like
about the mom or the dad,
but you're gaining a little bit more emotional investment,
and a little bit more hope as you go along.
And they don't suddenly feel like some plot-driven flashback.
- And it's the inverse of the first movie. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: And in a weird way, because it's the inverse of the first movie,
that gave me all this confidence to go, "You know what, I feel like that's right.
"That's like the character for this film. It's the makeup for this film."
ANGUS: And I feel like you show that she's not losing her drive.
Like she is aware of her family.
- She is constantly reinvigorated. - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANGUS: Just as she's communicating that to those around her,
we know what she can remember now. Visually.
ANDREW: Yeah. LINDSEY: The other two... Yeah.
And the two other things that were interesting
to discover through doing that
was that, one, the only time the audience is ahead of Dory,
in terms of her memory, is just the opening scene.
Um, and we kept that pretty... We kept that really short.
ANDREW: Really limited, yeah.
LINDSEY: Uh, because we didn't want that,
that the audience had all of this huge memory
of her parents that she doesn't have.
So we kind of cut those up across the way.
And also that we were feeling
like we needed to be reminded of her parents.
And again, that longing kind of triggered
for the audience as well as Dory,
which allowed us to not feel as though
we've spent two-thirds of the movie away from them.
It kind of allowed us to intersperse those moments
throughout the film so the audience
kind of was reminded as much as she was.
ANDREW: It kind of kept them afloat throughout the middle of the picture.
LINDSEY: Yeah, exactly.
ANDREW: And I've been noticing, watching it again,
it also kind of builds up a little bit more anticipation
and hope for when you think you're about to find them.
LINDSEY: Yes.
ANDREW: So it's like stair stepping. LINDSEY: Yeah.
And you were the one that was like,
you know, "I want the first one."
I mean, the first one is a little one,
which is just her remembering their names.
But then the first real flashback is, it goes kind of...
Mommy is the first flashback.
And the second flashback is Daddy.
And then the third flashback is the family.
ANDREW: Yeah.
And give it some progression.
And now we're actually watching, where she's meeting Destiny.
And um, Destiny started out as an adopted sister whale.
Uh, and we thought it was funny
that the parents, uh, might possibly have short-term memory...
We didn't know at the beginning of this,
we're talking four years ago,
"Should they all have short-term memory loss?
"Should all blue tangs have that, and maybe..."
ANGUS: We can tell you, the answer is no, because...
ANDREW: (LAUGHS) 'Cause we didn't do it.
ANGUS: It is impossible to get you to track three characters
- with short-term memory loss. - ANDREW: Right.
As you will see again in the deleted scenes.
ANGUS: Oh, man.
ANDREW: But we thought at the time,
"Wouldn't it be funny that they just had this sense of loss,
"and then they find this orphaned whale shark,
"and then they would possibly want to, like, adopt her?"
And so there was this sort of sister rivalry thing for a while.
That fell away,
but not after we had already cast Kaitlin Olson,
whose voice I love and adore
from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
And, um, we just found another way to repurpose Destiny,
and then bring in Bailey and make them this wonderful duo.
Uh, I don't know what you call them, pool mates? Like dorm mates?
ANGUS: Well, for a while, we... She was a whale shark
who was afraid of identifying as a shark.
And she wanted to be more of a whale.
We were trying to justify the whale speak.
And ultimately,
because Bailey has the issue of learning to see better,
we thought it might be a neat idea
to have, uh, Destiny not see very well.
So that it would ultimately...
ANDREW: Link them. Yeah. ANGUS: Link them at the end.
Not romantically, but as they would work together...
ANDREW: Eyes and ears. ANGUS: Eyes and ears, exactly.
LINDSEY: Although I think they're secretly in love.
But that's just me, that's my call.
ANDREW: Is that your call on it? Interesting.
LINDSEY: Yeah, you know, I don't know.
I have their backstory.
(ANDREW LAUGHS)
Um, but no, I think... And Ty Burrell, who's the voice of Bailey,
again, it was, I think, right out of the gate.
It was like, "Oh, it has to be Ty Burrell."
'Cause his charm of his voice is...
It's like kind of ubiquitous with
just lovable and charming and...
ANDREW: It's a little freaky...
I think almost everybody
is our first choice we went for, for voice.
I think it's a combination of
we just really nailed the right voice for the character,
but also when you do a sequel to a very popular movie,
people return your phone calls.
And, um, they were very eager to be on the film.
So it wasn't that tough of a search
to get all the right voices for this film.
LINDSEY: Who came up with the "Ooo"?
- I mean, I know it was... - ANDREW: That was me.
LINDSEY: Was it you? ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: And then when we had Ty do it for the first time,
we were dying...
- 'Cause he did the whole, like... - ANDREW: He committed.
LINDSEY: ...trying to figure out the right frequency.
ANDREW: Frequency and stuff, yeah.
LINDSEY: So he was kind of going high and low with it.
And trying to be like, "Okay, I'm channelling... (VOCALISING)
"I'm lightheaded."
All of that was so,
all of his kind of improv of this kind of conceit
that he would have to make this noise
in order for the echolocation to work.
ANDREW: The other thing that's cool technically is that,
uh, just the cinematography and the abilities of the looks
that you can get now at Pixar
are kind of infinite and legion.
And I thought,
"Well, how could we make the flashbacks special?"
And so tilt-shift has sort of
come into the lexicon of cinematic grammar
in the last you know, eight years.
And I thought,
"Wow, we've never done that exact look in a Pixar film.
"This might be the perfect excuse,
"where it just makes things feel very miniature,
"down to an almost dollhouse feel.
"And it has this almost Glass Menagerie
"kind of arrested childhood element to it."
And I said,
"Heck, let's give it a shot
"with Ian Megibben, our cinematographer."
And it worked, it worked like gangbusters,
enough that it gave us the idea to keep using it
when she finally reunites with her parents for a moment
when everything goes in slow motion.
And it's just this wonderful visual way of telling even...
Anybody that's not really paying attention.
You just get this sense
that it's a revered, cherished thing from the past.
LINDSEY: Right.
That's a way,
it's a kind of cinematic way of thinking of a memory for her,
especially a memory of a childhood.
It's almost like looking through old photographs...
ANDREW: Mmm-hmm.
LINDSEY: ...and kind of the way you feel about that.
This has kind of an emotion attached to it, which was nice.
ANGUS: So if Hank is the surrogate for Marlin in the movie,
Becky is the surrogate, uh, Dory,
is basically the Dory for Marlin in this film.
ANDREW: And we wrangled with the animation department for a while
about how to find the humour,
'cause she was drawn goofy in the storyboards for a while.
But translating that to something
that just looked very realistic in 3D,
uh, it kind of came down to, like, just give it...
Even though these are all animals
that are kind of having voices and speaking,
and giving kind of animal movements,
there's a whole 'nother level of reality
you could go with Becky and just treat it like a true...
- We used to just say... - ANGUS: Water chicken.
- ANDREW: Yeah, water chicken. - (LINDSEY LAUGHS)
ANDREW: Just chicken of the sea. ANGUS: Chicken of the sea.
ANDREW: (LAUGHS) A literal chicken of the sea.
Just treat it like a real chicken acts.
Like, it doesn't look at you, it's not paying attention, it twitches.
ANGUS: This idea of Marlin being irritated by the foot,
and then pushing it out of the way was inspired, I think, a little bit
by a graduation speech that you gave, Andrew.
ANDREW: Me? Oh, that's right. At the...
ANGUS: Yeah, you were talking about how you had this tassel
that kept hitting you in the face
- as you were delivering this speech. - (ANDREW LAUGHING)
And it was building up
a tremendous amount of tension with the audience,
because they saw this tassel hitting you in your face.
And eventually you just, you addressed it.
And the audience felt this sigh of relief.
- (ANDREW LAUGHING) - It was this idea of,
if you do something and you don't address it,
the audience is like, "Is he out of the way...
"I got to get out of here." You know?
ANDREW: It's going to be distracting.
- Yeah. - ANGUS: So.
ANDREW: Yeah, it's like that little hair in the projection on the screen.
LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm. "Just stop the projector, I can't take it."
Ah! Gerald.
Gerald and his bucket.
He literally, I think, again,
was a character that was drawn so great in the storyboards.
ANDREW: Was it Trevor Jimenez that drew him?
ANGUS: Yep, yeah.
LINDSEY: And it was so simple, in his drawings of him
and his animation so caricatured
that it was like a struggle in a weird way
to get that same simplicity to work in CG.
But it's so... Like this one, just, I think,
every time we watch it, we laugh at this scene.
ANGUS: I remember us having the idea of the bucket
as a way to get Marlin and Nemo into the park.
Like you always had this idea of how...
What container our fish should be in.
ANDREW: Exactly. ANGUS: And they're like,
"Well, where does the bucket come from?"
"Well, it's got to be, uh, Gerald's private bucket."
And then maybe they could, from that weird idea...
ANDREW: It's never addressed, though.
We never give you any history about why he has that bucket.
LINDSEY: He loves that bucket.
- He loves that bucket. - (ANGUS LAUGHING)
ANGUS: And then from a performance riff with Kaitlin and Ty,
we came with this idea of Ty as Bailey,
you know, giving direction that was never quite, uh...
LINDSEY: Clear.
ANGUS: ...clear, and, "Hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute."
And then the impatience.
ANDREW: It's almost like without his echolocation,
he's really bad at direction.
ANGUS: And so there was something about that,
with the frustrating...
LINDSEY: He gives, like, all the wrong cues.
ANGUS: "Well, just hold on, wait, wait, wait,
"come on, hurry up, hurry up."
LINDSEY: "And now. And no, wait." And, yeah.
ANGUS: It's the kind of person on lookout
that's not very good at being the lookout
that became a little bit of comedy for us.
ANDREW: You know you've found the gold with side characters
when they can, uh... You could almost just go off
and just keep a story going on,
like a whole feature just with them, you know.
When you find yourself having to, like, trim down the scenes,
'cause you're just putting too much in
every time they're onscreen,
which was happening with us all the time with those two, um...
Then you just know.
ANGUS: It was a balance, because I feel like,
if Destiny was too angry at Bailey,
then you wouldn't like her.
But if Bailey was irritating enough
so that we justified her irritation with him...
We wanted to put the audience in the driver's seat
of being right with Destiny with being irritated.
And that's where the comedy...
LINDSEY: A charming argument is really difficult to perform.
ANDREW: (LAUGHING) Yes.
LINDSEY: Um, 'cause it gets so...
You know, it just walks that line between being, like,
"I don't want to hear somebody argue."
But the minute you can find charm in an argument,
and then these guys were so great at walking that line
between finding the thing
that was making them annoyed with each other,
and making that so funny and universal
that you completely were sympathetic
to both sides of the argument.
It was great.
ANDREW: So, what you're watching now is a sequence
that we called "Stroller Crossing,"
which was the bane of our existence.
It was so difficult to figure out plot-wise.
It was so hard to figure out
editing-wise, animation-wise, scoring-wise.
It's just... It's probably
'cause it's dead centre in the middle of the movie.
It's always one of the hardest parts to keep going
and keep the energy going, and follow every thread.
ANGUS: But it was...
LINDSEY: And it's the beginning of the...
Sorry. Of those two storylines starting to interweave.
Like you've just kind of separated it.
And it's the first scene
where you kind of see them back together
but they don't know that each other is there.
But it's the beginning of that interweaving
starting to happen.
ANGUS: And the reason why it needs to be there in the movie
is that Dory is changing
from being this passenger to this driver.
ANDREW: And we're literally portraying that.
ANGUS: And we're showing her take the steps to make the calls,
to tell Hank what to do.
That then this happens again at the end with the trucks.
You see the beginning of it and the echoing of that here.
ANDREW: That was our big epiphany, is that,
"Oh, we can lean into the fact that she's been a sidekick,
"and that's how she was built in the first movie."
And even is that as a character in the story,
she's like that with anybody that she meets.
And that's kind of what we needed to do,
was have her graduate to being the lead.
Like she would sometimes literally be driving,
or just be the person that would lead the charge.
ANGUS: And story-wise and as filmmakers,
we needed to take her from a sidekick
- to being a main character. - LINDSEY: So poetic.
A little fun Easter egg fact
is when you look at the gift shop,
there is a guy shoplifting in the background.
ANDREW: Oh, that's right. (LAUGHS) ANGUS: That's great, yeah.
LINDSEY: Now here are the otters.
Now we get to talk, it's the first time...
I mean, the otters we always knew as a character,
I mean, not only are they this way in real life,
but certainly our character department
and our animation department
leaned into the cute on the otters.
And...
ANDREW: Surprisingly hard to get them to be
as cute as they finally came out to be.
It was a weird combo of the design and the animation of it.
ANGUS: Cute is a fight.
ANDREW: Cute is a fight. ANGUS: Because it's simple.
And simplicity and clarity often are difficult
when you're working in a medium
that's adding detail, and detail, and detail.
And maintain that clarity of a vision, of nature,
of what makes it gettable and relatable as both,
air quotes, "realistic and also charming."
ANDREW: Yeah.
We're in this weird, hybrid world
where, yes, they're fish with eyes that talk,
but you're still trying to make the audience
ultimately just kind of believe
they are real fish in our world.
And real octopi and real otters and stuff. And so it's...
ANGUS: And the rendering is so good,
you're working on the model, you're like,
"Well, they need scales, 'cause fish have scales.
"Okay, great."
And then, "Oh, they need gills, 'cause fish have gills.
"Well, they need realistic fish lips."
And before you know it, you have a very...
LINDSEY: A fish.
ANGUS: ...ugly bass.
So we're always balancing between those things in design.
ANDREW: Sort of what's the cartoony nature of something,
and then the live version.
ANDREW: "Touch Pool" started out sort of as a...
Almost just a quick aside moment
early in one of the versions of the film.
And I think I knew all along
we would be able to do more with it.
And kind of waited for the story to demand
that we kind of really investigate that world, and improve it.
It was just really tough,
because it's very complicated.
There's a lot going on, it's very noisy.
And even in a rough version of doing this for ourselves
with the storyboards and stuff,
it could be very time-consuming and labourious.
So we just sort of left it to the side.
And it wasn't until we were about
midway through the four years
that it started to really have a point to it.
That it was a point
where she was going to lose her sidekick.
And she was going to be forced
to have to drive 100% herself,
just for a trial moment.
And that would graduate her to the next level
of finding confidence in herself.
And once we understood that that was the use of this,
'cause we weren't using it that way for the first two years.
LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm. It was just... Yeah.
ANDREW: Suddenly it was an essential scene,
and it expanded and it got all this wonderful stuff.
And now it's this kind of tentpole
- in the middle of the picture. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: But I think what kept it alive for the first two years
is we just knew it was going to be a unique set piece.
I mean, when else are you going to be in a touch pool
with main characters trying not to be grabbed
and pulled out of a... Like an alien abduction.
ANGUS: And that was based on a real thing
where the story supervisor, Max Brace, said
when we were at the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
he saw in the quarantine area a whole basket of starfish.
And he asked, "What are those fish doing there?"
And they're like,
"Oh, these are starfish from the touch pool.
"They need a bit of a break."
LINDSEY: It was like a spa.
ANDREW: I don't know if I ever heard that story.
ANGUS: Yeah, that was from...
That was what kind of kicked it off,
and he did a drawing from that.
ANDREW: That must have been from our very first visit in 2012.
ANGUS: It was from the first visit.
ANDREW: Wow! ANGUS: And so that idea of,
"Oh, we're going to let some of these guys take a break.
"Because this is traumatic for them."
It became a backbone for some of these ideas.
ANDREW: And, of course,
we didn't reflect the actual consideration
that is taken in those aquariums.
We just made these guys suffer because it made us laugh.
LINDSEY: Yeah, 'cause that's funnier. ANGUS: Yeah.
And the trench warfare plus the touch pool was like...
ANDREW: I swear, I always pictured it like World War I.
It was like trying to go through No Man's Land.
ANGUS: It's ultimately pointless.
- (ANDREW LAUGHS) - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANGUS: You gain some ground, you lose some ground.
LINDSEY: It was also the flashback here
is when she remembers the Just Keep Swimming song.
ANDREW: Yeah, which I was really big on keeping.
LINDSEY: For a while... It didn't find a home for a while.
ANDREW: It used to be early in the prologue we showed that.
LINDSEY: And then when we kind of cut that down,
we lost it for a little while.
And then we kind of brought it back
to be the lesson that she uses here
to kind of get them out of that situation.
ANDREW: Yeah. To me, I felt it would just give her such confidence
and such ammunition or fuel
to know that, "This song was made for me by my mom."
And just like, that would charge it so much in a positive way.
LINDSEY: Right.
ANGUS: This is where we learn about
the world's most powerful pair of glasses in this exhibit.
And this is meant to be the idea that, as a child,
Dory had the ability to see the exhibits around.
That's where a lot of her information...
ANDREW: We actually had a scene a long time ago
where she had some memory
while she was in the tank looking out through the glass,
and we made real references
to all the weird stuff that she had said in the first movie
like, "Es-ca-pe," and, "The Sea-Monkey has my money."
And, like, what if all those things were things...
- It's almost like the end of... - LINDSEY: Try to work them in, yeah.
ANDREW: Of Usual Suspects, you know, with the Keyser Söze stuff.
And just like seeing all the stuff on the wall to explain it.
And then it was a fun "in" joke,
but then we realised we just didn't need it.
ANGUS: And it also makes their world small
if you explain that everything she knows,
she knows from that one thing.
ANDREW: Is from that one view. Yeah, you're right.
And now we're back with Marlin and Nemo.
This was, you know, always tough.
How do you link the side storylines with the main storyline?
So, even though they're not next to each other,
how can the advancement of the B storyline,
which would be this one with Nemo and Marlin,
have something to do to help advance Dory's storyline?
And we had a lot of practice with this on Finding Nemo.
It was the same problem.
And it took a long time as well in that first movie
to get them to feel symbiotic.
And this one was, um, really,
"How do we accent the absence of Dory?"
So, that's a lot of the reason Becky is there.
Becky is a surrogate Dory,
and they don't deal with Becky correctly.
It's sort of a magnification of how each of them would deal with Dory.
Nemo is very trusting, and Marlin is very sceptical.
And that gets amplified here.
And now they're stuck alone, with a problem.
And it forces them to really appreciate Dory's absence.
And this, for the Disney fans, I mean...
The idea of these water spouts
and the tidal pool with the, sort of, crashing wave on the far side
actually came from me from visiting The Living Seas as a kid
when Epcot was kind of new.
I remember The Living Seas really well.
And I grew up in the ocean, and I was always kind of amazed that...
ANGUS: Near the ocean.
- You grew up near the ocean. - ANDREW: Oh, I grew up in the water.
- Jerk fish. - LINDSEY: Fun fact.
- ANDREW: The second time. - (ANGUS LAUGHING)
And so, uh, the way the water splashed
and just created this sort of simulated tidal pool.
And it kind of matched with the tidal pools I played in.
And I just always remembered that. I think it's still there.
- And you were just there. - LINDSEY: Yeah, it is still there.
I remember, I saw it, and it was...
ANDREW: It was the first place I ever saw this kind of water jet kind of floor.
So, that's basically... Epcot is to thank for that.
LINDSEY: And then now we have the Loud Mouth Clam. (LAUGHS)
- The Loud Mouth Clam. - ANDREW: Which is me.
LINDSEY: Which we... Andrew was the voice initially.
And then, we're like, "No, no, he can't possibly remain the voice.
"I'm sure somebody else can do this voice better."
And then we asked a couple of people to do the voice.
And then, nope, it turns out Andrew is meant to be.
ANDREW: I do obnoxious really well, I guess.
LINDSEY: He is meant to be the Loud Mouth Clam.
ANGUS: The clam used to be back on the reef.
ANDREW: It used to be a neighbour of Marlin's
that just was a know-it-all with his special...
With his kid that knew it all.
LINDSEY: Shelby. ANGUS AND ANDREW: Shelby, yeah.
ANGUS: "The interesting thing about pearls is..."
ANDREW: "Have a good day at school, son."
And we're like, "How does Shelby get to school?"
- LINDSEY: He's a clam, so... - (ANDREW LAUGHING)
ANGUS: So, we cut that, we cut that.
And then we're like, "They gotta run into somebody.
"What about that clam? The clam was funny."
(LINDSEY CHUCKLES)
LINDSEY: The expression on both of their faces in that shot just kills me.
And then the open ocean tank, I mean, that...
Talk about a technical challenge. (LAUGHING)
ANDREW: I actually loved the production design of this room.
I don't know if it ever gets the love it...
You could see it on an end credit card
and a couple other shots.
But it's designed so that you actually feel like you're in the ocean
if you're a human walking through this.
So, everything is dark blue.
You've got dolphins and a giant blue whale,
you know, floating above you.
And everything is of the same colour.
So, you just kind of feel like this might be
what it's like to be a fish underwater
around this central column with all this life in it.
LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: But it's also inspired by a big exhibit at...
LINDSEY: In Monterey.
ANDREW: In the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where it's just a large glass...
I don't know what the name of the exact exhibit is,
- but it's basically to be deep sea. - LINDSEY: Huge glass wall, yeah.
ANDREW: What it's like to be in the deep sea.
And you see big balls of sardines.
LINDSEY: The cool silhouettes that people get
like just kind of up against the glass was always...
ANDREW: This has turned out to be one of my favourite scenes in the movie.
It's, uh, for as complicated as it was to,
kind of, get it all constructed and built,
not only of the set and the characters and editing it and stuff,
it's just this quiet, simple, two-person scene.
It's got all this stuff loaded behind it.
People, you know, saying goodbye.
And Dory, kind of, stating how she feels about herself,
that she's kind of ready.
She thinks maybe she can face her parents now.
And she's maybe worthy enough.
I love when you do all this stuff
and it can get concentrated down to just its essence.
And you can feel it all in there,
but it's just the surface... It's just all so quiet and subtle.
LINDSEY: It's all subtlety, yeah. ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: Ed's performance on this is so great, too.
I mean, he just did it so nicely,
like, the quiet kind of admission that he's going to miss her.
ANDREW: Should we say the number on the tag,
or should we just allude to the number on the tag?
LINDSEY: This is your fault. ANDREW: It's a phone number.
ANGUS: It's a phone number.
ANDREW: That's all we should say, right?
ANGUS: Yeah, it's a phone number and...
ANDREW: All right, there you go.
LINDSEY: There it is. ANDREW: That's all we'll say.
ANGUS: Oh, no.
LINDSEY: We always knew this was going to be a beauty shot.
- I mean, the desire for this exhibit... - ANDREW: It had to be.
LINDSEY: Needed to kind of... Not only kind of
represent home to her emotionally,
but just visually it had to be something that was arresting.
And felt like it was the goal
of everything that she'd been doing up until this point.
And the challenge...
I mean, we lived with this scene for so long
in kind of very rough form,
because it was just so technically difficult to achieve.
And we kind of had to go on faith that it was all going to work,
especially when you
see that she's kind of having these ghosting flashbacks.
It's kind of when her memory and her present kind of collide.
The conceit was always like,
"Okay, this is going to be really cool."
And the reality of it was really hard to get
and rough for a long, long time.
And everybody was kind of like, "Is this going to work?
"Is this going to work, where she's seeing these images live?"
ANDREW: It's a confluence of a lot of things.
We had tried different styles of flashbacks,
the ghosting always worked here.
We weren't sure if we were going to do it everywhere else.
We came up late with the shell paths
that she uses to find her parents
- at the end of the movie first. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: And then we started to reverse engineer
and go, "Wait a minute.
"Just to make a thread that's just a single narrative idea
"that's going through all these flashbacks."
What if the parents... It's all the same day.
And it's the parents are just slowly...
Had decided that day, "We're going to put out shells,
"and we're going to slowly lay them down,
"and see if she can make her way back with them."
And it's ultimately one big metaphor.
And foreshadowing what's going to happen to her
in her real adult life.
And it all became of a piece once that all fell into place.
LINDSEY: And I'm going to say some dorky story thing right now.
And it's like each of these things is like a shell in and of itself
- that's leading the narrative. - ANDREW: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
LINDSEY: No, but it's true. Stop it. Don't laugh at me. Jerk fish.
ANGUS: No, but it's true.
ANDREW: But you actually, you look, you pray for that to finally happen
before the film is done.
LINDSEY: Yeah, that it all looks intentional.
ANDREW: Because then, you become fearless
and you get all this... You get reenergized.
You get a third wind, a fifth wind to go back
and tweak whatever you need to.
And usually everybody else on the show does, too.
Suddenly, they all see it, too.
They see if we just change these few things,
- it'll all make the... - LINDSEY: Kind of tie it together.
ANDREW: The story feel like it's inevitable.
It'll feel like it was just one grand design all along.
'Cause that's all I ever want.
We talk about it, it's all you ever really want.
And you can sense it when you go and watch a film,
or you read a book, or you're being told a great story,
and you just can tell just by the way it's being doled out
and being told to you that you're in good hands,
you can relax.
This person or this group knows what they're doing,
and you're going to be led safely through this story.
- LINDSEY: Yeah. Like a path of shells. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANGUS: I will say, my mom does love purple shells.
The reason why I pushed for that, because my mom loves purple.
ANDREW: Really? You didn't tell me that.
ANGUS: No, I wanted it to be a surprise for my mom.
ANDREW: And she's never going to listen to this commentary, is she?
ANGUS: No, but...
LINDSEY: When she watches the movie, she'll know.
ANGUS: I think when she watches the movie, and she says,
"Mommy loves purple shells," like, that's a personal thought.
ANDREW: That's so sweet, Angus. LINDSEY: Aw!
The last thing that tied this...
ANDREW: Yesterday was Mother's Day.
LINDSEY: No, it was... Yeah.
ANDREW: And "Happy Mother's Day" to Angus' mom.
LINDSEY: Um, the thing that ties this scene together
really, truly, was the music again.
I think it was because it was such a disparate, kind of,
bunch of things.
Conceits that we were trying to have work all together.
You know, for the longest time, we lived with temp music.
And we were trying to, kind of, you know,
guess at what it's going to end up being like.
And I think the music, the score under the scene
is what really kind of just links the whole thing together.
Um, crab fun fact.
ANDREW: That's John Ratzenberger as the husband crab
doing the clipping of the hedge.
- Was that the fun fact? - LINDSEY: That was the fun fact, yes.
ANGUS: I remember us running into
the power of the ordering of information
as she came to the purple shell, like...
How much does she know about her flashback of being the kid?
And just us putting it in a different order
gave an entirely different...
ANDREW: No, that was huge. ANGUS: ...level of emotion to it.
That was one of those ones where just a few shots,
just changing them around, gives you an entirely different feeling.
Just to put you in the driver's seat of what she's thinking.
LINDSEY: Yeah. I mean, you feel it when you're watching it.
It's kind of you know what's about to happen.
And it's that sense of making sure that we kind of, you know,
give that some weight,
that we don't deny the audience that sense of, like, "Oh, no, oh, no.
"Here it's going to happen."
And kind of you lean into it and give it a minute.
ANDREW: This movie always felt troubled and hobbled
and so hard to find its real groove till the last minute.
And Nemo was not that different.
And I remember this scene,
this scene of her finally getting the guts
to go into the pipes on her own.
Once this finally...
This, for me,
uh, became one of the first strong cemented footholds for me.
Once I felt this scene,
and there was a lot not working around it,
all these other things we've talked about practically,
probably either weren't aligned, or even had been thought up yet.
I knew, like...
It's like uncovering, like, bedrock.
- You're like, "Okay, this is right." - LINDSEY: This is working.
ANDREW: This is right for the character,
this is right for the scenario.
This is right for the spectacle.
The whole thing just felt like,
"That's a piece of the dinosaur bones,
"and that bone is definitely the hipbone,
- "and it belongs right here." - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: And it gave me the confidence
to just take that off my mental plate,
and just search what fits well with that and do that.
- Was that the same for you? - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANGUS: Yeah, I think so, too, because we had...
I think it's that we know we needed to show her
confident to go in the pipes,
but not confident enough in herself to get through by herself.
ANDREW: To succeed. Yeah.
ANGUS: She needed to ask for help, and she needed that missing link.
At the same time,
we had Bailey and Destiny.
They're learning from each other, too.
And so, it was a nice kismet of those two ideas.
ANDREW: And it became an example
of how the whole movie should be working, in small.
And it was clear to me,
"Oh, it's the penultimate moment for her character."
Like, after this,
the only way to go after this is for her to do it on her own.
So, it told me where exactly in the story it had to be.
It couldn't happen early in Act 2, it couldn't happen in the middle.
It had to happen right near the back.
LINDSEY: Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say,
is that actually we had other moments that did this,
that these scenes were actually...
She tried these same kinds of things.
And talked to herself in the same way, and all this stuff.
And we kept pulling them out,
because they didn't feel like
they were placed right, with the exception of this scene.
This scene was always the one that you're like,
"No, this is where it needs to be,
"so how do we get ourselves
"to feeling like we deserve this scene right now?"
ANDREW: Yeah.
ANGUS: Also, we had the thing that was going to come on the heels of this,
is meeting with Marlin, and having Marlin give her confidence
by seeing his confidence in her,
and having him demonstrate it to her.
ANDREW: To me, that was the reward she deserved
for going through what she's going through right now.
- Like getting lost in the pipes. - LINDSEY: That was an early scene.
That was one of the first scenes we got into production, too,
was when she runs into Marlin and Nemo
- and he kind of... - ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: He thanks her.
ANDREW: We had to do a couple tweaks after producing it.
But ultimately, we knew this scene has to happen in this movie.
LINDSEY: It's one of those things where,
again, as we talk about it after having completed it,
I find myself talking about it a lot.
- That it... - ANDREW: That scene?
LINDSEY: It bothers me, yeah.
And it never probably would have,
in a weird way, had this movie not been made.
But I'm so grateful that Marlin's been given a chance to thank her.
ANDREW: Technically, I watched Nemo, he does.
LINDSEY: When?
ANDREW: He does, but he just tosses it off.
I think that's why it feels like he never did.
LINDSEY: When does he do it?
ANDREW: It's right when he has to part from her
after they've been dumped by, uh, Nigel.
LINDSEY: Oh, that's right. ANDREW: And he goes,
"You've done all this, and I couldn't have done it without you, thank you."
- But it's so tossed off. - LINDSEY: But it's before he... Yeah.
ANDREW: It's so tossed off.
And it's so not really what's going on with anything.
LINDSEY: Right. ANDREW: That you realise...
The truth is, he didn't really ever convey that,
even though it was just cursory, like said out loud of his mouth.
LINDSEY: Well, right, he said it out of just being devastated
versus being grateful.
ANDREW: Yeah, there was no reflection on it at all.
LINDSEY: Yeah, so, I feel like, you know, in a weird way again,
it's like something you didn't know you were missing
until all of a sudden you have it.
And now that you have it, you feel like, "God, she so deserves that.
"And if we hadn't done this movie, she would have never had that."
ANDREW: It would have been left unaddressed.
ANGUS: And this is great.
This came pretty early, but the idea of her being...
"No, no, follow me."
ANDREW: Her correcting Marlin. LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: Yeah, it's small, it probably gets overlooked by everybody,
but it's the beginning of the matured Dory.
It's like she's now going to trust her instincts,
no matter how crazy they are.
- And that's all Act 3 really... - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: I mean, I learned this on Toy Story,
like, once they kind of had figured out
that Buzz and Woody are there for each other,
then Act 3 becomes a test about...
You just test that newfound rule or newfound belief.
And you test it as hard as you can, and see if they'll survive it.
And so, that's what this became.
It's like, "Okay, no matter what comes to her,
"no matter how illogical it's going to be,
"by the time she's gone through what she will to find her parents,
"we just keep testing that."
As crazy and as illogical as the moments will be.
LINDSEY: This is actually one of the few moments in the film
where we harken back to a cue from Nemo.
ANDREW: Other than the very beginning
when they're going to school.
LINDSEY: And it's intentional,
obviously, because it felt like this was, again,
a weighty moment and a kind of a completion of
something of a relationship,
or a thank-you for something from the first film.
Tom Newman kind of reluctantly agreed,
since he's always looking to do things again, you know, new.
And it was the one moment I think we all were like,
"No, no, it has to be this, the theme from Nemo."
'Cause emotionally,
- you need to feel that. - ANDREW: Mmm-hmm.
And now we go...
For a while, it was called "Off to Canada." (LAUGHING)
And now it's called "Off to Cleveland." We didn't know what was funnier.
"Ca" -sounding word, Canada or Cleveland.
LINDSEY: I think I love how people probably
are going to, like, read so much into the fact that it's Cleveland,
and really it's just because the name sounds funny.
ANDREW: That was the only reason.
ANGUS: Well, there was that and Spinal Tap.
ANDREW: Well, no, well, yeah.
LINDSEY: And it's inland. It's landlocked.
ANDREW: It's completely landlocked, that's why we liked it, it was funny.
LINDSEY: So, no offence, Cleveland.
ANDREW: It's not as funny as Iowa. 'Cause it starts with a vowel.
LINDSEY: It had nothing to do with your basketball team.
- Nothing at all. - ANDREW: No, not at all.
ANGUS: When Bob Peterson first heard about this,
he's like, "I'm from Cleveland."
ANDREW: And we're like, "That's what makes it funnier, Bob.
- "You're funny." - ANGUS: It's funny.
LINDSEY: He's like, "I can never go home again."
So now we're back in quarantine,
and this was another scene
that took a really long time to get right.
ANDREW: Well, for a long time, the parents were there.
And, again, it took many versions
until I think it was...
I remember Vic saying, like, "I think they should be dead."
And there was a lot of internal people being like, "Really?"
- And we all... - ANGUS: "We should kill her off."
ANDREW: We all kind of agreed that
that kind of a gut punch for Dory's character,
that moment, that was the right thing.
Then the debate became, "Are they really dead or not?"
ANGUS: Yeah. ANDREW: And...
We had already come up with a scene,
you know, all our messiness,
of them being found out in the kelp forest.
And so I think that led to the shell path.
And then it just felt like, "No, that's the perfect design."
And then it just became,
what's the right amount of time to wallow
in this loss,
so that it forces our main character
to have to truly feel like she's...
LINDSEY: Face her worst.
ANDREW: Yeah, 'cause all along, I remember this
even when we were writing the first draft.
It's like, "What's the lowest, worst place
"you could bring Dory?"
And that's to have her completely all alone like she was,
however she got lost in the first place,
with nobody to help and her memory failing her.
LINDSEY: And even worse, it's her fault. That she feels,
not only was it her fault
that she lost her parents the first time,
but this new family she's found,
it's her fault that they are lost now, too.
And so it's like this triple whammy.
ANDREW: So we knew that that was the low point,
we always knew we had to get there.
This was sort of a last-minute idea, was like,
"Wait a minute, you could make it seem like we..."
And trick the audience that her parents were just there
by having all the blue tangs taken out
of the Open Ocean exhibit
- and put in here. - LINDSEY: Yeah, that was a big deal.
ANDREW: And, again, it subtly gives you this little flame of hope of like,
"Oh, they are here. You just missed them."
But we haven't really said that.
And then you come here,
and with a big school of blue tangs,
you actually can keep hope alive
just for a few shots of, like,
"Wait a minute. Where are they? Where are they?"
She's fully grown, she might not be recognised right away
until she says her name.
And then you start to suspect something must be up.
LINDSEY: Yeah, this was a lot of adjustment
and pieces and ordering of information.
And how do we not make it frustrating,
and feel like we've been duped.
There's, again, as an audience,
you don't want to feel as though you're being tricked.
ANDREW: Yep.
LINDSEY: You want to kind of be with her in that kind of sense of surprise.
ANDREW: And this scene right here, right now what you're watching,
is just like a real representation of Pixar,
where it's at, I think, in its maturity of filmmaking.
I mean, after about 20 years of doing this.
It's kind of a bold move to just go and just stay in her head,
and be able to also just technically
and cinematically just tell it like this.
We're actually putting a lot of trust into the audience
and all ages to just sort of follow this moment in time,
sort of a car-crash moment of just feeling,
and also tracking a lot of plot.
- There's a lot of plot going on. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: Suddenly, Hank's grabbed you, and he's caught.
She's dropped,
Marlin and Nemo are going into a tank into a truck.
And I think we get away with it.
- (LAUGHS) - LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: And the goal was,
can we make it feel like it all happened too fast for her character?
Just like when something tragic like that
might happen to you,
you know, that suddenly it's over.
And time slowed, but also time went, like, in a split-second.
LINDSEY: Yeah, big life change.
ANDREW: And now we're suddenly spit out in the ocean.
These are my favourite types of moments, I should just say.
When it just gets really, really sad and dire.
I always joke, like, we should just say, "The end," after this.
LINDSEY: That's it.
ANDREW: But no, to me, there's nowhere to hide.
And I mean that in the most enjoyable way
from a writing/filmmaking standpoint.
Like, you know, it's one person just stripped down
to what the whole point of the movie is.
And it's almost like there's those kiddie bumpers
that are put on the side of the lanes for bowling.
Like you kind of can't script too much, it's just...
And it's all about the nuances.
LINDSEY: And the pacing and the...
ANDREW: Yeah, all the little adjustments
make these maximum, uh, impact
and you can just really tell
whether you've gone too far or not enough.
And it's just the playground I love to be in.
And to be able to just open this up
and just be in this lost moment,
and kind of, in a weird way,
let Tom Newman's music just carry so much of it.
Because, to me, it's a real...
If you ever want to know
how much music contributes to a film
and how much you're dependent on it
and how much it can do when done just right,
um, this is a great scene, I think,
to amplify not only that
but what Tom Newman's music in particular does.
I just feel that Tom's music has so many layers of complexity in it,
in just the way he produces it...
LINDSEY: With instrumentation. ANDREW: ...and the way he mixes it,
that you're getting just within that musical score line,
a lot of the complexity of, emotionally,
what's going on internally with characters,
and in particular, Dory, in this scene.
And so, as simple as it seems to be,
it's actually magnifying all this complexity.
LINDSEY: This was, again, as most of these types of scenes are,
deceptive in its kind of simplicity,
because whereas, in many cases, you can kind of do a lighting setup,
you know, for a scene, and let it play out pretty naturally,
and not worry too much,
because you're happy with that kind of general sense
of the set lighting and the conceit...
- This one was shot-by-shot directed. - ANGUS: Mmm-hmm.
LINDSEY: In terms of, what are we seeing?
How much of it's murked out in the background?
What's going to contribute to that sense of her being alone,
and her memory's fading, and her doubting herself?
And how dark are we going to play this?
So that, you know, again, every single piece of this simplicity
- contributes to the overall tone of the... - ANDREW: Yeah.
And you have to play this subtle palette of progression.
LINDSEY: Right.
And this next shot coming up is a perfect example of her looking forward,
and then suddenly we rack focus, and just fade up the shell.
We had to, like, play with that until, you know, when you were out of focus,
you never saw that shell there in the beginning of the shot.
So that, again, everything's kind of coming forward,
and progressing along with Dory.
And then, the way we progressed, it's like,
"Wait a minute, there's a trail."
ANGUS: It's like Bridge on the River Kwai with William Holden.
ANDREW: Hey, that's not a bad comparison. I'll take it.
- ANGUS: Finding the line. - (ANDREW CHUCKLES)
LINDSEY: I think the sense was that you wanted the audience
like a millisecond ahead of her.
- ANDREW: Yes. - LINDSEY: You know?
ANDREW: And there was a slightly earlier version of this
before we had come up with the idea
of having the parents possibly be dead for a while,
where this was the home that they grew up in.
When we first came up with them having short-term memory loss
and wanted to feature them, they lived in a tyre by a piling in the kelp forest.
And it was in the prologue.
But we loved that setting so much.
- I'm going way back. - ANGUS: Yeah.
ANDREW: Um, we always kept that setting alive.
It was just one of these beautiful set pieces.
- We didn't have the shell lines then. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: And again, it's like finding a piece of furniture
that just doesn't know the room it's supposed to be in yet.
LINDSEY: Right.
And we should say that, obviously, Diane Keaton and...
ANGUS: Eugene Levy. Yeah. LINDSEY: ...Eugene Levy
are kind of so crucial to making this relationship
so emotional, and obviously this reunion is so emotional,
the way they performed it.
Diane had never done an animated film before, a voice.
ANDREW: And we always recorded them together whenever we could.
LINDSEY: It was, you know, I mean,
I think the casting of them was immediate,
but we leaned on their kind of superior acting chops...
ANGUS: Yes.
LINDSEY: ...to sell these little brief moments so that you felt this reunion.
ANDREW: We had this speech from Dory for a very long time.
This is one of the first things we had Ellen record,
- in one of our earlier sessions in 2013. - LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: And it was so honest and true about what we were trying to capture
about Dory that even though with all the story changes,
and all the plot changes, and all the moving things around,
uh, her speech never really changed.
I think that gave us a little hope
that we weren't digging in the wrong place. (CHUCKLES)
LINDSEY: Yeah. ANDREW: 'Cause that never went away.
LINDSEY: It was one of those touchstones where you're like,
"We need to deserve this moment."
Another funny thing is that, you know, Ellen...
We watched this with her a couple weeks ago and... (CHUCKLES)
She did so many recording sessions with us.
And we made her pant, you know, do... (IMITATES PANTING)
'Cause she's so frequently swimming all the time...
ANDREW: Swimming all the time, freaking out. Yeah.
LINDSEY: ...that I think after she said what she thought about the movie,
her next statement was like, "I'm not sure you put all my panting in.
"I feel like you guys asked me to do a lot of panting
"that never made it into the final."
ANGUS: Where's the pants? LINDSEY: Where are the pants?
ANDREW: Where are the pants?
And we've been in such intense territory
for about 10, 15 minutes of this movie.
It felt so right to go, "All right, now, we just kick it into high gear
"and go into crazy town."
ANGUS: Yeah, so she has her, "I left the oven on!" moment.
ANDREW: (CHUCKLES) Yeah, "My muffins!"
ANGUS: "My muffins!"
ANDREW: Yeah. ANGUS: Yeah.
- Which we tried... - (ALL LAUGH)
ANDREW: And we just go... ANGUS: We had tried it different ways,
nothing worked as well as that.
ANDREW: Nothing else worked, it was just like switching into high gear.
And we're not going to lower it now until we're done saving everybody.
And it took a long time in the course of this journey.
There was often debates about, "Who's the valued family here?"
I mean, there's Marlin and Nemo,
and then, of course, Jenny and Charlie, the parents,
and there's Hank.
And we realised Dory creates families wherever she goes.
We've tried to set up just logically that
she hasn't seen her parents since she was little.
This would be the most coveted thing logically.
But the people that you've emotionally spent screen time with the most
are Marlin and Nemo as her family.
So we had many different versions.
And it finally just felt right to earn the right to find the family,
have the reunion of her original parents.
But now the most valued thing that we've spent time with,
which is Marlin and Nemo, and Hank to some degree, um,
are the things that are at stake now to rescue.
LINDSEY: So it used to be that at one point,
we moved her reunion with her family to the very end of the movie.
ANDREW: Mmm-hmm.
LINDSEY: And that felt like we didn't get enough of them,
and it was too late.
And we wanted them to be with her, and see how...
ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: ...capable, kind of be proud of her.
ANDREW: Exactly.
LINDSEY: Just watch her through this Act 3,
and be just kind of overwhelmed with what she's capable of doing.
ANDREW: It's kind of a fantasy that every kid has,
is they want their parents,
no matter what their relationship is with them,
to be witness to them at their best.
LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: And the same is as a parent to the child.
They want to be proud parents for a moment.
So I feel like that's ultimately what's satisfying
about having them alongside through this third act.
LINDSEY: This scene coming up where she (CHUCKLES) calls out
to Destiny and Bailey,
and they kind of make the decision that they need to jump out is, again,
"It's your destiny, Destiny" was one of those lines, I think,
that we had for a long time.
That we're like, "Where is the 'destiny, Destiny' line going?"
ANDREW: (LAUGHS) Yeah.
Again, they... You can kind of tell in this whole scene.
They recorded this together.
And there's just such chemistry between the two of them.
Technically, it's just this whole third act kind of blows me away.
That it's just, on every level, every department,
the effects, the lighting, the animation, the modelling...
ANGUS: Every water effect would have been impossible
and brought all of the servers to their knees.
ANDREW: But you're also... I mean, we did save...
We did kind of save the third act
to be one of the last things in the production,
(STAMMERS) 'cause we knew it was going to be asking
everybody to be at the top of their game.
And we knew they would be at the back end of production.
LINDSEY: Yeah, at the end. Yeah. ANGUS: That's incredible.
ANDREW: So you are seeing people...
LINDSEY: It's like a little mini production all in itself.
ANDREW: The best of the best is happening right here.
LINDSEY: Yeah.
And the lighting...
I think you always wanted it to be kind of this sunrise.
ANDREW: It's gradually getting brighter.
It's just dusk... I mean, dawn,
at the beginning of her coming back out of the kelp forest.
And then by the time this ends and the truck goes over the cliff,
the sun's high in the sky.
And just to help follow along with her triumph.
LINDSEY: And this Act 3 was always walking the line between,
- "Okay, how do we make this..." - ANDREW: "How do you buy..."
ANGUS: Fish in a truck. LINDSEY: Fish in a truck.
LINDSEY: Yeah, I think that was an early idea that you had,
that you just were like,
"No, at some point, Hank is driving a truck.
"It's going to happen."
ANDREW: And it fell under such doubt
that we actually cut this whole idea of Act 3,
and did a whole different Act 3.
- And... - LINDSEY: He was still driving.
ANDREW: He was still driving, but it was like...
ANGUS: All I want is an octopus driving a truck.
ANDREW: And it was just like at a steamroller pace.
LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: And we just thought we could do it slow-mo, and all within the park.
LINDSEY: You were right. You were right.
He's trying to be nice and say that I wasn't the one that was like,
"Can we try something else?"
ANGUS: Well, often when you try other things,
you reveal what was working about the original thing.
And you can't figure that out unless you do that.
ANDREW: It was maybe more labourious
and time-consuming than we'd like it to be,
but that's not that different than almost any other thing
that you finally come to terms with.
Um, you could debate the entire four years
just trying to make one of these films.
LINDSEY: True.
ANDREW: But it was...
It does give you this boost of confidence when you say,
"Okay, we've gone too far. We need to go back a bit."
And you realise, "Oh, now I know exactly why and how to use this."
LINDSEY: Right.
Back to the music again.
This whole music cue is what I actually play in the morning now
to get my kids out of the house and on their way to school.
- (ANDREW LAUGHING) - It's the most tense cereal-table,
breakfast-table moment of like... (IMITATES HURRIED CHATTER)
And it's like, "Come on. I'm driving, we're leaving."
It works.
I recommend it to anybody...
Any parent there, just play this cue in the morning,
get your kids out the door.
ANGUS: One of the ideas I pitched that never made it was...
ANDREW: Oh, no, one of the many.
ANGUS: I had this idea that maybe Dory couldn't communicate with the otters,
but Charlie came in and, "Actually, honey, let me handle it.
"What do you need?
"Tell 'em to get on the bridge, all right." (CLICKS TONGUE)
LINDSEY: Yeah. (LAUGHS)
ANGUS: And so he would communicate with the otters,
and then he was like, "I'm quite fluent."
ANDREW: It was a funny notion. ANGUS: Yeah.
ANDREW: 'Cause it was never...
It was always interesting to see what was passed down from parent to child.
LINDSEY: Yeah, exactly. You're always...
We always laughed whenever we could find a trait
that one of the parents had,
that we were like, "Oh, that's where Dory gets her language."
ANGUS: But it slowed the pace...
ANDREW: We never asked Diane or Eugene
to speak whale, though, right?
- We never got that far with it. - ANGUS: Oh, I don't know.
LINDSEY: Did Eugene do it? I think...
ANDREW: I'm sure they would. LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: Nobody likes speaking whale.
LINDSEY: Nobody likes speaking whale.
That's a true statement.
This Act 3 is like...
Every single piece of it was trying to go through
and make sure, "Okay, does that connect to this?
"And do we need that? And what's the plot?
"How do we get her in the truck and out of the truck? And..."
ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: It's again... It's trying to figure out how you do this impossible
logistic thing,
and make it feel like it's just grounded enough in possibility
that you can buy it.
ANDREW: There's a lot of reuniting resolve moments.
Her with her parents.
Her with Nemo and Marlin. Her with Hank.
And they all were required.
And it was a dance, and it took months to rewrite them,
and find their exact homes,
so that you never felt like you were slowing the momentum down.
LINDSEY: Right.
Another fun fact... That truck driver's voice...
ANDREW: Oh, yeah,
that truck driver who is trying to kick them out of the truck,
that is Alexander Gould at age 21,
who was the actual voice of the original Nemo in the first movie.
And that is just how many years had gone between
when he last recorded Nemo, (CHUCKLES) and it was pretty weird.
LINDSEY: But we couldn't have a sequel without having him in it.
ANGUS: We brought him in to do Nemo and it just didn't work.
- LINDSEY: Frankly, it was awkward. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANGUS: But we said, "We do have the part of truck driver..."
ANDREW: Little creepy watching this,
hearing a 21 -year-old voice out of a little Nemo.
ANGUS: I said, "How would you feel about being a truck driver?"
- And he said, "I'll do it." - LINDSEY: Yeah.
(ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANDREW: And I'm hoping that in other countries, they'll do the same thing.
LINDSEY: I hope so. ANDREW: Yeah.
ANGUS: This speech was around almost from the beginning.
Vic wrote this speech from Dory to Hank.
And again, it worked the first time, even in a whole different, um, context.
And we always left it, and tried to put it back in.
It just works so well.
ANDREW: It's just such a great declaration of, like,
"This is who I am and I'm proud of it.
"And you're just going to have to deal with it.
"I'm so... I'm that confident with who I've become,
"or who I am, or how I see myself."
And I think that's why it's always lasted.
Things have been added since then with blue tangs cheering them on.
LINDSEY: Yeah, and then trying to figure out
how to get them out of the truck,
it was... Yeah.
Again, it feels like it was
many, many, many, many months trying to figure this out.
And also where this all took place. How far inland could they go?
And when could we lose them?
You know, when did Bailey's echolocation give out?
ANDREW: Yeah.
You're always straddling logistics, or, sort of, believable logistics.
And just all the character emotional needs to satisfy you as you move along.
But this is probably more similar to Toy Story
than any of the other endings that I've ever done,
where it was just a singular idea that just compounds.
LINDSEY: Yeah. ANDREW: And you keep...
LINDSEY: Adding obstacles and... ANDREW: You keep...
Yeah, hammering on it.
LINDSEY: There's a lot of things in here that were around from the original,
and we kind of loved them from the get-go.
Obviously that kind of...
This moment here where they're driving...
Angus, I think you made them redo this,
just to get the right timing, about 18 times.
ANGUS: You've got to get... It's got to be right.
When that octopus hits the windshield...
ANDREW: I can't tell you how many times
Angus asked for fixes on that shot.
ANGUS: You just need that... You just gotta get it right.
- LINDSEY: It's down to the frame. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
ANDREW: But this got adjusted.
We used to just make them... Hank start driving.
We just for some reason thought,
"Oh, Hank probably knows how to drive a truck."
And I think that bothered everybody more than anything.
I think when we finally drilled down to what the culprit was
for why we were questioning the sequence,
is that we needed to show him...
ANGUS: Learning and trying... ANDREW: Learning how to do a truck,
- and have all the limits... - ANGUS: Yeah.
ANDREW: ...and feature them of how much you couldn't drive the truck...
LINDSEY: Right. ANDREW: ...if you were an octopus.
LINDSEY: Septopus.
ANDREW: Septopus, sorry. I keep doing that.
We went down a weird path about whether we should ever go into
why he lost a tentacle, and where it came from,
and we never had a satisfactory backstory,
so we just left it open.
ANGUS: But the truth is we just didn't model it with seven tentacles
- 'cause it was cheaper. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
LINDSEY: No, it's 'cause it looked better.
ANDREW: It was 'cause it looked better. ANGUS: It was also cheaper.
Well, I pushed for it, 'cause the animators...
That's one less thing they got to worry about.
That's why Mickey Mouse only has four fingers.
'Cause it's less to draw.
ANDREW: So he's in good stead, he's in good company.
ANGUS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, no one asks how Mickey Mouse lost that finger.
LINDSEY: Yeah, you don't want to talk about that.
ANDREW: Although we should. That'd be a good story.
LINDSEY: You could just... We just, like, in the end credits
just show the tentacle floating by.
- Disturbing. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
LINDSEY: No, I think it's...
I don't know, I read something that was written
that was just saying that every one of Hank's tentacles
was about as complex from a simulation standpoint
- as a whole character... - ANDREW: Is that true?
LINDSEY: ...from one of our previous films...
ANDREW: They just want us to believe that so we'll have sympathy.
ANGUS: Here's a fun fact for the nerds.
Uh, the tentacle rig that we used on Hank
was also used and shared for Star Wars: The Force Awakens,
for the rathtars aboard Han Solo's freighter.
ANDREW: That is an actual fact. LINDSEY: Where's the credit, Lucas?
ANGUS: I don't know. LINDSEY: What's up?
No shout-out for us.
ANGUS: Well, it's all... We're all one big, happy family.
- So I think it's... - LINDSEY: The seagulls.
Seagulls are back.
ANDREW: The seagulls did their cameo.
LINDSEY: Yeah.
And then, there's a really good one coming up here.
- Here we go. Ready? - ANDREW: Okay. Yeah.
For those that have a conspiracy theory
- that we have Die Hard, uh... - LINDSEY: References.
ANDREW: ...hidden Easter eggs,
we do in this shot right here. There you go.
- You figure it out. - LINDSEY: Try to find it.
ANDREW: You figure it out.
ANGUS: That's not the only Die Hard reference in this film.
There is a Die Hard 2 reference earlier.
ANDREW: That's true.
ANGUS: For those nerds who wish to delve into...
- (ANDREW LAUGHS) - ANGUS: Other than myself.
ANDREW: I think it was just one guy, but we'll see.
LINDSEY: Clearly, Thelma & Louise.
ANDREW: I think it's just a couple of guys that are there.
(ANDREW AND ANGUS LAUGH)
ANDREW: And...
Yes, I know. I used Louis...
LINDSEY: And, Angus, was this... This was you, right?
ANGUS: Yeah.
LINDSEY: Louis Armstrong, slow motion.
This was really early on, too.
ANDREW: I couldn't ignore it.
It was so funny. It just made so much sense.
And it indulged in a moment that you realise you wanted to indulge in.
I'm such a Blake Edwards fan of...
Especially Pink Panther Strikes Again, where...
All the slow-mo fight with Cato and Peter Sellers, um...
And, of course, I like Louis.
Heard that in WALL-E.
But it just...
The confluence of it all just really matched.
It just felt like you didn't see it coming,
yet it's exactly what you wanted right at the moment.
And then being able to...
We had to finagle it a while till we could make a way
so that it just was topped off
by hearing Sigourney give her sort of summation. And...
LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: And that helped to make it feel of one big grander design.
One big piece.
LINDSEY: Yeah, there's just something undeniably satisfying about it
- when you did it. - ANDREW: Yeah.
LINDSEY: I think Angus showed it...
It was a couple of years ago, right?
ANGUS: It was a while ago. ANDREW AND LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANGUS: It was like, "I just want Hank driving the truck.
"And I want slow motion with Louis Armstrong.
- "It'll be gold. Wonderful World." - (ANDREW LAUGHING)
ANDREW: With a cigar in his mouth.
ANGUS: Also, this is an idea to try and show a reprise of hide-and-seek,
that eventually she could play hide-and-go-seek,
'cause she was terrible about it in the first...
ANDREW: In her Dory way. LINDSEY: Mmm-hmm.
ANDREW: In her own amazing Dory way.
LINDSEY: It was also trying to be kind of a little bit intentional
about why we're back on the reef.
And I think, again, we did several versions of this epilogue,
um, trying to make sure that it didn't just feel like
we were doing a quick, haphazard, like,
"Everybody's back on the reef. Happy family."
ANDREW: And one of the first things we came up with
that fell away and then came back...
I remember Vic and I came up with, uh...
I remember finishing each other's sentences about
what if it was just Marlin and her at the end,
and it almost was more of a reprise of both movies.
And once that notion got in my head, I just couldn't drop it.
It just felt so right.
And talking about the view,
and the fact that at the beginning of the very first movie,
he was admiring the view with Coral.
And I couldn't justify it for some of the iterations of this film.
But then it came back again, near the end of this production.
And there was something still off.
And that was when we decided to, like...
Would there be one more memory, one more flashback?
LINDSEY: Yeah, and it was...
And again, that was an idea we had a while ago.
And then we dismissed it, and then...
Again, what kind of happens in all these things
to make it finally clear what you need to do,
it's hard to remember the exact order of things.
But things that we dismissed long ago
as not being necessary all of a sudden,
- because of other decisions... - ANGUS: Yeah.
LINDSEY: ...felt like having this last kind of flashback
that completes the storyline,
and actually has her remember that as a kid...
ANDREW: Yeah. LINDSEY: ...she did it.
And that was why her parents had the faith in her.
ANDREW: She would ever find it. Exactly.
LINDSEY: That she would find them again.
And it kind of made so much sense.
ANDREW: And on a visceral level, it allows you in the same screen moment
to be content with both sets of parents,
- or with both families. - LINDSEY: Right.
ANDREW: To be with Marlin,
and to be with Jenny and Charlie.
And kind of have your cake and eat it, too.
You could kind of have this group hug.
(ANDREW STAMMERS)
But it felt more logical in how we doled it out.
LINDSEY: It's also cool that, like, the... For me, I don't know.
But, um, the first line of the film
was probably the first thing we ever recorded
my daughter Sloane doing.
And then this last bit
was the very last thing recorded with her.
ANDREW: Oh, wow. That's so fitting.
LINDSEY: And that spans two and a half years of her life.
Started at four and a half, and she was seven at the last.
ANDREW: That's how you measure these films.
LINDSEY: I know.
ANDREW: Our kids grow four years older.
LINDSEY: It's amazing.
And then, at one point, you wanted the end credit song
to be right at the heels.
ANDREW: Right when she said, "Unforgettable."
And then, once we heard it and it was amazing, by Sia,
to a level I never thought was possible,
of sort of this... Sort of magical, beautiful feel.
It then felt shortchanging to not summate,
from Tom Newman's score, both movies.
And we found this way to sort of let one finish
and segue to the next.
ANGUS: I still think it was a mistake not to have
- the barracuda come by right here. - (ANDREW LAUGHS)
You said you wanted symmetry with both movies.
- But it's like you see... - ANDREW: Everything's fine.
ANGUS: Just like everything's fine. We can relax.
Barracuda. That would have killed.
- LINDSEY: Quite literally. - (ANGUS CHUCKLES)
And then we're in the end credits.
Which were a fun kind of gag of Hank, um,
kind of secretly appearing in these various scenes.
ANDREW: We figured it would keep the kids in their seats.
Because it's sort of a Where's Waldo? thing,
always trying to find Hank.
And make it harder for anybody's credit to be appreciated.
LINDSEY: Yeah, there you go. It's always our goal.
- (ANDREW LAUGHS) - Have nobody look at the actual credits.
We try to...
ANDREW: But I mourned the loss of the Tank Gang so much
that we lobbied hard,
that if they don't show up anywhere else,
can we put them as a bumper at the end of the film?
LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: And it made it in.
So, and you can pass along to anybody else...
If you're watching this, listening to the commentary,
- you know about the bumper. - LINDSEY: You are our people.
- You're our people. - ANDREW: So all we're asking is that...
ANGUS: No, there's probably a few people that just...
They see the movie the first time with the commentary.
ANDREW: There can't be. LINDSEY: That's not possible.
- But if there are, God bless you... - ANGUS: I'm sure there is.
...for being like, "That's how I like to watch my movies."
ANDREW: If you're that person, then I want you to e-mail...
- (ANDREW AND LINDSEY LAUGH) - ANGUS: Next time you see this movie...
LINDSEY AND ANDREW: Call the phone number.
ANGUS: Just try watching it without the commentary
just once for us.
'Cause that's the way it was intended to be seen.
ANDREW: But pass along to other people to watch
or at least fast-forward past the end of the credits,
so they can see the bumper.
- 'Cause the bumper is... - LINDSEY: Fun.
ANDREW: Is meant to be there, too, for your enjoyment.
Well, we're finally at the end, and as you can see,
there are legions of people that work on this film.
On not only this film, but many of our films.
And every one of them is essential to getting it done.
And we're the lucky three that get to talk about, uh,
what went on behind it.
But there's probably a thousand stories
each one of those people have about the time they've spent on this film.
LINDSEY: This film is literally
everybody giving their blood, sweat and tears,
and their time and their lives,
and all of their anxiety and energy and intelligence.
And it's all what makes it up on the screen.
I think, um, it's a real testament to the people and all the artists
and technical artists here at Pixar.
But also a real testament to their love of this world and the story.
Because I feel like you can feel it when you watch the film.
ANDREW: Yeah.
ANGUS: I don't think the movie would have been possible
technically, uh, 13 years ago.
But I think another thing that gets glossed over,
just in thinking about it more,
is that the crew has matured over 17 films now.
Not everyone has worked on all 17 of those films,
but it definitely benefits not only from technological advances,
but from the crew advances of working in the same team
or parts of the same team,
educating each other and working together
to produce the best possible work.
And I think this film really stands as, like, a state-of-the-art,
not only of the technology, but also of the studio's potential.
So I'm very proud of the work that everybody did for that.
ANDREW: Yeah. LINDSEY: Yeah.
ANDREW: Everybody works really hard on every movie.
And it's just a nice reward when it can actually come together,
and you have a movie that really, really shines for it.
And this is definitely one of 'em.
LINDSEY: So thank you for watching and listening.
ANDREW: Thank you. ANGUS: Thank you.