How Pixar created the ultrarealistic animated film, The Blue Umbrella (interview)

VentureBeat: Was Taxi Driver an influence on that?

Unseld: I looked a bit at Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver just stays dreary. Blade Runner is the same. Blade Runner looks gorgeous to a certain extent, but the world the characters live in is not a beautiful world. It’s a harsh world. There’s a bit of beauty to it, but you can never have too much of that. There are a lot of movies set beautifully in cities where it rains.

VentureBeat: The Technicolor musicals had some of it, too.

Unseld: Yeah. I love the early Technicolor stuff. It’s amazing. There’s a cinematographer called Jack Cardiff. My favorite one of his is actually not The Red Shoes. It’s Black Narcissus.

A lot of the stuff I showed to the lighters was Wong Kar Wai – especially his early one, Chungking Express. I was thinking, “OK, this is photorealistic, but that doesn’t mean anything art-direction-wise.” I feel like there’s a lot of stuff, especially in the last 10 years, in live-action films that use a lot of CG, where it becomes very unreal. It becomes too polished and too clean. It’s a reality that doesn’t feel real to me. It doesn’t feel like it has a history or a texture. I don’t want to live in that. I was looking for something that is really colorful and beautiful, but still feels gritty and real. Chungking Express has that. It’s shot handheld, all on location, all with natural light, the neon lights. But it’s beautiful color-wise. The same thing, but more extended – it’s what I gave as reference later on – happens in a later movie, In the Mood for Love.

His American film, My Blueberry Nights, is a strange beast story-wise, but it was shot by the amazing Darius Khondji. There’s beautiful stuff that I wanted everyone to look at. In the front, out of focus, there’s something on a glass window – a bit of red or a bit of blue. It’s very painterly, even though it’s real. I wanted that painterly feel at the end. It’s nearly an abstract film. We still tell a story to a mainstream audience, but as much as we could do an art-house film within the confines of our audience, I wanted to do an art-house film.

VentureBeat: Tell us about your pitch process, because I can only imagine how scary that must be, to sit there with the Pixar brain trust and pitch. Do they let you do your spiel and then they give you ideas right then and there, or while you’re giving it, do they say, “Well, wait a minute, what about…” ?

Unseld: That would have been weird. [Laughs] The pitch was strange, because I’ve directed shorts before. I’ve worked in animation for a while. I had done talks on technical things. I was used to giving talks. But pitching something was different. Telling an emotional story just with words was something I’d never done. I don’t work in the story department. I work in the cinematography department. We have visual things to show. That was the one part I was maybe a bit scared by.

What I did then was I realized, through my first tries at developing it, “Well, I’m not good at this.” I prewrote the whole thing in the way that I would talk – not scripted, but in natural language. I recorded myself on my computer pitching while I was alone at home, and I watched it. It was really embarrassing. It was a very intimate moment, to be that honest with myself. But I did that like 50 times.

At one point I said, “I still kind of look like I’m mumbling. I’m not as emotional and expressive as I imagine Pixar people to be. Well, I’m just by myself at home. What if I just act really silly and really over-the-top and push it to 200 percent, because nobody’s watching me?” I wouldn’t have been able to do that in a workshop where you try to improve that, because people would have been watching. So I did that and I watched myself. I realized that it was just slightly stronger than before. In my head I thought I was acting crazy, but looking at it on video, it was a bit better, if not quite where I thought it should be. That helped a lot.

When I gave the actual pitch to a panel of the main directors here, the heads of story, and then later to [Pixar creative chief] John [Lasseter], it was amazing. They’re amazing listeners. It made such a big difference compared to pitching to people here I knew, some people in development who do this a lot. Pitching to the panel and to John was amazing, because I could see how they were listening. They were sitting there like this and watching me and emotionally following what I was talking about. I could see it in their faces, and suddenly I had this energy. They let me pitch the whole thing, I showed the test, and then afterward we talked about it.

The worst thing is when you’re telling someone about something like this and everyone is poker-faced. Then you spin out of control. It was amazing how actively they listened. They nearly became part of me telling the story.

VentureBeat: The look is fairly photorealistic. Did you think about that when you did your camera, that you wanted to take some of the camera from live action?

Unseld: The photorealism thing, I realized, is not just how it looks. It’s how you shoot it. It’s how you move the camera. It influenced a lot of cinematography and editing decisions. I was thinking of it more like a documentary, to a certain extent, where it feels like the set exists beyond what I shoot. There are even shots or editing in there like in a documentary – the shot is maybe 10 seconds long and you only want the beginning and the end, so you just cut out the middle. There’s a shot when they cross the street where we do that. We only wanted to shoot it from places where you could actually stand with a camera and use long lenses, so it doesn’t feel weird that you’re standing next to two people just meeting. It’s not just that it looks real. It feels real.