John Lasseter Interview For ‘Cars 2′

Not only an animator, producer, writer and chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, John Lasseter has directed some of cinemas best loved animated movies in Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bugs Life, Cars and now Cars 2. His latest follows star racecar Lightning McQueen and the incomparable tow truck Mater as they take their friendship to exciting new places when they head overseas to compete in the first-ever World Grand Prix to determine the world’s fastest car. But the road to the championship is filled with plenty of potholes, detours and hilarious surprises when Mater gets caught up in an intriguing adventure of his own: international espionage. Torn between assisting Lightning McQueen in the high-profile race and towing the line in a top-secret spy mission, Mater’s action-packed journey leads him on an explosive chase through the streets of Japan and Europe, trailed by his friends and watched by the whole world. Adding to the fast-paced fun is a colourful new all-car cast that includes secret agents, menacing villains and international racing competitors. ‘Cars 2′ is out now in the US and comes to UK cinemas July 22nd. Check out what John Lasseter had to say about the film below.

How did the idea of the globetrotting and Spy elements of Cars 2 come about?

John Lasseter: For Cars 2 the spy movie came out of a scene that took place in the Drive-in movie theatre in Cars 1. That scene shifted, but we had developed a movie within a movie, a spy movie. I love spy movies, that’s when we first came up with the idea of Finn McMissle. I always thought it would be really cool because in our world the spy and the spy car are one and the same. Even though that got cut from the first movie I always had that in mind. I thought it would be fun if we had a chance to do a new film.

The travelling around the world in Cars 2 was inspired by doing the publicity for the first Cars movie. I kept looking out the windows and thinking how our characters would do in Tokyo, Paris, London, Italy…I also thought it would be fun to see the Cars version of these places. So we thought Spy movie, you can go all around the world, that would be really cool to do. We wanted to take the characters around the world.

Cars 2 starts a few years after the first movie, Lightning McQueen is a champion, he’s won the Piston Cup, he’s living happily. He gets invited to this World Grand Prix, this international race of champions. But he’s never taken his best friend, Mater, along with him. Because he’s not sure how he’ll do outside of Radiator Springs. But he takes him on this big trip around the world because he’s his best friend and Mater is Mater, he’s embarrassing and causes him to lose a race. Because of that their friendship sort of fractures and splits. There’s a lot of heart with this story of two friends breaking apart and then coming back together. That’s what the heart of the film is. It was really important for us, even though it’s a big spy movie and it features a lot of action around the world, we still wanted to have that Pixar heart in our film.

It’s Pixar’s 25th anniversary this year…

John Lasseter: We’re very proud it’s our 25th anniversary. It’s typical Pixar though, we’re so focused on our movies, finishing Cars 2, working on Brave and the sequel to Monsters Inc, Monsters Univercity. We’re working on all those and I remember someone saying, “hey, you realise that this year is Pixar’s 25th anniversary?” We were like, “IT IS? Oh!” (Laughs) We didn’t even realise it at the time. We’re so proud of Pixar. With all of our films we work so hard to make them great, for audiences and for the people who work so hard on them. Also, no matter what the subject matter of our films is, we want there to be a heart. We want all the films to stay with audiences for a long time.

You’ve got an incredible cast for this film, a lot of great newcomers…..

John Lasseter: We were very excited to get Finn McMissle to be voiced by Michael Caine. That was so awesome, MICHAEL CAINE (laughs), one of the greatest actors that ever lived. He was fantastic, he has this twinkle in his eye that comes through in his voice, that’s so much fun, he’s an amazing actor. Emily Mortimer as well, who’s this lovely, wonderful, sweet, beautiful British actress. We have John Turturro who plays this Italian Formula 1 car, he’s comic gold, he’s fantastic. Eddie Izzard, this BRILLIANT British comedian, so fantastic. We have such a great cast for Cars 2, it’s really fun to expand the world of Cars, all these new characters, because when we travel around the world one of the things we wanted to do was have Japanese Cars, British Cars, French Cars, German Cars, Italian Cars, all come to life.

There’s so much detail to the different cities in Cars 2, it’s pretty astonishing. What was that like?

John Lasseter: I really want to make the worlds in our movies believable. In Cars 2 it was so much fun to take these places that I dearly love, I’ve travelled to these places, each of them is so different, but each of them is so magical. I think because I’m born and raised in California, going to these places and seeing how beautiful the buildings are, how old they are, also the wonderful rich history that is right there. Then re-conceiving that in a world for where Cars are alive, so you see Car parts in all of the buildings. The more you look in this film, the more you will see the automotive influence on all the buildings, that was fun bringing to life.