During this time, I also had four of my five sons. By the end of Toy Story 2 where we started to go into this period of me being this creative executive working with these other guys, my wife Nancy, bless her heart, was so supportive, and she kind of thought she was getting her husband back, you know, after this. ‘Oh, you’re not going to be directing now. She thought, ‘Be careful, John, one day you’re going to wake up and your boys will have gone off to college and you would have missed it,’ and she was right.
I decided to take the summer of 2000 - after Toy Story 2 was completed - off. We bought a used motor home, piled all five boys, Nancy and I in it, and we went right out to the Pacific Coast, put our feet in the Pacific Ocean and we turned east. We had two months with no plan to get to the Atlantic, put our feet in the Atlantic, and turn around and come back.
Everybody thought we were nuts. ‘You’re going to be at each other’s throats.’ But actually what happened is that we got so close as a family. We loved it and for the first time in my life, I started kind of thinking of just the day I was living, right then and there. I wasn’t even thinking what the next day was going to be because honestly, we got on the road [and], ‘Where do you want to go? We’ll go this way,’ and we just went.
I got back from that journey and I had changed. I said, because I knew I was doing a movie about cars as a character, but I didn’t really know the story, I said, ‘That’s what I want the story to be about, what I just learned.’ That the main character learns ‘the journey in life is a reward,’ about living kind of each day. You can have your career, you can have all this stuff, but it’s about having family and friends around you to just share in your ups and downs of your life.”
The World of Cars: All other Pixar movies feature worlds within our world. Cars doesn’t. The action takes place in a completely make-believe world. “It was really just a choice of looking at cars being alive,” explained Lasseter. “We thought, ‘Well, we can either choose to tell a story with humans in it or do it without.’ We thought that doing it without might be a bit more of a challenge, but we kind of thought that it could be more fun that way. So we chose to develop the story as a world where cars are alive and there’s no humans.
We had a lot of fun thinking what humans need and what cars need and try to find the parallels. The obvious one is a restaurant to a human is like a gas station to a car, so it became one and the same. We tried to give it the feeling of both. Tire store to a car is like a men’s shoe store, right? I don’t know if you noticed that when Luigi had McQueen try on the tires that there’s a patch of asphalt in front of the mirror so you can see how good the tire looks on the asphalt. We have fun that way in really thinking through this world.”
Lasseter on Snagging Paul Newman as a Voice Actor: “In choosing voices for our movies, I always want really good actors whose voices lend themselves to the character we’re trying to do. We never ask actors to put voices on. I also love actors that can make a part their own - ad-libbing or whatever - because spontaneity is not something you normally find in an art form that takes four years to make something, where you craft something frame by frame by frame. But in the recording session, I always want the spontaneity, because I always love to make it feel unexpected or natural.
We called Paul Newman because he was one of the greatest actors ever, but also [because of] his love of cars and his love of auto racing. I thought that this is something where I’d really love to have him in the film. I wanted to have a lot of voices in the film from the automotive world of racing and outside of it and so on, and I thought he would be great. I thought he could lend a lot to the character of Doc Hudson. It was far more than that. When we talked to him and he said yes and we were finally working with him, he got so invested in this film. He really saw the dedication that I had to making this movie not only a great story with great characters that entertained everybody, but the details of the racing world and the automotive world I wanted to get right.”
Page 2: Getting the Racing Scenes Right and Working with Owen Wilson
