A Story Is Born Part Two

By: CHRISTOPHER ALLAN SMITH
Date: Monday, November 05, 2001

The new Pixar film MONSTERS, INC. is officially a hit with an opening weekend box office take of over $60 million. Perfect timing, then, for the second part of CINESCAPE's interview with the film's creators.

Co-writer Andrew Stanton takes credit for some of the more intriguing ideas of the film, including coming up with a rationale as to why monsters hide in kid's closets, or under their beds (or, as I can personally remember, both).

"When I heard about MONSTERS, the first thing I think of is things that are scary and being scared," Stanton says. "Then I thought, 'Okay, there's this parallel universe,' why do they scare you? That got me thinking. We finally came up with the idea that they power their world with the screams of kids. What that tripped us into, which I immediately loved, was that was such a benign, unoffensive need that is so counterpoint to what kids think the monsters are coming in to do to them. That seemed pleasing."

Given the somewhat horrific

overtones implied by the premise, that of monsters scaring kids (and let's be honest, how many kids remember the monsters that scared them fondly?), one of the things that played into the development of the film was how much to scare.

"We kind of ignored it [how much to scare] and did what was good for the film," says co-director Pete Docter while describing the way the film opens with the fears we all remember from nights alone in bed. "We're trying to do it as serious and straight up and scary as we can, then spin it to make people laugh. We're trying to be scary and truthful to the moment. In terms of the design of the characters, these are guys we're asking people to stay with for an hour and a half and watch them change and grow and they've got to have appeal. Trying to remain true to the idea they are monsters, but still getting appeal and likeability."

"[Lead characters] Mike and Sulley still have big fangs and are monsters, but they're maybe a little more rounded than they originally were when we started," continues Docter. "They have horns and claws, but Sulley has blue fur. We talked to a lot of kids, looked at their drawings. We basically went with real animals but gave them a kid twist. Sulley's based on a bear... It's a matter of taste as to how far you go. Kids see stuff so much. Before, kids might see this film once. Now it's going to get drummed into their heads. That's a different situation. They're almost getting raised by these films now. Which is not a pleasant thought. That places a responsibility on me that I as a filmmaker don't want. I'm not supposed to be their parent. I just want to entertain them."

It's the drive to entertain that leads to a lot of the work done in the screenwriting process, and leads to a lot of creative dead-ends. It's the mark of animated story production that the makers aren't forced by deadlines or pre-set release dates to use the first idea that comes into their heads.

"The one big one

that we got into, maybe two years before now, was the idea that Sulley... Well, at that point the idea was he wasn't a scarer; he was a janitor," says Docter. "We gave him these really thick glasses and our thought was that at some point, he had been a scarer, but he saw what happened to a kid once he scared them and couldn't do it anymore. He used to be the best, the star quarterback, but now he's got this injury and he's got these glasses and he can't see anything. As we worked through that, it became more and more removed from the subject matter. It became more complicated. It seemed like the heart of the film is monsters scared kids. If it's about a monster that used to scare, but doesn't anymore, that's just one step removed. So we dropped it."

"They're all in their senior year," Stanton says, talking about one of the ideas from his earlier drafts. "So they were even more in their youth, and dorm room buddies. That was something that eventually faded away. A lot of it takes a very circuitous route, and that was one of them that seemed to be convoluted with too many steps removed. It seemed such a quicker read to have them already working and you can still get all the information you need. The simple, most economical things in movies seem to be the hardest things to discover. You know you hit it when people go, 'Of course, that's how you should do it.' It tends to be that you do 15 iterations to get that. When you tend to see something in a movie that is complicated, it's probably someone's first or second idea. In a weird way, you think more complicated first, then go through all these passes to get simpler and simpler and simpler. There's this Italian word for it, spritzatura, which is the art of concealing art. It's so simple it looks like no one worked hard to do it."

What did the various

iterations and constant editing finally produce? Docter spouts the pitch he's obviously committed to memory.

"The tension comes from the idea that monsters scare kids because they need the scream," Docter says. "The scream is the power source of the monster world. It's almost like plutonium. They view kids as this extremely dangerous, volatile thing. There's a scene early on where a guy comes through with a sock stuck to his back. Immediately the CDA, Child Detective Agency, which is like a cross between the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency, descend on him. They surround the place, they blow up the sock, shave the guy, really extreme measures. Later in the film, Sullivan, the top scarer, accidentally brings back this girl to the monster world. This is 10 times worse than a sock. He doesn't want to come clean, because he'll be disgraced, fired. He just wants to sneak her back. That's the basic tension of the story, getting back this extremely dangerous, toxic thing. Of course, along the way, he becomes parentally attached to her. He grows to care for her."

And it only took five years to produce.