What An Artist Has To Say

There's a nice little interview with Pixar's Andrew Stanton over at Groucho Reviews. Of course, he talks about his latest directorial effort, Wall-E, which opens this week. But as the individual who oversees the development of all Pixar features and shorts, it's his view of testing movies that really caught my eye. Or, more accurately, not testing movies...

We never think of who are audience is. We always just made the movies we want to see. And I'm just immature enough. And everybody else here is just immature enough that we figure that anything silly and juvenile, you know, is probably gonna cover for the kids.
    ...But frankly, if I started to try and guess what other people want, i would make a bad movie. One of the things that was a revelation to us in Toy Story is that we hit a real wall...because we were constantly trying to second-guess or give what the executives wanted at Disney. And when we...almost were threatened to lose the whole job, we spent a couple weeks alone and just said, "Screw it. We have nothing to lose. Just go with what we want to see." And that became what you know as Toy Story now.
    So we've learned ever since then: "I'm just gonna go with my gut. I'm going to trust it." That's why I go see other filmmaker's movies. I don't go to see them to try and guess what my demographic is and what I want. I'm not a pollster. I'm not someone—I'm not a number. I'm a person. And I want to go see what an artist has to say.

Check out the whole interview here.