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Posted by Dominic von Riedemann Jul 7, 2008 |
Interviews are a tough process. The interviewer has to get inside the subject's head within the allotted time, while the interviewee has to stay friendly while answering the same old questions.
So it's not surprising to see WALL-E director Andrew Stanton snap at the anonymous putz at Garnett News Service (via Cincinnati.com) who unloaded idiocies like "Are you the Martin Scorsese of animation or is Martin Scorsese the Andrew Stanton of live-action?" and "WALL-E is a romance between an iPod and a trash can. Was WALL-E more challenging than Toy Story or Finding Nemo in terms of identifying with the characters?"
After gamely dealing with the first two, Stanton finally loses it over the last question: "You take a risk by not having dialogue for the first 35 minutes."
"There's dialogue from frame one," he says. "It's just not in English. It's amazing to me that people think that way, and I think that it's completely incorrect . . . Kids are going to get it way better than you are."
Having interviewed Andrew Stanton, I can tell you that he's a great subject: patient, friendly and willing to expose the messy inner workings of Pixar Animation. So where did this interview go wrong?
Can we say, "The interviewer had no clue"?
Neither WALL-E nor Finding Nemo have any connection to films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or Goodfellas so the Scorsese comparison is beyond ludicrous. Calling Stanton's movie as "a romance between a trash can and an iPod" is a great way to irritate your subject, and everyone's been talking about WALL-E's supposed "lack of dialogue" since the day it was greenlit.
Whoever wrote this up needs to go back to journalism school. Because no one likes getting questions from someone who doesn't have a clue.