First Showing has an interview with Andrew Stanton about Wall-E. And its not the typical fluff that your likely to find when it comes to animated feature interviews.

The only thing I did that was a little unconventional, is the manner in which I formatted the script. I was very inspired by Dan O’Bannon’s script for Alien. His description paragraphs were not your typical paragraphs, they were actually small phrases that were all left justified, almost like a haiku, and they created this rhythm of just being in the moment of quiet and visual. And you found yourself reading the descriptions much more than you normally do a script because of that form, instead of just skipping to the dialogue. It really kind of paced you as a reader and gave you the much more visceral feel of what it will be like to watch that movie. So I used that for Wall-E — it really helped.

The article brings up an excellent quote that Andrew Stanton is known for saying: “The day we start thinking about what the audience wants we’re going to make bad choices.” I love this quote, and it is so true.

When working on a piece, you want to always put yourself in your audiences shoes, but you never want to let your audience dictate what you will present to them. I think that is where so many films fail these days.

As Andrew puts it:

we were so driven on Toy Story, we just knew we wanted to make this kind of a movie and nothing was going to stop us no matter what anybody said. When the dust settled and the film came out and it was so well received, we realized so much of that was because we listened to our gut, and I would say the filmgoer part of our gut, not just the filmmaker…

…I don’t go to see another filmmaker’s movie hoping he’s guessed what I want. I go to see it because I like his sensibility and I want to see what he wants to do next, or she wants to do next. Because that was such a direct reason Toy Story worked, because we just finally got to this point of crisis and said, let’s just go with what we want, we’ve been trying to please people for all this time, that we just know that that is the way to stay from here on out, no matter what people say or do.