Monsters, Inc. and Tatum O’Neal’s Addie in Paper Moon?
Docter: No, not all. In fact, initially, we were even closer to Addie’s age with Boo. In our first draft, she was an older kid. And we really liked the sort of the scrappiness of Addie. She can stand her own against this grown man, intellectually but emotionally, too. She is just a force to be reckoned with. She’s a great character.
You said you watched it in reference to Monsters, Inc. How did that process work? What were you looking for in particular?
Docter: Yeah, we do that pretty much on any film. As soon as we kind of identify what type of film we’re making—you know, a buddy film in the case of, say, Toy Story—we start to watch as many as we can. Good, bad, whatever. We just try to notice what other filmmakers do and don’t do with a similar subject. With Toy Story we watched 48 Hrs., Midnight Run, and
The Defiant Ones, which is pretty classic. We started to realize there are key
moments that each one of these hit.
So, with Monsters, Inc., when we realized, “Oh, this is a film about an older professional guy who’s stuck with a little kid,” we watched The Profes-
sional, Paper Moon, and Little Miss Marker with Shirley Temple.
We watched a lot of these films, again, just kind of looking for the bench- marks that these kind of films hit. What are the things we like? What are the things we don’t like? I’m such an admirer of Bogdanovich, in this film especially, and of his control. He’ll have these shots that are, what? A minute long, two minutes long? I mean, I think our average shot length is two seconds. It’s just a bold move, just lock the camera down on the front of the car and off they go.
They have this whole relationship. You can’t save anything in the cutting, which is what we’re used to doing, not necessarily for animation but for dialogue. You can use little snippets of stuff and piece it together in a sort of Frankenstein way. The performance that we get was never really there naturally, if that makes sense. Whereas in Paper Moon, it’s either there or it’s not—and it certainly is there in this film.
Were you familiar with his other films? Because this was his third hit, after The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?
Docter: Yeah, I had seen Last Picture Show and what else? I had seen Daisy
Miller, I think. Not a lot of his films, but this one certainly really struck me.
Is there some sort of through-line or some sort of common element that his films have?
Docter: Well, certainly with Last Picture Show, he definitely has a thing for that sort of bygone era and even the black-and-white thing, which is pretty bold. Last Picture Show has a similar kind of minimalism to camera theatrics. He tries to make the camera as invisible as possible and as simple as possible, which then makes it all the more difficult on everything else, including the actors.
I remember one shot in Paper Moon, where Ryan O’Neal is eating break- fast, and someone comes in from the back, then they exit, and somebody else comes in from the front. And there’s all this choreography of people moving in and out of the frame. It’s only one shot, and yet you’re getting all this information out of it.
Do you have another scene in particular that made you a fan?
Docter: Well, the very opening shot is such a simple shot of the grave and of people standing around singing. And way off in the distance this car drives up. And again Bogdanovich is just holding, holding, holding, and it stops and he runs over and it’s Tatum O’Neal. Just a great introduction; right away you’re intrigued. What’s going on? There are only three people there and there’s this little kid. It’s almost like: How much can I get away with not showing you or not telling you? I think that does a lot to make people intrigued and to want to continue watching.
So how did Paper Moon change your life?
Docter: I grew up liking The Muppet Show, cartoons like Warner Bros., and certainly the Disney films. Most people talk about Star Wars being this definitive moment. I saw Star Wars, but it didn’t really have this huge effect. I like the more character-driven stuff, and Paper Moon brought that home to me in a way that I had not seen in live action, really focusing on the whole story just about characters. It was almost theatrical in the same way you might see a stage show because you’re locked in a room. It’s got to be about
characters, and yet it was so cinematic, a film that couldn’t be done in any other medium. It just kind of blew my socks off.
Can you tell me what lessons you took from it? What lessons did you learn and adapt to Monsters, Inc.?
Docter: We went through the film and charted out relationships. In a weird way, it’s almost a buddy film, as well. It actually had a lot of simi- larities to the Shirley Temple film Little Miss Marker where characters are metaphorically handcuffed together. For it to really work, you have this curmudgeonly guy who’s got his own life, his own way of doing things, and then he’s handcuffed with this kid. Story-wise, Paper Moon certainly did this really well—coming up with some social reason why he can’t dump the kid or pawn her off on some relative. So I guess, long after your question, it was probably more story beats, if that makes sense. How the relationship progresses throughout the story. And this was probably more evident in earlier drafts because as it turned out, when you have a younger kid, that relationship is a little more of a one-way street. It’s kind of like getting a cat or something. So that’s kind of the way Monsters, Inc. turned out as the kid got younger.
There’s this great line that kept coming up in pieces in 1973 and ’74 when it was Oscar time for Paper Moon. Someone said, “You aren’t a director until you directed children.” I was wondering, how does that translate for voice-directing a child for animation? What are the spe- cific challenges?
Docter: For us, we get off pretty easy. For Monsters, I initially thought, “Oh well, we’ll stand her in front of the microphone, and I will say the line to her and she’ll say it back.” Well, she was two and a half, and she didn’t want to do that at all. Basically what we wanted from her were real sounds, screams and yells, and giggles and things like that. She just started running around the room, and I thought, “Oh boy, this is going to be a disaster.” Luckily one of the sound guys just brought in a boom mic and held it. We could play. So we had puppets, and we had quiet toys and candies and things like that. That’s how we got the sound, by just goofing around, which is nothing that would be useful at all in a live action film.
Tatum O’Neal was older than two and a half, but even so, the amount of depth of performance that she’s able to pull off is pretty astounding.
But it sounds like your directing bag of tricks is not that different because by most accounts, she hated filming this.
Docter: Oh, really?
Bogdanovich would bribe her: “I’ll buy you shoes if you just get through this scene, I’ll give you twenty dollars if you just get through this scene.” On that level, she was really getting into the shyster spirit of the character.
Docter: Yeah that’s true. It seems like, and to some degree this is true even of adult actors, but they’re going along with you. Basically the whole thing about acting is kind of tricking either the actor or yourself (if you’re acting) into experiencing these emotions that hopefully read as truthful.
With kids, especially, you have to be very clever about what you’re mak- ing them do. They think they’re doing this for one reason, but for the film it’s actually giving what you need for the story.
Frank Marshall, the associate producer of Paper Moon, says Bog- danovich was “able to achieve a movie that is touching but not senti- mental and funny but without using slapstick.” As the viewer, how does it achieve that for you?
Docter: It was true to the characters. That’s what I really admire about that film and the school of films we’ve be talking about too. It wasn’t about gratuitous whacking people in the head with a two-by-four. It was funny because the moments were so truthful, and I recognized them as moments in my own life. Not literally, but in some relatable way. There are other films that do this, of course. I saw The Station Agent, which I think does the same thing. It’s hilarious, but doesn’t resort to slapstick or gags. It’s about how characters react and the truthfulness of the characters.
I know having done a very minimal amount of improv in comedy classes as an actor, just to try to know more about how it goes on. They say the mistake that most people in comedy make is they try to be funny. Really the humor comes out when you’re not trying to be funny, when
you’re trying to be truthful in the scene. And I think that’s what’s happen- ing here.
On the commentary track for Paper Moon, Bogdanovich talks about advice he got from Howard Hawks that he applied to this film. It was something to the effect of, “Always cut on movement, so the audience won’t notice.” Do you have any sort of early advice that is still valuable to you?
Docter: After doing Toy Story, I got to know this wonderful guy named Joe Grant who did the story on Dumbo; he basically authored that and designed the Wicked Witch in Snow White. He had been working at Disney in the 1930s and was still working there just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, when he passed away.
We would call each other almost every week and just talk about how things used to work, how things work today. He was very much a live-in- the-present kind of a guy. Whenever I would talk to him about Monsters, he would ask, “What are you giving the audience to take home?”
And I thought that was an interesting way of thinking about it—that the film shouldn’t live just for that moment you are watching it. There’s got to be some idea there, something that will stick with the audience. Something that they’ll walk home thinking about and will pop in their heads the next week. That’s what we’re looking for, that films aren’t just trifle and fluff. They have some deeper meaning and relationship to life.
One of the central questions in the film is whether Ryan O’Neal’s char- acter is, in fact, Addie’s father. As an audience member, do you think he is her father?
Docter: I do, yeah. But I have no idea if that’s intended or not.
Bogdanovich often talks about silent moments. He says, “It’s those silent moments that often make stars. Those are the moments when the audi- ence feels closest to the people, you’re almost inside their heads.” And as an animator, how does this translate? Are the rules exactly the same?
Docter: I’d say it’s exactly the same. As we’re starting out, young anima- tors tend to think that the scene is the dialogue—that the dialogue is the
meaning of the scene and we’re illustrating that somehow. I’ve come to think of the dialogue as almost another appendage. It’s what’s coming out of the character’s mouth, but it’s maybe not really. In fact, most often in conversa- tion, it’s not really what you’re thinking at all.
It might be as simple as when you come up and say, “Hey, how are you doing?” You’re not asking literally, “How is your health?”
You’re generally saying, “Hey, I’m your friend. Are you still my friend?” That’s kind of the subtext of things. So there are these layers to things, and I think it’s between the actual dialogue, as he pointed out, the space around them, that you really get to see inside the character’s thoughts. And that was a lesson that we learned from the great Disney animators. They would always talk about what the audience wanted to see in the characters’ thoughts, what’s going inside their heads, not what they’re saying. That’s when it comes alive, when you can really see what’s going on in there.
Why do you think Paper Moon—this a film made in the 1970s about the 1930s—still plays pretty modern? How do you think it achieves that?
Docter: To me, and this may be too obvious of an answer, it’s because it’s about relationships, which I don’t think change from cavemen days to now. You get this very clear relationship dynamic between people, and it’s infi- nitely entertaining and engaging. How many times do you go to the airport, and you’re standing in line, and somebody starts talking or yelling? Some interaction is going on, and you can’t take your eyes off of them? We’re wired for that. I think, at the heart of it, that’s what Paper Moon is about.
175