Lindsey Collins and Andrew Stanton Talk Finding Dory with CS

Finding Dory director Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins discuss the long journey to the Disney•Pixar sequel

Thirteen years after Finding Nemo became an instant animation classic, director Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins are gearing up to unleash their long-gestating sequel, Finding Dory. Back in April, ComingSoon.net brought you a behind-the-scenes look at the new film straight from a special press day held at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium. Now, with the film’s big screen release just over two weeks away, we’re pleased to present an extended conversation with “kindred spirits” Andrew Stanton and Lindsey Collins. In the below interview, the pair discuss working together for the first time on Nemo and how their experience there would keep them inseparable through films like WALL-E and John Carter!

CS: Lindsey, you were credited as a production manager on “Finding Nemo” and have worked with Andrew ever since. Where did this friendship start?

Andrew Stanton: Well, the friendship has yet to start! (laughs)

Lindsey Collins: Yeah! Who says we’re friends?! (laughs) I guess it started with “Nemo.” The production manager is the person who, kind of on a daily basis, is in every single meeting with the director. They’re making sure they’re in every place they need to be. That meant that he and I were basically attached at the hip at that point and through the film. Then he left to go work on “WALL-E” and I went on to “Ratatouille.” He was gone for awhile and came back saying, “I hope you’re not on anything. I was thinking maybe you could come work on ‘WALL-E’ with me.” I was like, “This old thing? I’m off of it! I’m going to go work with you!” Then my producer on that was like, “Wait, what?” But it was all okay. Since then, I think it’s been something where Andrew and I are like kindred spirits in the sense that I like the way he works. I like his style. I like his pace.

Andrew Stanton: It’s like finding a good band. There’s just this chemistry that you try to post-analyze later in meetings like this. You don’t think about it. It just works. You just go, “Great!” because you quickly find out how rare that is. It’s not about thinking the same. It’s about complementing each other. Sometimes that’s because you’re thinking about the thing that the other person isn’t thinking about.

CS: How did Monterey become the setting for “Dory”?

Andrew Stanton: Because we didn’t want to travel too far!

Lindsey Collins: Originally, [Andrew] wanted to set it off the coast of California because we were so intrigued with the kelp forest.

Andrew Stanton: The kelp forest was big on the first movie. We all got [scuba] certified here for “Nemo” and we all fell in love with the kelp forest. Then we all got depressed when we found that you couldn’t put a kelp forest in Australia. It doesn’t exist. In a weird way, it started with the simple desire for that environment to be in the movie. But so was the first movie. The first movie was build out of a lot of strange desires to see things underwater. I had this list of things that I wanted to see and little did I realize until later that they’re all in the submarine ride that I went on at Disneyland as a kid. I was like, “That’s where they all came from!” It’s all a vicious cycle.

Lindsey Collins: So from there it was the kelp forest and otters and sea lions. At some point we were like, “So it’s Monterey?” That’s where all that is. Pretty early on, too, [Andrew] knew that he wanted Dory to be from some kind of aquarium.

Andrew Stanton: Yeah, how else do you explain that she knows how to read and that she speaks whale? You needed something that was very eclectic.

Lindsey Collins: And that provided her the opportunities to learn all this stuff.

CS: Was it important for you to answer those questions? After all, it doesn’t really matter in the first film that she knows how to read unless you’re really nitpicking.

Andrew Stanton: No, but we used it kind of as stepping stones or starting points. It was really about making the story symbiotic with not going to the same place twice. I wanted to expand the universe of what the first film felt like. I wanted it to be complementary and I didn’t want to go somewhere different just for the sake of being different. Even when you take everything off the list that we saw on the first movie, the list is still massive. You could do dozens of movies. The ocean is that big with that much life and that many kinds of looks. We ultimately had to just pick something and start building from there.

Lindsey Collins: A lot of it came from asking, “What do we know about Dory?” We know she suffers from short-term memory loss. We know she speaks whale. We know she reads. Then [Andrew] started making this weird list of characteristics. If we tried to explain it all, it wouldn’t be cool, but there are a couple things that you’ll see that might make you go, “Oh! That’s why she did that!”

Andrew Stanton: I also had the “Toy Story” movies as a guideline. I get just as much a thrill of connecting dots that weren’t meant to be connected — from “Toy Story” to “Toy Story 2” to “Toy Story 3” — as the people watching it. It’s just fun to use every part of the buffalo. Make it all essential. You start there when you can.

Lindsey Collins: That is your kind of footprint as a director.

Andrew Stanton: I don’t like hanging chads.

Lindsey Collins: Hanging chads, yeah. You’re not a fan. You try to tie things up. Even things you’re not even aware you’re tying up sometimes. There’s obviously some level to your brain that goes for that.

Andrew Stanton: It ultimate comes to trying to make great art — and I’m not saying that what I do is great art — but it’s what you aspire to. You have to always ask, “Can I tell it with less? Can I show it with less? Can I make everything essential?” That’s when things become garish or melodramatic. When there’s too many notes.

Lindsey Collins: And too much convenience. But Monterey was perfect. It had everything we wanted and it’s two hours away.

CS: And it was in “Star Trek IV”!

Andrew Stanton: Can you believe that that got by me? I didn’t know it. I mean, I knew it, but I didn’t even realize it when we were making the film.

CS: There’s a pretty powerful line in “Finding Nemo” about Dory’s parents. Was that something that you always knew was there and could serve this story or did that have to be rediscovered?

Andrew Stanton: It was always there. It was always kind of loaded. I remember writing that line and going, “Okay, this is the one hint that there’s loss in her life.” It’s the only thing that justifies why she get so upset in “Finding Nemo.”

CS: One of the great aspects of “Finding Nemo” was that Nemo was, essentially, disabled with his bad fin. Now we’re seeing a number of other characters with disablities in a seven-legged octopus and a whale that can’t use her sonar. Was that something that you very actively wanted to reincorporate into the story?

Andrew Stanton: I didn’t take it too literally as being disabilities. I took it as a representation that all of us are imperfect. All of us are flawed. Whether that’s physically or mentally or character-wise, it’s more that there’s just no perfect person. We all feel sometimes that there’s something we’re deficient at. Eventually over time, if you’re lucky, you kind of go, “This is just who I am and the world’s just going to have to deal with it.” You just start to embrace who you are and accept it. There’s something very freeing about that.

CS: Do you feel that this story has aged with you? Is this a story that you would have told if you went immediately into a sequel a decade ago?

Andrew Stanton: That’s a good question. I’m not sure and it may be too soon to tell. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if this is something I wouldn’t have been able to do years ago.

Lindsey Collins: When we give the interview after the movie comes out, there is an answer I have to that question that I will not give right now. How about that?

Check back soon as we’ll have even more Andrew Stanton, Lindsey Collins and the rest of Finding Dory‘s cast and crew between now and the film’s release in theaters June 17!