http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_friend?currentPage=all

Stanton’s precepts are often invoked at the studio, particularly “Be wrong fast” or “Fail early.” He explains, “It’s like every movie is a kid, and no kid avoids puberty. Just dive through it—get that outline that should take three months done in one, so you get the inevitable bad stuff out of the way and have more time to plus the good stuff.” Another Stantonism is “Do the opposite”: if a woman is going to spurn a marriage proposal, Stanton will open up possibilities by wondering, “What if she said yes?” He urges writers proposing a fix for a balky scene to “finish the sentence”—to follow their change’s consequences to the end of the movie, to insure that it works throughout. His byword, though, is not tactical but emotional. Pete Docter, whose first directing job was “Monsters, Inc.,” says, “I thought the film was about clever ideas and bits, and Andrew kept saying, ‘What makes me care?’ ” A loyal dog or a syrupy score won’t do it. Lee Unkrich remarks that if Stanton “feels a filmmaker is telling him how to feel, you can see the red rising in his face—the red-thermometer face.”

Stantonisms are the closest thing Pixar has to a secret sauce. Michael Arndt, who came to the studio shortly before winning an Academy Award for his “Little Miss Sunshine” screenplay, says, “I thought they must have some foolproof system, some big Pixar story machine, but they actually just make it up each time as they go along. Pete Docter’s analogy is ‘Everyone holds hands and jumps out of the airplane with the promise that they’ll build a parachute before they hit the ground.’ ”

In the afternoons, he and his editor, Eric Zumbrunnen, tightened the film. The reshoot had solved some problems—making the beginning an amuse-bouche rather than a rebus; clarifying and strengthening the Carter-Dejah bond—but, in doing so, it had brought into relief a difficulty endemic to all stories: the middle. “It’s gone from a second-act overweight problem to a second-act slump to what we’re hoping is only a second-act sag,” Stanton told me. Any novice could start a film off or bring it to a conclusion, he said, just as “any person with decent observation skills can probably deduce if you’re sick or not. But only a doctor can diagnose what’s truly going on. You can’t fake the middle of your story: if you haven’t achieved a deep enough understanding of what you’re doing, it will always reveal itself in the middle.”

I couldn’t get up in the morning or get to sleep at night if I thought perfection was possible. In between, though, you have to trick yourself into believing it is possible, which is dangerous.

Stanton says he always had an animator’s sensibility: “I can’t remember not thinking that my bike was cold in the rain, that fish are lonely in their bowl, that leaves are frightened of heights as they fall.”

As he began to realize his value, Stanton increasingly wished for wider recognition. Julie Stanton told me, “Andrew can never get enough acknowledgment, so he’s very susceptible to flattery. What I’ve said to him—which he does not like—is ‘When is the wonder of it over? Two Oscars, O.K., “Nemo,” one of the most loved animated films ever—people like you.’ ” When she made a similar point over dinner at El Paseo, Stanton, who often offers up his recollections pre-interpreted, said, “My parents were very spartan with compliments, so my private demon is ‘Can I make something so good that people can’t help but be effusive?’ ” “Your dad has a Nemo flag on his boat, but he’d never talk to you about it,” Julie said. Stanton frowned and sighed. He’s grown close to his father in recent years, and even sports a similar beard. “To give my parents credit,” he said, “they did instill my love of movies. They took me to everything from ‘Jaws’ to ‘The Tin Drum,’ and it had a huge effect. I’m always trying to get an art-house feeling into a blockbuster.” “Have you ever asked your parents what they think of your work?” I said. “That wouldn’t count,” he said, horrified. “It has to be pure, unprompted praise.”

Afterward, Stanton told me, “I was mentally kicking my own ass, because I don’t think I have a take where she didn’t smile—and I don’t want my learning curve to be the reason a scene doesn’t work.” He went on to acknowledge a deeper anxiety: “John Carter” faced a test screening the following night in Portland, Oregon, before four hundred citizens and five of Disney’s top executives. He was hoping that the lorazepam he’d take to palliate the flight north would keep him tranquillized for the duration. “If there’s anything looming as a threat, it’s this medium,” he said. “Because if, worst-case scenario, there’s some story line or motivation that seventy-five per cent of the people aren’t getting, I don’t have many options, other than cutting it out. If I can’t cure the tumor, in a way I’d rather not know it’s there.” He twisted in his chair, brooding. “I’m only as good at solving problems as I have the ability to do something about them—and it makes me so mad.”

Yet he also wondered if he would ever escape Lasseter’s shadow. “Even on ‘Toy Story,’ my ego kept wanting to see how I’d do on my own,” he said. “ ‘Finding Nemo’ was my first chance.” Like a stool, the idea required three legs to stand. “I’d always wanted to do the ocean in animation, and I was fixated, as a child, on my dentist’s fishtank, which was embedded in a wall: what a weird way for fish to see humans. The missing link—What is this movie about? What makes me care?—came on a walk to the park with my five-year-old son, Ben. That was when I realized that my anxiety—I kept cautioning him—was making me a terrible father.” Stanton worked up an idea about an anxious clown fish, Marlin, whose son, Nemo, defiantly swims out from the reef—and is promptly scooped up by a diver and deposited in a dentist’s fishtank in far-off Sydney. Lasseter loved the pitch, saying, “You had me at the word ‘fish,’ ” and Stanton began pre-production in 1999. But Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, says that problems soon became apparent: “Andrew is phenomenal at pitching, but the pitch isn’t going to end up onscreen. And the tank story was really derailing him.” In the dentist’s tank—which looked exactly like the aquarium in the office of Stanton’s childhood dentist—Gill, a Moorish-idol fish voiced by Willem Dafoe, becomes a surrogate father to Nemo. But no matter how Stanton rejiggered the subplot it kept stopping the movie: there was no emotional payoff. And the delayed revelation of the source of Marlin’s anxiety, the barracuda attack, “was absolutely not working,” Lasseter says. Lee Unkrich recalls, “Andrew wanted to be arty in the storytelling. He was trying to be fiercely independent and prove himself. But I know he was finding it hard to come in to work, because he feared, ‘This is the film that’s going to take Pixar down.’ ” Stanton told me, “I just felt, I suck, I suck, I suck, and they’re going to replace me.” One morning over the Fourth of July holiday in 2001, while he was visiting his parents in Rockport, Stanton woke before dawn and wrote a mission statement. He admitted to himself that he’d been at once stiff-necked and craven. “Try to get fired,” he wrote, as a corrective. “Don’t be concerned about box office, release dates, audience appeal, Pixar history, stock prices, approval from others.” He added, “You have a gift for looking at the world with a child-like wonder. . . . You lose that and you lose it all.” After this reckoning, he began to ask colleagues for help, and the main thread of the film, Marlin’s quest for Nemo, finally came together: kids thought it was hilarious, and adults found it almost unbearably poignant. With that solved, the fishtank subplot suddenly became only a minor interruption to the over-all flow. “What I realized,” Stanton told me, “is, ‘Fine, I’m not an auteur. I need to write with other people, I need people to work against. It’s not about self-exploration—it’s not about me—it’s about making the best movie possible.’ And as soon as I admitted that, it was amazing how the crew morale pivoted and suddenly everyone had my back. If you own the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re still taking charge, you’re still being a director.” Aware of the irony, he added, “I learned that from John on ‘Toy Story’—every time he got confessional, and said, ‘Guys, I think I’m just spinning my wheels,’ we’d rise up and solve the problem for him.”

“We survive to fulfill our purpose for others.”