Being chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios seems like it would be more than enough of a job for anyone, but John Lasseter somehow manages to find the time for side gigs, especially any involving his treasured Cars franchise. He shares directing and story credits on Cars 2, the new sequel to the 2006 hit, and he’s overseeing the creation of Cars Land, 12 acres in Disney’s California Adventure Park devoted to everything Radiator Springs, from Mater’s junkyard to Luigi’s tire shop
I was so sorry to hear you lost your father last week. Doing interviews is likely the last thing you want to be doing. Thanks for talking to TIME.
He was a great man and he died peacefully in his sleep, which was sudden but is the way we all wish we could go. It was a week after his 87th birthday. [Talking about Cars 2] is what my dad would want. He was really the first inspiration for Cars.
How did the publicity tour for Cars inspire Cars 2?
I was traveling to all these different places around the world and looking at them from the point of view of cars being alive. I kept laughing at how unique Tokyo and Italy and so on would seem from the automotive standpoint, all the different signals and roads and all those things. I thought if I do another Cars movie, I want to take the cars around the world.
Cars 2 features familiar characters, Lightning McQueen and Mater , but it’s a spy story. Where did that angle come from?
You know how Sally and McQueen go on their first date in Cars? Originally it was going to be at a drive-in movie theater and there would be a movie within a movie. So we created this spy movie starring Finn McMissile. We storyboarded it. Then we shifted the location of their date, but I never forgot about how cool it would be to do a spy movie where the spy and the spy car are one and the same.
In the opening scene of Cars 2, Finn McMissile scales an oil rig in stormy seas and hangs in the air, Mission Impossible–style, while doing battle with a bunch of evil cars. You defy all automotive logic as we know it.
I will be frank with you: I am a little boy. With the job I have, I don’t have to grow up. The little boy in me comes out when I make these movies, and one of the best things for me is the gadget stuff. I like to think things through; by nature I have to have things logical — like how would a car drive vertically? He would have these little magnetic plates that would come around and coat his wheels so he could drive on anything metal.
In that initial sequence we wanted to establish Finn as the coolest spy car ever. We knew people would anticipate seeing Radiator Springs and all the characters they know, so when the first thing they see is a boat out in the middle of the ocean, it is sort of like, “Wow, what is this?”
In terms of total box-office grosses, Cars is ranked seventh of all the Pixar movies. But given the amount of Cars merchandise I alone have in my house, I assume in terms of merchandising that it’s a much bigger financial success than most Pixar films. Is that the case?
The merchandising is gigantic. We’ve had other movies with bigger global box office, but never in film history has a movie grown in popularity so much after it got out on DVD. The sales of the DVD and the toys have never stopped, and that never happens — it’s billions of dollars [nearly $10 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times]. Cars is one of the biggest films in history when you combine everything. I think it is Disney’s fourth biggest franchise.
And half of that came from you.
I have purchased at least four McQueens. But this is really Mater’s movie. Why Mater?
Mater is so loveable. He is such a sweetheart, and we thought there was a lot of opportunity for growth for that character. I love the friendship between Lightning McQueen and Mater, and this is really about their friendship. Mater discovers that people are not laughing with him, they are laughing at him — that innocence is so much what the heart of the film is.
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