The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Paper Moon
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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 similarities
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 specific
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.