MEET THE ROBINSONS Director STEPHEN ANDERSON is one of the good guys. You know it when you meet him. You know it without even talking to him. Just seeing him tells you that. Talking to him makes it even clearer.

On the eve of the debut of his first feature film as a director, his own personal long awaited future, while his family were enjoying the luxury of sleeping off a long deserved first day of vacation in Walt Disney World, Steve generously took an hour to talk to us about “getting here from there�?, and feeling the anticipation of the sun coming up on a brand new, and very exciting day with Wilbur Robinson and family.

You’ve said in other interviews that Lewis’s story is very personal and very similar to yours. At one time, when talking both about your own past which is so similar to Lewis’s story, and about the tact you took with the film’s story, you said “the mistakes that you wished could have been different don't matter; it matters where you're headed.�? Knowing what you do now as a first-time feature helmer, and thinking back to when you started on this project, what does the present look like as compared to the future you had in mind back at the start of production?

Can I think about that one for a minute?

RW

Sure. Let me ask you this, instead: how do you lead a story team through writing and building a comedy? I know you were looking to make a film that was heartfelt and sincere but I also know that you were still essentially a building a comic vehicle, so what challenges does this pose for a director? Because if we look back at the pioneering Disney films, the story was principally shepherded by Walt, and if you talked about comedy you were really talking about gags and bits. The directors like Dave Hand and Clyde Geronimi weren’t so much focused on directing “a comedy�? or “a musical�? per se, they were simply directing Walt’s films. But now, it’s very different. This was your film – and being a single guiding hand is not the norm in animation. Plus, contemporary comic narrative, even in animation (thinking of films like “Shrek�?), is quite different and even with all the yucks it’s not just about gags and bits. So how do you build and lead a comic film?

SA

I think the main thing in leading a team like that, and certainly the thing that I learned on past movies as a story supervisor, that I brought to “Meet the Robinsons�? early one when we started filming our story, was the notion of keeping fear out of the room. There certainly were projects in the past where I, or other story artists, felt that there was only so far we could go in the room in terms of getting our input. And sometimes we were afraid of saying the truth about certain things – certain elements of the move that we weren’t happy with or certain things that we thought could be better, and that’s not the way I do it. The way I run a story room is that it needs to be free, open, there can’t be any bad ideas, no one can be afraid of saying something that’s going to hurt a person’s feelings or to criticize a part of the movie that someone’s going to be overly protective of. There needs to be no fear in the room. Anybody can say anything, at any moment, at any time. You can poke a whole in any element of the story. I think that’s really the key to being successful in this very collaborative medium, and a medium that takes so long. I think it’s really important to have a group of people who can sit down and really create like that. Freely exchange ideas, be it funny ideas, be it emotional ideas, you know it really doesn’t matter what kind of thing you working on at that particular moment, or what type of sequence you’re working on, it just has to be a free exchange of ideas, and it was really important to me to have that on “Meet the Robinsons�? as a director now. With the story team that we had they came through with flying colors.