Pixar director has a driving passion

By TERRY LAWSON
DETROIT FREE PRESS
DETROIT -- An acquaintance who had just bought a high-performance Porsche once claimed, "You don't drive it, it drives you."
One of the favored automobiles owned by John Lasseter -- the director of "Cars," founder of animation giant Pixar and the new chief creative director at Walt Disney -- is a Porsche, and any interview with Lasseter is a Porsche experience: You may turn the key, but he controls the ride.
"I've been told I'm a little excitable," says Lasseter, who is notable as the only diner at an upscale metro Detroit restaurant wearing a Hawaiian-looking shirt. On closer inspection, its design is a colorful quilt of -- what else -- cars.
"It's my auto show shirt," says Lasseter, who never misses a North American International Auto Show. This year, he attended with some of his Pixar co-workers, but in 2005, he gave Detroiters the first look at footage from "Cars," an adventure-comedy whose characters are all cars.
About the movie
The film, opening Friday, tells the story of Lightning McQueen, an overly confident celebrity rookie on the racing circuit, who goes off track on his way to a big race. He ends up in a tiny little town on Route 66, the highway that revved up a million dreams -- not to mention a classic song and a TV series. That was before, to Lasseter's lament, the interstate system turned long-distance road trips into a chore instead of an adventure.
Lasseter's love affair with cars began even before he got a summer job working as a stock boy in the parts department of a Chevrolet dealership managed by his father in Whittier, Calif. "I was a kid who loved to draw," says Lasseter, 49, "and one of things kids of my generation loved to draw were cars. Plus, I collected Hot Wheels."
Working at the dealership, however, got him interested in mechanics, engineering and design, all of which would serve him well when, after graduating from the Disney finishing school California Institute for the Arts, he went to work as a traditional illustrator. While contributing to projects like "Mickey's Christmas Carol," Lasseter followed with great interest the development of "Tron," a live-action fantasy that was one of the first to feature computer graphics.
Learning about CGI
Lasseter's excitement over CGI -- computer generated imagery -- led to him being assigned to make a 30-second test reel he hoped would be used for an animated version of the children's book "The Brave Little Toaster." But when Disney executives learned that CGI animation would be at least as expensive as hand-drawn, they nixed the idea. Lasseter did an end run around one of them, and was fired. He ended up at LucasFilm, working in the pioneering CGI unit that would be sold and become Pixar.
Pixar's short films, which bring lamps and mechanical toys to life, were industry sensations leading, with some irony, to a Disney deal to do full-length films that the studio would distribute. The first two out of the box, 1995's "Toy Story," directed and cowritten by Lasseter, and 1998's "A Bug's Life," co-directed and co-written by Lasseter, were instant, huge hits. But the round-the-clock effort it took to make the films meant Lasseter spent a lot of time away from home.
Hitting the road
"I had four sons by that time, and my wife, Nancy, kept saying, 'You know, you're gonna wish you had spent more time with them when they're grown up and involved in their own lives.' So we talked about it and bought this motor home, and just hit the road, all of us. We started at the Pacific Ocean, and drove all the way to the Atlantic, and while we could've ended up killing each other, I guess, we had the best time of our lives. We stayed off the interstate, just stopping at whatever campground or town that looked interesting."
"Cars" was inspired by this experience -- "the idea that life is the journey, not a race to the finish" -- and by a couple of "neat little old towns that time had forgot."
"Cars" was to have been Pixar's last film with Disney. Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and Disney had ended negotiations for an extension of the distribution deal, but when Disney CEO Michael Eisner was pushed out of the company, his replacement Robert Iger made it a priority to get the company back in the Disney fold. That led to Disney's $7.4-billion acquisition of Pixar in January, which made Jobs the single-largest shareholder in Disney.