Sound and Vision Magazine talked to Pixar’s John Lasseter about the feature-packed Blu-ray release of the Disney/Pixar film Cars. Lasseter is very much pro-Blu-ray and he comes across as being excited as a film maker with the format’s potential.
Similarly, when Lasseter heard about Blu-ray, he immediately started thinking of all the ways he could use it to enhance the experience of Pixar’s films. “I went to Bob Chapek over at Disney Home Entertainment, and said, ‘Teach me, teach me, teach me about what you can do with Blu-ray that you can’t do with DVD!’ There were two main things I got excited about. One was the new ways to do commentary, which I love. As a filmmaker, the commentary is the one true document of the making of the film, because everything’s fresh in your mind. Ten years later, I forget the stories of the little details of making Toy Story. But at the time, you know it. And the second thing is, a Blu-ray player is like a little computer, so there’s so much more you can do.
“I love making the movies for the theater, but I also love making them to be seen at home. With Blu-ray, all the high-definition and the amazing sound helps bring out the details — and we really, really stress the details. The amount of data this format can handle lets us go so much deeper into the story — the characters and their world — but also lets us talk about the filmmaking.”
Lasseter was behind the effort to make Cars an example of what Blu-ray can do, with the Car Finder Game and the Cine-Explore interface for commentary, etc.
For Lasseter, Blu-ray is clearly not a gimmick or a marketing tool, but a new, and pretty much untested, creative vehicle he can’t wait to take out on the road again to see where else it takes him. “We’ve been working on this version of Cars for well over a year — since even before the movie was finished — looking ahead to when Blu-ray would come out. We knew we wanted to create this, so we were really excited, but we wanted to wait until the technology settled down. As we get used to what we can and can’t do with Blu-ray, it’s the same thing as with computer animation: It gives us more ideas. I always say that art challenges technology, and technology inspires the art. With this disc, the art was challenging the technology. The more we get to know about Blu-ray, it’s going to inspire us to do great things that we can’t even think of right now.”
Read the full article for a lot more. I’m certainly interested in what Lasseter will come up with for future Pixar Blu-ray releases.
