Cars 3

Hi, welcome to the Cars 3 commentary.

I am Brian Fee, director of Cars 3.

I'm Kevin Reher, producer of Cars 3.

I'm Andrea Warren. I'm the co-producer.

And I'm Jay Ward. I'm a creative director for the Cars franchise.

So I actually got my start at Pixar as a story artist on Cars 1,

and I also worked on Cars 2,

so I spent a lot of time with John Lasseter,

director of Cars 1 and Cars 2,

and the Grand Poo-bah of all things Pixar Creative.

But my history with these characters

and my history with John, and Joe Ranft,

who was the story supervisor on the first film,

was a, I guess, training school for me.

I always look back on that time as where I learned the most.

And the mentorship that I had under Joe Ranft

and, of course, John Lasseter, as well,

is very important to me and incredibly honoured now

to be able to be directing Cars 3 and take it to a mentorship story.

So, we actually made a point with this film to try to mimic the start of Cars 1.

But, of course, we wanted to put a twist on it.

So we wanted you to feel like you're watching Cars 1,

and then pull the rug out, and get right into the fact

that this is the third movie and things are gonna be a little different.

We take it to the new place that McQueen's at in his life.

He's older now. He is a seven-time Piston Cup Winner at this point.

He's done everything you expected.

The real main difference now

is that he's no longer with his mentor, Doc Hudson.

One of the key relationships that we really tapped into for this film

was bringing Doc Hudson back.

He played a huge role in Lightning McQueen's life.

In this film, he's moving forward without that guidance

and without that friendship and mentorship in his life,

and how he's navigating forward without that.

It's so powerful to hear his voice.

I think it's powerful for McQueen to remember it.

And Paul was such an amazing actor

and just embodied Hud in so many ways.

We so respected Paul Newman and what he brought to Cars 1

that we went to the Newman's Own Foundation

and asked if we could use lines from Cars recording sessions

that John Lasseter had left the mic open

and Mr Newman just talking about racing

and talking about the history of racing and what it meant to him.

And we incorporated a number of those lines

from the open mic into Cars 3.

These characters are... They're like family to me.

And to be able to continue to tell their story,

the story of the mentorship and the generations,

and how every generation informs the next one.

At some point in your life, you have to

look back to the past in order to move on to the future.

I think the point in the beginning isn't that

McQueen just wants to win more trophies

and more Piston Cup victories.

He wants to race because he loves it

and because this is like his family and his dear friends.

And just being there is such a joy.

So we really wanted to hit home in this sequence

what it is McQueen has to lose later on,

when Jackson shows up,

when racing is taken away from him.

We figured that it's his passion.

That's the one thing we get when we talk to all the drivers.

They have such passion.

We want to be able to display that passion

that McQueen is so desperate to hang on to.

So, we wanted to show him racing, wanted to show him enjoying it.

But more importantly, we wanted to just show the community

and these other racers like Cal and Bobby.

We wanted to show the camaraderie

that drivers have and that just people have.

When you go to work and you just...

The best part of your day is being with the people you're with.

We have a lot of fun at Pixar working on this movie

and working with the crew, the wonderful crew,

that'll be some of the best memories I'll ever have.

We wanted to really get that spirit into the film.

So, one of the really important things in this scene is the song.

We were also lucky to get Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys.

Dan Auerbach has that magical combination

of mixing modern sounds with rootsy classic rock at the same time.

It just all comes together so nicely. He lives in both worlds.

And I think of McQueen that way. And this is a new movie.

We want it to feel modern.

We want it to feel like the world is progressing.

But McQueen has got a classic edge to him.

He's a classic character in our minds,

and we wanted the music to reflect that.

Saw the sheriff's radar on... Oh, the sheriff's ticket maker.

Ticket maker, yeah. I think Mater once called it.

Referred to the sheriff's ticket maker.

We looked at where NASCAR had gone all these years later,

we noticed, basically, the cars were similar,

but the paint jobs had gotten really bold,

so Craig Foster, our graphics lead,

and the whole art team really worked on giving McQueen

that same classic body style, but some updated graphics,

which came out really cool for this.

And the number 42 Dinoco car is Kyle Petty.

Seemed appropriate to keep it in the family with the Pettys.

Any time Mater's at a race, he's wearing a hat,

and that's an idea that actually came from John Lasseter

and is also inspired by NASCAR fans.

'Cause you walk around a NASCAR race,

you're gonna see some very creative and interesting hats.

This movie is all about generations.

Yeah, these are McQueen's,

what we would call the contemporaries.

They look like they would have looked

after the Cars first film,

so that when we meet the next-gen cars, it's really a big shift.

We want it to feel completely different.

Talk about Jackson Storm's design.

Jackson Storm is an in-house design.

We spent a lot of time trying to make sure,

when he pulls up next to McQueen, that McQueen looks old.

I don't know. We like McQueen. We like the way he looks.

We're biased, but we tend to think his design turned out good.

So we gave ourselves the added pressure of,

"Now we gotta make McQueen look old and outdated."

So, that was the design challenge with Storm.

Yeah. I think a lot of it is that Jackson just looks aggressive.

Everything about him is sharp and angular.

And Jay Shuster, our production designer,

who did the character design, called him a "weapon on wheels,"

which I think does sum him up.

He looks like a stealth fighter next to McQueen.

Even in the early stages of his design,

we were attracted to that almost shark-like nose, how it cuts down.

And we tried to keep him as low as possible.

So, he really sits low to the ground.

For animation purposes, we couldn't do this,

but we always talked about just barely being able to

slide a credit card under his body.

We were really lucky to get Armie Hammer

to be the voice of Jackson Storm,

who just really knocked it out of the park

as an aggressive, take-no-prisoners racer.

He brought this youth and a swagger

and an arrogance to Jackson Storm that totally fit the character perfectly.

A lot of what you see on the screen was just a result of the energy

that he was able to bring in the recording studio.

One little fun detail that's in this scene when it first starts is that

the Piston Cup, as it's rising up on the stage, is...

The mechanism that's supporting it isn't working quite right.

And that came out of Animation. 'Cause even back in Cars 1,

there's a history of every little thing that's around Chick,

-nothing ever really works right. He's clunky.

Chick Hicks, who's voiced by

Pixar's own voice talent and writer, Bob Peterson,

who makes Chick incredibly funny

and is always poking at McQueen and his legacy

and has a good time with it.

We were also lucky to get Kerry Washington as Natalie Certain,

who was a whip-smart statistician,

and her licence plate is reflective

of her birthday and New York.

And she had a great time doing the part, and we loved having her as a part

-of the Pixar casting team. Yeah.

The goal with her was to make sure she's the smartest person in the room.

- And Kerry just nails that. She really is. She really is.

Especially next to Chick Hicks. -(ALL LAUGH)

Exactly.

We took a ton of time getting all these stats for all these cars.

I worked with Catherine Kelly on all the motion graphics for this.

And it was a ton of work for that whole graphic design team

to get every single character's specs right.

We just laboured over that. For something that goes by super quick,

but we just wanted to make sure if somebody ever froze a frame

that they could read all of it and that it made sense.

Right. And made sense to a racer or someone in the racing world.

Not just sound like some made-up mumbo jumbo.

Yeah. John's big thing is authenticity, and that's...

What we really strived for was getting the details right,

whether people notice it or not.

And we know people

tend to watch our films over and over again.

So it's like an onion, where you peel back layers of it,

and there's always something there each time you watch it.

Armie has such energy, right?

He can look you in the eye with the biggest smile on his face

and just say the most horrible thing.

Armie was a fantastic actor to work with.

Really brought a lot to the role.

We wanted Storm to feel a threat.

We wanted him to feel confident and powerful.

And that also played into his engine sound.

All of our characters have their own

very meticulously dialled-in engine sound.

And we wanted Storm's to really stick out. We wanted him to, right away,

match his visual.

We wanted it to feel like somebody

from the future, practically, had come in.

We wanted it to have its own character,

unlike anything we'd ever heard.

We were able to cobble together the sound

through some manipulation and pitch-shifting

and a lot of other throaty noises and some bass that you hear