Andrew Stanton Quotations

We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

Working at Pixar you learn the really honest, hard way of making a great movie, which is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you, much more talented than you, and incite constructive criticism; you'll get a much better movie out of it.

Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to movies all my life, I came to the conclusion that there were really two camps of how robots have been designed. It's either the tin man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's an R2D2.

I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archeological dig.

We're all going to keep telling love stories, we're all going to tell hero stories. It's all a question of what your own thumbprint, your own DNA, is, and what it brings to the table that makes it unique.

Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.

Art is messy, art is chaos - so you need a system.

I'm still craving approval from my parents. It took a lot of success for me to realize it was never coming. It's just not in their nature.

The happiest moments of my childhood were when my toys broke, because then I could destroy them with impunity.

I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.

Even as a kid I was never the generator of humor, but I always knew who was funny, who to hang out with.

And I'm not anti-sequel, but I just feel like there are very few ideas that are meant to be continued.

I never think about the audience. If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.

In fact, I don't think I'll ever make anything that will feel as divinely dropped in my lap as the opening of 'Wall-E.'

Sadly, my hobby is what I do for work, so I don't go off and go fishing. I go home and veg, and then I go back to work.

I mean, frankly, I'm not speaking as a representative of Disney or Pixar, I'm speaking as just myself as a filmmaker: I don't go into anything that often thinking about a sequel.

I think in the future we might see things arrive the way Prince announces a concert where a few days before the show he announces it and tickets just go up. You might see that with movies and other things.

I've always been shocked and waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop that a girl would ever talk to me, let alone want to marry me. They always seem to hold the power to me, and from my mother to my wife to my daughter, every time I try to really figure them out, and think I've got them pegged, I pay for it.

The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. Its a nice problem to have.

There's a mercurial nature, but more of a mysterious nature to women that I think is what makes them so attractive. And I think that that's what I love: Guys never seem to know when they've come too close and crossed the line, and then the temper comes.

I had never touched a computer in my life before I came to Pixar.

I'm a family man, I have kids, and I go to the movies. And I'm just going to make the kind of movie I want to see.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

Most people know me at Pixar as the guy that doesn't like to do sequels or very reluctant to do sequels.

The way Pixar has always worked is that we think of an idea and then we make it. We don't develop lots of ideas and then pick one.

Well, executive producer can mean anything in the world of Hollywood, sadly. It can be a bought title in many instances.

Well, I have no problem with 3-D but I don't think it's necessarily a blanket requirement for every film.

I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldnt get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.

There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don't know anything about, and when I learn about them they're always fascinating.

He was one of the major players (at Pixar), and we have yet to process what that will mean over time.

We're not supervised. We're sort of allowed, like an independent filmmaker, to do what we want. You don't get that freedom anywhere else. And this is the only studio outside of Disney, when Walt Disney ran it, where an artist runs the whole place. Here, it's John Lasseter, and that trickles down.

I'm twice as funny, I'm twice as smart, I'm twice as whatever when I'm around other people that challenge me.

John [Lasseter] always said that he was Andy, and Joe [Ranft] and I were Sid, and I think that's true.

If you want someone’s attention, whisper.

In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it.

The best stories infuse wonder,

I almost feel like it’s an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure.

A major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you, and to take the wheel and steer it.

Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.

There's a lot of downsides to social media, but one of the nice things is that you can cut through all the BS and go straight to the person and ask them directly. I think that's a wonderful thing. I love talking to people who are true fans or who have a true love of cinema, and so if I can talk to them directly, great.

I've been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can't translate a book literally to the screen. It won't work because it's a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse.

Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story,

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

Don't give [the audience] four; give them two plus two.

Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.

The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.

You end up using your own instincts. You end up having the guts to do what you should have done all along. After a while, we needed to give (the movie) back our voice. We went too far in listening to every single thing (Disney) told us to do.

A lot of studios talk about a 12-to-1 ratio -- they come in with 12 ideas and one of them makes it,

It's like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around. It takes a long time for things to stop, so we took advantage of working very fast and redid a large part of the picture.

The big myth is that we want to make the best computer-animated movie in the world. And it's like, no. We want to make the best movie we can make.

It'll look even better now for somebody at home than it ever did for anybody seeing it for the first time in the theater.