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THERE ARE CERTAIN QUESTIONS THAT GET ANDREW STANTON RILED UP. IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL: HE'S HAPPY TO TALK ABOUT HiS ROAD FROM ANIMATION TO LIVE ACTION AND THE LESSONS HE'S LEARNED. HE ACTIVELY RELISHES QUESTIONS ON HOW A PIXAR stalwart, director of WALL*E and Finding Nemo, leapt straight into a major science-fiction epic. And he frankly acknowledges his own mistakes and the challenges he encountered combining live action, location shooting and huge amounts of visual effects. But there are queries he clearly loathes, and he explodes like a firework when one interrogator at a press conference Empire attends asks who he's made this film for. "That's the worst way to make a movie. I do not listen to The Beatles because I think they know what I want; I listen to them because I want to know what they like. It's not designed from the outside I've been asked that question for 20 years at Pixar, and I've given the same answer we do not think of who the authence is That's the worst way to make a movie!"

It's a point he returns to many times, and everything Empire has seen of Stanton over the past two years - on set at Longcross Studios outside London, and at various events as he introduces John Carter to the world - suggests he's sincere.

John Carter is not an easy sell: a science-fiction movie based on a century-old serial that moves from the Wild West to another planet (actually Mars, but known as Barsoom in the books) where warring tribes with confusing names battle endlessly. Yet selling all this isn't Stanton's problem. It's Disney's Oh, he'll help out, enthusiastically introducing newcomers to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books that he's loved since he was a kid and explaining what the heck 'Tharks' and 'Zodangans' are. But ultimately it's not his job to get people into the cinema. Stanton's concerned with making sure you have a good time once you're there, and displays a Pixar-ian determination to focus on the film, not the ephemera of selling it.

Which may be the key to his success in getting John Carter this far. Films based on Burroughs' Barsoom Series have been in and out of development for an astonishing 80 years; there have been four attempts in the last two decades alone (the last by Jon Favreau, who provides a voice cameo here). Most floundered for technological reasons: prior to 1985 or thereabouts, Hollywood couldn't figure out how to colour the Martian skies reddish, let alone bring to life the planet's nine-feet-tall, four-armed, green, tusked Thark warriors.

But even with modern technology offering solutions to those issues, it remains a tough sell, and more than one studio has ducked the problem. How do you explain this complex epic to a world with a goldfish attention span? 'Disney's Avatar' might be a good start.

US Civil War veteran and adventurer John Carter (Friday Night Lights' Taylor Kitsch) is mysteriously transported to Mars, and finds himself caught in a conflict between the aforementioned green Tharks, led by Willem Dafoe's Tars Tarkas, and the 'red', human-like Martians, split into two warring tribes led by Ciarán Hinds' Tardos Mors and his daughter, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), on the one hand, and Dominic West's Sab Than on the other. Carter - like Superman - finds he has superhuman strength and agility in the lower Martian gravity, but with giant beasts on the prowl and arenas baying for his blood, he still has a struggle to survive. And we haven't even mentioned the factions jockeying for position within each tribe, or the savage Warhoons, or the role played by Mark Strong's sinister Matai Shang.

So how do you make the granddaddy of space opera, ripped off by virtually everything since (including Avatar - see sidebar on page 120), feel fresh again? Stanton's solution is simply to ignore the whole issue.

"I wouldn't have made it if I was worried about that because there's no way around that," he tells Empire. "My big thing is, 'How do I make this feel how it felt to read it?' I have no control over when people see this; I don't know what else they've seen. I just want this to be pure for what it is. All I cared about for most of my life up until 2006 was that somebody would do it and that somebody would do it right."

IT WAS WHEN STANTON HEARD THAT FAVREAU'S EFFORT HAD FALLEN THROUGH IN 2006 THAT THOSE WHEELS STARTED TURNING. HE KNEW DISNEY HAD A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BURROUGHS ESTATE FOLLOWING 1999'S TARZAN, SO HE PAUSED DURING work on WALLER "I called Disney and said, 'If WALL OF doesn't flop, would you guys consider me maybe crossing over and doing this movie? Because I know how to do it right.' They said they'd consider it, and in two months bought the rights and said yes. It was a case of, 'Be careful what you wish for'; I thought, 'Wow, I'm really going to do this now.'"

Luckily for Stanton, he felt sufficiently passionate about the books when he returned to them to sustain him over the next four years. "At 12, it was the idea of this stranger in a strange land, this human being thrown into a world he didn't see coming, and discovering it through him. But my wife likes to say I'm just gay enough. I really enjoyed the romance - I've always been a sucker for unrequited love. And here he's getting the girl, losing the girl, getting the girl and losing the girl. Plus the adventure! The books are simplistic, they're meant for a young age group, but I put a lot of value in things that stay in your psyche so I felt there was fertile ground there. I mean, they're not perfect, and I'm kind of glad: it took a little bit of pressure off that they weren't Pulitzer Prize-winners!"

So followed the four-year period of scriptwriting which continued right through the shoot and into the reshoots after filming. Stanton brought in Pixar's Mark Andrews almost at once, a story supervisor and fellow Carter fan who'd come to the studio with Brad Bird and who is now directing Brave. Soon after, Stanton invited actual Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon, another fan of the books, to join them. The trio soon found a dynamic that worked. Stanton played the same role he takes at Pixar, pushing and pulling and worrying at the story structure. Andrew was "the fearless guy, very fast", who'd generate ideas by the dozen any time they hit a roadblock until something stuck. And Chabon? "It's the obvious thing: he's just an insanely great writer. Mark and I were trying our best to fake dialogue of this weird antiquated style, but Michael, it's in his veins. He'd just make it this beautiful, poetic thing."

The trio pulled apart the book, which suffered the inevitable structural defects of having been written as a serial, and began to hammer together a story. "We put the book away, and for almost a year basically treated it like an original story. Like, what would be the strongest way to do this? What was amazing was that, when that process was over, I went back to the book and it wasn't that far out. It was a chiropractic adjustment to make these things work, but you had to have the intestinal fortitude to do that."

GIVEN SUCH LENGTHY PREPARATION, IT'S PERHAPS NO SURPRISE THAT STANTON DISPLAYS A ZEN-LIKE CALM - IF A DISTINCTLY UN-ZEN-LIKE LEVEL OF BOUNCE - ON SET AT LONGCROSS, SURREY, IN FEBRUARY 2010. SITTING ON THE DECK OF A SOLARpowered airship, he seems almost breezy about the live-action elements, and as a theatre geek delighted to be working with actors outside of a soundbooth. While his leads. Kitsch and Collins, are relative unknowns in the UK apart from small roles in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the supporting cast is as strong as they come - as well as West, Hinds, Dafoe and Strong, it includes James Purefoy, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church and Polly Walker. You won't see the last three - they're performance-captured and transformed into huge green Tharks - but you'll hear them, speaking both Martian (developed by Avatar's linguist, Paul Frommer) and English.

The chance to work with this calibre of actor is one reason that Stanton never considered animating this epic. More pivotal seems to be a desire to test himself, to see if he too could do what so many of his filmmaking heroes had done and shoot a live-action epic (on film, too, "while it's still around"). But the biggest reason is that Stanton was convinced the story demanded something animation cannot provide. "When I read the books as a kid I saw it as real." he explains "I saw a real man standing in the real desert with real creatures that were nine-feet tall, and I want it to feel like that when I watch the movie."

So Longcross Studios, formerly a World War II tank factory, plays host to Martian airships and reception rooms, each one beautifully designed and carved to look both futuristic and ancient: think Star Wars' battered future-tech meets The Lord Of The Rings' naturalistic craftsmanship. A few miles away a sort of alien cathedral/ city square is being built in an enormous warehouse until recently used by the now-defunct Woolworths, which probably says something profound about the economy. Both cavernous spaces play host to Fairbanks levels of derring-do as Carter fights the greatest battles of his life. Kitsch, as Carter, is minimally dressed in loincloth and various bandolier-type straps across his chest; West's dastardly Sab Than sports vaguely classical armour, as if making up for his lack of fight scenes in 300. As the pair shoot an airship confrontation. West takes a short break. "I've never been on anything this big," he grins, "and there's swordfighting! Lots of fighting. It's part of the whole mood of this production, that there's all this high-end technology and they still put 10-denier tights over the lens. Stanton has an interest in what's traditional as well as the super-technological."

While no-one but Strong's Matai Shang gets to wear much, it's Lynn Collins' Dejah who will be baring most flesh. Cover illustrations of the Martian princess' scantily clad form are one reason for the books' enduring appeal, and even here she wears outfits that could be crumpled to about the size of a golf ball. The good news for modern sensibilities is that she's been given rather more purpose in life than inspiring odes to her beauty, coming across less as a naked, kidnapped lady and more as a troubled fighter herself - making her burgeoning relationship with Carter rather more convincing than the book managed.

"When I read the script I was captivated by the strength and the intelligence of the character," says Collins. "She's Regent Of Science And Letters, and completely driven in her journey to save Barsoom. It wasn't until I got the part that I saw the costumes. . . They're largely tasteful! There's one that's pretty revealing, but I'm hoping that people are going to connect with the emotional journey and not get distracted by the shell."

As we tour weapons workshops and costume stores, the scale of it strikes us as almost DeMilleian - and this studio shoot represents only a fraction of the film. Fully half the effort is based in the Utah desert, hopefully giving the Martian landscapes a sense of weight and reality that CG alone can't achieve. Despite the climate there, Stanton still dresses his actors in grey mo-cap pyjamas and piles them on stilts - heck, it was part of his pitch to Dafoe and Morton that he would do so.

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"I liked that we needed all these things," smiles Dafoe. "I chose to see it as an opportunity for a different experience. You're working with a different language, you're not going to look like yourself or move like yourself. I could go on and on about how uncomfortable it was, but I could also go on and on about how much fun it was. 1 needed no convincing."

This has been an extreme filmmaking challenge. In Utah, the crew, appropriately enough, worked on the same land that NASA uses to test its Mars rovers. "We had insane windstorms that would shut the whole thing down for three, four hours at a time," says Kitsch, who was on set almost every day of the shoot, often in a harness and suspended on wires, or throwing himself around in anticipation of fantastic beasties that will be added in post. "In-between gusts, literally, we're trying to get a take in. Under a mile away, they were discovering a new dinosaur. Grips would come round the corner saying, ? found dinosaur teeth!' It was a trip."

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THROUGHOUT THE SHOOT, STANTON TOOK SEVERAL UNUSUAL STEPS TO WRESTLE HIS FILMMAKING EXPERIENCE INTO SOMETHING CLOSER TO THAT OF PIXAR, EXPORTING THE WORKING PRACTICES THAT WORK SO WELL FOR THAT STUDIO. FIRST OF ALL, he decided very early on not to watch the dailies and agonise about day-by-day reshoots, but just keep moving on.

"I said, 'I'm always going to stay on schedule and I'm always going to stay on budget. Because I'm 100 per cent positive that I'm going to reshoot, and I need as much money and support and time as they will give me for that. So why should I give anyone an excuse to scrimp on the reshoot I'm positive we're going to do? I'm going to be a good citizen.'" Since the Pixar method essentially involves storyboarding and re-storyboarding stories at least four times during production ("and each time it's basically a reshoot"), Stanton considers reshoots more a sensible option than some sort of failure of directing: "I don't get how you can make a movie without reshooting, because there's a certain part of the brain that doesn't work until you watch it like a movie."

Secondly, he insisted on calling the post-production stage "principal digital photography", to reflect its importance (there are about 2,200 CG shots - more than an entire animated TiIm). "Up until this summer (2011), so about a year-and-a-half, I still feel like I've been on a live-action shoot - but it's all been digital. But there's the same mentality that we can still change lines and edit differently. I've had a lot more tricks of the trade than I'm used to in an all-CG environment - I was able to make myself a much better filmmaker than I probably was on the shoot my first time around, and I'm not embarrassed by that! All that matters is what's on the screen. But I definitely want to be better at it next time."

Thirdly, Stanton argued for, and eventually instigated, changes in the way those CG shots were constructed, so that they could be tweaked as he went and re-done if necessary. "The factory of production was not laid out to put the product through the way we wanted to, so there were a lot of frustrating conversations and banging of heads. In the visual effects world, you're charged for every time you try something - that's how post is wired up. But we can't do that; we've got to be like on a principal photography shoot. You have to create a pipeline that allows it to be a shoot. But it's like turning an aircraft carrier around when you're working with people who have always worked a certain way. No matter how much they like your work and literally ask how you do what you do, often they don't really want to hear that because it's so daunting to turn this thing around. But that's what the movie required - and after they did so, all of 201 1 has been. . . not smooth sailing, but much more productive and much more what I'm used to." That new pipeline may also have had the happy effect of keeping the budget, reported as going far north of $200 million, under some sort of control - even if the numbers are undoubtedly still in Major Blockbuster territory.

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Finally, like non-Pixars Tron Legacy and The Muppets before it, Stanton put John Carter before the Pixar "Brain Trust" - that inner circle of the studio's greatest minds, including John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich - and took their notes into account when planning his reshoots.

"I got one big whack in the face," he winces. "The biggest thing that came out of it was, I was so concerned about people understanding all the rules of Mars that I felt I had to present a lot of it at the beginning, and it was sort of information overload. They felt that I had to reset, and I just hadn't come up with a clever way to come into the story later with a lot of the Mars issues. That opened my eyes, and I had to reshoot whole scenes, but I'm glad I did because they were reimagined better. And there was a lot of patchwork stuff. Just a big facelift."

WHEN EMPIRE MEETS WITH STANTON IN NOVEMBER 2011, THE EDIT IS LOCKED, THE SCORING IS IN PROGRESS, ONLY 10 PER CENT OF THE EFFECTS SHOTS REMAIN TO BE DONE AND STANTON SEEMS CONTENT. "MID-JANUARY it will be done, done done!" he grins "At least, the 2D version. I personally don't seek out 3D, so I gave it to someone who cares, and from what I've seen they've done a great job. It was post-production 3D. I didn't want to shoot in 3D because it's like throwing one more chainsaw in the air while you juggle, and I was worried it would distract from the film."

With 1 1 books in the series and several optioned by Disney along with this story, this could be the start of a franchise - a prospect about which Stanton is optimistic, if not sanguine. "I'm the guy that's always saying no to sequels at Pixar, but I was introduced to these books as a series and I always hoped it would be a series like Bond. I remember saying that out loud when I was 12. But it's not that I'm confident we'll get a sequel. I'm just paranoid that you can never start writing early enough. I'm emotionally fine if this is the only movie; I don't have the hubris to think it's going to do well ahead of time. But if it does well and they want to make another one, they're going to want it yesterday. And even if it ends up on the shelf, it's writing practice!"

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If the film does do well, we can expect it to contribute to the Pixar-isation of Hollywood. With fellow alum Brad Bird moving to live-action blockbusters with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and the Brain Trust now being consulted on all sorts of high-profile Disney efforts, there's a conscious effort to export the practices that have clearly worked at its Emeryville headquarters. If he has his way, Stanton will be at the forefront of that effort.

"Everybody wants to make good movies, and we make it so difficult for ourselves because we contribute to the myth that these are products that have to be made for the outside world as opposed to being, at the end of the day, art - an expression from the inside out. No matter how sexy or what the amount of spectacle you have to invest in the characters and you've got to care. That's all I ever really want when I watch a movie or read a story: what's going to make me care?"

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Author affiliation:

helen@empiremagazine.com