Riding Away With Brian Fee and Kevin Reher #Cars3bloggers

The director and producer of a movie is who really controls the direction.  We got to talk to both Brian Fee (director) and Kevin Reher (producer) and ask them their thoughts on Cars 3.  

Originally Cruz Ramirez was going to be a male.  We asked Brian about changing the character to a woman instead:

Really early on in the process of this film the character was a male.  We eventually realized that we were missing an opportunity here.  I mean, I have two girls at home.

I wanted something for my daughters.  I wanted a character for them to look up to.  My daughters, I would see them afraid to do something.  If they thought they were going to be bad at it, they just wouldn’t even try it.  It’s human nature, but it still breaks your heart as a parent.  Everyone’s bad at everything at first…That’s just how it goes!  I remember talking with my girls about playing a musical instrument, taking lessons, and I said what about guitar?  And they said, Guitar’s for boys. I just thought you’re too young to start assigning these labels and not being interested because you’re deciding that’s for that other group.  Everything that happens at home, it gets put in our back pockets.  We come to work the next day and we start talking about story.  It slowly starts to blow up and one of our writer’s also has girls, and she’s feeling the same thing.  She was talking about her own experience where animation is also a male dominated business!  When we talked to a lot of story employees at Pixar, a lot of females from producers to story artists, and we learned things that I would’ve never have known from people that I’ve worked side by side with every day and admired their work.  I never realized that they’ve never thought they were any good.  They, they said in their own personal story, they didn’t feel like they were good enough to be there, and they would work their tail off just to continue to have the privilege to be there.  Perhaps this is over-generalizing, but from their perception, the male counterpart doing their same job just seems naturally confident!  You know?  They didn’t have that kind of confidence.  The awareness of that gave them even less confidence.  We started just paying attention to all this stuff, and we thought Cruz needs to be a girl character. 

The first thing we did was made her a female.  We decided to not rewrite the part and just make it a female. That didn’t work.

The original Cruz as a male character was working at the time.  He was a sycophantic assistant and was funny because he wasn’t confident. He didn’t have any bite to him.  That was somehow entertaining as a male character.  He was a puppy.   As soon as we gave it a female voice, it was all kinds of wrong.  We learned our lessons, and quickly learned that one.  We started to write the character with more bite.  That’s why we have the scene where McQueen starts blaming her and lashes out at her and she just bites him back.  That’s the reason we wrote that scene that way is because we thought what would Cruz really do?  She was easily the hardest character and quite frankly, the most important character in film.

We asked about casting and Kevin told us:

We watch the reels, and then we put together a list of 10 people.  Then that gets down to maybe two or three.  Then we go to John Lassiter.  Usually the one we like the best is the one John agrees. 

Soundtrack and score add so much to every movie, and it’s super important to the overall effects.  We asked how did the soundtrack start  come about for Cars 3.  Brian told us:

We knew we wanted Randy back.  That was a no brainer.  

Kevin told us:

Randy does amazing small moments.  He respects not stepping on the humor which is often very difficult for some of the composers.  

Randy also does a full orchestra whereas a lot of composers will just do the string section one day.  Then they’ll do the horn section the other day.  He likes everybody in the room, and they love him for being able to be in the room together.  I mean, they gave him a standing ovation at the end.

We learned so much about Cars 3 in this interview.  (You can read my earlier one with Brian Fee here.)  Is there anything you learned or wished we would have asked?

Have you seen Cars 3 yet?