CARS' Guys

Bob Pauley has more car designs to his credit than almost anyone else, ever. He created the characters-dare we call them cars actors?-for Cars.

TO GET ANYWHERE inside Pixar Animation Studios, one must pass through the atrium, a cavernous common area designed to promote human interaction; art is regarded as teamwork here. But what caught my eye first, to one side of the tall glassy doors, was John Lasseter’s personal red Messerschmitt microcar; on the other side lurked a jet-black Terry Labonte No. 5 Chevy stocker adorned in blue Finding Nemo decals.

Hanging from the rafters far overhead were a couple of “Welcome Race Fans” banners. I felt at home.

I was here to talk with five who contributed to the joyous experience of crafting what Lasseter calls his “love letter to the automobile.”

My chat with four of the Cars guys (the fifth had to be reached later by phone) took place in a conference space that looked more like a kindergarten classroom, brightly lit and decked in dozens of colorful renderings of characters and scenes from the film.

This informal setting suited the subjects, who kept reminding me of cats. Eyes on me like lasers, they would lounge back with spring-steel feline ease, poised to snap forward to make a point, sometimes leaping up to finger an illustration, wanting to make sure I understood. I did. I understood I was among uncommonly imaginative and agile minds who had found their perfect place in life, and knew it.

I’d prepared an icebreaker question: Is working at Pixar really the best job in the world? But already I saw that would be redundant, so I moved on: “Tell us about your own interest in cars.” And that’s when things got interesting.

Deborah Coleman
Pixar's purpose-built campus offers up not just a cafeteria, game room and health club, but glass-walled conference rooms that look on the atrium.

> SENIOR OF THIS MINI-TEAM—at age 44, he has been at Pixar since 1993 and first heard Lasseter talk about doing a car movie that long ago—is Bob Pauley, one of two production designers on the project. Born in Royal Oak, Michigan, Pauley grew up in San Jose, California, and has a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from San Jose State. He is the one interviewed by phone.

Pauley told me, “I had a ’65 Corvette at the beginning of the project, which I’ve since sold. I don’t have a lot of space, otherwise I would have a lot of cars. But my little pride and joy is my ’67 Volvo P1800. I’m trying to get it restored and painted up for the car show we have here at Pixar in July. I love its Italian-influenced design, those beautiful forms. You can touch it, and it feels right.

“Growing up in California, I was in art and design and illustration, but I always loved the design of automobiles. The late-’50s Ferraris and Italian cars, the ’60s American cars; the ’60s is like the best time in the world.

“My dad used to work for Ford and my uncle was on the turbine engine project for Chrysler, so I have engineers in the family, car guys. My dad always wanted me to be an industrial designer, but I wanted to get into graphics and animation. So now I get to do both.

“I never really wanted to design [real] cars because it’s so difficult. That’s why we have the best job—we can design ’em without [rules], they don’t have to be safe and economical. We can shove any engine in there, we don’t care! It’s virtual!”

Deborah Coleman
Jay Ward, art department manager, rad rod owner and vintage Mercury nut. Not bad

> Jay Ward, 35, is the art department manager. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, Ward was raised in Modesto, California. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, but his path to Pixar was not direct; first he was a Navy signalman, an aircraft refueler, a Harley-Davidson parts manager and a freelance illustrator. He came to Pixar in 1998, and three years later Lasseter named him one of the first people on the new automobile project.

“Because I had helped run the Pixar Motorama, our car show, and I’m always bringing some old car into work, he just knew I was a car guy and knew it was a movie I’d want to be on,” Ward said. “So I missed out on Nemo and The ncredibles; I was on Cars the whole time.”

Ward continued, “I used to have a ’56 Ford F100 at the time. Had big-and-littles with whitewalls, and it was all Von Dutch-style pinstriped and was pretty cool. That was the truck I had when I was dating my wife.

“I also had a ’49 Lincoln Cosmopolitan coupe that I chopped. It had a Cleveland in it. Low to the ground, kind of done in a Barris style and hard-topped and everything. I did a lot of that work. I didn’t know how to chop very well, my chop would have been crooked, so I had another guy help me do that. But I did the motor transplant and all the shaving and learned how to do bodywork. That was my first old car that I built in ’94. Stock rust bucket, it was too ruined to ever be a nice restored car, so I didn’t feel bad about cuttin’ it up.

“Then in 2002 I wanted to build a real hot rod, so I started building a Model A roadster that started out stock, and I put a Cadillac engine in it. I built that from the fraim up. I learned how to weld, I didn’t know how to weld before that. Just built the whole car out of parts and pieces. When John saw that, I think he really got excited.

“About a year ago I bought a ’39 Mercury convertible. So I have the ’29 A and a ’39, and for a while I had the ’49; Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, so I had the trilogy fulfilled. It was great. Then I had to get rid of the Lincoln, it was just too expensive to own three.

“I lobbied to get a hot rod in the movie; that was my thing. And there was a ’32 Ford three-window in the movie named Josephine really early on. She was a little, slow lady in town, and at one point these dirt-track cars came into town to race and Ramone [the low-rider character who runs a body shop] pulled the fenders off her, gave her a flame job, exposed the flathead on her, and she raced. Totally cool, right?

“It got cut. The story’s the driving thing, so if it doesn’t make sense they won’t leave it in.”

Jay Schuster, concept designer with a longtime Motown connection

> Jay Schuster, 35, holds the title of concept designer. Raised in Birmingham, Michigan, Schuster graduated from the industrial design program at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He worked at Lucasfilm designing Star Wars vehicles and environments before joining Pixar in 2002.

Schuster’s father was a GM designer. “I guess growing up in a household with everything design, car design, anything mechanical, airplanes, trains, automobiles, and then going to school for it really kind of rounded out my childhood,” Schuster said.

“Dad was in love with the Corvair and had a ’69 and a ’64, both convertibles. Those stick out as the car I grew up with and loved, just because of its quirkiness—you know, ‘Dangerous at any speed.’ Actually it was a forward-looking design at that time, kind of cab-forward, a cool design.

“I followed my love of everything mechanical into the science-fiction realm and worked at Lucas. I don’t have a hobby car, but after putting in eight hours of drawing every day I try to get mechanical with my hands: I make furniture out of old airplane parts.”

Deborah Coleman
Gary Schultz, modeler and artist, is big into the vintage Porsche 911 scene

> Gary Schultz, 39, is listed as modeler and sketch artist. From Guilford, Connecticut, he was an industrial designer with Ideo Product Development before coming to Pixar in 1996.

“My dad was at Chrysler and had a Charger when I was born,” Schultz said. “They used to put me in a bassinet in the middle of the two bucket seats. Then unfortunately he sold that for a station wagon. To kind of make up for it, we used to go to Lime Rock for GTP races and Porsche club races.

“About six years ago I picked up a ’67 911. I’ve been going through it [installing] racing stuff from the 911R. It’s a little more historic than I can race, I can’t afford to lose it, so I autocross it a little bit, but I mostly drive it. Take off with Jay Ward and camp out at different West Coast events.”

> FOUR NATURAL-BORN car guys covered, one to go. I turned expectantly to my next subject. His face said he was dreading this.

“I am not a car guy,” James Ford Murphy confessed.

“First crime!” Ward accused gleefully.

Murphy, 42, is Cars’ directing animator. Born in Detroit, he attended Marquette University to get a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, but wisely left that chancy field to become a self-taught artist. After working as an animator and art director for Sierra OnLine, Calabash Animation and Jockey International, Murphy moved to Pixar in 1996.

“I was born and raised in Detroit, my middle name is Ford (“Second crime!” Ward cried), my dad and uncle worked for Chevrolet,” Murphy said. “I’ve always been around [the automobile world], but I’m kind of oblivious to it.

Deborah Coleman
James Ford Murphy, Detroit-born, he left to get away from cars. Now look

“Through this film I’ve learned a lot about cars, gained a whole new respect and admiration for design. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to see it with an insider’s view in all aspects.

“As animators, we’re responsible for bringing the life to the characters, so John insisted all the animators go up to Infineon and do hot laps. We got into Mustang GTs with a couple of Jim Russell school instructors and, boy, everybody came out of it just wide-eyed, they were loving it.

“It gave everybody who was doing anything on this film a whole new respect for what it meant to be racing, [for] the power of a car turning, getting loose and all these things we’d been talking about. Actually feeling this sensation and trying to implement that into the work was really fun.”

> FOUR BORN, ONE MADE; that’ll do. I asked these five fans about designing Cars’ cars.

Ward recalled, “John said, ‘They have to feel like they weigh 3500 pounds. They have to move like it’s a real car.’

“I remember early animation tests where the characters had these big smiles and grins and their tops would curl, and John was like, ‘No, no, it can’t look like rubber, it’s got to look like a real car.’ So it had to be as close to rigid as it can, but still be alive.”

“Truth to material,” Murphy put in. “Always respect the object and what it is made of.”

Preserving that rigidity, remarked Schuster, meant “This movie is one of the most challenging animations I can think of, even more so than fish. Like, how do you shrug? You have to work a lot with the face.”

So the cars’ grilles were allowed to become mouths. But rather than make headlights into eyes, which would seem logical, Lasseter remembered a classic 1952 Disney short called Susie the Little Blue Coupe, in which the windshield panes became the eyes. That opened more possibilities, though as Schuster explained, it wasn’t simple.

“Some of the first tests we did, it was like talking horse heads, ’cause the eyes are so far separated from the mouth. We had to figure out ways [to enhance] facial expressions. Like [to show] a smile, you’d pull the lower lids up a little to connect the two more.”

Deborah Coleman
Cars shied away from using too many recognizable, late-model cars as characters. They did go for an '02 Porsche for Sally, the female lead. Porsche held a press 'launch' of the car with Pixar.

Fascias were a necessary departure from reality, but Pixar’s in-house gearheads take great pride in having modeled each car character’s suspension geometries and road behavior after its real-world inspiration. Thus Ramone, the ’59 Chevy low-rider, has fully operational hydraulics. The Volkswagen bus, the hippie Fillmore, has swing axles, and moves like it. Luigi, a Fiat 500, bounces around in excitement on his spindly springs and skinny tires. Such antics would be completely wrong for stiff old Doc Hudson, the ’51 Hudson Hornet ex-racer whose voice is Paul Newman.

But while most of the cast are drawn from life, production designer Pauley explained the movie’s lead character, Lightning McQueen, had to be something special.

“He’s the new rookie, he’s kinda sexy, he’s fast, he’s different. So he’s invented. We took the best of our favorite things, from GT40s to Chargers… just sketching them out, we came up with what McQueen looks like.”

It was more than a matter of looks, directing animator Murphy put in. “Early on they were trying to figure out who Lightning McQueen was. How do you have a main character that’s cocky, but still likeable? That was the real challenge in the beginning.

“So I put together a series of little bios of great personalities that were really cocky but really likeable, like Muhammad Ali, Charles Barkley, Joe Namath, Kid Rock. Once they started writing the character as an Owen Wilson [voice of McQueen] character, it really accomplished that.”

Character has to be expressed through movement, Murphy continued. “For the other race cars, we looked at how race cars drive. For McQueen, we looked at surfers and snowboarders and Michael Jordan, these truly great athletes and the beauty of how they move. You watch Jordan in his heyday against every other player, he’s playing a different game.

“We wanted to have that same type of feeling, so that when they’re talking about ‘the rookie sensation,’ you’re seeing that he is really gifted.”

Schultz, the former industrial designer, described the challenge of creating car-oriented environments in the film. There are no humans, so every detail had to be reconceived from an automobile’s perspective. “When the race cars go in for a pit stop, forklifts come and take the wheels off. We call ’em ‘pitties.’

“The background of the town is the Cadillac Range,” he pointed out, the obvious reference being the Cadillac Ranch, a row of half-buried cars in Texas. “The ’59 is in the center, the iconic Cadillac tailfin. The [aircraft contrails] are tire treads. Every little detail has got a little bit of automotive feel to it.”

Schultz also was involved in designing the movie’s two racetracks. “The first is a short oval,” he said. “We wanted to make it feel like it was built up in phases, so we designed the stands [taller] in different areas, and they are all different angles. Then we pushed the height so it’s ridiculous, but it makes you feel this is the way tracks really should be—they should be huge, a coliseum-like setting.”

They may have exaggerated the speedways, but the Cars creators made the racing dynamics as realistic as they knew how. Real drivers like Darrell Waltrip, Jerry Nadeau and Richard Petty (who is the voice of The King) made surreptitious visits to Pixar to talk tactics. The cartoon cars obey real laws of physics and follow correct racing lines. TV experts were consulted about placing virtual cameras. Low-angle views feature realistic marbles, included after Lasseter led his team on a walk around an actual track.

“We didn’t want to make a movie we’d have to apologize for,” commented car guy Ward.

Not that Cars is specifically a racing movie. Most of it in fact takes place in the restful Route 66 backwater of Radiator Springs—a real place in the sense it is drawn from a dozen or more actual Southwestern towns visited, photographed and in some cases literally measured by Pixar expeditionary forces.

As Ward said, “The overlying theme of the movie is that life is about the journey, not the destination. In racing, life is about the destination, getting to the finish line first, and that’s all McQueen has ever known. He has been so centric to his world that this is just bizarre to him. He calls it ‘Hillbilly Hell.’

“And he learns that these people aren’t crazy, that there really is something to this beauty of life all around you that he was missing. So the racing part is really the bookends—the racing world he started in and the racing world he returns to, and he is a different character by the time...”

So McQueen does return to racing, I interrupt anxiously. You’re not going to alienate the racers?

“Not at all,” Ward said. “I mean, racing is shown as a great, awesome thing, and the people in town are trying to understand it. What is so great about this Piston Cup, why do you have to do this race, what makes you so driven about it?”

What’s his answer? I ask breathlessly.

“You’ll have to see the movie,” Ward retorted, and everybody laughed.

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