WALL-E director says the Pixar classic is still protecting him 18 years later

But there’s a subtler connection between the two movies, as Stanton told Polygon in a Zoom interview, alongside In the Blink of an Eye writer Colby Day: Stanton used WALL-E to win arguments with the studio over how he and Day approached the movie’s story.

In the Blink of an Eye features three plot threads that lightly connect across millennia, while suggesting that some human truths never change, particularly about the most important things in life. In the first storyline, set 45,000 years ago, a Neanderthal family struggles for day-to-day survival. In the present day, post-grad anthropologist Claire (Rashida Jones) tries to cope with her mother’s terminal illness, while fighting her growing attraction to affable fellow student Greg (Daveed Diggs). Centuries later, in 2417, an astronaut named Coakley (Kate McKinnon), genetically modified for longevity, works alongside her spaceship’s AI to solve potentially lethal problems interfering with her mission to create a new human colony far from Earth.

Polygon spoke with Stanton and Day about some of the choices behind their film, from portraying a purely benevolent, emotionally generous artificial intelligence in an age of AI anxiety to basing the Neanderthal scenes around an unsubtitled, created language — plus, of course, where WALL-E fits in.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: It’s an odd moment for a science fiction story portraying AI as wise, kind, and self-sacrificing — one of the elements of this movie that strongly reminded me of WALL-E. What kind of conversations did you have about the part AI was going to play in the story?

Andrew Stanton: What's funny is that AI wasn't even a term people knew much about when I read the script. Even when we were shooting, two years ago, it was just starting to become a hot topic in the headlines. So we were all kind of predicting, like, “Is this going to be a negative [for the film’s reception]? Is this going to be a positive?”

But Colby had already put a stake in the ground: What if [humanity] had gotten past all the negatives, and [an AI companion] became a very reliable, positive, long-term relationship for somebody that has got longevity in their genetics? We just love being "what if?" about that. I don't think we were thinking we were ahead of the current state of the world. We weren't making a comment about now.

Colby Day: One of the things we did talk about is this tendency we have as humans to invent fire, then burn ourselves on the fire, then have to figure out how to use the fire more effectively. It seems like that's what we're doing with AI, as we're creating something that's very problematic currently. But the film, as a hopeful film, presupposes, “What if we are able to get through the growing pains of this thing being something that is currently burning us?”

Stanton: I'm sure a lot of people died trying to figure out electricity. But we're past that now. In this movie, we just jumped to the same thing with AI — we're going far out, past all the mistakes.

WALL-E projects a similarly benevolent relationship between people and robots, though it maybe feels more positive than this movie about machine life, and less positive about humankind. Are you feeling any more optimistic about the future now than you were when you made that movie?

Stanton: I get just as pessimistic as the rest of us at times. But I'm an optimistic person at the end of the day. I want us to try to find the way forward. What I love about this film, it’s like, “What if we're doing it just right enough?” Rather than the glass being half-empty, being “it’s just slightly half-full” about it.

And the WALL-E of it is funny. WALL-E only came up to me when making this film because I thought about the Neanderthal story, and I had the confidence that you would be able to follow characters that didn't speak a language you could understand. You’d have no problem understanding their emotions and their relationship. WALL-E gave me the confidence that we could get away with that.

Was there ever a conversation about subtitling the Neanderthals, or having them speak sign language or an understandable proto-language? Were you that confident about it out of the gate, or was there any debate?

Stanton: There might've been debate behind closed doors with the studio, but I think WALL-E protected me all along. Because the minute that came up, they realized, “Oh, no, he's done this before.”

Day: I wrote into the script that we wouldn't [subtitle the Neanderthals].

Stanton: But you did write in their dialogue. Which is what I did with the WALL-E script, too. I still thought the actors needed to know what they were saying and why, even if we changed the language.

Day: But I do remember fear of “How could this work? How will we make this achievable? How are we going to relate to these characters when we don't understand them?” And Andrew on a Zoom being, like, "Well, when I was making WALL-E…" and everyone was like, "Oh, right, right, right. Okay."

Stanton: Also, we're all authorities on the human face. All you need to do is watch somebody be good at acting and emoting, and you're there. Usually, you only use the dialogue to confirm the assumptions you've already made.

Why was handling those scenes without language so important for both of you?

Day: I think so much of telling a story about people in the past was with the goal of trying to understand the emotional complexity of people in the past. I think it's really easy to flatten the past and think of it as simple, and think of the problems people were facing as simpler, and the way people felt as simpler. So I think getting to be intimately connected to these characters without totally understanding them was important to me to try to hopefully empathize with them.

Stanton: That was a huge win for us, is that we captured an authenticity that we'll never know, unless we invent time travel, about Neanderthals and early homo sapiens. And the idea was, “Could we make you see yourself in them?” That was so fun to achieve.

Other touchpoints people will inevitably compare this film to are other movies that handle emotional connection throughout history: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Cloud Atlas. Did you think of either of those movies as touchstones?

Stanton: Oh yeah. The minute I read the script, I was like [to Day] “You love Cloud Atlas as much as I do!”

Day: I love, love [Cloud Atlas author] David Mitchell. I love story circles, and that was my goal initially.

Stanton: But I think the reason we love those movies is, triptychs are wired into something about us as humans. You go underneath the roots of that, and I think there's something deep that all of us connect to about trifectas. So I just embrace it. If you consider that a sci-fi subgenre, whatever, that's fine. But I have no shame about going there. There's something in [stories told across time] that’s no different than the way a love story has certain similar parts, no matter how it's told.

What did you have to do to individuate In the Blink of an Eye? How did you approach making sure the story wouldn't be mistaken for anything Cloud Atlas or 2001 were doing?

Stanton: Well, this movie wasn't trying to do the same thing. I mean, it is on one level, but on another level, it's really settled into those stories. This thing was never stopping. It was like a braid. It was just never stopping the harmony of the weave. And to me, that was a really exciting way of telling a story. I've gotten old enough and told enough stories now, or helped enough being made, that telling a story differently is just as exciting to me as the content or the theme.

Day: I was excited by the formal challenge of telling a story about time, and I think getting to do a story that was about past, present, future just felt, to what Andrew's saying, like a formal challenge. Finding personal, emotional stories within that is all you can hope to do as a storyteller. You hope that whatever you have to say is going to both feel very specific to you, and hopefully be something people connect with. I was glad Andrew did, and hopefully audiences get to, too.

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In the Blink of an Eye is streaming on Hulu now.