With Pixar’s Finding Dory now available on home video, I recently got on the phone with director Andrew Stanton to talk about directing one of the most successful films of 2016. As most of you know, the sequel finds Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) setting out on an adventure to discover answers about her past. Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (newcomer Hayden Rolence) are back along with Bob Peterson as Mr. Ray and Stanton himself as Crush the super-chill sea turtle. New additions include Dory’s fish parents, Charlie and Jenny (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton); a beluga whale named Bailey (Ty Burrell); a whale shark called Destiny (Kaitlin Olson); and the curmudgeonly octopus, Hank (Ed O’Neill).

During the interview Stanton talked about what kind of gift you get when your movie crosses a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, his reaction to the success of the film, what he’s excited for people to see on the Blu-ray, if he held back any deleted scenes, the way you can now render in real time, what he might do next, why Pixar changed the release dates of Toy Story 4 and The Incredibles 2, and more. Check out what he had to say below.

COLIIDER: First of all, I have to ask, when your film crosses a billion dollars worldwide, what is the gift that Disney and Pixar get you?

ANDREW STANTON: [Laughs] I think I got a couple of congratulatory emails, so yeah I’s pretty whippy.

That’s actually not what I wanted to hear in any way, shape or form.

STANTON: [Laughs] Yeah, all I got was a watch.

Being serious for a second, you went into making this movie knowing Finding Nemo is loved by so many people and that the whole planet is excited for it, but you never know how they’re gonna react. A billion dollars is crazy, so for you what does it feel like knowing that so many people loved Finding Dory and it was such a huge hit?

STANTON: It feels great. To be honest, I never really attach the monetary gain to how much people like something, because there’s plenty of films that have been box office wins that I’ve forgotten almost right after I walked out of the theater. So I don’t put a lot of weight into that. What I do is if people still talk about it or watch it years from now and I won’t know that for a while, so less so the fact that they went in the first place. It’s all good, I’m not complaining or dismissing it, but –It’s a huge sigh of relief, it always is, but it’s a huge sigh of relief that you made something that matched their expectations.

The trick is that all you’re really trying to do the whole time is match your own expectations. We learned a long time ago with Toy Story 2, which was our third film...over 20 years ago... that you have to convince yourself that you’re making another original very early on and stop looking at it like it’s a sequel to anything, it’s the only way it’s gonna get the same love that the original did. And so by the time you’re done you don’t see it as anything else but its own freestanding film, and that’s been true in any of the sequels I’ve worked on. So for me Finding Dory is Finding Dory, it’s not the follow-up, and I have that comfort of just knowing that I gave it that and that I feel like that about it. So the fact that other people receive it as strongly as the original it just makes confirmation of that.

The Blu-ray seems like it’s loaded. Is there one thing on the Blu-ray that you’re really excited for fans to see?

STANTON: I don’t know if the fans will love it as much as I do, but privately got a huge thrill and felt like a big win to get to sit down and talk with Thomas Newman and really let him go to town and break down how he approaches composing a score. Because I was a huge fan of his for years before I ever got to start working with him, and this is our third film together, I plan on working with him for a very long time. He rarely wants to talk about himself or get into it, even in private, so I thought it was such a gain to capture that on film. So I get something out of it just from having that event and I hope other people do too.

The Blu-ray includes deleted scenes, is it all the deleted scenes you had, or are there things that you still held back?

STANTON: There are a couple of things that were held back simply because we couldn’t get the rights to either the music or the talent. But very little. I’d say 90% of what we did has somehow made it onto the DVD. So if it didn’t it was because we couldn’t get the rights or because it would be so boring or so close to versions of what we’re showing you that it would be a waste of your time.

You guys pushed the boundaries of technology with Dory, what was the thing that you are still so proud of in terms of the technology used to create the story or to help tell the story?

STANTON: Hank would be obvious. He is probably the thing that we’re all most proud of, so he just wins overall. But I think that’s kind of an obvious answer, I think the things that isn’t so obvious is how much we have conquered water since then. We rarely go to the surface of the water in the first film, most of Nemo is a movie magic trick that makes you think that we put water in the film but there’s nothing there, it’s just floating fish in digital air. We could barely get away with simulating water or breaking the surface, so it’s very limited in that movie. But we conquered that and we could do any derivation of water in every scale and every form, so we did it wherever we could. So it kind of lead the production design and the aesthetics of the storytelling to exist way more at the water plane, and not only out in the ocean and the pools of water and the tanks, but in things like the coffee carafe and in cups of water, because wherever we could do it we did.

If I’m not mistaken, rendering time is always a challenge. I know it has gotten so much better, you guys used to have to render overnight. How quick is the rendering gotten now where you can see what people are doing?

STANTON: You can actually render in real time now, but –I’m gonna use the wrong terminology, but you can kind of see it in a very pixelated form. So you’re not seeing it at some sort of high-resolution gorgeous version, you’re sort of giving that up so that you can see something very quickly. But you can see a very accurate representation of where all your lighting is gonna be, and that was stuff that used to take overnight and sometimes days. And now that we can do it in real time, even at a sitting and wait a minute or two. It’s miraculous and it really helps us not only catch problems but to be a little bit closer to that intuitive nature that you get on a live-action set where you’re just looking at it and then you’re adjusting it because you’re getting ideas in the moment. And that’s something that we’ve never artistically had the luxury of and I just loved.

I was gonna say, that has to help with the animation.

STANTON: It helps with the storytelling, it helps you have the realization that, “Oh my gosh, take away all those lights. We don’t need to see any of that, we can just be paying attention to this.” And, again, be a little bit more intuitive with your lighting.

When you look at your schedule when you direct, it’s like every four years, so what do I need to do to make so I’m not seeing another movie in 2020 and a little sooner?

STANTON: Well, for me, it’s not doing animation because there’s no way around that. So what I’ve decided is to take a break from animation, so I’m hoping that I’ll do four things in one year now for the next round rather than one thing in four years.

Do you know what you’re gonna do next?

STANTON: I do, but I can’t talk about it. I got a couple of things in the pot for next year.

I will definitely do a follow-up once you announce.

STANTON: Cool

One of the things though is you’re obviously involved with Toy Story 4, and I know that they recently changed the release date. What was the reason? Was Incredibles 2 just further along?

STANTON: It was a combo of...Because we’re always like this, we hate when we have to announce because we just basically want to keep sliding the date of release of the movies until the stories are just right, because we don’t want to compromise on that. And Toy Story 4 just needed more story time and Incredibles was moving along faster, so we realized we could do a better switch.

Incredibles is one of those awesome movies and all of us have been waiting for Brad Bird, if he had the story to tell, to make the sequel. As a fan, how excited are you to see him return to that world?

STANTON: Everybody’s excited. Just like everybody else, I’ve had to wait longer than I’ve wanted to. But I’m also somewhat of a fan of having to wait that long, it always tends to make the release sweeter. It’s an idea he had for a very long time, he just had other films he wanted to make.

One more thing about technology, you guys are always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at Pixar using technology to help tell the story, is there something that you guys are on the cusp of being able to solve that you couldn’t have done before?

STANTON: I don’t know. If they are, they haven’t told me. It could be happening right now in the room next to me and I just don’t know [Chuckles].