Before he became a toy loved by children everywhere, Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans) was a legendary Space Ranger on an intergalactic adventure, alongside a group of ambitious but untested recruits (voiced by Keke Palmer, Dale Soules and Taika Waititi) and a robot cat named Sox (voiced by Peter Sohn). As part of a virtual early preview, Collider got the opportunity to watch a portion of the Disney and Pixar animated sci-fi action-adventure flick Lightyear, and in about 30 minutes of footage, I laughed, I cried, and I can’t wait to get to know all the characters better when the movie hits theaters on June 17th.
During this interview, Jeremy Lasky, who’s the director of photography for camera and staging on the film, talked about what his job entails on a production like this, what he loves most about his job, his own deeply personal connection to the character of Buzz Lightyear, the role that time and the idea that we can never get it back plays into the story they’re telling, and which character he’d like to see get their own Disney+ TV show.
Collider: I tremendously enjoyed the bits of the film we got to see.
JEREMY LASKY: Excellent.
You’re the director of photography for camera and staging on Lightyear. For the average person watching, who doesn’t know what goes into making an animated movie, what exactly does that mean?
LASKY: It means almost the same thing as it does in live-action. I have a team and our job is to figure out how the movie is shot, what the compositions are, where the camera is pointing, whether the camera is moving or not moving, what the feel is of each moment, and then how the characters are staged. That’s a little different than live-action, in that, although we have actors in the movie, they’re not live in front of us, giving a performance. That’s what animation does. So, we are often determining, as we’re figuring out shot choice and composition, where the characters are in a scene. We will often and block out an entire scene with these characters moving around, and then shoot it as we’re seeing it. It’s similar to what live-action does, but it’s a little different and we’re breaking it up amongst a crew of people, about 12 to 14 layout artists on a show.
There's a director of photography for camera and staging and a director of photography for lighting. And our job is to work as closely together as we can to feel like we’re one person. On Lightyear, that was especially key because so much of the movie is about shadow, and about information loss, and about what you can see and what you can’t see. You can’t do that without all of these disciplines together. Ian Megibben, who’s our amazing director of photography for lighting, and I needed to be joined together for as much of the movie as possible, even though we’re on different ends of the pipeline, to make sure we’re creatively and visually in lockstep.
So, he would sit and do some lighting on our early scout cameras and pre-vis stuff. Even the real pragmatic stuff of, “Please do not shoot that hologram against the open window because I won’t be able to see it when the light comes in,” is a great note. Otherwise, you do whatever you want without thinking, and downstream departments get stuck with it and have to figure out how to cheat it to make it work. In terms of what’s different about Lightyear, that collaboration was really key and was taken to an extreme that we have not been able to do before.
What do you love most about what you get to do with this job? There’s always something new that happens with each one of these films, so what was new with Lightyear that you most enjoyed getting to tinker with?
LASKY: It’s a good question. I love making movies, and I love making movies with people. So, to be at Pixar and to get to be on so many films with different people, that’s the thing that I love. I also love storytelling. When I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life in college, this was the thing. Not so much storyboarding and not animation, but it was this thing in between of, how do we tell this story? How do I make sure the audience understands what they’re seeing and gets hit emotionally where they need to? Where’s the beauty in what they’re watching? That was what I was into.
At the time I graduated, Pixar was the only place doing CG, at a feature level. It’s live-action and it’s animation, and it’s all of these things together, which sounded amazing, and it is. On this film, the excitement was really that collaboration. We make great movies. I think we can make a movie that is better, or that hits our visual goals that are very difficult, by working together more collaboratively. How can I make that happen? How can I drive that? How can I bring people together, while we’re doing camera and layout, to get their ideas and to be influenced by the rest of the smart filmmakers that are here? How can we do that? And then, how can we continue doing that, during the pandemic when we’re all at home?
What do you love about the character of Buzz Lightyear, that we get to see in this film? What do you think makes him an interesting character to center a story around, and how did you find yourself most connecting to him, as you went through the process of doing this movie?
LASKY: Buzz is human. He goes through all the things we go through. He makes mistakes. He reflects back on those mistakes. He has to grow. Everyone goes through this process. I love his humanity and how much he cares about the people around him, almost to a blindspot. His mission is his focus. It’s how he learns to deal with these things that I think is so fascinating to watch. His acceptance of new ideas and his realization that there are other answers is a really interesting journey for me, and I hope will be for everyone. And there’s this idea of time and how time plays, and how we never get it back. No matter what you think you might do, time is gone and you can only move forward. Everything you do and every step you take is hopefully moving you in a better direction than the stuff before it.
I know that sounds kind of corny, but for me, that’s my connection to the movie and that’s my connection to collaboration. I haven’t talked about this a lot, but I had a kidney transplant three years ago. In order for me to be healthy and move on, it was a deceased donor, so someone had to pass away. For me, that’s an incredible responsibility. What do I do with that now? I’ve been given this gift, and I need to earn it. And I need to continue to do it every day. So, seeing where Buzz comes from, and seeing his view of time and my view of time, it just hit me in the right way. On this film, how can I use my role to provide opportunities for everybody else? That’s where I came to it from.
I love that. Well, because these animated movies always have such a great ensemble cast and such fun supporting characters, if you could give a Disney+ show to one of these supporting characters, who would you love to explore more deeply and spend more time with?
LASKY: Oh, man. I think 99.5% of the population would want a Sox show, certainly. Sox can just walk around and talk about random things, and he’s in entertaining. He doesn’t even need to open his mouth, and he’s entertaining. Every time he’s on the screen, he steals the show. It got to a point where (director) Angus [MacLane] would be very careful about it and go, “Okay, maybe we don’t put Socks in this shot because we really need to pay attention to Buzz,” or “Let’s not have Sox do anything here because, as soon as he moves his head, that’s what I’m looking at because that’s somehow funny.” It was just simple things. So, I could see that being the breakout hit of the season.
Lightyear is in theaters on June 17th.