Chris Sanders Talks About Learning From Lupita Nyong’o While Directing “The Wild Robot”

Watch Chris Sanders Talks About Learning From Lupita Nyong’o While Directing “The Wild Robot” - Variety on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00I've always been anxious to work with actors who take the role seriously, but none more

00:06so than Lupita.

00:08She had a particularly big job to figure out Ros, because Ros doesn't have any facial articulation.

00:15So everything is unusually carried by her voice alone.

00:19And Lupita immediately from the get-go understood the different sort of architecture, if you

00:24will, that was going on inside of Ros, because she's a programmed being.

00:28So we began every session by just talking, and it never ended.

00:33Every session we would talk upwards of an hour before we began to record, particularly

00:37our very first recording session, because we had to figure out who this character was,

00:42how she thought, and how she saw the world.

00:45And Lupita really took the lead in figuring that out, and crafting and shaping her own

00:50character.

00:51And then she went beyond that, and really she crafted a voice.

00:54So Ros's voice changes from the beginning to the end, and we came up with these three

01:00phase voices, phase one being straight out of the box, and what we termed an engineered

01:05optimism.

01:06And so she would actually kind of stress her voice up into this sort of, hello, sort of

01:09Alexa Siri sort of zone.

01:11And then as the film went along, she would evolve and become more just pure Lupita.

01:15So it was absolutely fascinating to watch her figure out and take this character apart.

01:20So I learned a ton just being in the room with her and watching how she approached a

01:26character, how she deciphered it.