00:00I had worked on Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who about 5-6 years ago, and at that time really
00:08formed a deep bond with Audrey Geisel, Ted Geisel's widow.
00:14And we had always talked about doing another film after Horton, and my own personal connection to Ted Geisel's work
00:24runs very deep, and I'd be extremely happy if I was making a Dr. Seuss movie, you know, every other
00:33movie for the rest of my life,
00:34because I just find his imagination to be so rich, and his ideas to be so relevant, and his characters
00:43so appealing.
00:45So Audrey actually came to me, and we were talking about what the next film was going to be, and
00:53she actually came and asked if I would consider the Lorax.
01:00And I went back and re-read the book about 55 times, and found that obviously the themes were even
01:12more relevant today.
01:13There's something that Geisel hinted at in this book, which is that the power of one individual can resonate wide
01:28and far.
01:29So this kid who opens his book and closes his book, and becomes a central driving force of our story,
01:41you know, he starts out very innocent and very unaware.
01:46In the movie, he wants to find a tree because he's got a crush on an older girl, and that's
01:52all she thinks about are trees.
01:55But he has absolutely no concept of what he is about to discover.
02:02And through this journey that starts out as this very innocent, simple journey just to get a tree, he becomes
02:11aware of a much larger calling in life.
02:14And that calling is, you know, has, within the story of the book, global ramifications.
02:22So I think the power that one person can have, you know, one seed can have, I think that, you
02:35know, when you're young and reading that book, that's very appealing and intriguing.
02:41When we started to talk to Chris Reneau about the visual expression of the film, one of the ideas that
02:50we had discussed was to create a world that is heightened in its beauty.
02:59So that when you descend into the natural world of the film, that the beauty of it is absolutely striking
03:08and unforgettable.
03:09And Chris and his team of art directors and designers have created, both in terms of color and texture and
03:22composition, images that I find to be absolutely beautiful and you just want to immerse yourself in these images.
03:36The story of this movie is about a young kid who has a massive crush on a girl who lives
03:46down the street.
03:48They happen to live in a world where there's no nature.
03:53It's all been replaced by man-made things, a little bit like Las Vegas.
04:00Everybody who lives there loves it, but nobody really misses trees when you have wonderful metal replicas of trees that
04:08don't drop leaves and don't ooze sap.
04:11And flowers that are plastic and so in this world where everything's that we would normally think of in our
04:20world as being organic is made out of plastic and steel.
04:24Everybody is extremely happy living there because it's a fanciful place to live with the exception of one girl, one
04:3216-year-old girl who's voiced by Taylor Swift who dreams about real trees.
04:40She's never seen one. She's just heard of them. And a 12-year-old kid who lives down the street
04:48is a hopeless romantic, head over heels in love with her, knows that that's what is the most important thing
04:58to her and sets out on a journey to find her that simply so she'll pay attention to him.
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