Our talk with the writers, our final presentation of the morning, ended with a second screening of the aforementioned scene in which Cruz tries to tell Lightning what it’s like to be a woman in racing.
This time, though, we’re just given the storyboard and voice acting; the effect is to see, more clearly, the work of the writing, especially in its relation to body position and camera angles – the direction of the scene, in other words, as something far more intricately linked to the script than it might be in a live-action film. Most of the questions afterwards were about Cruz and her role, and Kiel Murray, the only female writer on the film, responded generously.
“There’s a lot of studies about why women, on average, have a lower level of confidence… certainly, in my own experience, that’s true. There’s a lot of things that go into that. And that’s something that really went into Cruz. We tested that out with women in leadership positions, and I was surprised how many of them still felt that, that they wish they didn’t suffer from it, and that they were pretty sure that the guys next to them weren’t feeling that way.” This is where I asked her whether any consideration was given to the idea of making Cars 3 Cruz’s film, much like Cars 2 was Mater’s. Kiel looked to her co-writers, Bob Peterson and Mike Rich, on either side of her. “This was always going to be Lightning’s story,” one of them said.
I think I’ve talked enough about story and its deification amongst Pixar employees, so I’ll skip mentioning that again here. The writers of Cars 3 talked about it plenty, as well, but the best part of these 40 minutes was watching two of the writers yell “Language! Language!” at the Story Supervisor, Scott Morse, after he used the word “sh*t” offhandedly. It was, in all the right ways, a magical Disney moment.
Cars 3 hits theaters June 16.
