Cars 3 will be available on Blu-ray and DVD next Tuesday and you can even have a chance to win a digital copy from us in an upcoming Twitter party. Follow @LifeofDadShow on Twitter for more information.

I took part in a Disney media trip where other writers and myself were able to ask Brian Fee and Kevin Reher some questions about the making of Cars 3 and much more. Here is part of that interview.

How do you feel about Cruz and Cristela and that character and what she brought to the movie?

Kevin: She’s so much fun to work with. She said she didn’t bring luggage, and she was flying from LA.

Brian: While we’re trying to constantly evolve and enrich the story, and we just doing it, we eventually realized that we’re, we’re missing an opportunity here.  I mean, I have two girls at home. And I go home every day, and we have a very heavily male dominated movie.

I wanted something for my daughters.  So I wanted a character for them to look up to. For them to identify with, because my daughters, I would see them afraid to do something.  If they thought they were gonna be bad at it, they just wouldn’t even try it.

That is human nature, but it still breaks your heart as a parent. Because everyone’s bad at everything at first. That’s just how it goes!  I remember talking with my girls about playing a musical instrument, taking lessons, and I said what about guitar?  And they said, that’s for boys. And I just thought.  You’re too young to start assigning these labels.  And therefore not, not being not interested because you’re deciding that’s for that other group. 

And it’s a male dominated sport. Everything that happens at home, it gets put in our back pockets, and we come to work the next day, we start talking about story.  It slowly starts to blow up and, and one of our writer’s, also has girls, and she’s feeling the same thing.  And, and… She was talking about her own experience where animation is also a male dominated business!  We’re trying to get more females interested in animation.

Besides two female character, how do you end up with the names of the characters?

Kevin:  We fell in love with the name Cruise Ramirez. One of the original writers came up with it, and we just cause it’s a car kind of, you know, cruising, and stuff, and… So we have the name Cruise Ramirez, which we found out was actually is not the most typical male name.

How was it to work with someone who you’re putting them out of their comfort zone…

Kevin: Blood, sweat and tomatoes. It was masterful.  But it’s when you don’t have non-actors, it’s tough. Well, when you have an actor, with trained, experienced like Carrie Washington she just knocks it out of the park. You’re done early.

Brian: But you still have to put them in the right mindset. They have to feel it so that what can come out of them feels true.  They’re not concerned about how silly they look.  Right?  So that’s the difference.

What other tricks can you share with us in regards to actors and getting from them what you want us to see in the movie? 

Kevin:  One of the things about the side characters, especially, is when we cast, you want to be sure you don’t have enough screen time to tell a back story. To, you know, flesh out a character. When Carrie Washington opens her mouth, you know, she’s a smart statistician.  You get it right away or Paul Duley, you know, even back in the day, George Carlin as Filmore. You get that he’s a, you know, hippy mini-van, and, and you get what he is.  You know?  And so that’s one of the things that we try to do in the casting part of it.  But in terms of working with the actors.

Brian: My job is to just know the 360 of the circle a story.  I know where we’re going, where we came from.  And I’ll set the actor up as much as I can, or much as they’ll tolerate.  We’ve done our own scratch recordings at work just to prove out the script and stuff.  So I have my own, kinda like how I would do it.  I’m not as good an actor as them.  So I don’t want how I would do it. I prefer a professional that’s better than me to show me how it could be even better.  That’s my hope. At first you want to set ’em up, and then just kinda let ’em do their thing, and see where it goes.  And hopefully it goes somewhere better than what was in my head.

Is there any actors that you wanted for this movie that you weren’t able to get?

Kevin: You know, we got really lucky with this movie. I can tell you other stories, but I can’t tell you all the stories. Everybody said yes on this one.  But there’s a famous story which I won’t give you the guy’s name, but we wanted him to be Mr. Incredible.  And he said does it pay well?  We said no.  You’re just doing it because you want to be in animated movie for kids.  He goes why would I want to be an animated movie?

We hired someone else.  And in the interim, he dated a younger woman with a child.  And you just know they went to the Westwood and saw The Incredibles.  And we got a call the next Monday saying, um, Mr. So and So would love to do anything Pixar.

Did you do any specific research trips for this?

Brian: We came here to Charlotte.

Kevin: Well the research trips on Cars 2, I went on were much better. Auto shows, Monaco, and Milan.

When you first did Cars 1, did you imagine it would go here…

Kevin: On Cars 1 there’s no master plan. It would be easier if there was a master plan. On Cars 1, you know, we did all that research on Route 66. I went on those trips on Route 66.  And we listened to people’s stories about the town. I took all black and white pictures.  Of these amazing towns that got bypassed that are just ghost towns.  A lot of it was in the movie.

And then Cars 2 was about racing, and Formula 1, and all the different kinds of racing.  And then, you know, we just found ourselves going back to the sort of that emotional time of Cars 1.  We didn’t expect back then that there would even be a Cars 3.  Let alone what it would be about.  So…

Can you tell us what your next project’s going to be?

Brian: I don’t know. I’m gonna take a little bit of a break, and go into development.  And start thinking about things. I’ve been trying not to think of it.  Been trying to rest my brain.

Cars 3 is available on digital download and on Blu-Ray and New on 4K UHD on November 7.

Please note: I was invited to a Cars 3 blogger event from Disney, but my thoughts are my own.