"Cruising" with the Voice Actors of "Cars 2"

TeenHollywood is on Hollywood Boulevard with a bunch of the cool actors who give verbal life to the autos in the amazing new Pixar/Disney film Cars2! 

Sometimes funny, always entertaining and just a hoot, Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Emily Mortimer, Eddie Izzard, Sir Michael Caine, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson and even director/Pixar Studios head John Lasseter fill us in on the story, the look and the humor of Cars 2.  

TeenHollywood: Owen, was it hard to come back to doing the voice for Lightning McQueen after a few years? Did it take a while to get the feel of the character again?

Owen Wilson: No. I would say it came right back. I was excited that John Lasseter was directing again so it was nice to be working with him and this story was even more fun to do than the first one because the character was already established. On the first one, it was a lot of figuring the tone and on this one it was a great adventure that these characters are on. I thought the friendship between Mater and Lightning McQueen was a hilarious, interesting thing to explore.

TeenHollywood: Do you identify with Lightning?

Owen: Well, he sounds a lot like me (laughs). I think maybe the enthusiasm that Lightning McQueen has. I like that quality.

Eddie Izzard (Miles Axlerod): I identify with the businessman (in his character). I was doing accounting and financial management at Sheffield University before I said “No. Let’s chuck that in”. I was never going to be that but I can do that stuff. I do identify with that and the Richard Branson-esque quality (that Miles has). I do like great new ideas, even though there is a twist in my character that takes us to a different place.

TeenHollywood: Owen, was McQueen saying “Kachow” your thing or was that in the first script?

Owen: No, John Lasseter says that was my thing that I added one day.

TeenHollywood: Do you ever say that in your life if something good happens?

Owen: I say it to kids.

TeenHollywood: Your character moves so fast. Was that fun to watch for you?

Owen: I move kind of slow so it’s nice to see something I’ve given voice to that has some energy.

TeenHollywood: You’ve been all over the world doing publicity and shooting films. Is the car culture as prevalent in other countries? We love cars here in North America. 

Owen: I was just watching an ESPN sports biography thing because the Indy 500 was on a few weeks ago. I saw one on racers A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti. Andretti grew up in Italy and he and his brother were obsessed with cars from when they were kids. That does seem to be sort of a universal thing for people to be into cars.

Eddie: Yeah. Every country has an obsession with cars. It may be a boy thing but no, my niece is into cars and gadgets and I like that. In different countries it might be different cars but John Lasseter would know and they’ll be in the film. There might be more American cars that we (Europeans) might not know round the world but everyone has their own favorite cars.

TeenHollywood: There’s sort of a green message in this film about alternative fuels. Are you into green cars? Do you drive a Prius?

Eddie: I would if it made a growly noise. I do want to have a Prius but I’d like it if it’s just a recording of “rowwwwrrrrr” (indicating a fast engine revving up). I think people want a nice growling Prius car. Make it noisier.

TeenHollywood: They had to make them noisier because blind people can’t hear them coming. It’s true.

Owen: Maybe that’s what hit my uncle!  I have a Prius. It is like a golf cart. When you put it in reverse, it beeps so people can hear it.

Eddie: So it’s like a very quiet, useful shark.

Owen: Yeah, very stealthy.

TeenHollywood: Emily (Mortimer), Holly Shiftwell is a Brit secret agent. Did you model her after any particular Bond girl or Bond heroine?

Emily Mortimer (Holly Shiftwell): No because I knew if I tried to emulate a Bond heroine I’d fall flat on my face. I just had to be me in that world. With my character, nobody really knew what direction she was going to go or what the level of her relationship with Tow Mater was going to be. My natural instinct was to be how I would feel; completely dippy and pathetic in that situation.

Larry the Cable Guy (Tow Mater): And that’s why we like her.

Emily: And then we realized that if she were out in the field in this very high-powered spy mission, she wouldn’t be quite so crap as that so we developed it together over time. John Lasseter (director) is explaining the gadgets, what’s coming out of here and she’s got wings and this and that. It’s not my field of expertise so I would lose concentration. I couldn’t keep all these things in my head!

Larry: You mean you couldn’t show emotion and talk about a carburetor?

Emily: (laughs) Exactly.

TeenHollywood: Larry you’re really the star of the movie. Did you know when you got the script that Tow Mater is really the central character?

Larry: I had no idea. John (Lasseter) told me how the movie was going to go and I said “Looks like Mater is gonna have a pretty good part in this”. But I didn’t really think much of it. I had been doing toy (work) because I do all the voices for Mater, games and everything. When I started doing the lines for the movie, almost everything Mater said was funny and I enjoyed doin’ it. I had no idea until people started seeing the movie and were saying “This is your movie”. I’m like “Really? That’s awesome”. It’s pretty neat.

TeenHollywood: Mater also has a lot more emotion to express in this one. How did you get into that?

Larry: Mater is so much like me that it wasn’t really that hard. Mater is easy for me because he’s just a free-lovin’ guy and everybody likes him. (In this movie) he gets really sad and he’s upset but you don’t want to have him get too mad at people and go over the edge so I would put myself in a lot of situations he was in. How would I feel if that happened to me?

I’ve got a four-year-old boy and a three-year-old and I’ll put them in the situation so that you can get the emotion out. I would think of (my kids). That was the only hard part for me; doing different emotions that Mater never showed in the first movie. He’s the heart and soul of the movie. John helps me get to those emotional levels.

TeenHollywood: Larry, Mater has a funny problem with the spicy hot Wasabi (horseradish) in Japan, mistaking it for something sweet. Did that happen to you?

Larry: Oh yeah. We went to some kind of Japanese restaurant. Not a sushi place. I don’t do sushi except for bait. You can catch good bass on it and catfish love it. Somebody told me, “You’ve gotta try this. This is good. This is like a minty dessert”. I literally went like this (he indicates swiping up a big gob on his finger). Then I went “Aaaaaaaaaa”. It ruined my whole dinner. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know it was that hot. I might have told John that story. I don’t remember. I’m like Mater. I had no clue.

TeenHollywood: Emily, Holly and Mater have kind of a white collar/blue collar romance. Were you familiar with Larry’s comedy act?

Emily: I am familiar with his work in Cars one because my son and I are addicted to it but I hadn’t really seen his comedy act but I mean to now, or the TV show which John is obsessed by and keeps quoting. The History Channel show (“Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy”).

Larry: We’re kind of like what the movie is about. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what you dress like or what you do for a living; people are people. Emily (and Holly) come from a different background but we hit if off like that because we’re good people. We’re nice people. That’s the theme of the movie; it doesn’t matter where you go. You may feel out of place but everybody is pretty much the same.

TeenHollywood: Mater is like a U.S. ambassador. He has heart. Do you think Mater might help repair our American relations with other countries?

Larry: I hope so. What I read is that they think we’re arrogant. I’m not. If I went to another country, I wouldn’t be like that and Mater’s not. But everybody thinks Mater is dumb. He’s not a stupid truck. He just does things differently. He’s lived in a small town all his life and that’s not a bad thing. So what? He’s still a nice truck. Just because he doesn’t know how to use the bathroom in Japan (a cute joke in the film) doesn’t mean he’s a jerk so I think that’s a great way to be perceived. He goes to a foreign country and is nice to everybody. He may not know their customs but he’s excited to be there. That’s a great message.

Emily: My husband is an American (Alessandro Nivola) and he sometimes feels like the perception (in Europe) is that he’s more stupid than they are. Then he has to prove them wrong. Whereas I, on the other hand, am at an unfair advantage here because people assume that because I talk with this posh, British accent that I must be intelligent which isn’t necessarily true.

TeenHollywood: Emily, now that you’ve played a spy in an animation movie, would you like to do that in live action?

Emily: Yes. I’m convinced though, that this is the most glamorous I’ll ever be on celluloid. There is something so cool about being a nifty little purple sports car.

TeenHollywood: Larry, would you like to be a spy?

Larry: No. I don’t think I could be a spy. I’m too fat to fit through holes and stuff. I can’t squeeze through anything. I couldn’t get through the lasers.

TeenHollywood: Speaking of spies, Sir Michael Caine, you’ve played spies and now you are the spy car Finn McMissile. This part seems tailored for you. Was it fun to return to the spy world?

Michael: Well, it's one of the many reasons that I did it. Suddenly, I get to be offered a spy and the car that I have is a 1966 Aston Martin, pale blue, which I think is very, very cool. I've always played cool spies and so this is absolutely marvelous. I love my car and that's an incredible name, isn't it, Finn McMissile? It's lovely. It makes me sound as though I'm dangerous or sounds as though the car is dangerous.

TeenHollywood: You were also a character voice for the recent Gnomeo and Juliet. Is there a reason you are suddenly voicing animated movies?

Michael: I did Gnomeo and Juliet because my friend Elton John and David Furnish, his partner, we're very close friends. I was the voice of Juliet’s father but I’d like to do a really funny voice. I haven’t done that yet. 

I've got three grandchildren and I really wanted to do (this film) because I wanted them to see me. They gave me a toy car of Finn McMissile with my voice in it. My grandchildren play with it and they know it's me. So, I've got this tremendous bond with my grandchildren through this film. The films that I make, little children can't go and see them. Even teenagers think of me as the butler in the Batman films. So, it was a wonderful opportunity for me.

TeenHollywood: The Queen of England is a car in this film and she gave you a knighthood in real life. How do you think she would react to seeing herself as a posh car?

Michael: I think she'd react very well. She's good fun. I've met her a couple of times and I sat next to her at a dinner once and she suddenly turned to me and said, 'Do you know any jokes?' 'Yes, but not many I can tell you, your majesty.' She said, 'I'll tell you one while you think of one you can tell me’. Her joke was very funny. The queen has an incredible sense of humor.

TeenHollywood: Joe (Mantegna who plays “bad guy” Grem (a Gremlin) and Peter (Jacobson who plays “bad guy” Acer (a Pacer), what was your experience on Cars 2 like? Did you need some backstory on your “mob guy” cars?

Joe Mantegna: I’m old enough to know plenty about these cars. I drove a Pacer for a while. It had its ups and downs. One person’s lemon is another person’s pineapple I suppose. I’ve been (the voice of mobster) Fat Tony on “The Simpsons” for twenty years so there was some familiarity for me but it was nice to play a car as opposed to a fat Italian guy. It’s great.

TeenHollywood: Are your kids excited that you are in the new Cars movie?

Joe: My two kids are grown so my daughter would be more excited if I came home with a new car for her (laughter).

Peter Jacobson: I have an eight-year-old so this is right up his alley. He’s really thrilled. My wife thinks the car looks like me.

TeenHollywood: Are you guys into racing or race cars?

Peter: I went to the Indy 500 when I was ten. It was rained out. After an hour I watched them whiz by and that was it so I was turned off by it. I don’t much about it.

Joe: I was a little into Formula One racing a few years ago. They did a Grand Prix in Long Beach and I remember going to that. I have a lot of relatives in Italy and Formula One racing is huge in Europe. I was in Monte Carlo last year and that was interesting.

TeenHollywood: Did you play with toy cars as a kid?

Peter: Hot Wheels!  I had a whole stash of fantastic Hot Wheels. I watched “Speed Racer” on TV.

Joe: I used to make model cars from plastic kits. I remember making cars from the 50’s, a ’57 Chevy. Cars had strong identities then and looked different from one year to the next. That’s changed a lot today. You’ll go to an auto show and they’ll say “Here is the concept car”. I always say “Why don’t they make it?” It’ll be this great car. Once in a while they do.

TeenHollywood: What is it about cars that appeals to kids and teens?

Peter: As kids, they see them in the world as big, adult machines that they’ve ridden in. They could crash.. something violent and crunchy about it. My kid loves them. He likes trains a little more.

Joe: It’s that combination of something mechanical that makes noise and has buttons and has a certain beauty and it’s this thing you spend time in. I guess we’ve all been through it. Cars are a huge fascination. It’s a world-wide phenomenon.

TeenHollywood: John (Lasseter, writer/director and head of Pixar Studios), how fun was it to have a car representing the Queen of England in your movie?

John Lasseter: We had so much fun with that. She’s somewhere between a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce. We started thinking about her crown and it looked like a hat. I don’t like putting a human hat on a car so we started looking around and found these fantastic old British luggage racks that were usually found on land rovers and those kinds of cars. They were really big and we looked at that and said, “If we just made a really glitzy luggage rack and made it long and put big jewels on it, it kind of looks like a car crown” so that’s where the Crown was derived from an old luggage rack but it’s really kind of fancy and cool.

TeenHollywood: The racing scenes in the film are awesome, especially in 3-D.  Did you watch a lot of live racing or old racing films to get ideas?

John: Yes and what’s kind of exciting is that we can put our (virtual) cameras anywhere in order to get those shots whereas ( the live-action films) had to use a camera car at top speeds.  We can put our cameras wherever we want with no danger to anybody.

We (added) the European-style racing and then we put tremendous effort into the sound on this film. You get that awesome American V 8 sound in Lightning McQueen up against this gorgeous very high-pitched Formula One racer sound. It just was cool. We had so much fun.

TeenHollywood: What about choosing the spy storyline? The story is like a serious spy movie.

John: Yes, it’s not a parody of a spy movie. It’s a real spy movie. We studied spy movies at length and all the tremendous chase sequences in movies like Ronin and the first Bourne Identity, all the way back to (the Steve McQueen film) Bullit and we were taking a look at all those.

TeenHollywood: Pixar is so story-oriented. You just tell good stories beautifully. Why doesn’t the rest of the movie industry learn that lesson?

John: I don’t know. I’ve learned the lesson. Disney’s learned the lesson. It’s a good question. We love movies, we’re passionate about that at Pixar. I love to be entertained by a great story. We trust the story that we’ve gotten ourselves into and we just keep developing and keep pushing. We won’t release something we don’t think is working yet.

TeenHollywood: The new spy characters of Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and Holly Shiftwell (voiced by Emily Mortimer) are very cool and cool-looking too.

John: Thanks. I wanted Finn to become old school as far as his gadgets go, so all of his gadgets have a kind of older style to them, and then Holly Shiftwell is a kind of brand-new kind of spy car, and she has very high tech gadgets, so it was really fun defining those two.

TeenHollywood: Why make this one in 3-D? (Note: You can also see it in “normal” 2-D if you want)

John: I like 3-D. I shot my wedding in 3-D and I have a bunch of vintage 3-D cameras. So when digital projection in theatres made it possible to start doing 3-D, I was so excited, because I’ve always felt with our medium of computer animation, it’s a truly 3 dimensional world in our computer, but can look at it in 2-D if you want to. We don’t do the gimmickry stuff. We like to include elements that look cool in 3-D but don’t take you out of the story. It enhances the story.