Last night, we here at DoS had the absolute pleasure of catching an early screening of the next Pixar flick, Ratatouille. It’s really a great movie, with engaging characters, brilliant storytelling, and jawdropping animation. There’s a lot of love in each frame, and it shows. ‘Course, it doesn’t hurt the movie when it’s directed by Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles), and features the main character voiced by one of my comedic heroes, one Mr. Patton Oswalt.

So, imagine the luck yesterday when I stumbled upon an interview over at AICN featuring Patton Oswalt talking about the surreal world that Pixar functions in, and generally the creative process behind the film. It’s a hell of a fun read, a bit R-rated in the language, and there’s a (clearly marked) spoiler, but I cannot recommend this interview enough. Perfect for a lazy Sunday like this one.

Here’s a bit to tantalize your reading tastebuds.

Quint: That’s Pixar. They handle that kind of detail so well. Obviously you’re a geek, you’re like me, so and getting the job and saying “I get to be the lead of a Pixar movie,” must have been a landmark…

Patton Oswalt: Getting to go to Emeryville was like… That was a bigger career moment for me than getting the job, so it was like “Wow, I’m glad I was a stand up, I got to go fly up to Emeryville and see the campus…” so everything else is like icing on a cake that’s already iced and the cake is on a jet ski that’s sitting on a pile of diamonds. That’s what this is like at this point.

Quint: What’s it like? I know Moriarty’s been there, but I’ve never had the pleasure…

Patton Oswalt: Oh dude… you’ll eventually go there. It’s amazing. It is this super really cool… it’s like Willy Wonka’s factory, but without the creepiness. And everyone gets to decorate their own cubicles. It’s all people who don’t want to buy things, they want to make their own stuff, like “I’ve made this! This is the only thing that exists!”

So everything has this weird uniqueness to it. I’ve worked in a lot of buildings. I used to work for MTV. I hate buildings that have “the fun touch,” because usually the reason it has “the fun touch,” is because it clearly is a horrible place to work and they’re going out of their way to make it look really fun. It’s clearly this very planned out fun whereas Emeryville, the campus, is clearly… there’s no fun touch… the place is fun anyway.

There’s sloppiness in the corners. It’s really a lived in and weird kind of place and they have this room where whenever people go on trips and they find some weird trinket or bumper sticker or something odd, it doesn’t matter if it has anything to do with the movie they’re working on, they just pile it on this huge table and you can just wander through the room and just look at stuff. It’s like the way artists keep morgues of like, “I don’t know where I’m going to use this, but that looks so cool I’ve got to remember that.”

Quint: Yeah, Ray Bradbury did that.

Patton Oswalt: Yes! That’s what they do on a huge scale and then each cubicle has its own… One looks like a cave and there’s one cubicle that, and I forget who this artist is… the cubicle itself is so boring and normal looking that it really kind of stands out, like he’s going out of his way not to do anything to it, but he has the bust of Shakespeare from the BATMAN show and when you click it back and hit the button this wall opens and there’s a speakeasy. They have a speakeasy and a little mini-casino hidden behind one of the cubicles that they go in and there’s like 20’s jazz music playing and they just drink and shoot craps. I was like “What the fuck?”

And again, their writers take computer classes, the computer programmers can take writing and filmmaking classes. There are life sculpture classes. They want everyone understanding the entire process rather than a bunch of specialists that don’t quite mesh with each other, so it’s much better when a writer is talking to a computer guy and actually understands. “I know what he’s saying when he’s like ‘We have this much memory and we’ve got to coax the computer…’” You know what I mean? They all know each other’s jobs. It’s really cool and they are encouraged, like “Learn stuff you don’t know anything about… just fuck around…” It’s just so awesome.

Click here to check it out.