Of all the kickass stuff happening at the Platform Festival, the thing I’m most excited for is this afternoon’s presentation by Gary Rydstrom, a seven-time Academy Award winning (!) sound designer who recently jumped into directing, helming the Academy Award-nominated short film Lifted. (That’s an image from Lifted to the right; and the short will be shown in front of Pixar’s Ratatouille starting tomorrow.)

This afternoon, Rydstrom will be presenting Pixar’s revolutionary early shorts, showing Lifted, and giving Platform attendees a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to make the film. I just had a quick phone conversation with Rydstrom, a really nice guy whose filmography reads like a list of my favorite blockbusters. My first question was a pretty obvious one.

MERCURY: Where do you keep all those Oscars of yours?
GARY RYDSTROM: What’s nice about having that many is I could finally give one to my parents. A couple of years ago I gave one to my parents and it’s now the most handled Oscar in the world. Everyone who comes anywhere near their home has their picture taken with it. So it’s turned into a pile of dust. I keep a lot of ’em at Skywalker Sound, where I did a lot of that sound work, and they’re placed there, since it was kind of a group effort, so it’s nice to be able to do that.

I bet the mailman comes by and gets his picture taken with your Oscar.
There’s one person who came over to the house once knowing we had an Oscar there. He had, in his car, the top half only of a tuxedo. And at some point after dinner, he said, “Do you mind if I go and get changed?” [He changed] into his shirt and the tux coat, and had his photo taken from the waist up with the Oscar. That’s the sort of thing that happens.

How did the shift come about from you doing sound stuff to directing a short for Pixar?
One of the first things I did sound for was [early Pixar short] Luxo Jr. So I was connected with John Lasseter and Pixar for doing sound for them. So I was part of that group from the beginning. So I think what happened was, I got to my midlife crisis era, and wanted to do something more, or something different. I wanted a different challenge. And Pixar was nice enough to give me a chance to make movies there.

I’ll always love sound, but sound comes at the end of the process. And I went to film school, I wanted to make films, and I was yearning to get involved at the beginning of the process. Sound is great, but there’s so much that happens before then. So it’s really just due to having a lucky break and an opportunity that Pixar gave me at an opportune time in my life. I was very lucky.

Something that struck me about Lifted, as well as Ratatouille, was how much physical comedy is going on. How do you go about having all that physical comedy when you’re working in such a labor-intensive, drawn-out process as animation?
That’s one of the reasons I’m really happy to be tied to Ratatouille, ’cause Ratatouille has great physical comedy. And I love that. To tell you the truth, I went into film because I liked physical comedy. That’s my love. My career in sound was ironic, because I got into film because I love Chaplin and Keaton. And then I ended up doing sound for 20 years.

How did you end up getting into sound?
I’d done some sound in film and I got offered a job at Lucasfilm in 1983. You’re a film student, you know, and [Return of the] Jedi had just come out, and they say, “Do you want to work at Lucasfilm?” Two easy decisions in my career: One, somebody asked if I wanted to work at Lucasfilm, and then later, they asked if I wanted to work at Pixar.

Yeah, you can’t really answer other than “Yes” to those questions.
I like telling stories without dialogue as much as possible. And as a sound guy too, I liked the early Pixar shorts because they told stories without dialogue. They used physical action, and you got a sense of character just through the animation and the facial expressions. And I wanted to do that too, because that’s what I love.

Rydstrom and I talked a bit more, including just a bit about one of Pixar's upcoming features, Up, which he'll be writing. Here's the official synopsis:

From the Academy Award-nominated team of director Pete Docter and co-director Bob Peterson comes Up, an action-adventure starring an old man. In this “coming of old age” story, our hero travels the globe, fights beasts and villains, and eats dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon.

That's all we've got here, but I'd heartily advise cutting out of work a bit early to check out the Pixar presentation this afternoon. There'll be some great short films shown, and--if talking with Rydstrom was any indication--there'll also be plenty of smart, fun insights into what it's like to make films for Pixar. Like the rest of Platform, it'll likely be a world-class event, but in Portland. Which is awesome.

Pixar Animation Studios: Screening and Behind-the-Scenes Look at Lifted, presented by Gary Rydstrom
Thursday, June 28 from 4-5:30 pm, Newmark Theatre, 111 SW Broadway, $10