Lupita Nyong’o gave her honest feedback to writer-director Chris Sanders when she saw room for improvement in his script for their new animated film The Wild Robot.
In the upcoming animation, an adaptation of Peter Brown’s book, the Oscar-winning actress voices Roz the robot, who is shipwrecked on a remote island and forms a connection with its animals.
Nyong’o and Sanders recorded each scene several times in the studio and she would often give notes on the script, prompting Sanders to go away and rewrite some lines for her to re-record.
“She’d react to these pages and she would tell me what she thought and where she thought it was lacking,” Sanders told Deadline, adding that he would have been worried if the actress “had come in and like, shrugged, read the lines and gone home”.
“I loved that she pushed back, I loved that that she had things to say, and I loved that she made me work harder as a writer and as a director to get this to where it needed to be,” he added.
He admitted that while it’s “never a party” receiving feedback on a script, he never disagreed with her suggestions.
“She’d say, ‘I don’t think this is right, I think you wrote the wrong direction here.’ And she would tell me what she thought. I don’t think there was ever a moment where I didn’t disagree with what she said,” he continued. “Getting notes is never a party but you gotta do it. You can’t ignore them. I can’t.”
Sanders went on to praise Nyong’o for finding her robot character’s voice, insisting that her performance went “beyond acting”.
The Wild Robot, featuring the voices of Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara and Kit Connor, will be released in cinemas in September.
