He won an Oscar for directing 2003's Best Animated Feature "Finding Nemo" and has been a vital contributor to several of Pixar Animation's films since "Toy Story" in 1995. Yet for all of his impressive career achievements, Andrew Stanton admits that he really didn't get his (land)fill until his trash-compacting robot WALL·E came rolling along -- the studio's latest offering that feature the talents of two of the filmmakers favorites: "Alien" saga star Sigourney Weaver and "Star Wars" sound pioneer Ben Burtt.

"It was hard to not to be a fanboy when I knew that I had to be professional to make these things work," said Stanton, laughing during a recent @ The Movies interview. "It took me awhile to come down from the clouds. It was a real treat to be able to not only meet them, but work alongside them as equals."

Fortunately, Stanton said that he got over his jitters of working with Weaver quite easily. He said that came when the two sat down for dinner the night before they recorded her first lines of dialogue as the voice of the computer on the film's mothership, the Axiom.

"I was just completely nervous because I've been a fan of hers for so long," Stanton said. "She was just as cool, calm and collected, and as mothering and friendly as you can imagine. It's not a huge leap between who she is on the screen and who she is in person. So in a weird way, it was very comforting."

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Based on a story by Stanton and Pete Docter, "WALL·E" tells the tale of a Waste Allocation Load Lifter -- Earth Class (WALL·E for short), a robot that someone forgot to shut off when the planet's inhabitants colonized in space. Compacting trash and collecting unique items over a period of 700 years, WALL·E's life changes dramatically when a probe droid, EVE, is sent to the planet to find out whether it's safe for humans to return.

Becoming smitten with his robotic counterpart, WALL·E gives EVE a piece of evidence that may help shape the future of mankind. But as he follows his love back to her mothership, WALL·E discovers that the residents and robots of the Axiom have lost sight of the real meaning of life -- putting the plans to re-colonize Earth in jeopardy.

Opening in theaters Friday, "WALL·E" could best be described as a movie whose time has come. It's been 14 years since Stanton first began toying around with the idea, so to speak, which he came up with prior to the release of the first "Toy Story."

"It wasn't a full idea. It was just the idea of the last robot on Earth, doing the same thing forever," Stanton recalled. "It never got any farther than that, and it wasn't until about six years ago when I picked the idea up again when I was in the middle of making 'Nemo.' By that time, I learned a lot by that time about writing other stories and making other films and realizing the best place to put the character was in a sci-fi love story."

Admittedly, "WALL·E" isn't your average film, because in the midst of the action, breathtaking visuals and sounds, and rousing action and adventure, the film is a love story between two robots. But based on his "last robot on Earth" premise, Stanton knew he could make the idea work.

"To me, that was the attraction of the story from its initial concept," Stanton observed. "When I had to focus on the idea in 2002 and ask myself, 'Is there a movie here?' Almost my second thought was, 'It's about loneliness and the opposite of loneliness is love, so it's got to be a love story.'

"I loved the idea of combining the genre of a love story with science fiction. That just seemed to be something fresh and original that I hadn't seen before," Stanton added. "It seemed like the perfect story to tell through our medium with an inanimate object. It seemed to all make perfect sense to me."

Sounding Off

Bringing Burtt on board "WALL·E" was crucial to the production, especially considering that the film relies more on sounds than dialogue to propel the film's narrative. After all, this is the guy who created the blips and beeps for -- and effectively gave personality to -- R2D2, and conceptualized the groundbreaking sounds for the "Star Wars" universe. And now he was person charged with the make-or-break responsibility of giving "voice," for the lack of a better word, to WALL·E and other robotic characters.

Stanton was thrilled that Burtt used the same sort of practical approach as "Star Wars" by using everyday objects and instruments to create the sound effects for "WALL·E."

"His methodology didn't seem to change any. He has more software tools at his disposal now so he was able to manipulate the sounds better," Stanton said. "But in a weird way it's not that different that the rudimentary things he was doing with software and keyboards back then. It's just a little bit easier to do now."

Not surprisingly, the visuals for "WALL·E" are even more stunning than previous Pixar films, thanks to the ever-growing advances in digital technology. But the irony is, Stanton used those tools meant to create perfection to create an imperfect look for "WALL·E" because part of the film is set in a gritty, polluted world.

"The computer can do things perfectly, but what we're trying to do is create this visceral sense of reality," Stanton explained. "Everything about reality is imperfect, so we spent most of our labor in the realm of imperfection. We tried to analyze what makes something imperfect and apply to something that's as obvious as a distressed look or rusted shade on something -- or not as obvious, as we fixed the software of our camera lenses in the way that they pulled back and focused is more accurate to imperfection of the lenses used in the 1970s."

While "WALL·E" is only Stanton's third film as a director in 10 years (he also co-directed "A Bug's Life" in 1998), he's more than happy to wait his turn in the Pixar stable of filmmakers to bring another project to the fore. After all, Stanton and his fellow directors -- including Pixar chief Jon Lasseter ("Toy Story" and "Cars"), Docter ("Monsters, Inc."), Brad Bird ("The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille") -- often contribute to each other's films.

And Stanton said that there's no better of a scenario than to work with a cohesive creative unit that's only flourished since Woody and an astronaut named Lightyear buzzed into the brave new world of feature-length computer-animated films in 1994.

"Nobody leaves Pixar because we know that we got a good thing that will never be recreated," Stanton said. "We're not driven by track record; we're driven by wanting to keep the existence of Pixar so we can keep working in a place like that."