It took Shuster more than a year to get hired by Pixar, but he arrived there just in time to work on Cars.

Strike: And back in Detroit you were working as a car designer.

Shuster: Not actually a car designer. I made it to a few internships doing car interiors. I never made it to the Big Three. I... didn't want to do it.

Strike: Your heart was someplace else.

Shuster: I felt like I might get too comfortable. Because my dad had done it, why should I? I just had the space thing in me, I just had to get that out.

Strike: You must've had a whole stack of designs, fantasy drawings.

Shuster: In school, rather than design the TV, the "this or that" they wanted, I was always doing storyboards, crazy sci-fi scenarios, anything that didn't apply to the project at hand. But thankfully they let me do that.

Strike: WALL•E and EVE are the alpha and omega of design -- mechanical and clunky vs. sleek and electronic. In fact, she looks a lot like an Apple product, like an iPod. Andrew Stanton [WALL•E's director] mentioned someone came in from Apple during production.

Shuster: Jonathan Ive [Apple's SVP of Industrial Design] came in and sat with us for an hour and went over design futures. I definitely related with him on many levels, coming from the same field.

It was a lot of exercise designing both WALL•E and EVE at the same time, a lot of work jumping back and forth between those two modes: very streamlined, sexy, floating parts, [then] back to this rust bucket.

Strike: After my first look at WALL•E, the robot from Short Circuit crossed my mind.

Shuster: Ohh... [Shuster gives a slightly exaggerated laugh.]

Pixar consulted with Apple on design for the film, and maybe that's why EVE looks a lot like an iPod.

Strike: Has that come up before? There's really not much resemblance beyond both having binocular eyes for stereo vision. Did anybody else say that early on?

Shuster: Oh, yeah. In fact, a lot of people here looking over my shoulder at the initial designs were, "oh, you've seen Short Circuit." Well, no, actually I never have.

Strike: You're lucky.

Shuster: I've heard that too. Also, reading [about the supposed resemblance] on online chat boards, things like that does tend to get me a little riled. In fact I did pull [the Short Circuit robot's] silhouette off the web and did a little comparison study for myself. They're nothing like each other. I'm preparing myself for a lot of that kind of comparison, but wow -- it's completely baseless.

Strike: Did you do any other design work on the movie?

Shuster: I designed the exterior of the Axiom, the luxury spaceliner. The hardest thing about that design was keeping the scale in check of how huge it was. This was supposed to be carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, layers upon layers of service tunnels for robots to travel through. It was really more a kind of an architectural exploit, making sure the thing still had a human scale to it, even when we were a quarter-mile away.

Actually Dan Holland here in the art department did the initial studies for the Axiom -- he kind of established the bones of the ship. I came in late in the project after wrapping up EVE and WALL•E and basically put a skin on the ship.

We were working very closely with Andrew at the time because there were a lot of critical areas on the ship that we had to fly into. We wanted very simple forms, so you could identify exactly where we were at the time just by identifying the shape of the ship.

Strike: You weren't much involved in the interior?