Toy Story talk like winning the lottery (From Oxford Mail)

Toy Story talk like winning the lottery

10:00am Wednesday 21st July 2010 in

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WELL it finally happened. Last week I had my faith in the generosity of the human race restored by a complete stranger.

Okay, not exactly a complete stranger, I’ve known who he is and what he does for quite a while, but until last Friday we had never met.

Perhaps I should probably point out the reason we’d never met is because he’s a successful Hollywood movie director, who is very busy flying around the world promoting his latest movie.

Not sure if you’ve heard of it, it’s a little animated feature called Toy Story 3. Rumour has it, it may do quite well at the box office this summer.

In a fairytale story, almost worthy of a Disney movie, one evening last week I used the social networking website Twitter to send a message to a guy called Lee Unkrich.

Who? Let’s just say he’s one of those geniuses who work at Pixar who’ve made all those fabulous movies like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, WALL-E and of course, the Toy Story trilogy.

Being a huge Toy Story fan, (and super geek), I’ve been following Mr Unkrich’s ‘tweets’ as they call them, about the new movie for about a year now.

So last week, on a bit of whim, I sent him a message asking if he’d consider giving me an interview. For the next few hours I checked my inbox nearly as many times as a lovesick teenager checks their mobile phone, and pretty much as expected, heard nothing.

So imagine my complete surprise when the next day, a slightly confused sounding girl at Disney got in touch at Lee’s request to see if I could find time to squeeze in a chat.

I’m told I threw my arms in the air with such force my workmates thought I’d won the lottery. Well, as far as I was concerned, I kind of did.

Over the next two days a trip to London was organised, as was a private screening of the new movie, and a visit to a swish London hotel to spend time with not only Lee, but also the producer of Toy Story 3.

I knew the invite had been pretty special, but it was only when the 50 or so journalists who were at the press conference were shepherded out of the hotel and my co-host Trev and I were guided upstairs to a hotel suite, that I realised just how lucky we were.

We spent about half an hour asking only a fraction of the questions we wanted to ask, and I’d like to say that thanks to my two decades of media experience, I was the picture of professionalism...

Sadly, of course, I wasn’t.

Unable to resist taking along my Buzz Lightyear for a photo opportunity, I managed to accidentally bump the hidden Buzz within my bag against a table leg as we sat down… thus ensuring the very first words spoken in my first major Hollywood interview were a rather muffled “Buzz Lightyear to the rescue!” from under the table.

At least it broke the ice.