Andrew Stanton has spent more than half his life with Toy Story. He was the lead writer on the first three movies in the franchise, a script saviour on the fourth, and now, co-writer and co-director of Toy Story 5.

“It wasn’t the plan. But it wasn’t not the plan,” he says.

Stanton has done more than think about Woody and Buzz for the past 34 years. At Pixar, he made A Bug’s Life and two Oscar-winners: Finding Nemo and Wall-E. But Toy Story was the movie that started it all, the one he and his peers could not believe they got to make. Everything that has happened since, he says, has been gravy.

The new film, scheduled for general release in June, is widely expected to be one of the summer’s biggest hits.

The past two movies both made more than a billion dollars each, and this one is probably on the same path. But while there is a business driving many of the decisions regarding the series, Stanton says they have also had a lot of time to think about where the story should go. It is show business, but they always try to put the “show” first.