"I entered this movie as director kind of late. I was asked to come on the project a little less than a year and a half ago, so several characters had been cast before I got there. Famous people like Ian Holm, Brian Dennehy, and Brad Garrett were already on board and some Pixar people happened to have perfect voices, like Lou Romano who did Linguini. He was a production designer on The Incredibles. And Pete Sohn is a young, very gifted story guide and animator who worked on Iron Giant and Incredibles and he did the voice of Emile, who is Remy’s brother. So those guys are in-house and they were already involved in the project and I didn’t see any reason to change what was perfect. I re-cast a couple characters and there was a lot of difficulty in casting Remy and I heard Patton Oswalt on the radio and I thought he’d be perfect. I brought Peter O’Toole on and when I was first writing the character of Anton Ego that was the voice I heard in my mind and I was just hoping that he would say yes and he did. But Janeane Garofalo we cast after I came on and she does Colette and a lot of people can’t even recognize her because she so completely disappears into this role, which is a testament to how great an actress she is, and I’m really happy with the voice track on this film because it put the challenge to the animators to come up to the quality and be inspired by the voices – and I think they did."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ratatouille