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- [00:00]
A
Andrew Stanton was the second animator at Pixar. He's been working there for 30 years. Like, if you want to know how Pixar runs, this is your guy. He's directed movies like Finding Nemo, Wall E. He's now working on Toy Story 5. He was the executive producer of Inside out of Ratatouille. And so I had to ask, what is it that you've done at Pixar to keep that quality bar so high? It's like hit after hit after hit. Appeals to kids, appeals to adults. What is it that you do to do it over and over again? Well, that's what this episode is all about. How have you gone about making these movies riveting for kids and parents? Because that to me is the thing about Pixar that just stands out. It's like I was an 8 year old kid watching Nemo and I still remember just the terror of Nemo getting lost and just crying my face out in the movie theater. I still feel that viscerally. And then I watched Inside Out a few years ago. I was like, this movie's awesome.
- [00:58]
B
Yeah, well, we've never written for kids, huh? We've just written for ourselves. So I guess we're just immature. And we've never left our childhood, Our childhood meant a lot to us. We're, we're, you know, we're definitely in the Peter Pan world all the time. And that's, but you, you find your tribe and animation, that's very common in your tribe is that you not ready to give up all the things that you enjoyed that when you were young and you're not seeing a reason to, but you've inherited or gained all this wisdom and culture for watching more and more adult movies and more and more adult books and, and foreign. And you know, you just, your, your, your palette broadens and you want to bring all that back to the table. You don't want to have to leave what you enjoyed about. I'll put, I'll put my experience on the line. Like I loved Sesame Street, I loved Monty Python, I loved Bugs Bunny, I loved Walt Disney. And I didn't want to give that up simply because I was growing up and enjoying Lawrence of Arabia and Clockwork Orange and, and all the other great things that were coming down the pipe. Pulp Fiction, you know, you name it. And he wanted to just add it to the stew. And there was a sophistication of cinema and storytelling that I didn't understand. Had to be exclusive to, to the adults. And I can speak for everybody else At Pixar, we just made what we would want to see and just made sure that we weren't accidentally offending or excluding younger ages in the means. But I've never worried for five seconds about a kid understanding what we're doing. Kids are really good, really good at trying to figure out what the adults are talking about because they spend their first five years with everybody physically and mentally talking over their heads and not including them, and they're figuring it out. They know they are huge readers of just gestures and tone and body language, Body language, all of that they're way better at. We get soft and lazy as we get adults. So I've never worried about the kids. They'll figure it out if we're truthful about what we're doing and truthful about what we're expressing, whether that's in performance or in the storylines or all of the above music, you name it, they'll get it. And so I've just never worried about them. I've worried about a lot of adults being too dumb to figure it out. It's the adults version. Yeah, well, it can be, right. We've had so many test screenings with families, and so often, almost every test screen, there's a parent that says, I think this might be too difficult or too harsh or too dark for my kid. And their kid will always sit there and shake their head vehemently, go, no.
- [03:51]
A
How do you do test screenings and get feedback from people at scale without having it be dumbed down? Like so many focus groups or things that are made by consensus tend to be pretty sterile and vanilla.
- [04:04]
B
Well, they're not made by consensus. You just get to have to endure listening to the consensus. We don't have to do anything. That's our choice. What we really gain from, we gained very little from the Q&As. Sometimes we'll find out, oh, nobody got somebody's name, even though we said it three times in a movie, our character's name or it helps us with things like clarifying things became, you know, aren't clear and you want to make them clearer. But when everybody's honest is when the lights are down and the movie's playing and they can. You can literally see them in, you know, the dark, laughing, smiling, leaning forward. And even if they. The lights come up and they say, I didn't like it, I believe how they were when the lights were down. Right. Tell me what you do, not what you say. Exactly. And so that's really where we are taking notes.
- [04:53]
A
So with something like Wally that scene, that character, where does that begin in your head? How does it go onto the page? And then how do we get from that to what we see on the poster in the movie?
- [05:02]
B
Wall E's unique. There's a very strict formatting to screenwriting, which is similar to, I guess, closer to music, where everybody understands the measures, the bars, the notes, the rhythm, the beats. And in screenwriting, there's formatting for how you describe a moment that you'd be watching versus how you'd be where to, like almost on a play where the characters have their lines and then there's these subheaders about where the locations of these scenes are happening. And you learn very quickly just by looking at it, even if you squinted your eyes like, oh, this is a cut to another scene. This is when people speak this. And so the formatting is very regimented, but you can play with that over time. People have to read lots of scripts to vet stuff, and they tend to skim the description and just go straight to the dialogue, which is a cheat and you really shouldn't do. So the trick in writing a screenplay is trying to write it so that everybody reads everything that you put in there. And so you sometimes mess around with the formatting. And so I was inspired. I knew that Wall E was going to be predominantly dialogue free. And even when there was dialogue, it would be sounds that you'd be interpreting. So I always described it as a foreign film that just doesn't have any subtitles. What it's emulating is what you get out of just the emoting that happens in the way something sounds. So I read a script that Walter Hill had done a draft for for Alien in 1979. And there's not a lot of dialogue in the first 10, 15 minutes of that movie. And you read the script and he sort of broke all the rules and did these little left justified haikus that were like four lines at a time or four or five lines, or would just break a line. Nothing would go all the way across the page. It looked to your eye like dialogue. And he broke it at the rhythm that he wanted you to read it. So it. The general rule is like a minute, a page, Y. And I just kind of adopted that same thing. And so that you would not cheat, you wouldn't ride ahead, and you would. It would say something like, you know, in. In Walter Hill's script, it would say the door opens and then it be a whole break. And then steam. Just the word. And then. Then another description of like, other doors opening. And it makes it sound like those are the moments worth savoring versus get to the point. And that's what I wanted for Wally was I wanted you to read it the way you're going to ultimately watch it and be at the rhythm and slow down your heart rate and be at the pace that ultimately is what you saw in the movie. So it was really inspirational. Wow.
- [07:57]
A
And so when you're beginning on Wall E, what are the sort of tenants, the pillars of a script that you're writing, a movie that you're making? Is it like theme? I want a good theme, I want good characters, I want a good premise. Like, what are the things that you're looking for?
- [08:12]
B
I want it to be about something, but I'm totally open minded that I don't know what that is, but I must be interested in it initially for some reason. So I kind of let the story, as I try to solve it and uncover it. Tell me. I was very inspired by reading a book about playwriting in the 40s called the art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Igri. I've read every book that there is about screenwriting and about stories, and that one spoke to me and he has a. A belief about. He calls it a premise. Other people might call it a theme, but he is very strict and he says, you want a premise that tells you the structure of the story. So it's usually a sentence that will start with a character and then a conflict and then a conclusion. I'm constantly writing a sentence that I think is what I'm trying to say, but I don't follow it. It's more a litmus test of what I think, the results of what, an analysis of what I think I've done. So I often have a page open. Used to be a notebook, but now it's a page on my computer. I just keep writing sentences and it's like, that's not the right word, that's not the right thing. And I don't sweat it. I just go, okay, then I don't have it figured out yet. I just let the story be. Be wrong or be lost for a while. I'm trying to get to the answer before others have to commit to what I've written. Because again, it's planned. So think of it like architecture. At some point they got to build this house and I want to be ahead of the game. But I don't get it right the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. I usually get it right if I'm really good at the seventh or eighth but ninth time. But I'm constantly sort of reviewing my work and analyzing it and then going and to two sides of the teeter totter. Like one side I'm analyzing what I've done, trying to find a structure, trying to find a meaning, trying to see what patterns I happen to be creating or possibly there. And then I go to the other side and I just jam and I just play and I don't think about anything because it restricts me and I'm just jumping to either side of the teeter totter. So for Nemo, like a sentence that I finally keyed in on after, I don't know, about three years, was, fear denies a good father from being one.
- [10:37]
A
Wow.
- [10:38]
B
If I can find that within the. The last year and a half, it helps me hone and focus on anything that I have executed or have left to execute, because now I know exactly what I'm saying.
- [10:50]
A
Fear denies a good father from being.
- [10:52]
B
Yeah, so fear was the main character denies was the conflict. So everything was denying his. Him from being a good father until he conquered that. And that was. But the sloppy way that I understood that at the very beginning was. Was just an experience I was having with my young son. I was busy on A Bug's Life and he was about 4 and I wasn't seeing him enough and I wanted to go. And I put all this pressure on time to hang out with him when we did have the weekend. But I would spend the whole time going, don't touch that. Be careful, don't run into the street. And I was being so overprotective, I was basically pissing away the connection time I was there out of pure love and desire. So I said, this must be such a common problem for parents that have every good intention. And so it's easy to say now and it seems so obvious to say fear denies a good parent from being one. But that's just how hard it is to, you know, to encapsulate something that has a narrative structure to it.
- [11:54]
A
I was reading something where you were talking about your biggest regret from Nemo, or kind of reflecting on the process of making it. And you talked about this fear that you had that maybe this movie was going to be a failure. And it leads me to this question of, you're working at Pixar, obviously a legendary place, and now you're directing something. And so how do you balance these high expectations of, oh, my goodness, this is a Pixar movie, with the play required to come up with a story like that?
- [12:24]
B
Well, it was basically A startup with a bunch of guys and gals that just were out of the off the radar. And, and, and it was. We kept it that safe and comfortable and, and we really promote an atmosphere and always have of failure. You're creating a new instrument that you're playing every time and you need the safety to just practice, practice, practice to figure out how it to make it sound good. And that's a lot of jamming. So if you're not falling off your bike, trying it all the time, then something's wrong and you are playing it too safe and you're your own worst enemy. The other way I put it is, especially by the time we became successful in the outside world's eyes so consistently is I get paid to play baseball, which is awesome, but I have to win the World Series to keep being able to do it. And the only way I know how to win the World Series is to just remember what it was like to be in my backyard and playing for the love of the game. So it's just always a mental exercise to just go. The outside world has. And all these pressures don't exist or they've. They've always existed and you didn't think about them when you were playing in your backyard. So don't think about them now. Right. So it's just kind of a. A mental headspace that I've always known.
- [13:42]
A
I taught writing for six years and the biggest trouble that my students faced was writer's block. They had so much trouble getting ideas from out of their head and onto the page. But you know what's weird? People don't get talker's block. Like if you just talk out your ideas, it works. That's why I love Whisper Flow and use it for my writing all the time. It's super easy. Press a hotkey and you just talk and all of a sudden the ideas show up on the page. The no ums, there's no sloppy punctuation, just a draft that you can work with and shape into something amazing. And since I'm no longer tethered to the keyboard, I can write on the move. And the biggest thing is that I trust it. Look, I love Siri. She and I go way back. We've known each other for years, but sometimes I wonder if she even passed 4th grade English class because she can't even get punctuation right. But Whisper flow automatically cleans up all your mistakes, digressions, and weird little vocal fillers without losing any. Any of the substance. That's why I love Whisper Flow. I use it every single day, and I recommend it to every writer I know. And you can try for free@ref whisperflow. AI howirite. Is there a one liner that you're going for with character similar to how you were talking about the one liner of the story with Fear and Nemo?
- [14:56]
B
Like Wally's is irrational love defeats life's programming, and Wally is a rational love. That's his character. And then I often give characters spines, which meaning they're wired up no matter what's going on in life. It's the core of you. Judith Weston, who is a acting coach, taught me this term, and she gave a good example that like Michael Corleone, the Godfather, his spine is to please his father. And that never goes away, even after his father dies, all the way through the second Godfather movie. And an actor can work with that because that. That can affect how you open, you know, a book or get up in the morning. Like it's. It's. It's your spine. And. And so Wally's spine was to find the beauty.
- [15:47]
A
I had Wright Thompson on the show. He's one of the greatest living sports writers right now, and his whole thing is writing profiles. And I said, what's a profile? He said, a profile is figuring out what is the central complication in any
- [15:59]
B
person's life, which we all have.
- [16:01]
A
How do they go about solving it in every single thing that they do?
- [16:04]
B
Exactly.
- [16:04]
A
And if you can get clear on that and then have that motif, that theme show up in all the stories now you have the conflict, you have the tension, you have a story, you have an arc, and everything comes together.
- [16:14]
B
That's exactly it. And the trick is, or the trap is that you think you. Is that you force one when you run out of time, or that you can't find one when you want one or you don't like it. And I guess with age comes a little bit of patience. But you just learn to just keep at it until you've struck what really feels like the truthful profile or spine with things like screenwrite plays again, they're a living document. So part of the excitement is once you hire an actor or get animators and get other artists involved, it's still a draft. And you get informed tremendously by other people getting involved, particularly the other animators and actors. And then you start seeing your words performed, and you start seeing better ways that it can be done. And so you do another draft and you refine.
- [17:10]
A
Seems like there's a real sense of meritocracy and egalitarianism in the culture of Pixar, that.
- [17:16]
B
And if you're doing it right, it's that in movie making in general, movie making is a team sport. And everybody has this myth of the director. There's a director with a vision, and everybody just heeds the vision. And there's a modicum of truth to that. Like, there's. There's a vision to be solved and to be figured out. And it's your job, once it's found as a director, I believe, to protect it and to keep and be the constant reference for everybody else about what it is, because you're the one with all the knowledge, but you're there as a supporter, that you're there to foster it. If you're doing it right, every name on that crew list, whether in front of the camera or behind the camera, virtual or live, should matter. And it would make a difference if. And it would be a different thing if they changed the roles, if you've changed the people that were on it in the same way that you would expect a different outcome of the game if you change the bench. So to me, it's always been a team sport, and that's the attraction. That's maybe another big difference. I mean, by. I'm not a writer. I don't. I don't sit there and go, this is what I want to say, and hopefully nobody will mess with it. You know, I. I go, this is what I think I want to say, and hopefully people will help me mess with it correctly. What matters for good dialogue that you believe it comes out of that particular character. You know, that there's idiosyncrasies and idioms. That's another perk about having an actor speak, is that the minute you start seeing an actor say it, you can tell right away whether it feels like something that character that you created would say or wouldn't say. Or you start learning how to take advantage of idioms and idiosyncrasies and quirks that the actor brings to the table. Somebody asked me once, you know what? How do you write good dialogue? And I said, fear of a really good actor saying it out loud. Like it's that simple.
- [19:37]
A
Well, like Tom Hanks is going to
- [19:39]
B
come in for fear of a good actor saying it out loud. Yeah, yeah.
- [19:45]
A
What character did you have the most fun writing dialogue for?
- [19:48]
B
Well, Dory is probably the most fun because you get to be the most impish. You get to meet them. I mean, I've definitely always been a class clown my whole life. Or an instigator So I get to see that side of me and be a wise ass. But what comes the easiest to me is Woody, because Woody has always been. I'm the one that kind of found the voice that we stuck with. And it was an amalgamation of just working with Tom Hanks long enough on the first one and then searching myself a little bit because I was a father, a new father. And, and. And I have a very cynical nature, but I'm a softy under right underneath. And so I kind of combined those two. And. And, and then without meaning to, I kept getting called in on Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 a little bit and a lot on Toy Story 4 to just kind of bring Woody's voice back. And. And it. There's just something very close to just my voice that I guess it is. So it comes easier for me with Hanks.
- [20:48]
A
And what was the relationship between Tom Han that voice to life? Describe that for me.
- [20:53]
B
Well, Tom's got a confident, benevolent, kind nature to him. I don't know if he's like me say this, but you can also tell that it's. It's a cocktail of sincerity and intention. There's a lot that he's still keeping close to his chest. You can. You can spend a long time with him and feel that you've had an honest discussion, but still not walk away not knowing, you know, much about him.
- [21:21]
A
Right.
- [21:21]
B
So he keeps his cards close, and I think that's a means to protect himself, you know, that maybe he's had all his life or maybe he's had because of the fame or both, as you know. And I've taken. I sort of ran with that. Not for the same reasons, not for fame or wounded or anything, but because Woody had an insecurity in the room of not feeling he was really that worthy of the station that he had. And he overcompensated with it by trying to be a dependable leader. And so they're all the stew of best intentions, but still, there's hiding a lot under it.
- [22:02]
A
Yeah. What have you learned from silent films?
- [22:05]
B
That we didn't gain much from dialogue being added and that we may even lost something in trying in going too far with exposition. It was amazing to me for. In researching Wally, we had, you know, years to work on it. So every lunch, at least a couple days a week, we would watch Chaplin movies and Keaton movies and get to a point where we pretty much saw it all. And the subject matters were so sophisticated, and they just found ways of getting it across with Very little help from title cards. It was really inspiring. It made you brave. It made you just go. Whatever it is, we'll figure out a way to convey it.
- [22:45]
A
What does live action give you that animation doesn't? And what does animation give you that live action doesn't?
- [22:50]
B
Spontaneity. In live action, you have to work very fast, but everybody's in front of you like they are right now with cameras. And the people that are going to be involved are all there. And you see it right away and you deal with it. Animation is in slow motion. So I have a meeting with the lighting people, I have a meeting with the props people, I have a meeting with the actors. And they're all doing their individual files. And at some point the files will come together. And maybe once a week or once every two weeks, we watch all of that combined together. And then we go, that didn't work. Or that did work. And then we can keep tweaking it, we can keep refining it like a. Like a writing, like a file on a word processor. So that's a big advantage. So we can be all the way to almost the release date and still do a fix. But we never get the fun of, look what I found. Look what happened. The sun just suddenly broke. And here's something I found at a vintage clothing store. This is something I just thought of. And we can do it right now. There's no spontaneity.
- [23:48]
A
Can you tell me about Wally and the way that you thought about bringing Wall E to life against the background of the apocalyptic premise and how you brought both of those to life?
- [23:59]
B
Just the four of us that were the brain trust at the time just sort of spewed a bunch of subject matters, and one of them became A Bug's Life. It was like the ant, the grasshopper fable turned upside down. Pete said he wanted to do something about monsters under your bed. And then we said, what about a robot movie? And somehow, through the back and forth, we came up with a planet made of trash. Because the lowliest thing we could think of, it all became about futility. It's like, what kind of robot could just be alone on a planet that everybody's left? And we thought, like a trash compactor robot. And wouldn't that be the saddest thing that it doesn't know its job is futile? It can stop compressing trash, but. And everybody's gone. And so with the working title was Trash Planet for a couple years. So it always was. The genesis was just this personification of futility and loneliness and Then it was just like, what to do with that. Pete tried things for a while and never went anywhere. And John and I were very convinced it could should be a romance and that there should be another robot that comes from somewhere else. And they're opposites. And I thought. We both thought that was a very strong idea. So when Pete moved on to do monsters and just kind of shelved the trash planet idea, I picked it up after Nemo because I couldn't stop thinking about it.
- [25:20]
A
What makes for a good love story, a good romance?
- [25:23]
B
Opposites always helps. Opposites, yeah. Creates conflict, creates drama. You know, we learned that big time with Toy Story on a buddy movie, that people with opposing agendas, opposing beliefs, they don't have to be 100% opposite of each other, but they have to have. You want some sort of conflict, you have some sort of obstacle in the way of them just getting along, or else there's just no drama. And then literally, visually, he was a box, she was a circle. It just all adds to the tension of will they, won't they?
- [25:59]
A
I want to ask you about a few people and hear what it is that you've learned from them. I got to start with Steve Jobs.
- [26:06]
B
Steve was the widest, farthest thinker I've ever met. Whenever you thought you were thinking what the results or the possibilities were of something, he was always thinking even farther, another mountain range over than you were. So it always was fascinating. He had tremendous patience for the right answer or for the discussion in the meeting to go the way it should go. So I was always fascinated with. You could ask him a question in a meeting and he would just sit there often with a namaste hand and just let the room sit in silence for as long as it took until he had the. He felt the appropriate response to something. And I always thought that was so impressive just from a guts standpoint. But over time I. I saw the wisdom in it because he just wanted to get to the. The core of the issue and not spend a lot of time being. Going down side roads or being distracted.
- [27:13]
A
I saw him described as this protector of Pixar.
- [27:17]
B
Yeah. Somebody described when I first got there, and it took a few years before I really got to meet him. I said, what's he like? And he was in his 30s at the time, and I was in my 20s.
- [27:28]
A
Wow.
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B
And he said, if he thinks he can do your job, he's the worst person to work for. If he thinks he can't do your job, he's the greatest boss. And he didn't think he could do what we did. And so that turned out to be very true. He also, to be fair, he got married, had kids right around the time he. We started rising with Pixar, with Toy Story. And so he was mellowing out and maturing on both the professional and the personal front at the same time. And we were big benefactors of that. He spent, even though within about five, six years he was back at Apple and starting that back up. He spent a good eight to ten years with us every week, a couple days a week. So I always say his 10 years in the desert was with Pixar. He really put all his eggs in the Pixar basket because he really loved the idea of making something that lasted longer than a computer. He explained to John once, John Lasseter, that the best he can do is have a shelf life of about five years with anything that he ever built in the computer world. But he saw that we were making the next, potentially the next Snow White, and that people might be watching that movie for decades. And here we are, Toy Story 5, and people are still watching Toy Story. And he was right.
- [28:47]
A
John Lasseter, what'd you learn from him?
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B
Everything. He was as talented as anybody gives him credit for. He was a natural Barnum and Bailey. And I don't mean that in the boisterous type. I just mean that he just really had a natural instinct or what an audience would like. He was a natural born entertainer. I think that's one of the things people don't realize is that I think if you had to simplify what was our strength as a group with John at the head of it, and it was me, Pete Docter and Joe ramped it for a while and then Lee Unkrich came on and that's really what people would call the brain trust. All of us individually couldn't help ourselves but want to use everything through an entertainment filter. In other words, I, I feel unworthy of comparing it us to the Beatles, but everybody gets this analogy, is that they, they were, weren't writing pop tunes that they thought would sell. They were writing pop tunes that they wanted to hear themselves.
- [29:54]
A
And it's like if we rock out, the people rock out too.
- [29:57]
B
Yeah. So they don't worry about it. This was they, they just naturally had a, a gift for toe tapping and so did we. We just had a natural individually, but collectively we just. Anything that got put in front of us, we found this out while we were making commercials, before we even got to making Toy Story became more entertaining, even if it was still broken or it was a story. We still needed work. Nothing got through us without becoming more entertaining. And so we had this sort of entertainment green thumb that was really, really a superpower when we were collective with John at the head of that. And. And so I learned a lot from that, but we also learned a lot as a group all together. Making the first movie was our first movie all around this Toy Story. Yeah. And so we just learned everything on that movie.
- [30:48]
A
It's cool to hear the analogies that you use. Like, early when we were talking about story, you used the word uncovering the story and solving the story.
- [30:54]
B
Yeah. I'm a big believer that this, a really great story already exists out there. I've just seen it happen so many times, and it's happened, knock on wood, on almost everything I've ever written. It just feels like, what is it? I think it was Michelangelo that said, the statues in the marble, I just uncover it. I've firsthand experienced that so many times in the last 30 years. It's just. And my analogy is an archeological dig is that you can take credit for picking the right area to start digging in, and you can always take credit for that, but then you don't have much say in what comes up first and. And when. So all you can take credit for is being aggressive in your digging. So. And, and then the money people come in, the executives come in and go, why are we digging here? What have you been? Well, we're, We're, We're. We've got a couple bones and it's going to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, we promise you. Yep. And. But I only have these two bones, and then I'm just drawing in lines to just express the rest of it to you. Then you start digging more and more, and you try all the stuff and you get enough bones brought up and put together that for Pixar. The big difference between, I think, other studios is that Even in the 11th hour, we can get to some epiphanies of uncovering and go, wait a minute, the neck bones, the tailbone, and it's not a Tyrannosaurus rex, it's a. It's a Stegosaurus. And then do you have the fortitude, the temerity to, like, go, we're gonna shift. We're gonna. We got this much time left. We have very little, but we're gonna shift and we're gonna fix the story to fit the dinosaur that we actually uncovered rather than the dinosaur we promised. And most places blink on that or shrink and we've actually structured our production flow so that we can do that.
- [32:52]
A
So what's an example of that? Like a. A thinning shift?
- [32:57]
B
Well, I'll use Nemo, since I haven't used Nemo in a while. Nemo, the opening tragedy of the barracuda killing mom was always in the script, but it was doled out. And as you would naturally think, it was intense. It was dark, so it felt like a big. It almost felt like therapy. It should be an uncover a revelation. That's something that comes finally is earned and exposed by the end. So I doled that out. I sort of implied something, the courtship and the life that was pre Nemo being born, and that it was dueled out throughout the film. And it wasn't until the present storyline of the end of Act 3, when Marlon is trying to get the fish to swim down and get his son, that counterpointing that was the tragedy. And it was all cinematic and cool. And it would cut to a barracuda swipe, and then it would cut to the fishnet coming down. But you just didn't like the father. You didn't like him. He just was too neurotic, too annoying, too complainy. And everybody said, recast or change him or rewrite him. And to my editor's credit and co director Lee Unkrich, he said, I think you should put all those flashbacks as one scene and make it the prologue and just let it tell everything up front. And I could not get past, like, that is so dark. That is so intense to kick off. Like, I'm going to kill Bambi's mom right at the top. Like, is that really any? And to be fair to them, they said, let's just try it. It's just a file. We don't have to show this to anybody else. Let's just try it. I'm like, all right, all right. And so we tried it, and that's the way it worked. And what was amazing to see was you had such empathy for the father after that, that everything that people had been complaining about, all the scenes, all the lines, all the stuff that if you compiled the notes from very smart people saying what to fix, I would have changed the wrong thing. I would have changed the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. So it was a real lesson. Tell me about this quote.
- [34:58]
A
It's from William Archer. Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
- [35:03]
B
Best definition of drama I've ever heard. That's all you're trying to do. Can you create a situation in every beat of your story that makes the person want to know what will happen next. And I don't mean like a mystery. That's the big obvious low hanging fruit. But how do you write what somebody says so that you're dying to know what the next person's going to say back? And how do you make a. And write it so that then you want to know what happens after that? How do you make everything pull you a little bit more forward? In San Francisco, we have cable cars. And if you understand anything about the making of cable cars, what it is, is there's a chain running under the street that's moving at all times. And all the cable operator does with this big clamp is clamp onto the chain and it pulls them up the hill and down the hill. And all I'm ever doing when I'm helping other people with their stories or analyzing my story is when did we accidentally unclamp or did we ever clamp? Because if you've done it right and you've really, really honed it, you're clamped the whole time. That's kind of the goal. That's, that's, that's the, that's the goal to me of storytelling is keeping you so engaged. Can be the slowest moving movie, can be the fastest movie, but keeping you so engaged that you never thought about anything else, you never looked at anything else. And then ideally it's in a theater and the lights come up and you were transported. That's always the goal. The goal is that with a song, the goal is that with a painting and the means to doing that with a script and with a movie is all the ingredients working in concert to keep you clamped and moving forward.
- [36:55]
A
Can you tell me about those two words in that quote? Anticipation and uncertainty. Like what do those, how are they working together?
- [37:03]
B
Well, those are the two things that you can conjure. Like you and I are sitting here and we're talking. That's a scene. But what if you and I are talking and there keeps being a tapping at the window while we're trying to talk? That adds some unknowability, some uncertainty. And if the tapping gets a little louder and a little more insistent, it feels like when somebody. Is somebody going to finally break and address it? Like that's drama mingled with uncertainty. So the power of creating drama and uncertainty is actually quite accessible and quite yet at the ready. It's just your, your mindset about it.
- [37:49]
A
Yeah, that cable car analogy is so good. Because the other thing is there is in so many movies, there's a moment when you feel like, you kind of hook onto the cable and now you're there. But sometimes I just never get that hook. And so I'm never actually invested in the story.
- [38:08]
B
This is a lesser analogy, but I use it all the time. Is keeping your interest in a movie is the beach ball that's thrown into the crowd during a concert? People got to keep up. I don't care who's performing or what's going on. Once the beach ball gets thrown on, you are watching the beach ball, and what happens the minute the beach ball disappears? You're back to just kind of watching the concert, checking your watch, whatever. Like. So I'm always like, when did the beach ball drop? Like, I'm watching other people's films at Pixar all the time, and all I'm really doing going is, when does the beach ball drop? Okay, it dropped.
- [38:42]
A
There's.
- [38:42]
B
Why did it drop? When did it first come into the concert? Like, I know that's a weird word, but for me, that's my brain, and that's what works for me, what makes
- [38:52]
A
for a good ending. There's a line from Aristotle where he says, it's surprising in the moment, but inevitable in retrospect.
- [38:58]
B
It's the combination surprising and inevitable because you don't want to see it coming. But when it happens, there's no better answer. Of course, it had to be like, exactly. And that's really hard. And it's not. I mean, there's much more pressure on something like that when it's literally being asked, who done it or how. How did it happen or what will happen? There's plenty. I'm more impressed now by quiet movies that are just about somebody's possible inner conflict. It could be as simple as a pause and a sigh is the most satisfying result of the journey you've taken with that character. It's just all about where the emphasis is.
- [39:41]
A
I really notice this appreciation that you have for the simplicity.
- [39:47]
B
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I think stories don't interest me if they're not incorporating the human condition to some deeper degree. Even when I did something about a fish, I wanted it to really have some. Some real human inter. Inter. Turmoil.
- [40:12]
A
Well, ironically, it's easier to process that through the lens of fish than humans.
- [40:19]
B
Sometimes I think it's an easier entry. You don't. You're not trying to compare it to you right away. And. And maybe that's why it's so effective. And you're not judging it as harshly because you're like, I would never do that? Well, you're not a fish, you know, But I've always indulged in the bittersweet, and I think I always have, even when I was little.
- [40:40]
A
In your TED Talk, you talk about the importance of evoking wonder, and why is that so crucial? You still hold that to the same degree of importance as you did back then.
- [40:50]
B
For me, the greatest stories do that. They make you humble and appreciative of the power of life and just existing. And sometimes that's in smelling the top of a baby's head, and sometimes that in surviving a near fatal crash. You know what I mean? It can come in all shapes and sizes, but there's a wonder to existence that I'm always appreciative of seeing and hearing it through a new perspective. And I think it starts with something as simple as a children's movie about deer in the forest, you know, which was Bambi, the first thing I ever saw.
- [41:34]
A
I think it's just wild that we can bring these characters to life and have them. It's so easy to build relationships with them. I mean, another example that I was thinking about over the past few days was those Chevron with Techron commercials. Oh, yeah, Remember those with the talking cars?
- [41:51]
B
Yep.
- [41:51]
A
And I remember we watching San Francisco giantska be like, oh, yes. You know what I mean? And they smile and they frown.
- [41:58]
B
Yeah. There's something evocative about anthropomorphized characters when done right. And the more they're. And there's not a hard, fast rule, but when they're done, really, they find that sweet spot. They invite you in. I also say that in the TED Talk, there's something about infant babies and puppies and kittens when you just. You can't help but go, oh. And you find people say out loud like, oh, they like me, or they're scared, or like, nobody asked you to speak for them. That's how much pull they produce in a human being. And all I was in a, as a greedy storyteller, filmmaker, was like, I want some of that juice. Can I have a movie that just does that to you all the time? And that's what started Wally years ago.
- [42:51]
A
There were these 22 rules of storytelling from Pixar. That.
- [42:55]
B
That's not generated by us.
- [42:58]
A
That was not generated by you guys.
- [42:59]
B
It was by, to my knowledge, X and Pixar employee that had come up with their own set of observations and rules. So I'm not saying we didn't necessarily follow some of those things, but there's never been A rule book. And there's never been tenements that we follow that are said or written down. So that's become a myth. And I'm here to tell you that just because it's online doesn't mean it's real.
- [43:23]
A
Tell me about the relationship between stories and change.
- [43:28]
B
I'm going to quote that book again. Lahas Igri says in the Art of Dramatic Writing, like, even a rock changes, you know, grows moss. It gets damp, it gets. Dries off the sun. Like nothing stays the same. So I think we are. I think the. To go back to my analogy, I think that the cable car gets disconnected and the. On a fundamental level and the beach ball disappears when there's not enough change. But change can come in so many forms. That can come from an eye shift when it's cinematic. You know, it can come from a pause, just. It was active, then it wasn't. That's. Change is kind of an umbrella for everything. I mean, it happens in your dreams all the time, Right. Suddenly you're here and suddenly you're there. Suddenly you were talking to a lizard and suddenly you're talking to your mom. Yeah. You know, and the crazier it is, the more dreamlike it is. But we're wired to have the next thought, have the next perspective shift.
- [44:31]
A
My friend Sean Puri, he said that stories are about a 5 second moment of change. And when you're thinking about telling a story, you almost get in your head at the beginning. What is the fundamental change that's gonna come from this? Of. I went from being really sad to being really happy to being really stuck to figuring out and then everything before the story kind of leads up to that. I just think about that all the time.
- [44:54]
B
Oh, I'll be honest, I get a little nervous about. I'm at a place in my life where I spent so much. I spent maybe 10, 15 years in my 20s, into my 30s, just soaking in everything I could possibly learn. And then it got in the way. And I call it analysis paralysis. And I just. Maybe it's just age and impatience, but I've gotten to a place where I just don't want to know the rules anymore. I just want to be. I just want to jazz hand it and see what. And. And dig myself out of my own holes. I make. Because part of the fun is the discovery and the solving.
- [45:42]
A
When. When Lee Child came on the show, he said something very similar.
- [45:46]
B
Yeah.
- [45:46]
A
And Lee Child is just. He sold like 200 million books, right? Yeah. And he was like, I don't sit down with an outline, I just try
- [45:56]
B
to come up with a really good
- [45:57]
A
story and see what unfolds. And there was a really interesting kind of back and forth in the YouTube comments of that episode where people were like, I can't believe he does an outline. And someone made a good point, said, this guy has read hundreds of books every year for decades. Like, his repertoire is so deep. And I think that there's a time when you kind of transcend the rules
- [46:18]
B
and you run the risk of following a map that you've. If you've created grooves in your head.
- [46:23]
A
Right.
- [46:24]
B
I don't think there's a right or a wrong. It's just more of a reflection of where you're at in your arc of being interested in writing and stuff. I needed the first 15 years just to prove to myself I could do it, and then could I do it well. And now I'm just afraid of now I realize, oh, part of the fuel was the challenge of that, and now I need a different source of fuel to be the challenge. But I don't want to take challenge out of has to just come some other means. And so that's not following a pattern. What's your source of fuel now? Not planning much. You know, having just enough to be inspired and then just getting messy and seeing what happens. I can always go back to the old way. I know exactly how. I so, you know, set myself up. I know what books to read to inspire me, what patterns of planning and carding on the wall. All that stuff I have at the ready if I want to. But it's more interesting now to just kind of walk into the grocery store without a recipe and just start grabbing items off the shelf and then see what I do in the kitchen. It's a lot more fun now. Before, I would have just made a mess.
- [47:41]
A
When you talk about inspiration, what does that feel like? Is it, oh, my goodness, I need to do it right now, or is it like, hey, I feel like there's a door that if I walk through and I kind of tip through the house slowly, I'm going to uncover things.
- [47:53]
B
You know, iPhones have changed everything because iPhones have changed everything. Yeah. Now I don't have to run to anywhere. I can just throw it on my notepad or my file that I have my Google Doc or whatever, and I can just keep moving forward and letting the pieces fall. And I put a lot of weight and value on things that stick. And it needs time for me to go, was that just a fleeting interest or am I still thinking about it, you know, weeks later, days later, years later. It's always tended to be the things that interest me that are most ready to be baked keep coming back at me. So I just don't want to forget them. I have a fear of forgetting and that I had a good thought yesterday and I'll never have to. So I'm very dogged, even more so about writing it down. But then I'm not afraid of letting it get lost. And so I let the inspiration kind of naturally occur. This sounds boring, but I always kind of need a deadline. Like I just kind of like if it's. It's harder when it's self imposed as opposed to like agreeing to a job. But it doesn't hurt for me to just go to promise somebody else, like, oh, this is when I'll have it done by. It kicks me into gear. I'm. I'm very dutiful about promising things to other people and so especially when it comes to a job. So I use that to my advantage to just make me see, see it through. One of the hardest things I think, I mean there's that term I'm sure you've heard, whistling on the steps of Carnegie Hall. You'll find most people in life spend more time telling you the symphony they're going to write than the symphony is written. And that's called whistling on the steps of Carnegie Hall. As far as entering it and actually doing the work and you have an orchestra proving it, playing it in front of an audience. And I don't want to even accidentally be whistling on the steps of Carnegie hall. Like, and so I have a term when I'm working with other people or advising other people and I'll say finish the sentence like, like if they have enough material, even if it doesn't have the whole idea, like I don't have an ending or I don't have a middle, I just say just freaking write the sentence. I'm usually a little harsher than that. But like, and, and so just write the sentence. Just write and I'll tell you it's going to be bad. So pressure's off. But I'm telling you, you don't get to get to the nice sentence until you've written the bad sentence. So you're just delaying getting to the nice sentence. So just write the bad sentence. If somebody could tell you and promise you that on the 10th try you will nail it, you wouldn't piss away. All this time on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth, you'd get a rigor to it. And you just commit to looking bad at your job for a while to get to the really good stuff. And to me, writing is rewriting and just staying in the same half built sentence and saying someday, someday. Someday is just whistling on the steps of Carnegie Hall. Right, Yeah.
- [51:17]
A
I want to emphasize that you're saying writing is rewriting. The thing about writing is not the first time you do it. It is just the rewriting and rewriting. The drafts. The drafts, the drafts. That's actually when it comes together.
- [51:29]
B
Yeah. It's chipping away at the marble. It's strumming on the new instrument that doesn't know how to be played with before. Every time you decide not to, you're not practicing, you're not practicing with this new instrument you're trying to build. So you're just going to be that less practiced.
- [51:45]
A
Can you tell me about the Pixar brain trust?
- [51:48]
B
It's been mythologized and it's also been 30 years. 30 years is a long time. People have died, people have moved away, people have passed on and retired. And so it started for the first 10 years to be a specific group of names, because when we started, we were one group that made one movie. We weren't large enough to do more than that. So the group that figured itself out like a band, like a garage band, was John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Pete Docter, myself and Lee Unkrich. We were told, right as we were doing the IPO and finishing that we would have to break up and split off to make more movies at the same time. And we said, that's crazy. That's like telling the Beatles, now that you finally figured out how to work as a group, you've got to make solo albums. But they said, business wise, that's the only way we can survive. So we said, well, we're going to make crappy movies if we can't capitalize on this hive mind we have together. So we said, well, wait a minute, we're all under one building. We'll treat it like doctors with individual patients that advise on each other and we'll keep meeting together. And then instead of listing all five names, we just, it got ridiculous on the calendar. We just called it the Brain Trust and sometimes just the bt, but it was just the same group that had made Toy Story and it was the same group that was making basically Bugs Life and the same group that got rejoined to save and redo Toy Story 2. And so it became the thing to call in, in Emergencies, like a voluntary fire department out of a town and regularly meet. And then one of us passed away, and we hired more directors. We met other people that made us smarter and funnier. And so that group started to expand and change. And then it kind of got unwieldy for a while. About 15 years in or something became sort of like a club that everybody wanted to be a part of. And I felt for a long time it lost its mojo because it used to just be five people in a room. And when you're five people in a room, everybody's involved. The minute you're over 10 people in a room, there's an audience. And I don't care who you are, you act differently. You know you're on. You know people are listening. There's a lot of people that can hide and never have to say anything. It creates an air of feeling judged. You're not as safe and you're not as. You're not as brave. So I just felt it lost all its power. And I kept trying to tell other productions because we were now making three movies at a time, four movies. And I would tell individual productions, find your own brain trust. All of that really is. Is there is a key group of people, and they may all be on your show. They may be somebody from another show, whatever that that is less than 6. That makes you smarter. Makes you admit to them when you're alone that I don't know what I'm doing. And you feel safe. You're not going to lose any credibility for saying that. They'll tell you when something's on your face, but they'll also tell you in a way that will inspire you. Like, my goal always when I'm advising somebody is not to tell them what they're doing wrong. It's to inspire the student to redo their homework. How do you constructively criticize in a way that makes them want to go redo their homework? There's an art to that in and of itself. And so we've kind of gone to the other side of that. And people have learned now sort of how to create their own brain trust. So there isn't this group of names anymore, but there's a methodology to that term of where can you safely go, I need help. I don't know what I'm doing. Make me smarter. Inspire me to go, get up and do this again.
- [55:34]
A
So what I'm hearing from you is the brain trust is a group of less than 6 that can inspire you when you're feeling down. Look at Whatever's going on that isn't working, and say, hey, that's not working. And now I'm inferring this. One thing that's important is that the people on the brain trust are different from the people who are actually making the film, which gives them a bit more distant and objective view of what's happening. Some.
- [55:58]
B
Some mix. I mean, you. You definitely are trying to get objectivity. So it's rare that they're all internally on your show, but to be fair, we were all internally on the show when we worked on Toy Story. So I don't make it a rule. It's just what brings clarity, what brings objectivity, what brings inspiration.
- [56:19]
A
I have to ask, how is AI going to change animation? How's it going to change storytelling?
- [56:23]
B
Who knows? I mean, we've always had machine learning. If you really break down what AI does of just automating things that are tasks that nobody wants to do or makes the job easier, but nobody's ever tried to get rid of the artist in the world. We are. We're always trying to just make it easier and more freeing for the artist to be artistic. And I just. I have no interest in speaking to anything but another person, so. But it's a. It's a quite a scary tool. An impressive tool for. How so? It's. I had this line that didn't make it into the movie of this movie I did recently called in the Blink of an Eye. And these commentators on the news were saying, every couple generations, man reinvents fire. And they have. It takes a while for them to figure out how not to burn themselves instead of heat, warm themselves. And that's what I think we're seeing out of A.I. i mean, it can do a lot of damage, and hopefully it'll be able to also do a lot of good.
- [57:30]
A
Well, what I hear you saying is the technology is not the point. The point is telling story never was.
- [57:35]
B
Yeah. And so, I mean, I would argue that 10 years ago, you know, everything costs money, but 10 years ago, you could pretty much have the means of seeing whatever your brain can think up. It's just whether you can do it faster, easier, cheaper. But if you don't like what you're seeing now, it's just. It's the eye of the beholder that's decided for one reason or another not to show it. Not. You know, you're just judging the art, the artistic choices. You can't blame the technology anymore.
- [58:04]
A
Last question. If you get invited to UC Berkeley or something, you're going to Teach the screenwriting class. What are the core tenets of what you're trying to teach people? Hey, you really got to understand these things if you're going to do this at a high level.
- [58:18]
B
I mean, I'm often asked that, and I've already thrown up that one book, the Art of Dramatic Writing. And there's a book, it's called how not to Write a Screenplay, which sounds like the kind of book that you would avoid in a bookstore. But it is so smart and clear about the basics of formatting and a screenplay and how not just in formatting, but how to make somebody want to turn the page and keep reading. Just stupid little tricks that are just a great foundation on it. So I always throw those two books at people if they're just literally getting into the meat and potatoes of screenwriting. And then once you're past those two things, it's what do you have that's worth telling? Now it's down to content. But I've come to a place in life where I've really realized that the telling is just as important as the content. What do you mean? How you tell something can sometimes or oftentimes be the reason you're enjoying something more than what's being said. You can have a really good joke told poorly, and I'd rather have a really bad joke told.
- [59:34]
A
Well, it was great to meet you. I'm amazed at what you've done in these movies that you've made. It is. The whole town is just like, this is crazy that you've worked on all these projects, led all these projects.
- [59:46]
B
That's weird. It's weird. Suddenly you blink and all this stuff's been done.
- [59:52]
A
You've had a cool career. Congratulations.
- [59:53]
B
Thank you. David, great to meet you. This was a pleasure.