Pixar’s Formula For Storytelling Success & Emotional Persuasion w/ Founder Ed Catmull EP 1474

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See you there at pixar well we also say that failure is part of the process it does happen we don't actually use the terminology very much now there are times when you have something which actually does fail so we don't avoid it you have to like if something really fails you say it but the terminology of making a film is since we know they all have problems is we're trying to solve the problem hmm that solution didn't work let's try.

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Welcome back everyone to the school of greatness very excited about our guest today we have the inspiring ed catmull in the house the co founder of pixar animation and the new york times bestselling author of creativity inc overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration i'm so glad that you're here thank you so much for being on.

The show i'm really happy to be.

Here we were just chatting for the last thirty minutes before this conversation and i'm fascinated by your story by your life and the things that you've seen witnessed overcome and building a business but also just building a beautiful life of your own you were surrounded by some of the most brilliant creatives leaders of industry since you were in college and you essentially grew up with these individuals in chasing after envisioning manifesting creating a dream of yours to make animated films which took you a long time and then you've now done over thirty two films since your time of starting at pixar i believe and disney thirty one thirty two films is that correct yeah and it's incredible to know the influence you've had on the lives of i'm assuming billions of people who have consumed your stories so i just want to acknowledge you for the incredible amount of work that you've created the incredible amount of things that you've had to overcome in building the first animation film to building a massive company and all of the the unseen forces of thousands of creative individuals coming together the incredible magic that happens with that but also the challenges you've had to overcome as well so i'm so excited you're here and we were talking about one of my favorite moments from pixar which was toy story three at the end where that made me so emotionally captivated so moved to tears at the end of this movie that i may i remember watching the first time thinking how am i crying watching a cartoon like how is this making me feel so deeply about my own life and imagining my own life and it's just amazing what you and the entire team has been able to create so i'm excited you're here i'm excited for the book that has the expanded edition to it which talks about what you learned in the last ten years of leading pixar and disney animation as well and yeah welcome again to the show very excited well i'm.

Very happy to be here although i also want to be careful that i don't take credit for what those other people did of course but being the.

Leader being co founder leading the charge and casting a vision and overseeing the vision is a big responsibility well that's.

That was the fun part yeah was okay how do you have these rather amazing people work well together over a long period of time and it never changes like it's today's problem is not like yesterday's problem and it you know keeps changing right right what was the.

Biggest challenge you had in starting that first movie because i remember you saying it took about fourteen years of time of like saying when we'll be able to actually create this animation i think it was fourteen years from your prediction what was the biggest challenge in waiting that long and actually putting out the first movie with toy story well in.

When i when i first started it was like this was the the goal was to make a film and i naively thought that it would probably take ten years and i very quickly within two or three years was disabused of that like that was just wrong but i didn't replace with another estimate it's like i really didn't know so it was more of okay how do i think about the people how we work together but also what are the economics of it and what are the technical problems that need to be solved because initially i thought of myself as a researcher i was thinking in terms of what are the problems that we need to solve to get there and then while doing that this when i was in new york tech it was after i left utah i i also found that because i was now over this group and i was kind of avoiding actually being the manager of the group so i was trying to have it both ways yeah i wanted to be the person that was solving the technical problems and i kind of liked being a leader to be honest so i had these theories about how to manage but i also found that i liked figuring out these kinds of problems too that is the relationships between people and what made them work was really interesting so i didn't have to give up one over the other more like a time allocation but i would say there was a phasing over time but i stayed pretty deeply involved in technical issues probably for the next ten or fifteen years on the technical side on the.

Technical side before launching the first film.

Before launching well yeah before launching the first film yes and because we had this rather amazing group there and i i had a i worked on having a culture like it was open and we published everything we did now at this point because we're new in the industry there were some people who thought were pretty close and i just felt like well we're not close at all so some people were secretive about their breakthroughs and i just thought well breakthrough breakthroughs we're years away yeah so the best thing to do was to publish everything we did and completely participate in this community and i'll have to say that a lot of my deepest friends come out of academia because we go to the same conferences we've known each other for fifty years but by publishing everything we also became the place to come to so we were bringing in the best people and then finally star wars happened and when star wars happened then george lucas was the first person in the film industry with credibility who thought that technology was going to affect the industry like the number one and believe me we had tried and to anybody else we were utterly and completely irrelevant it wasn't like they didn't think we could do was they didn't even think about it at all wow so george thought it was going to be possible so he hired me in because we had this rather amazing group this.

Is late seventies now this would have.

Been yes late seventies because i joined lucasfilm in nineteen seventy nine okay and when i left new york tech and trying to create this environment i realized at that point that half of what i thought was actually worked really well it became the foundation of what we built on and half of what i thought was a complete crock didn't work at all but the most important thing for me was that when i went to lucasfilm i came away with the insight that about half of what i did was right and half was wrong i was going to hang on to the things that were right but i was going to try something new but i believed that my ratio of right to wrong would probably remain fifty fifty and would probably continue to be true for the rest of my life which i have found to be true and it isn't as if i have a way of keeping track i mean it's an know you don't really know how to put numbers to this but i felt like the value to me was understanding that i was right or excuse me i was wrong more than i thought i was you were wrong more than you thought yeah yeah so at lucasfilm now it's a new educational opportunity and george wanted to bring technology into film editing to digital audio and into computer graphics and now it's another educational opportunity because now you've got three customer groups one of whom hated what we were doing they didn't like the idea these are the video editors george knew video editing he's the one that wanted it but the person they put in charge of doing it thought it was a terrible idea so okay so that did not end well even though we did something which was way advanced or anything else in the industry we didn't have a customer wanting to use it the digital audio had a guy who loved the idea and basically worked with this really well but the third group was ilm an ilm was neutral their view was well your resolution is too low but if you ever get to be good enough to be used in the films we'll use it so now we're the driving force our goal is to meet their needs to be good enough for what they were doing because they were the best in the industry and if we could make them happy then we would have succeeded so we became the driving force nobody else that was our motivation so those were the kinds of lessons and the other lesson was that as a representative of lucasfilm i got to visit all these different companies supercomputer companies cray cdc companies that most people either haven't heard of or don't remember and also the emerging workstation companies and they wanted to sell the lucasfilm so i can go in and talk with the leaders of the companies because they want to sell the lucasfilm because star wars was sexy yes and for lunch or for dinner i'd meet with the engineers because they knew that i was actually a real technical person what i found was at every one of these visits i got two different views of a company in the same day and i became aware that in a lot of companies there was like a class structure not a term they would use people would never say well we're first class here there are people who say we're treated as second class okay but you can see this going on in companies and i remember thinking this can't be good so as we continue to grow and at some point we began to bring in artists especially when we became pixar then the one thing that was clear to me is we needed to make sure that we didn't have a notion of first class and second class that we really had to make sure right from the beginning that we gave the message of valuing everybody and that isn't the same thing as saying that everybody is the same yeah they're not they have different skills different capabilities and so forth but the notion that some people are better than others in different class not a good thing so the basic principle was that you actually make the assumption that everybody can be better not the same but everybody can be better and that that is not a high risk proposition it is worth doing so basically we were learning as we were going through this and then we got to the point where george you know because he got divorced and his cash position was now completely different then he needed to sell us so this is a year long stressful period for us and then a very stressful period but part of that was by this time we had reached a level of quality because we had built some hardware in order to do high quality images that ilm was starting to use what we had and so part of the deal as we spun out was they had the rights to use the software that we had and they used it in the film i think the the first major one was the abyss although we had done something earlier for them like for star trek there was that thing where you flew over the planet and it turned lifelike sure so we'd done a couple of things for them but i found somebody to help run the graphics group we were never part of violin but they needed somebody in ilm as they started that transition to digital technology so we we were acquired by steve jobs wow.

What year was this now this would.

Be nineteen eighty six nineteen eighty six.

Steve jobs acquires you and you'd known steve before then well i i met.

Him once and and then he just disappeared at the time we were now starting to get sold now i didn't know why he disappeared later of course i learned the reason was he was in this internal struggle which resulted in him being removed at apple so this was basically a public humiliation for steve and largely had to do with the way he related with people so that's kind of the mythology around steve and i knew steve when he was like this that is his behavior around people was not empathetic and that kind of behaviors is frankly kind of it's interesting and people like to tell stories about it and write about it it's sort of like the bad boy behavior and it's unfortunate because it doesn't capture the arc of steve's life which is far more interesting and impactful instead the focus on the outside whether it was movies or writing about him or articles was about a period in his life and that was a period in which he was kicked out of apple he started next computer and next he did some brilliant things like his software choices it turns out were fundamentally ultimately changed not only next but later apple his hardware choices were questionable and he made some poor business choices sure and choices in which he thought these were really big wins but i was looking at them and thinking oh this cannot be a good idea right right right but he.

Bought you guys he bought pixar yeah.

Then then he bought pixar after he got there so we knew steve when he was like that but we didn't have any choice like we'd been spending a year this was an utter disaster it's a long story itself like the things he went there but the end result was the steve acquired us when.

He acquired you guys did you were you excited or were you more nervous based on his personality.

Well we were excited to keep alive and keep going so that was the excitement part the dream yes and and steve is like he is i mean for us and varied i had a great relationship with steve so i think i worked for steve longer than anybody else wow and i never had an argument with steve never never wow we disagreed at times but we never had an argument the.

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And and what and my style with steve was that if i didn't agree with him first of all i i knew i was self aware enough to know that i absolutely could not think as fast as he could right he's really smart you're not going to debate him you're not going to jump in yeah yeah so i mean there are people who are who actually can push back with him and argue with him successfully so there's something that's not known about steve but he actually values people that push back on him but i can't think that fast so instead he'd shoot down what i say and then i would say well let me get back to that and i'd wait a week so i think about my next sentence right for a week for a week and then i would give it to him and he'd shoot it down let me get back to you so this might go on for weeks in the couple of cases it went on for months and there'd be one of three outcomes i'd say each one was about equally likely one of them was we reach a point when i would say oh i see what you're saying you're right and that ends it about a third of the time he would say okay got it you're right end of discussion just like you just bought what i said and that was it i didn't explain it very well the first time sure and one of the reasons i would do this is i never confused the personal power that somebody might have or their position with what was right so i didn't matter if somebody was a better debater who could think faster than i could or they were in a senior position as i didn't mean they were right so it just meant that i couldn't argue at the same rate so i just didn't give up as long as i knew that i was right and if i wasn't right then i would change so the other third of the time is we didn't reach a conclusion so in that third i just did what i wanted to do and steve was okay with it because we had discussed it.

And that's how it worked oh interesting.

For all those years how many years did you work with him well.

He.

Acquired us at that time we were then a public company so we were a public company until we were acquired by disney and then at disney the terms of it was that we had the equivalent of a board of directors but we're just now a group within disney and i had a dual report to bob iger and to the head of the studio but we had this steering committee so this steering committee was john steve and me and then bob iger the chairman of the studio and the cfo of the company wow so like every month to begin with and slowly sure gap with everybody but now this group would would come in and they were like our board of directors so that continued up until the end.

Of his life how many years total kind of in that range is that.

When you first from eighty six and i forget what year he died wow.

Then tanner lo i think her yeah something like that yeah okay so thirty something years yeah yeah it's amazing what were the biggest three biggest lessons you learned from observing steve jobs from communicating with him and from the way he.

Left the world well in the case of one of the lessons one of them which he understood intuitively which was that when you're wrong you change now i mean there's different ways of phrasing it's like there's no upside in being wrong and some people think they need to win the argument and steve actually understood that was never the point it was you want to get to the truth quickly but he also understood that at an intuitive level that because of the power of his personality it actually could distort the process and that was part of his learning as he went through this was the recognizing what was him recognizing that his abilities his superpowers could actually get in the way of finding out things so i'll give a couple examples one of them which would surprise people was that we had a board of directors because in nineteen ninety five at the end we went public and this is a this is like a big public offering we were the second largest ipo of nineteen ninety five only after netscape and when did toy story come out in ninety five ninety five so we went public one week afterwards wow so when we were doing the road trip and part of the road trip showing the movie was well actually wasn't showing the movie it was telling people that we had a new technology that's going to change filmmaking so now it's a complete confidence this film is going to be a big success wow but he could say to them nobody else can do this there isn't anything like it it's going to change the industry and we've got the people that that that changed the technology and they're doing the content that's what this company is but we don't we're not going to go public until after the movie comes out because we think that we should show you how big this is wow before we go public smart so that was what we did for the few months leading up to going.

Public telling a story about the story.

Yes wow and that we were going to prove it and you guys did and we did you proved it big.

So what was that first week like.

Toy story launches box office and then you go public the next week later what was that week like it was surreal what were the numbers of the box office and then going public well.

Interestingly enough what i remember at the time because our whole group at the time would go to our computer graphics conference which is siggraph and for the most part it's showing the newest technology and we believe firmly because we made short films and they were actually you know academy award winning short films and and they're quite impactful but they're short and people would always pay attention on the outside to the technology so when the film came out the biggest question that we had and everybody was looking for it and all of the technology people were looking for it was what are the reviewers going to pay attention to and what we found was that almost every review there was at most one or two sentences about the new technology and the rest of the review was about the movie wow and that for all of us was like that's the win it wasn't about the technology.

It was about being a great movie.

Yes and if we had done that and we we got people to buy into this world and watch it and feel it then that was the win and everybody understood it at every level in the company wow so that's what i remember was reading those things to find out whether or not we had really accomplished what we wanted to do.

It'S incredible i mean what i'm curious about is how were you able to tap into the human mind and create emotional connections with audiences through these animations how was this studied and executed for the last thirty years at such a high level and how did you do that for that first movie well i.

I will say that for the first movie there was it's one of those things where there is some luck in that group that that first came in we had always in the history of both the new york tech and then at lucasfilm and then at pixar was to say we really want to hire the very best and so i would say well we want to hire people who are smarter than i am and i know other people say that but because like what does that even mean but it means that you don't want to be threatened by the people that you hire and they just have to have these extraordinary skills and so when we when we were building out our our technical group i mean they they were just really good i mean they were they had passed me in terms of their understanding of all the technology and john understood that too so when he did his first hires is the first person he hired was andrew stanton and then the second was pete docter and then joe ranf came in and then we brought in really to be an editor except he turns out to have been this is like one of the best storytellers ever is lee unkrich so this is this amazing group of people that came together and now part of it was we really had established a culture where that this was the right thing to do is you aren't bringing in you weren't even thinking about them as oh okay who's going to be second to me it's like okay who's really good and it turns out that andrew was had this extraordinarily structural sense so we didn't know that right right just like it emerged because of the challenge and pete docter had this this incredible emotional core well and still does i mean so he went on to do up inside out you know it's like getting the emotion right it's like who he is and lee has this actually phenomenal filmmaking sense okay we're doing this but you really have to get all these pieces right and then the the the person that was sharon callahan initially who was thinking about the lighting and people aren't often aware of this but the lighting is really important for conveying the emotions and then the artist that we had ralph eggleston had a color palette for the movie because it turns out the basic color changed throughout the movie and it's this subtle thing that's affecting your perceptions wow so like this is just amazing group of people and the interesting thing about it was that none of these people had ever made a feature film before in their life oh my goodness so we hadn't used computer graphics but they also hadn't done it a two d film they hadn't done any film so it's unbelievable everybody is a beginner they all had to figure it out and you're.

Leading them yeah how i mean how do you know i mean yeah the emotional that the emotions you're able to pull out of people you know in these films through you're a technology guy but through the tech through the art through the color through the lighting through the sound design and the music through the tonality of the voice actors and bringing it all together to create a cohesive emotional story is unbelievable how you guys do this and i continue to do it but how did you know how to put it all together well.

I i mean the way i thought at the time is is how do you have a group that works together because i'm not a filmmaker and i i would you know over time we developed a way of of helping people was which ended up being called the brain trust but my view was when i went to these meetings was how do we make sure this group works together like what are the things that make it work together and what takes them off the rails so it was to work out some some principles for that and it's fun to give notes to movie but the truth was there's only one movie in all those movies that i gave a note that i felt so strongly about that i had to push really hard to get it in there what was that it was in monsters incorporated what was the note well the no was at one point near the end the monster sully has to scare this dummy which is being videoed it's like a training video and you may recall that when he does this he then looks up and he sees that the girl's right there and he scares the bejesus out of this little girl the one he loves and he didn't mean to do it but the original thing what she saw was that she saw him on the monitor so i looked at this and i said you can't do this because anybody that has a child remembers there are times when they may have done something that where their child was was in danger either because of themselves or it happened to them and when that happens it sears into your soul and you never forget it for as long as you live wow and the for sully he needs to see that he was the cause of the thing that scared her that it was not good enough to have her see it by the monitor so and so there's some pushback on it and you know i talked with andrew and so anderson no this is actually critical to the film i just felt so oh good but that's it right and so i can look and say well i did one at.

Least one note in thirty movies yeah.

Yeah and but with but that wasn't my job yeah they're the filmmakers it wasn't my job it was to say okay is this working well together why isn't derailing when does it go well when doesn't it go well and so that was the whole time and then when jim morris came in initially over he came in as producer and then he was our head of production and then he was our general manager and then became the president it was like we're both like you know we're in there just looking at the process and what works what doesn't work and you're just evolving it right over time i.

Mean you got pretty animated during this retelling of story with monsters inc what movie left you with the deepest amount of emotion when you watched it after it came out or in the process of making it what was the movie that captivated you the most i'm sure that's hard to say which one you liked the most but was there a moment a movie that really touched you in a way based on your own life experience different than the other emotional moments in movies well it was.

It'S a little hard to say because any emotion in a movie connects to watching the people go through this so i don't i can't even watch a movie in the same way that others do because of actually seeing what took place.

The creators the producers the everything that's.

Right yeah i mean they're just you know these films all at the beginning have problems it's just one thing after another and we go through multiple steps and with different ways of trying to fix the problems and in fact it was one of the things i was i wanted to like clarify with the the expanded edition of the book was that you know i i talked a fair amount about you know failure and how is is part of the process but i realized that we it doesn't actually capture what takes place because we all know that we learn from failures in fact failure is kind of popular talk about nowadays about a way of learning the reality is that we have two meanings to failure which are deeply built into us there's one meaning which is that we know that we've had failures and we learn from them and as part of the process of learning the other meaning is the one that we got in school and that is if you fail a class it's because you screwed up you didn't work hard enough or you're dumb right none of those are good meanings right all right now you go out into business bridges fail relationships fail companies fail and in politics and business failures are used as bludgeons with which to beat opponents there is real and palpable fear behind failure all right so if we talk about failure then it is almost possible for most people to emotionally disconnect those two concepts and so i realized that that's what i observed that at pixar well we also say that failure is part of the process it does happen yes we don't actually use the terminology very much now there are times when we have something which actually does fail so we don't avoid it you have to like if something really fails you say it but the terminology of making a film is since we know they all have problems is we're trying to solve the problem that solution didn't work let's try this so the iterative process is we're trying it let's try this and as long as the team is working well together even if they haven't solved the problem if they're working well together we say okay keep going it's a tough problem and and they know that they know we have their back and the and the only thing the only real clue we have that we have to do a major change is if the crew begins to lose the confidence that a leader can actually get them there they may like the leader and this is not you know i like i you know i don't like them it's it's more like i just don't have the confidence we're going to get there and those things start to build so we are aware of some of them because people will come and talk about some of the problems they've got so you then start off how do we help the person how do we supplement them could we add somebody to the team to remove somebody what are the things we can do behind the scene to help them and if we get to the point where we can't do it then we'll do a bigger change and we essentially have failed and it's tough because we picked the person to be the failure because we believe they can do it because they're very good so for them it's actually a very difficult process to go through are.

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Only had a couple of the the directors who could survive this and stay with the company and they're very valuable and those who have stayed were actually incredible contributors but it's emotionally hard for them to go through right but one of those was we was with ratatouille and the man who designed it conceived to the idea of a lovely man he's really very good in fact the look of the film that you see came from this guy wow but the film was stuck and they couldn't get out of it and so at that point due to other reasons that were on of you know brad bird had finished mission miss impossible he did that later sure he had actually finished the incredibles so we asked him to take.

It on interesting and now when the movie is stuck do you mean it's stuck in the beginning stages or it's in post production or it's like the story needs the story so the story is not complete yet that's right so you've got the new story but you're like well we need changes here or it's not really fully emotionally connecting or the journey doesn't work is that what.

You mean yes but in the meantime we're building the models we're going to.

Call the you're building the characters the characters backgrounds the animation you're building it without the right the story complete that's.

Right wow so and there are pieces of it that we think are working so we'll start to make them because you can't make the whole thing at the end so you need to start.

To make make like one scene you're like we like this part we think.

This work we think it's good you're right maybe it's going to work we might be wrong so sometimes you may throw that away really that's expensive it's.

Kind of like shooting a scene that you don't use but you got a thousand people animating something and working on.

Yeah yeah you to try things you figure them out sure because what is the lighting what's the character going to look like how is this going to to work so they're doing all this work but you can't go too you can't get too far ahead of yourself.

Get on the story complete yeah so.

It'S it's a tricky balance but it's always a tricky balance yeah you know life is a tricky balance so the in this case you know the characters look beautiful it's everything's gorgeous about it it's not working and there are a few things that are just fundamentally wrong one of them was that originally that chef the chef gusteau was alive throughout the whole movie okay and he kind of sold his soul he was actually a highly rated chef but he was making money because of advertising and using his name to sell products and so.

And he was consulting on the movie is that right or the the chef.

That was cons no the chef in the movie got you the chef in the was that guy he was alive.

Gotcha because there was a consultant i think i saw a photo of here of like a consultant showing you how.

To make oh that's separate that's the research we do gotcha like we're trying to learn what takes place sure but.

The chef it's based on he's alive.

Well no no we we made up a chef got it gusto yes and he's just fat guy and he's kind of lost his way and then there's this rat that wants to cook who just happens to end up being in his kitchen yes and because of the passion of the rat then it actually causes the chef to realize he went down the wrong path so now you've got this problem throughout a lot of the movie is is this movie about the rat who wants to cook with that passion or is it a redemption story for the chef who has lost his way and then the other problem that they were wrestling with was that the rat has a family the rat doesn't talk to humans right so he's going through he's meeting people and learning things in the restaurant but because he can't talk you don't know what he's thinking and then he goes back to his family and he explains what he just went through but you just saw this you're watching a movie you just saw this and now it brings the movie to a dead halt because he's explaining to them the things that you just saw it's not good for filmmaking so brad bird enter the picture brad looks at it and the first thing he does after working with a good friend of his who is a good screenwriter they kill the chef so the chef died for some reason and but he's still on these tv programs because he'd been teaching on whatever the channel was and the rat's inspired by him but because the chef is dead and remy knows the chef is dead then the chef is now a figment of his imagination so what this means is that the figment of his imagination can sort of pop up and he's interacting with what he thinks this chef would.

Teach him or tell him yes so.

It answers it takes care of two huge problems one of them is we now know who the movie's about it's about the rat that wants to cook so problem number one is solved and the second one was because he cannot talk to the figment of his imagination and it doesn't feel unnatural because it's not like he's talking to a ghost he's actually you know that he's talking to himself or if it sounds clear so that means that he doesn't need to go back and explain anything to his family so you know what he's thinking at the time so now the pacing starts to work now that's the brilliance of brad bird is to come in and say oh here's what we're going to do for good storytelling at every step of the way and so now this film which had these interesting elements about it turns into something which is brilliant and then brad has has has his own take about art and what it means to critique art and its impact of it and he puts this in the movie he's watching this movie thinking well like where's it going because iraq can never really run a restaurant in paris like isn't going to happen so that's what makes it hard so he takes this hard concept and he turns it into this thing at the end which is profound and then when the audience sees it it's like oh i didn't see this coming and this is beautiful what i remember about the movies is actually going into the audiences because i remember we went we had the big opening in paris wow it's cool and i would get to that moment and what i would do is i would turn around and look at the audience that was the rewarding.

Part as they're watching the final scenes.

Or the whole movie no it's that final scene i look at them and they were going like this they didn't see it coming that's incredible and it was that's what it was it was incredible and then like because of that's rewarding when something like that happens and.

Was there ever a time you you cried in your own watching your own.

Premiere oh i i well i did for because of toy story three really for toy story three and did for.

Coco oh my gosh that's my favorite movie coco's a i've got a mexican girlfriend and so her whole family is from mexico and you know just whenever they come over to her house it feels like i'm in coco in america and whenever i go to mexico it feels like i'm in coco so for me that's one of my favorite movies of all movies it's incredible well that.

Was you know it was lee unkridge it actually created a problem because it was so good that afterwards lee says where where do i go from here.

Unbelievable.

But he cried in coco and incidentally he he directed both of those.

Films wow you cried in coco oh yeah what part made you well it.

Was the thing about any good movie of this sort of the kind of movies that we try to tell is that you are trying to connect to our own personal emotions but you're also trying to bring in something new and original just to be honest there's unfortunately sort of this bias against the mexican culture because what do people hear about on the news in terms of immigration or various things at the border they don't represent mexico and they don't represent what takes place like in southern mexico with you know the day of the dead if you say the day of the dead in america it's like oh it's kind of odd you know the day of the dead so but it means something entirely different there it's like the respect for the people that came before us that's what it's about so and you actually get that in the movie so they went down into the villages in in southern mexico and they spent a lot of time wow getting to know the people talking with them we had a a group in california they were like mexican advisors because we wanted to get it right essentially you've got these people from north america going down into to mexico i'm actually they're in north america too so you have people you know from america going down well how are they going to tell that story so they work really hard to try to capture that the same was true with like moana it's like another great movie incredible and you you actually try to get something from the culture because you don't want to work off the biases right you don't want to work off of what other people are thinking and the same was true with ratatouille we all know cooking in the home we watched our parents cook or we cook we watch the cooking channel you can see the chefs in the kitchen but what is it like to actually be in a highly rated fancy restaurant in any place what's the culture like we don't know that so for for for ratatouille they went into them into those restaurants and got to know them and they also were given some work like at the french laundry they actually spent time in the kitchen and they were given jobs to do so they were capturing that now what's interesting about it is that is even though we know a lot about cooking we don't know whether or not what they're saying in the kitchen the way they're acting is true right we just don't know but they sense that it is if you've actually done your research and you put that in the film then they there's something that is conveying to people because you took the time to find out something that went original so in the case of coco it was to go down and find out how do they feel about it what are they doing what are they thinking and i remember this is when the movie came out because we went down to the premiere and one of the things i appreciate is that when americans make movies about mexico they don't know the difference between the mexican broad brimmed hat and the spanish one so they like to interchange them but in mexico they know so they went down there and they wanted to get those details right and most of the audiences they wouldn't know but they felt like they needed to have the people who would know know that it was right sure.

What was what was the part of the movie that emotionally captivated you the most in coco well it was because.

The intent was it actually is the respect for these people that came before because it was real you know he learned something he figured out something about the people that came before him he also felt like he was he was able to fix some some things that were wrong but interest it was also emotional for me for a couple other reasons too one is in the storytelling was that initially lee was going to make this as pixar's first musical because pixar really doesn't have musicals or dna disney does and pixar doesn't but and one of the things i want to make sure is that we didn't try to make one studio like the other we also weren't trying to say you have to be different so they had to evolve in their own ones in their own way so if one wants to make a musical then they can and at pixar if they want to make a musical they can and so lou was going to be the first person to do that so we got these brilliant two people who also had done something down at disney so i mean they were you know good and close and we worked with them before and so they wrote the first song for his movie which is called remember me incredible and so but as a filmmaker he said okay that's thematic for the movie so now he he builds a story using this song throughout it all right so it's now a key element of where did it come from why was it written and the notion was that you know if his great grandma dies that the last person she's the last person who will know where the song came from and she's got.

Oh my god she remembers it she's.

Got alimer it's so emotional actually i know but by playing it and she remembers it actually gives in him life so wow is seeing that and and conveying that that's beautiful makes it powerful yeah and the other interesting thing about the story which is a separate thing was like how did he get started so one of the things we figured out this is very early on in pixar when we started our second movie the second was bug's life but the third one was going to be a sequel no sequel had ever been successful an animated sequel had ever been successful so the thought was originally by disney was that this is going to be a direct video so we start to make it but right away it's clear that the people working on it at pixar are very upset because to work on a sequel in a studio where we want to have the highest standard of quality means that we're working on something where the expectations is much lower we don't want to do something where the low expectations we want there to be we want it to be you know at high level so disney agreed to that so we then started to make this film and we frankly had a problems several problems with it because we were building on some assumptions that we got from the first film because the first film had been built knowing nothing but we drew some conclusions from it and some of the conclusions we drew from it were not correct so he built or started the sequel based on those assumptions only to find that we were wrong we just uncovered a bunch of things to question or challenge our original ideas and in the process of doing that we had to restart the movie really late in the game and remake it it's like a brutal brutal effort to remake this movie we had to make it eight months starting from scratch almost oh yeah it was a nightmare we had like a third of our people injured with rsi oh man and but one of the things that came out of that was the realization that the way we were starting films is we were trying to do what other studios do which was to have a development department looking for good scripts and so our thought was why are we trying to copy the model of other studios first of all the success rate of films other studios isn't very high low yeah so we said let's do it a different way so what we did was we're going to pick somebody who we think can direct a feature film and then we're going to say to them pick three ideas to develop so now the reason we say three is instead of saying pick an idea that you want to make into a film well what happens to all of us when you do something tougher in school or something like that you start to bang your head against while you get stuck so the reason we said three was why is that if you get stuck you can switch to a different idea so they'd have an artist and at some point they may have a writer come in work with them so it's like a really small team spending a year and there's some help of the development department we still have the development department but they no longer they were no longer looking for scripts to turn into movies their job was to help support this small group so they read scripts but all they were looking for was good writers who can join the team but we never made anybody else's script we always.

Started from scratch started from scratch wow.

So they would then spend that year going back and forth between their three ideas and at the end of the year they would come in the two or three people who were now the leaders over this and they would pitch it to the creative leadership of the company say some of the other directors so there may be like ten twelve.

People in the room these three ideas.

The three ideas and the way this works is there's a story room which there's a table in the middle and so essentially you can hold like twelve people in the room and there are two long walls and there's storyboards along the wall and they would cover them up so they put the material the conceptual ideas for the film on the wall and they'd take like twenty twenty five minutes present the idea there'd be a brief discussion on it and then we go through the three films now the process started and they all did this even though they've been on the other side like they've been on the creative leadership side and then there'd be time when they'd pitch their ideas and they'd all start saying the same thing they would say i love all three ideas equally it doesn't matter to me which one you pin now it's not true they do like one better and the debate when they leave the room is not which is the best idea to make in the film it is which one do they really want to make and i think we've always called it right because we'd come back and they'd go yes i was hoping you'd.

Pick that one sure but in the.

Case of coco pete came in and he pitched an idea which is related to an idea that he had pitched before he did toy story three and then when we got when we had the ability to make toy story three he was asked and directed and so he switched over along with the writer he'd worked with michael arndt brilliant brilliant writer and they developed a good relationship so they were so so basically lee was pitching that idea they originally had then he pitched his second idea which was to be a full on musical the interesting concept challenging concept and then the two walls are up so then we go into the other room so he opened the door and when we open the door the table the ceiling both walls and the end wall are filled with mexican artwork really so there isn't a single word that's said and everybody knows which movie we're making yeah.

There'S a poster bows of the first two but this one is a wholly superior that's right you walked into coco.

World that's right you walk in the coco world wow now the interesting part which this is the way it works is the final movie actually was very little like that first night it didn't matter right because you start off with the concept you're going to learn something the whole idea of all these trips to mexico yeah was to learn something because everything else is sort of based on you know kind of things you knew right because you're interested stereotypes and so forth so you expect it to change pretty dramatically in the process of.

Doing it so when he pitched coco and you guys went back and decided like okay this is the movie where we're choosing of these three was there a debate or was everyone just like oh we know he's the most passionate about this idea let's run him one let's let him run with the thing he's most passionate about i think in.

That case there were there probably wasn't any debate i would say with others there is some question about okay which which one is it the but that and that's probably more than normal there'd be a little debate about it right and also not everybody goes through the process like if if andrew stanton says he wants to make something it's like okay andrew you can make whatever you.

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