ShowbizU: When Pixar Met Robert McKee

165 Academy Award-nominated students, 500 Emmy Award nominations. You've touched many lives in your work, in your teachings, and I'm gonna— recently I was having lunch with a small group and Andrew Stanton was there, and they were asking him about early incarnations of Pixar, and, and he they said, how did you get going? He said, well, a bunch of us went to Robert McKee's class. We thought we knew what we were doing, and we walked out of there and realized we got a lot to learn. And so they, they asked him, they said, so now you know? He said, oh no, I'm still learning.

You know, I remember those guys very well. They came into my class, handsome guys, smart guys, what, you know, what we would call cool, you know, and pleasant in the night, you know, really nice, smart guys. And they were humble and their head was down and said, look, you know, we're computer nerds and animators and we love movies and we don't, you know, but we don't know anything about, you know, movies really and so forth. I said, have you made a film? They said, yeah, we've made this little animated film. I said, can I see it? So they showed it to me, this marvelous little short about an animated lamp. And I watched that, and I turned to them and I said, guys, you've got nothing to worry about. Just sit down, take notes, pay attention. You're going to be all right. OK. I mean, you could just see the talent bursting out of that little animated film. And so I knew that if I could get them to get the big picture and understand the shape of story and the character story relationship and progression and turning points and payoffs and setups, if I could just get them through those great, you know, deep fundamentals, it's to those fundamentals that they will come back. Again and again and again. It's just like we were talking about earlier. You know, what goes wrong with writing is writing, okay? It's solved by writing. What goes wrong with a story is story, and it's solved with story. And so every time they make a movie, you have to go back to the big questions. What does this character want? Why does this character want it? How are they struggling to get it? What's stopping them when they try? And what are the consequences of those choices and actions? You ask basic fundamental questions because if you don't know the answers to those questions, there is no story. And so having a foundation in the nature of story, then they can experiment, they can try, they can deepen it, they'll get better at it. I mean, Pixar is the best. But because they have a great foundation and they got enormous talent and huge IQs, what they do is, you know, is the best stuff in Hollywood. And so there's no mystery to this, but they paid attention, they learned, and the results are really, for me, gratifying because because I know that this works. What I teach works. And when people prove it back to me by taking what they learned and creating Toy Story 1, 2, and 3, and Up in the Air and all the rest of those— Up, rather. All the rest of those wonderful Pixar— WALL-E and all that. It's just great.