Speaker 1: Today. It's great to chat with Ed Katmull on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Ed is the co founder of Pixar Animation Studios and
Speaker 1: his former president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. He
Speaker 1: has been honored with five Academy Awards, including the Gordon E.
Speaker 1: Sawyer Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Computer Graphics.
Speaker 1: Ed received his Peachdeing Computer Science from the University of Utah.
Speaker 1: From the University of Utah and is the author of
Speaker 1: Creativity inc Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the
Speaker 1: Way of True Inspiration. He lives in San Francisco with
Speaker 1: his wife and children. Ed so excited chat with you today.
Speaker 1: I'm really happy to be here. So many potential starting points.
Speaker 1: We have so many mutual interests and including you know,
Speaker 1: creativity is a big mutual interest we have in the
Speaker 1: creative process. But I really want to kind of get
Speaker 1: more of like the humanity out of you a little bit.
Speaker 1: To begin with, you were you were a child growing
Speaker 1: up in the fifties in Utah, Is that right? That's right.
Speaker 1: I was born in West Virginia, but I as soon
Speaker 1: as the war was over, my father came out and
Speaker 1: got my mother from where she walk moors Virginia and
Speaker 1: moved out to Utah. Half my life there, spent half
Speaker 1: of your life there, And even as a kid, you
Speaker 1: were inspired by Disney movies, right, and that maybe you
Speaker 1: want to be a Disney animator someday. Yeah. It was
Speaker 1: the early days of television back in the fifties. There
Speaker 1: was the Disneyland called by the Wonderful World of Color.
Speaker 1: But it was a weekly event to watch Walt Disney
Speaker 1: is as well, of course to see the movies that
Speaker 1: were produced. Do you did you watch Fantasia when you
Speaker 1: were a kid, the original one? Yeah? Yes, I watched
Speaker 1: all of them, and for me, they were very inspirational.
Speaker 1: There was also a phenomenon which I didn't discover until
Speaker 1: many years later, but I would probably say the two
Speaker 1: most impactful films on me as a child were Pinocchio
Speaker 1: and Peter Pan. Now, the phenomenon I noticed as an
Speaker 1: adult was that I went back and watched him after
Speaker 1: not having seen him. Remember, for a long time there
Speaker 1: was no video or DVD, and they had this thing
Speaker 1: of scheduling their films every seven years for the asca release,
Speaker 1: so I hadn't seen him for a long time. Then
Speaker 1: I went back and I watched them, and I had
Speaker 1: these vivid memories of these movies, and when I saw
Speaker 1: them again as an adult, the things I remembered from
Speaker 1: the film were not in the movies. I had made
Speaker 1: them up. And well, that's pretty cool. And that's what
Speaker 1: kids do, is there is they got something much is
Speaker 1: stimulating their imagination, and then it gets in there and
Speaker 1: it gets mixed in with the stuff that the actually saw,
Speaker 1: and that's actually the way a life is. In any case,
Speaker 1: it's a good thing. You make me want to revisit
Speaker 1: some of my favorite movies as a kid, I probably
Speaker 1: made up a lot of stuff that I think was
Speaker 1: in it. Cool little trivia for you. My grandfather was
Speaker 1: in the original Fantasia because he was with the Philadelphia
Speaker 1: Orchestra and so he was one of the cellists with Stakowski,
Speaker 1: I believe was the conductor. Yes, that's right. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: a litt little trivia there. Now, you your first entree
Speaker 1: point into into this world was embracing the emerging field
Speaker 1: of computer graphics. But that must have been really primitive
Speaker 1: computer you know, like when you were there and like
Speaker 1: you studied in college, is that right, computer graphics? Yeah?
Speaker 1: The order of things was that I wanted to be
Speaker 1: an artist, and I was. I was, I think, the
Speaker 1: best artist in the school. But I was nowhere near
Speaker 1: what I saw coming out of Disney, and there were
Speaker 1: no schools for animation. So when I entered college, I
Speaker 1: switched over to physics, and and Einstein was the other
Speaker 1: iconic figure to me that growing up the fifties, it
Speaker 1: was Einstein and Walt Disney. It's like talking about iconic
Speaker 1: in terms of their look, like you know, what we
Speaker 1: thought of them, and their impact and the world and
Speaker 1: in the culture. So I studied in physics, but near
Speaker 1: the end of college there was this new field of
Speaker 1: computer science. So and I'd taken a lot of courses.
Speaker 1: I had enough courses to get two bachelor's degrees in
Speaker 1: four years. I took a lot of classes. I loved school.
Speaker 1: So I got two degrees. One was in computer science
Speaker 1: and the other within physics. But there was something about
Speaker 1: computer science, and one of the reasons I switched to
Speaker 1: it was that I wanted to be on the frontier.
Speaker 1: And with physics, the frontier was pretty hard slog to
Speaker 1: get to, whereas in computer science it was brand new,
Speaker 1: like we were at the frontier. At the time, but
Speaker 1: was in graduate school that I came back intending to
Speaker 1: study computer languages, potentially artificial intelligence, and my first class
Speaker 1: at the University of Utah was and computer Graphics, which
Speaker 1: is where the foundations were laid for the field. So
Speaker 1: as soon as it took that course and boom, everything
Speaker 1: fell into place, is like, oh, you can make art
Speaker 1: with this. But we were early on. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: talking about line drawings, or in the case of things
Speaker 1: that weren't line drawing, there were polygons, and the state
Speaker 1: of the things was that every graduate student was expected
Speaker 1: to push things forward. And the task that I wanted
Speaker 1: was to make it so that I could make curved
Speaker 1: surfaces and curved patches, and they didn't know how to
Speaker 1: do it at the time. There wasn't the technology in place.
Speaker 1: Well this is exciting, but it didn't matter if it
Speaker 1: was really crude. The way I looked at it at
Speaker 1: the time that it isn't rewriting history. It was that, oh,
Speaker 1: we're making this stuff up. That's exciting. But we had
Speaker 1: long ways to go and knew it at the time,
Speaker 1: and we knew what the barriers were, and one of
Speaker 1: the bearers being there was enough compute power in order
Speaker 1: to make highly realistic looking images. If I should as
Speaker 1: well as wams knowledge either sure, if I went to that,
Speaker 1: if I could try and travel and go back to that,
Speaker 1: that that that that guy and I showed him like
Speaker 1: soul the movie's soul would would would you have been
Speaker 1: like like, never believed that such a thing as possible?
Speaker 1: How would it react if he could if he saw that?
Speaker 1: If that guy saw what we what you've accomplished today,
Speaker 1: Well if first of all, we've certainly gone farther than
Speaker 1: I would have guessed at the time. So while I
Speaker 1: knew we were at the beginning of something big and
Speaker 1: that it was going to change, it's like a lot
Speaker 1: of things. The the you don't know exactly where it's going,
Speaker 1: and the way I think about it, the way I
Speaker 1: still think about it, is that there's eight An early
Speaker 1: question should be is this a significant area? Is this
Speaker 1: going to be a niche or is it going to
Speaker 1: be big? And then the other is one of the
Speaker 1: steps you take to get there, but you don't know
Speaker 1: where there is? Yeah, so you say, well, okay, there
Speaker 1: is there. There's something important there, and there's no question
Speaker 1: about it. There was something important in terms of being
Speaker 1: able to make high quality imagery without a doubt, but
Speaker 1: in going now to set the steps to get there
Speaker 1: while solving the problems, the concept of the long term
Speaker 1: vision also alters. So if you think about it, it's
Speaker 1: like there's an interplay or an interaction between the future
Speaker 1: and now, and you have to be comfortable. We're saying
Speaker 1: that that future is unknown and it's going to change.
Speaker 1: We don't know really what it is, but there's some
Speaker 1: place to go to, Okay, And now that we check
Speaker 1: in every once in a while on the long provision,
Speaker 1: we put most attention on how do we solve the
Speaker 1: problems of today? I love that it's just even going
Speaker 1: back to staying in your child for a second. You
Speaker 1: did make animation using flipbooks at one point, right those
Speaker 1: and and you you did a bunch of really cool things,
Speaker 1: like in ninety seventy two you made an animated version
Speaker 1: of your left hand, which was a big deal that
Speaker 1: you did that. Right, Yes, there was uh and there
Speaker 1: was the class project. As I mentioned, the first year
Speaker 1: was to take the course in computer graphics. And in
Speaker 1: the second quarter, you don't had a quarter system. I
Speaker 1: decided to make pick something which is really hard, which
Speaker 1: is to do this film of my life ten, which
Speaker 1: meant that I had to digitize it and make a model,
Speaker 1: get the data in there, and then write a little
Speaker 1: animation language where I moved the hand about. And there
Speaker 1: was a class project, but it was it was crude.
Speaker 1: I knew it was crude, but it wasn't even the time.
Speaker 1: I know, we're not measuring where we are now against
Speaker 1: this big vision, we're saying are we heading in the
Speaker 1: right direction? And so picking this particularly difficult task, even
Speaker 1: though today it looks crude, was for me a great
Speaker 1: step forward. And the people in the class. Only two
Speaker 1: people in that first class wrote everything from scratch. They
Speaker 1: were also the only two people that stayed in the
Speaker 1: field of computer graphics. Everybody else is using the packages
Speaker 1: that were provided to the students, and that was that
Speaker 1: The distinguishing point was if you threw away of the
Speaker 1: patage they gave and you wrote your own, that meant
Speaker 1: there was more passion. Fred Parker was the other person.
Speaker 1: That's so cool, and I believe that that actually it
Speaker 1: influenced the industry. Did they make a documentary or something
Speaker 1: someday or a movie that incorporated well, one of the
Speaker 1: first movies to use computer graphics in a significant way
Speaker 1: was Future World. Incidentally, as a movie, it sucked. Just
Speaker 1: to be very clear, I don't recommend going back and
Speaker 1: seeing this because when I say the second it was
Speaker 1: poor filmmaking in there. But they wanted to have computer graphics,
Speaker 1: so they asked for permission to use the hand piece
Speaker 1: as something that was in the film in the backgrond
Speaker 1: while they're working in their their last for these for
Speaker 1: the robots and so forth. So there was the picture
Speaker 1: of the hand rotating doing that to the background piece.
Speaker 1: That must have been cool. That must have felt good.
Speaker 1: I mean in gradual sorry, we're gon sing. In gradual school,
Speaker 1: you you set an explicit goal to make the first
Speaker 1: computer animated feature film. This was a goal that you had, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: So so I just want to like, we'll get to
Speaker 1: the pathway and we'll get to we'll get what we'll
Speaker 1: get to toy story and beyond. But let's talk about
Speaker 1: the year I was born. In nineteen seventy nine, George
Speaker 1: Lucas approaches you and he asks you to lead a
Speaker 1: group of people to bring together computer graphics, video editing,
Speaker 1: and digital audio into the entertainment field. This was a
Speaker 1: big deal at the time. So you know, what was
Speaker 1: that experience like to be approached to do that. You know,
Speaker 1: were you really super excited? Did you feel like you're
Speaker 1: moving towards this goal that you set yourself in grad school. Well,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing at the time was that the studios,
Speaker 1: all the studios had no interest to whatsoever in any
Speaker 1: aspect of what George was trying to do. And I
Speaker 1: talked with other studios in the past, including Disney, and
Speaker 1: what we were talking about was so irrelevant to them.
Speaker 1: There wasn't even if they're saying we shouldn't do that,
Speaker 1: it's like they weren't even didn't even want to have
Speaker 1: the discussion. It's like that was far off. How far
Speaker 1: off the radar was so because of the success of
Speaker 1: Star Wars, and because George had assembled a team of
Speaker 1: the people who were the very best at of the
Speaker 1: opti mechanics and the chemistry of film and worked out
Speaker 1: how to get motion blurred, which is critical for mixing
Speaker 1: with live action for physiological reasons. So these are the
Speaker 1: people who were the very best in the world. So
Speaker 1: George himself is not a technologist. He just said technology
Speaker 1: is going to change filmmaking. And he got some money
Speaker 1: because Star Wars was successful. So he said he wants
Speaker 1: to invest in R and D in these areas. And
Speaker 1: he's the only person in the industry that did that
Speaker 1: and had the ability and the credibility to pull it off,
Speaker 1: even if somebody had thought it was a possibility within
Speaker 1: one of the other studios, and I fact, I'm sure
Speaker 1: within Disney there were people who said there's potential there,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't break through. But George Lucas was a
Speaker 1: force of his own. So George basically asked me to
Speaker 1: come in to lead these programs. Now, for me, like,
Speaker 1: holy cow, this is this is a real filmmaker, a
Speaker 1: person who really understands storytelling, and uh, that's like the
Speaker 1: best possible position one could be in. So the answer is,
Speaker 1: like when the opportunity game, Okay, I really, I really
Speaker 1: did want to give you a front row seat, you know,
Speaker 1: to also you know, to see all the emerging technologies
Speaker 1: at that time. You also had a front row seat
Speaker 1: to a lot of software companies that would turn out
Speaker 1: to take over Silicon Valley in the coming years. Right,
Speaker 1: That must have been great experience. Yeah, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of friends. I mean, there are an other people
Speaker 1: that came out of the University of Utah. So John Warnock,
Speaker 1: who founded Adobe, came out of Utah. Alan Ka basically
Speaker 1: the founder of Objectornity in the programming. He went off
Speaker 1: to Xerox Park spent many years there, so UH when
Speaker 1: Jim Clark, who found the Silicon Graphics was there. So
Speaker 1: there's phenomenal a group of students in this brand new field.
Speaker 1: But we remain friends so basically which we could talk
Speaker 1: with each other afterwards. So there was that connection with
Speaker 1: the people in Sulicon Valley. But because we were with
Speaker 1: Lucasfilm and Lucas On myself had a lot of cachet
Speaker 1: and then that opened the doors to visit a lot
Speaker 1: of companies that were making workstations or supercomputers or mini computers,
Speaker 1: and as we progressed through it, so it basically it
Speaker 1: meant being involved with a lot of different kinds of
Speaker 1: people and just learning something from how it worked, what
Speaker 1: didn't work, what some of the mistakes were UH, and
Speaker 1: what the cultural issues were. So it's like Microsoft was
Speaker 1: actually making UH animated short animated storytelling films to go
Speaker 1: on CD ROMs, and it was clear I knew these
Speaker 1: people that the artists who were working there were second
Speaker 1: class citizens because fundamentally the company made its money from
Speaker 1: selling software, and so there was this class structure. At
Speaker 1: the same time, Disney was starting to use computer graphics,
Speaker 1: so they had a computer team there, but it was
Speaker 1: very clear that the technical people were second class and
Speaker 1: the artists were first class. Like they're flipped and so
Speaker 1: that's an interesting phenomenon. But in both cases, the people
Speaker 1: who were first class were actually trying to be mean
Speaker 1: and put somebody down, like they had their job to
Speaker 1: do and they have their their preconceptions and what they
Speaker 1: do they didn't know, but they ended up with this
Speaker 1: unhealthy class structure. So one of the things we did
Speaker 1: as we built worked out on Lucasfilm was to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: how do we have internally a good balanced on the
Speaker 1: technical and artistic side, whether it's imagery or sound or editing.
Speaker 1: So we worked a lot on I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: that right. Having said that, there were three times in
Speaker 1: the history of Pixar where that class structure notion kind
Speaker 1: of creeps in and it's like this insidious thing that
Speaker 1: gets into an organization. But it was going through that
Speaker 1: process of observing what others did, figuring out how we
Speaker 1: fell into it and when we didn't fall into it.
Speaker 1: The great benefit from having a healthy balance and understanding
Speaker 1: appreciation of what other people do must have felt like
Speaker 1: the wild West. That's her degree of the movie industry,
Speaker 1: and and all the technologies that were happening, like anything
Speaker 1: seemed possible, right, Well, I the analogy I usual at
Speaker 1: the time was being in the front of the line
Speaker 1: of an history account the will the West people kept
Speaker 1: getting killed. So okay, that's a better analogy. I prefer
Speaker 1: that analogy. Yeah, fair enough. That is what it felt
Speaker 1: like at the time, was that, Wow, you can see
Speaker 1: all the stuff out in front of you, and they
Speaker 1: just cut the tape and you're in the front of
Speaker 1: the line. So how fasting you out and gathered eggs? Yeah? Yeah, interestingly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was different between this and
Speaker 1: physics was it's fifty years later and we're still in
Speaker 1: the frontier. So you look at deep learning or what's
Speaker 1: happening with GPUs and the decreasing costs and of sensors
Speaker 1: and the size of sensors and their ability, like the
Speaker 1: thing you're still changing. It's fifteen years later, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: still off the front of the line. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. It would be incredible to see the next
Speaker 1: fifty years. But we can talk later about future. We're
Speaker 1: still in the eighties here right now and in my head.
Speaker 1: So nineteen eighty five, still a young man. But Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs crosses your path. He was working at Next. He
Speaker 1: wasn't like at that point he I mean, he wasn't
Speaker 1: the Steve Jobs we know right now, Steve Jobs. I
Speaker 1: mean he had he had left Apple. What was sort
Speaker 1: of what is sort of your impression of him and
Speaker 1: how was that interaction. Well, we met him initially when
Speaker 1: he was still at Apple, and I see by alan Ka,
Speaker 1: I mean he was our partner. He was an Apple
Speaker 1: at the time. He made the introduction, and then he
Speaker 1: disappeared because of the things were going on. We didn't
Speaker 1: even know why. Just like he's off the radar. We
Speaker 1: were trying to spin out as a separate company and
Speaker 1: having a lot of difficulty. And after he left, we
Speaker 1: met with him. He tried to buy us early on,
Speaker 1: but he wanted to turn us into a computer company.
Speaker 1: And so Albury Smith was the partners, one of the
Speaker 1: co founders of Pick star, so we declined that's not
Speaker 1: what we wanted to do. So we continued our path
Speaker 1: to trying to get funding to get bought out of Lucasfilm,
Speaker 1: and Steve formed Next, and then after he formed Next,
Speaker 1: then I ran into him at a trade show in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, and since he now got computer company going,
Speaker 1: then we started our talk for each other. So it's
Speaker 1: a difficult and stressful part of our lives because we're
Speaker 1: trying to make sure we're trying to hold our group
Speaker 1: together to do computer graphics. But in the early days,
Speaker 1: a lot of Steve was what you saw in terms
Speaker 1: of the reputation. And the unfortunate thing is that it's
Speaker 1: kind of sexy to talk about that kind of behavior,
Speaker 1: so it tends to be the thing that predominates in
Speaker 1: books or stories or whatever, because you want the drama
Speaker 1: of it. But it doesn't represent the most important story,
Speaker 1: which is that Steve went through probably one of the
Speaker 1: best examples of the hero's journey so early on in
Speaker 1: his career. His behaviors and the way he worked with
Speaker 1: people wasn't very good. It's the reason he didn't work
Speaker 1: out with Apple and with you, including with you. Well.
Speaker 1: The interesting was well, Steve and I disagreed. I you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not the sort that argue with somebody. I'm stubborn
Speaker 1: and I don't give up, but I don't argue. So
Speaker 1: I did have this conversation early on with Steve, this
Speaker 1: before we formed as a company and I was to
Speaker 1: be the president, and I said, okay, so what happens
Speaker 1: when we disagree? And his answer was, well, I what
Speaker 1: I found is if somebody doesn't understand something, I just
Speaker 1: keep explaining to them until they understand it. So I'm
Speaker 1: thinking to myself, Okay, this is not a good sign.
Speaker 1: But the reality was that when he and I did disagree,
Speaker 1: that was exactly how I worked with him. Is that is,
Speaker 1: he would do something, and he would he could think
Speaker 1: so much faster than I could that that I would
Speaker 1: say something and then he would come back with something,
Speaker 1: and then I'd end the conversation and I'd have a
Speaker 1: week to think about the next sentence, and then we'd
Speaker 1: talked about it, and i'd bring it up and he'd
Speaker 1: immediately shoot it down. And then over the period of
Speaker 1: up to two or three months, and we can kind
Speaker 1: of reach one of three conclusions. One of them is
Speaker 1: that I would actually see that he was writing, and
Speaker 1: and I'd just say, oh, yeah, you're right. And then
Speaker 1: about a third of the time he'd say, oh you're right,
Speaker 1: I get it, and so and that was then we
Speaker 1: did it the other third of the time, like he
Speaker 1: just gave up. And he was actually fine with that.
Speaker 1: But if we didn't agree, what he did want was
Speaker 1: for somebody to know why they were doing it, have
Speaker 1: an opinion. And I came to appreciate that with Steve
Speaker 1: was that he did not want yes people around him.
Speaker 1: And it's not the conception that people normally have of Steve,
Speaker 1: but Steve went through this building of Next and Pixar. Fundamentally,
Speaker 1: we both failed what our original charter as companies, and
Speaker 1: Steve did a number of things where he was really
Speaker 1: going for, you know, the home run on the first
Speaker 1: ball or something like that. But over time he learned lessons.
Speaker 1: He changed as a person when Pixar went public because
Speaker 1: he controlled the board. I remember he fired two people
Speaker 1: off the board because they never argued with him. They
Speaker 1: never pushed back. That's amazing. So, but he's such a
Speaker 1: powerful personality, you assume that he doesn't want to push back,
Speaker 1: And what it means is he wants and needs more
Speaker 1: powerful people around him because he appreciated the power of pushback.
Speaker 1: And and I say, even when I first met it,
Speaker 1: and he was instinctively new that there is no upside
Speaker 1: to being wrong. So sim is that he realized that
Speaker 1: that the person actually had a point. He just switched
Speaker 1: on a dime because he was interested in the truth.
Speaker 1: He wasn't interested in being right. I mean, he wanted
Speaker 1: to be right because it was the follow from the truth,
Speaker 1: but the truth precedes being right. Yeah, it sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a complicated He didn't he had a
Speaker 1: complicated the ego, like he obviously had a healthy ego.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's all usually about these kinds of
Speaker 1: figures is how paradoxical their traits are. He also was
Speaker 1: into mindfulness. He was also you know, like you just said,
Speaker 1: he was really like he liked to be challenged. So
Speaker 1: it wasn't it wasn't all ego. There was there were
Speaker 1: other things going on there that may be even paradoxical. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's uh, it may seem paradoxical. And the irony
Speaker 1: was that he was a he was zen the Buddhist
Speaker 1: and uh, the CFO took his public Lawrence Levy was
Speaker 1: it wasn't isn't to Tibetan Buddhism, and I'm heavily engage
Speaker 1: in the terra aden Buddhism. But it was funny fact, okay,
Speaker 1: three of us, and we never talked about it with
Speaker 1: each other. We were trying to do. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like we never talked about it. But uh, Steve, well,
Speaker 1: he had a powerful personality. He learned how to be
Speaker 1: mindful of it and be aware of the impact. He
Speaker 1: knew he had an impact, but part of it was
Speaker 1: paying attention to the impact. And once he could pay attention,
Speaker 1: then his mindfulness of it and the way he worked
Speaker 1: with people change. It was pretty dramatic change. And I
Speaker 1: mean part of it too is you got married and
Speaker 1: had children and has very wise wife and this incredible
Speaker 1: children and their relationship with Pixar turning to be something
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. His relationship with the Pixar directors was, let's
Speaker 1: say astonishing, because the directors actually have to have a
Speaker 1: trait which Steve understood, and that was if you pick
Speaker 1: an idea, you commit, you really commit, You're going to
Speaker 1: make it happen, and then at some point you realize
Speaker 1: oh this isn't working. Then even though you said I'm committed.
Speaker 1: Now you switch, you change, you make the changes. And
Speaker 1: that's the thing that might seem paradoxical, but it was.
Speaker 1: It's actually the most productive in terms of leading a
Speaker 1: creative effort is the ability to have a bigger picture,
Speaker 1: to commit to it, and then when you see something
Speaker 1: asn't working, the change it make. It makes differences. So
Speaker 1: he really connected with the directors because that's the way
Speaker 1: they have to work. It's a really great insight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he, I mean he wanted ultimately, he wanted to
Speaker 1: to make it work. You know, he didn't just want
Speaker 1: just you know, if like his social status would be
Speaker 1: improved but something didn't work, he probably would not be
Speaker 1: happy with that situation, right, Yeah, I was. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like we've been to dinner several times and obviously
Speaker 1: he's very recognizable, and it was the thing was he
Speaker 1: really didn't want that kind of attention. What he wanted
Speaker 1: was impact attention, not the attention of being like the
Speaker 1: star or something like that. That's a great distinction, by
Speaker 1: the way. I just I love that, you know, impact
Speaker 1: attention versus eco attention. Yeah, it's an important difference it
Speaker 1: is and when Steve put all those pieces together, I
Speaker 1: don't know, like twenty five, thirty years ago, thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: I guess it with thirty years that was the people
Speaker 1: who are with him stay with him for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life. And one of the reasons the hero,
Speaker 1: the Hero's journey, part of Steve's life didn't come out
Speaker 1: was that all these people were with him while he
Speaker 1: was alive, and so nobody was talking about the stories
Speaker 1: so many when he passed away, any movies about him
Speaker 1: or writing books. There are articles about him, but they're
Speaker 1: all based upon the preconceptions that they're the part of
Speaker 1: his life, and they don't know the change in his
Speaker 1: life because the people are with him weren't talking about him.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. I'm not going to sack and lie Steve
Speaker 1: while he's alive. He completely inappropriate, right right, So you look,
Speaker 1: he said, ah Ill story is missed, the real estate
Speaker 1: jobs was missed in this, in this, in this whole thing.
Speaker 1: But it was there was an arc and I love it.
Speaker 1: I think that we should, everybody, every one of us
Speaker 1: should think in terms of like, yeah, arcs, what is
Speaker 1: O R and that is part of our own creativity.
Speaker 1: How do we solve our problems? What are we doing?
Speaker 1: Why are we doing? What are ethics and our standards?
Speaker 1: I completely agree, and also to be open to the
Speaker 1: fact that in the life is cyclical as well. We
Speaker 1: can have an arc and then go rock bottom again,
Speaker 1: you know, and then I have another arc. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily one arc in our life. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: it never it is. Yeah. Yeah, oh, I've made it.
Speaker 1: I finally take it everything out. Okay, that's actually the
Speaker 1: bottom is not the top. That tends to be My
Speaker 1: experience is that I think that I've reached the hero
Speaker 1: in the hero's journey, and then like a global pandemic
Speaker 1: will hit and it's like, forget that idea. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: So you said I want to get to the toy
Speaker 1: story years because you said on a personal level, toy
Speaker 1: story represented the fulfillment of a goal I pursued for
Speaker 1: more than two decades and I dreamed about since I
Speaker 1: was a boy. And I think this, actually, this was
Speaker 1: this is a nice segue from the point we just
Speaker 1: made you know you because you in terms of arc,
Speaker 1: that's the perfect ending to the story, right you could
Speaker 1: if you're writing the book, you can stop right there.
Speaker 1: You dreamed of it as a kid. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you made the is your goal in grad school and
Speaker 1: then you make this amazing, amazing, impactful film. Some people
Speaker 1: say the best thing since Wizard Wizard of Oz. But
Speaker 1: yet you still, like, you know, after the release of that,
Speaker 1: you felt like something was still missing. You even started
Speaker 1: to question whether this was the the end point? Is
Speaker 1: that right? Well not quite that I getting of it.
Speaker 1: Tell me that. Okay, so we're getting close. Of course,
Speaker 1: there's a long story. If I talked a long time
Speaker 1: about it, but we reached the point where the movie
Speaker 1: came out, and uh, and I will say the people
Speaker 1: at Pixar understood that the goal was to make a
Speaker 1: good movie. So the technical people who were doing the
Speaker 1: part that part of making the film took immense pride,
Speaker 1: as did I when the when the reviews came out
Speaker 1: of Toy Story, and almost every review had most one
Speaker 1: or two sentences about it being computer animation, and the
Speaker 1: rest of the review was about the movie. So for
Speaker 1: the technical people, that was perceived of as the real success.
Speaker 1: And I took pride in the fact that that this
Speaker 1: wasn't turned into I was showing how technically, how good
Speaker 1: we are It's that wasn't the goal. The goal was
Speaker 1: to have a knew basically, create a new art form
Speaker 1: and to create great stories and art from it. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing about achieving a goal is that once I
Speaker 1: had achieved the goal, actually I no longer had it,
Speaker 1: and just to make another film isn't the same thing
Speaker 1: as having the goal. Now, there are people who want
Speaker 1: to tell a story, and so they've got a goal
Speaker 1: of telling their story. But for me, personally, the question
Speaker 1: wasn't okay, what's for me? The next film couldn't be
Speaker 1: the goal? What should the goal be? And so I
Speaker 1: had two things that I was wrestling with. Now we
Speaker 1: had just gone public, so there was plenty to do.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like I was sitting around like what am
Speaker 1: I going to do? We're now a public company, We're
Speaker 1: making other films, and I've got these two problems I'm
Speaker 1: wrestling with. One of them, by accidents, fell out of
Speaker 1: the book. So as I'm doing some rewriting is to
Speaker 1: put this back in and trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: right way to do it. But there were two things
Speaker 1: I wrestled with for a year. One of them was
Speaker 1: what is the next goal? And when I say goal.
Speaker 1: For me, a goal is probably better described as a framework.
Speaker 1: If you if you got something really explicit, then that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a good goal. Sometimes it is, but the
Speaker 1: question is what's the framework to operating? What's the next goal?
Speaker 1: And by the end of the year I realized, having
Speaker 1: watched what happened to other companies, why some are successful,
Speaker 1: why some fell apart, was this was to address the
Speaker 1: question of how do we create a sustainable creative culture.
Speaker 1: That was the goal, That was the interesting problem. So
Speaker 1: as we we're making our next film, there was Its
Speaker 1: Bugs Life and then Toy Story two. Each one of
Speaker 1: them had challenges, but a big chart of part of
Speaker 1: the challenges were the cultural creative ones. So but if
Speaker 1: you're okay, how do we do this, how do we
Speaker 1: help each other? How do we think about it technically?
Speaker 1: Where do we go? So there are a lot of
Speaker 1: things that were there, But since we'd had, with one exceptions,
Speaker 1: uh one exception, a very strong culture, then the culture
Speaker 1: itself can't help the change in the face of success
Speaker 1: and growth. Right, It's just like it's sort of build
Speaker 1: into what happens. So how do you make it sustainable?
Speaker 1: Not how do you keep it the same is you
Speaker 1: can't repeat that first goal. You can't make the first
Speaker 1: animated film again. So it's just realizing, all right, whatever
Speaker 1: it is is going to be different, So what what
Speaker 1: does it mean to be different all the time? So
Speaker 1: that was one thing that came at the end of
Speaker 1: the year, was that realization. The second question, which I
Speaker 1: didn't talk to anybody at the time because it was,
Speaker 1: to be honest, it's like a little embarrassing to just
Speaker 1: to talk about this what was going through my head now.
Speaker 1: I was very aware that we could only make have
Speaker 1: made this film if we had a number of people
Speaker 1: who are part of this. Some of them are well known,
Speaker 1: so George Locus's jobs, John Lassiter, beat doctor Andrew Stands.
Speaker 1: So we get people who are well known and have
Speaker 1: been very successful. And you know, Leon Kritch was part
Speaker 1: of this original team that made this. It was really
Speaker 1: an extraordinary group. And I knew that all those people
Speaker 1: were necessary, but also there were people who aren't well known,
Speaker 1: a lot of technical people who made some very foundational
Speaker 1: changes in the field of animation and graphics, and they
Speaker 1: were necessary and integral to making this successful. And people
Speaker 1: don't know who they are. So I'm very aware that
Speaker 1: everybody was necessary. Now having said that I'm aware of it,
Speaker 1: I still had this question everybody was necessary? But since
Speaker 1: I was the first one in this how much of
Speaker 1: this was me? But ask that question of myself? And
Speaker 1: I wrestled with it, and I recognized that other people
Speaker 1: will often ask that question. Almost nobody will admit that
Speaker 1: they're asking their question, but I was asking it. And
Speaker 1: at the end of the year, I realize that the
Speaker 1: is it trying to answer the question is an act
Speaker 1: of separation and understand why somebody would ask it, But
Speaker 1: trying to answer it means you must separate yourself out
Speaker 1: from everybody that made it possible in order to answer it,
Speaker 1: and that's a bad place to go. So at the
Speaker 1: end of the year, it's like, oh, I shouldn't answer it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any sense. I did it with these people.
Speaker 1: There isn't this line and say, well, how much of
Speaker 1: it was was me? And for me it was an
Speaker 1: important lesson that came out of this time, which are
Speaker 1: the really the depth of the connections between people and
Speaker 1: all their contributions, and that it only worked because they
Speaker 1: were all doing this together. That insight influenced the culture
Speaker 1: that you created at Pixar. You know, well, it's it was,
Speaker 1: it was. It was an interesting process to watch because
Speaker 1: you know, everybody wants to contribute. They want to feel
Speaker 1: like what they're doing is important. M And if you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of people, then then there's a question
Speaker 1: at my contributing and making a difference, and people do
Speaker 1: want to make a difference. Another thing that they came
Speaker 1: to me was that is that when when we're doing
Speaker 1: a lot of things, there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who don't agree. Now, they're realistic and people know that
Speaker 1: they don't all get their way, and they understand that.
Speaker 1: But there have been many times when Samuel ook their
Speaker 1: head at the door and they'll want to say something
Speaker 1: and and and they'll make a comment, a pretty strong
Speaker 1: thing about some sort of screw up that we're making. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing about that is, except for the people have
Speaker 1: known for many years who feel comfortable, for some people,
Speaker 1: it's requires some courage to come in and say to
Speaker 1: president of the the company, like this, we've made a stupid decision,
Speaker 1: like this is really screwing. So the fact that they
Speaker 1: would do that says something about them. They have that
Speaker 1: courage to do it. The second thing is that frequently
Speaker 1: they're just right. They see things that I don't see.
Speaker 1: And for me, that's a fundamental principle is that I
Speaker 1: only got a limited view of what I can see,
Speaker 1: and the people who are doing work we'll see things
Speaker 1: that I can't see, and I can be missing it.
Speaker 1: The other side of that is that I sometimes know
Speaker 1: things that they don't know, not because you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not a very secreted person, but you know, you have
Speaker 1: a lot of people there. It's not everything is known.
Speaker 1: But what what I do believe is that if they
Speaker 1: have of you, that it's critical to hear what that
Speaker 1: view is. They're uh, they're adult enough to know that
Speaker 1: not every view is going to be taken, but they
Speaker 1: need to know that somebody will listen, that they appreciate
Speaker 1: what they have. And then I've always tried to do that,
Speaker 1: Like somebody says something that I may not agree with,
Speaker 1: even if I immediately know they're missing an important piece
Speaker 1: of information, like right, oh wait, I know they're wrong,
Speaker 1: and I can explain it. It's like and and expointing
Speaker 1: that to them at the beginning is just about the
Speaker 1: worst possible thing you can do. Yeah, I have to listen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And for a couple reasons. One of it is my
Speaker 1: my meetor reaction just might be your wont I really
Speaker 1: need to listen because they might be right. Sometimes they're right,
Speaker 1: but there isn't much that can be done about it.
Speaker 1: But what they need is for somebody to have they're
Speaker 1: give them the respect of listening to what they say. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a really important lesson for all the
Speaker 1: sort of political fighting we're seeing right now and the
Speaker 1: cultural wars. I mean that advice is desperately needed right now.
Speaker 1: Your book talks a lot about the blocks to creativity
Speaker 1: and the active steps we can take to protect the
Speaker 1: creative process. This is a very interesting concept for me
Speaker 1: as someone who's a creativity researcher myself and I really
Speaker 1: really like this notion of protecting the creative process. What
Speaker 1: do you need to protect it from? Well itself? Typically okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you. I mean, we have one group. I mean,
Speaker 1: not every group can work this way, but we have
Speaker 1: something called the brain Trust. And the name the brain
Speaker 1: Trust originally came from Understanton and there were eight people
Speaker 1: you could identify that they were part of that original
Speaker 1: brain trust. Now it's evolved over the years based upon
Speaker 1: the needs. It's no longer a group of people, it's
Speaker 1: the way we run certain kinds of meetings. So but
Speaker 1: what made the first group powerful was they instinctively went there.
Speaker 1: And then the question was over time what worked or
Speaker 1: didn't work. So there are a few principles for these,
Speaker 1: uh these meetings. I say, they're they're way of running
Speaker 1: a certain meeting. Then who's in the room. Who's in
Speaker 1: the room I change depending upon circumstances or availability, but
Speaker 1: the principles stay the same. So one of them is
Speaker 1: to work to remove power from the room. And this
Speaker 1: is a hard thing to do. Yeah, but and there's
Speaker 1: a good reason for why we try to do that.
Speaker 1: But instinctively, well, the reason it worked in the first
Speaker 1: place is that all of them had such strong personalities
Speaker 1: that you could they could go to that place like that.
Speaker 1: There wasn't really the dominant player, and so we the
Speaker 1: rule was that the room itself, that group, the brain dress,
Speaker 1: could not override the director. So it's the director's choice.
Speaker 1: And uh, the uh, the reason for that is that
Speaker 1: when you're coming in with a new idea, when it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter what the project is or whether it's a
Speaker 1: film or whatever, you're at the beginning of stages. There
Speaker 1: are always problems with it, so when you present it
Speaker 1: to colleagues, then you're presenting something to them that you
Speaker 1: know doesn't work. So inherently, you're coming in from a
Speaker 1: position of being vulnerable. And if a person is feeling
Speaker 1: very vulnerable, they also may be defensive. And if they're
Speaker 1: density defensive and they're holding off ideas, then they're actually
Speaker 1: not helping themselves. So the reason for removing power is
Speaker 1: actually to try to address the problem of people becoming
Speaker 1: defensive and try to address the fact that for people, naturally,
Speaker 1: they're coming in feeling very defensive. So we actively say no,
Speaker 1: we want we don't want power in the room. You
Speaker 1: can't ride the director. The director knows that, and not
Speaker 1: only that if there are because every once in a
Speaker 1: while you have a disaster scenario, and the disaster scenario
Speaker 1: you may have to make some major changes, but we
Speaker 1: don't make those changes within two weeks of that meeting,
Speaker 1: and the reason is that we don't want to overload
Speaker 1: the meeting. If you go into meeting and you know
Speaker 1: that afterwards people get together and make a judgment and
Speaker 1: cut your project off or do something change, then it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter what you say about a moving power, you
Speaker 1: just screwed things up. So it's actively say okay, what
Speaker 1: is it that would cause people to be defensive. Another
Speaker 1: part of this is that the people in the room
Speaker 1: are here. It's filmmakers talking to filmmakers. So it isn't
Speaker 1: the lessons coming on from high and teaching people how
Speaker 1: to do something. These are our people who know how
Speaker 1: to make films and that be treated as peers giving notes.
Speaker 1: And third principle is that of of is you need
Speaker 1: to be honest with each other about the problems that
Speaker 1: you see, and you can do that without attacking somebody.
Speaker 1: What you're doing is you're working on the problem. You're
Speaker 1: not You're not saying that somebody else is solving. You're
Speaker 1: just trying to help. The fourth principle is actually not
Speaker 1: in the room so much is the fact that this
Speaker 1: process needs to evolve based upon the needs that we have.
Speaker 1: So there is a separate thought process and analysis about
Speaker 1: what works or what doesn't work. Now, I just came
Speaker 1: back to one thing on power. It doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: we say, oh, we're trying to keep powerut of the room.
Speaker 1: The fact is there are some people that are so
Speaker 1: experienced that by nature they have more power and people
Speaker 1: are going to defer to that power. So the rule
Speaker 1: we've tried to have, I don't want to say we're
Speaker 1: always successful, but the rule is that the strong, the
Speaker 1: people with the strong voices need to shut the hell
Speaker 1: up the first ten to fifteen minutes. If a powerful
Speaker 1: person speaks to begin with, they accept the tone for
Speaker 1: the room, and the trick is to let the conversation start,
Speaker 1: and then a person with authority can enter a discussion,
Speaker 1: and that's a different activity than starting a discussion. Now,
Speaker 1: in general, these meetings work very well. The principles apply
Speaker 1: either to the note sessions after we screen the movie
Speaker 1: or to two day off sites. That's when we call
Speaker 1: something a brain trust. But there are other kinds of meanings.
Speaker 1: Not everything is run exactly that the same just because
Speaker 1: of the nature of the problem, with the nature of
Speaker 1: the people. In general, this way of working works very well,
Speaker 1: as evidenced by the films that have come out of
Speaker 1: Disney and Pixar. There are times when it goes off
Speaker 1: the rails. It goes off the rails, for you know,
Speaker 1: people do get defensive or they don't want to offend
Speaker 1: somebody else. They want to look good. They're so focused
Speaker 1: on what they want to say they're not listening. So
Speaker 1: there are human reasons are going on, and they're subtle,
Speaker 1: like nobody's going to say, all I'm really defensive or
Speaker 1: I want to look good. Pay attention what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: because what I'm saying is like this really clever thing,
Speaker 1: like this isn't going to happen, right, So this is
Speaker 1: all under the hood kind of stoff having to do
Speaker 1: with personal emotions going on. So they do go off
Speaker 1: the rails at times, and there are some people, actually
Speaker 1: who are They screw up the dynamics of the room.
Speaker 1: But every once in a while, I'd say at least
Speaker 1: once per film, one of these meetings will happen that
Speaker 1: are magic, And by magic I mean that Ego has
Speaker 1: left the room. So ideas will come and go without
Speaker 1: people becoming attached to them. So you may offer up
Speaker 1: something to solve the problem. It doesn't go anywhere. Nobody
Speaker 1: cares like, it doesn't land, It doesn't solve the problem.
Speaker 1: What's my reaction when Ego's left the room? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You're not attached to the idea. That's the ideal state.
Speaker 1: Can I always get there. But if you can get there,
Speaker 1: then it's pretty phenomenal. It's phenomenal. Also, another major aspect
Speaker 1: of the creative process, or a barrier is is what well,
Speaker 1: let's say, let's just stick with A contributor to creativity
Speaker 1: is taking risks, being willing to embrace the unknown. This
Speaker 1: is another major element of your book. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit how that's part of the culture it
Speaker 1: picks are well, the I mean, this is a very
Speaker 1: complicated topic. The people have picks are like to take risks. Now,
Speaker 1: having said that, they also don't like to take risks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what you mean. There's a lot of money. Well,
Speaker 1: the the uh, and we've tried to work out a balance.
Speaker 1: The first thing to note is that we want you know,
Speaker 1: roughly a third of our films that would fail the
Speaker 1: elevator test. So you know, the whole notion behind the
Speaker 1: elevator test is that you get an idea, You get
Speaker 1: in the elevator with an executive in the company, and
Speaker 1: you are so concise and clear and compelling about the
Speaker 1: idea that you're presenting that by the time you got
Speaker 1: out the elevator that that executive is going to follow
Speaker 1: through and do something with it. Now. The only way
Speaker 1: for that to work, frankly, is that the idea is
Speaker 1: not very original as a derivative. So we want certain
Speaker 1: of our films be the kind that you could not
Speaker 1: make a pitch that you could do that they would
Speaker 1: fail the elevator tiest. So, as an example, what's the
Speaker 1: elevator pitch that would convince somebody that you should make
Speaker 1: a movie about a rat that wants to compareis right?
Speaker 1: That fails the elevator test? Is that ratatly gratu or
Speaker 1: the movie up where with this? Okay, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: tell a story about this old man. His wife has died,
Speaker 1: and because he's in grief, he ties a bunch of
Speaker 1: balloons to the house and floats away. But he ends
Speaker 1: up with a stowaway scout on the house. Okay, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter how successful the movie's going to be. You
Speaker 1: were never going to sell a lot of toy walkers,
Speaker 1: all right, It just fails the elevator test. Now, if
Speaker 1: you take on a project that's basically not very doable,
Speaker 1: then you have to be creative. You have to do
Speaker 1: something original. You've put yourself into position where I have
Speaker 1: to do something different and so about a third of
Speaker 1: our films is that they need to be that. When
Speaker 1: I say a third I want to do a sequel.
Speaker 1: If you say, okay, we want to make a sequel
Speaker 1: to the Incredibles, Okay, well, okay, that passes the elevators desk,
Speaker 1: so somebody wants that, right, or and some of the
Speaker 1: ideas when you actually said we want to do make
Speaker 1: a movie about something and say, oh, let's that's a
Speaker 1: good idea, all right. So I don't want to overgeneralize.
Speaker 1: But the risk part says, we damn well better be
Speaker 1: making a certain percentage out of them, which are very unlikely.
Speaker 1: And so the culture is we should be taking some
Speaker 1: risks on the technical side that we from film to
Speaker 1: film that will make changes. And they got everywhere from
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of smaller technical risks that are there too.
Speaker 1: In one case, we did this for Bray where we
Speaker 1: completely swapped down, completely swapped out the animition system that
Speaker 1: we've been using that we made every other film. And
Speaker 1: it was pretty painful, like it was blood on the
Speaker 1: floor of this one. And you know, it was very
Speaker 1: difficult because new software and you know, people that would
Speaker 1: have our side problems because they had to click buttons
Speaker 1: too many times, and and so for all the pain
Speaker 1: that went through that, there was this phenomenal meeting after
Speaker 1: it was done. And Jim Morris is now the president
Speaker 1: of Pixar, but we met with just the users of
Speaker 1: the software, right the artists or the users, to talk
Speaker 1: about the process as we're trying to make it better
Speaker 1: the next time we take on a big project. And
Speaker 1: we were going in, you know, preparing to have our
Speaker 1: heads handed to us, and there was this surprising thing
Speaker 1: that was there. It's like, you know, this is really hard,
Speaker 1: but I'm so glad we did it. Pixer has to
Speaker 1: make sure we are We're always willing to do something
Speaker 1: which is that hard. It's like, wow that, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was really impressive. So that was a cultural value. The
Speaker 1: other part of risk, though, is that people misperceived risk.
Speaker 1: Often if you say you're going to do something risky,
Speaker 1: like have a new process, then it's usually heard of
Speaker 1: as they the management of the film and as the
Speaker 1: producers of the film have decided to do something and
Speaker 1: I think this is a bad idea. We are so screwed.
Speaker 1: We should not do that, all right, So that's the reaction. Now,
Speaker 1: the reality is an idea of having a new process
Speaker 1: in the film comes from the people who work on
Speaker 1: the film. So it isn't like you're going out and
Speaker 1: taking a poll in the street or have somebody who's
Speaker 1: working at McDonald's to say we make better films. We're
Speaker 1: not doing that. The ideas are coming from people who
Speaker 1: are well intended. Now, if you say, okay, we're going
Speaker 1: to try this for this film, then what actually happens
Speaker 1: is if it doesn't work, and sometimes the new idea
Speaker 1: doesn't work, then you stop doing it. So the perceived
Speaker 1: cost is saying I do something applied to entire movie
Speaker 1: might be high if it's a mistake, but the real cost,
Speaker 1: while not zero, is still low because as soon as
Speaker 1: you realize it doesn't work, you stop doing it. But
Speaker 1: I think that's true in general across a lot of companies,
Speaker 1: is that people get freaked out or doing something which
Speaker 1: they say is risky and they apply a cost to
Speaker 1: it which doesn't apply because you change as soon as
Speaker 1: you find other it doesn't work. I love this approach,
Speaker 1: So so you're you're very comfortable with trial and error.
Speaker 1: I take it, yes, yeah, yeah, And you know what, what,
Speaker 1: lets let's like build even further, what what are other
Speaker 1: like for principles that you think make pisars so creative
Speaker 1: the movies are are incredible innovative. Well, there's I'll give
Speaker 1: you one example, and it doesn't necessarily apply to every field,
Speaker 1: but certainly doesn't in ours. Is that if you think
Speaker 1: you're making a movie, and people who aren't in this,
Speaker 1: they think in terms of the final product that they see,
Speaker 1: and so the pathway to get there is not visible
Speaker 1: to the people who were going through the process of
Speaker 1: making it. M So if we go to that early
Speaker 1: part though, is what is it that leads us to
Speaker 1: decide to make a movie? And the sort of natural thing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of studios were built this way, is
Speaker 1: that they're looking for a good idea or a good
Speaker 1: topic to make into a film, which sometimes can be
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, we make certain kinds of film. We're
Speaker 1: looking for an idea, or they're looking at scripts that
Speaker 1: are written by writers, talented writers to see what they
Speaker 1: should make. Now, that's a viable approach and companies use
Speaker 1: that successfully. But we took a different approach, which was
Speaker 1: that we picked somebody to direct a film because we
Speaker 1: think they've got something unique in terms of their creative
Speaker 1: abilities and leadership abilities before we have any idea or
Speaker 1: before they have an idea of what the film should be.
Speaker 1: And so the general ideas I say general because there
Speaker 1: are people I can understand or bad bird like they
Speaker 1: come up with their idea what they want to make,
Speaker 1: but it's the same principles, like okay, that they've got
Speaker 1: the passion and the ability and they're going to do that.
Speaker 1: But the more general case is we pick the person
Speaker 1: and then we give them like a year to come
Speaker 1: up with three ideas. And the reason for three ideas
Speaker 1: is because of something that most of us experiences, like
Speaker 1: you're working on something and you feel like you're beating
Speaker 1: the head against the wall and you're stuck, and sometimes
Speaker 1: you go off and you do something else. Then the
Speaker 1: solution comes back later. So we say pick three ideas.
Speaker 1: As soon as you get stuck, switch to the other one.
Speaker 1: So for the next year, go back and forth between
Speaker 1: the three ideas, and at the end of that year
Speaker 1: or whatever the period of time is, they then have
Speaker 1: got a rough idea of what three different stories might be.
Speaker 1: Then they gather photographs, they'll have some of the arts.
Speaker 1: Some artists produce, some drawings, they might get some images
Speaker 1: off the internet. There's a variety of things they'll try
Speaker 1: to do in order to convey what the idea is.
Speaker 1: So now they've all been through this, and although they'll
Speaker 1: play the same kind of minding on it, because they'll
Speaker 1: start off the meeting when they're presenting, and it's about
Speaker 1: an hour and a half for the presenting of the
Speaker 1: three ideas, half hour for each idea, and they'll start
Speaker 1: off by saying that they love all three ideas equally.
Speaker 1: So that's the starting point. It's not true they don't.
Speaker 1: And the job of the creative leadership is not to
Speaker 1: pick what they think is the best idea, is to
Speaker 1: figure out which one the director really wants to make
Speaker 1: when they've just said that they don't care which one
Speaker 1: is picked, all right, So and basically and every time
Speaker 1: it's worried because they come back and they say, oh,
Speaker 1: I was hoping you picked that one because that's what
Speaker 1: I really wanted to do. And and sometimes it's is
Speaker 1: obvious that my my favorite one was on Coco. Coco
Speaker 1: was one that wouldn't pass the elevator tests. And the
Speaker 1: movie about Ah the Day of the Dead. It's part
Speaker 1: of the culture of Mexico. It's not an obvious that
Speaker 1: film for this country. Uh. And Lenker came up with
Speaker 1: his three ideas and the we do it differently with
Speaker 1: each one, but in his case, we have two story rooms,
Speaker 1: and story rooms are rectangular, which means one side as
Speaker 1: the ideas for a movie or film and all the
Speaker 1: artwork for it, and typically it's covered up because you
Speaker 1: don't want the distraction of the other idea. That's one wall.
Speaker 1: So it makes the pitch. You uncover the boards, it's
Speaker 1: the idea, talk about it, there's a discussion about it,
Speaker 1: and you know in intriguing is they have a good
Speaker 1: idea and then they'll switch over to the other wall
Speaker 1: and again take it off, go through this half hour
Speaker 1: long presentation and discussion. But there's only two long walls.
Speaker 1: So in order to go to the third film, we
Speaker 1: had to move as a group into the other room.
Speaker 1: So now we walk into the other story room. The table,
Speaker 1: both walls, and the ceiling are covered with Mexican artwork.
Speaker 1: Now without a word being said, I know which film
Speaker 1: we're making it, right, yeah? Yeah, And that's all we're
Speaker 1: looking for is like, okay, where's that passion And it's
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of work and a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of things you have to do. You need that
Speaker 1: passion behind it. What are you trying to do is
Speaker 1: make the environment to let them do it, because even
Speaker 1: though they've got the passion, they don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: it is. It takes a lot of work. They've got
Speaker 1: discovered things, they have to discover things about themselves too.
Speaker 1: These are when you're telling these stories that they are
Speaker 1: also personal journeys. Yeah, when they don't operate in isolation.
Speaker 1: It's not like the one person creates the whole story.
Speaker 1: There's uh, you know, the team aspect of it, where
Speaker 1: the sum is greater than each of the individual parts.
Speaker 1: I think is an important part of this as well.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to find these teams where they're
Speaker 1: all inspired to work on this together. You have your
Speaker 1: discovered an uninspiring team that was uninspired to I've seen
Speaker 1: a couple. So it's part of the making and say, okay,
Speaker 1: sometimes the dynamic isn't working right. I mentioned before that
Speaker 1: sometimes we have these difficult decisions that we have to make.
Speaker 1: We don't make them right around the brain trust. But
Speaker 1: we've got this, uh this the pathways like you got
Speaker 1: an idea. By definition, the idea is just the beginning, Like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. So what does it mean to go
Speaker 1: into a brain Trust money meeting or presentation and walk
Speaker 1: out and say, well, gee, that isn't any good? All right,
Speaker 1: that isn't working. Well, of course it isn't working. They're
Speaker 1: just starting. So you can't judge well the film is
Speaker 1: doing based upon the state of the project. This is
Speaker 1: a hard thing for some people to get. The only
Speaker 1: real measure we have is how effective is the team
Speaker 1: working with each other and while they're going to these
Speaker 1: difficult things together. And the only reason that we pull
Speaker 1: the plug on something is if that dynamic within the
Speaker 1: team falls apart, if the director loses the confidence of
Speaker 1: the crew, then we have to do something. And that
Speaker 1: has happened the painful and the reason the person was
Speaker 1: given the opportunity in the first place is because they're
Speaker 1: very talented. You have a very talented person, but they
Speaker 1: can't quite make that step to make to be a director.
Speaker 1: And so you get to the point and say, well,
Speaker 1: it actually isn't it working. We have to in some
Speaker 1: cases supplement, but in some cases, you know, do some
Speaker 1: adjustment of who the team is, and it's not easy
Speaker 1: and it's very visible position. So it's difficult if we
Speaker 1: if we have to replace the director, but we have
Speaker 1: done it. That is, once you decide to make a film,
Speaker 1: that commitment means you're not committing to a person. You're
Speaker 1: committing to ultimately a couple one hundred people. We're working
Speaker 1: together and trying to do the very best they can,
Speaker 1: and you have to make sure that the dynamsure that
Speaker 1: team is healthy, that it's fun, maybe hard work, but
Speaker 1: they have to feel good about what they're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why do you think the animation form the media is
Speaker 1: so popular? What do you think the appeal of anthropomorphic
Speaker 1: characters are in animation? What's going on? What's captivating the
Speaker 1: human imagination that you know so much there? Well, in
Speaker 1: the case of animation, they are if animation of humans,
Speaker 1: you've got caricature that you can put in there that
Speaker 1: it's difficult to do with live actors. Now, there are
Speaker 1: times when you need live actors because our connection with
Speaker 1: the human face and the human body is extremely powerful
Speaker 1: and that's the right way to tell the story. But
Speaker 1: sometimes you need the caricature to tell the story. And
Speaker 1: there are times in which the story is so powerful
Speaker 1: that you need the caricature in order to get it across.
Speaker 1: So there is a there's a rationale for why certain
Speaker 1: things are appropriate. It's a question that the studio will
Speaker 1: ask at times, is like, okay, why is this an
Speaker 1: animated film rather than a live action film. I personally
Speaker 1: don't find that particularly useful conversations they have, but every
Speaker 1: once in a while there is a conversation. And then
Speaker 1: there are some things where like with inside that takes
Speaker 1: place inside the head. Okay, well it would be weird
Speaker 1: to do it, say with with real people. I mean,
Speaker 1: the character allows you to do something. But the other
Speaker 1: thing to note is that there's a Communist understanding is
Speaker 1: that animated films are made for children. And even while
Speaker 1: Disney understood this is not true. And as we don't
Speaker 1: make our movies for kids, we make them for adults,
Speaker 1: to make them for ourselves, we are doing it in
Speaker 1: a way that makes them accessible to kids. But you know,
Speaker 1: we believe in understanding. If you were if you were
Speaker 1: talking down with the movie to kids, then first of all,
Speaker 1: they know that they're being talked down to, and that
Speaker 1: I want to take a gun to the head. They
Speaker 1: want to sit and watch the particular film. You have
Speaker 1: to make something which is for them, but it's accessible.
Speaker 1: And remember that children are wired to try to figure
Speaker 1: out what's going on in the world. So the reason
Speaker 1: they'll watch any films over and over again is they're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how things work. And if you've
Speaker 1: made it accessible, then you've got something which they can
Speaker 1: go over and over again. But fundamentally it's got some
Speaker 1: deep or or mature things in it with the comedy
Speaker 1: and the caricature that makes it accessible to understand obviously. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that that does a great answer about the animation
Speaker 1: part of it. But the stories you create as well
Speaker 1: are so special and really tug at the heartstrings. I mean,
Speaker 1: most recently, Soul really brought me to tears, you know,
Speaker 1: and I related so much to my own work on
Speaker 1: transcendence and what it means to live a meaningful life.
Speaker 1: What role do you play these days in well? Interested
Speaker 1: in you know, in the creative process. It picks of
Speaker 1: these of new movies that come out, you know, what's
Speaker 1: your day to day sort of involvement of the stories. Well,
Speaker 1: I retired a couple of years ago. So the thing
Speaker 1: about setting up for succession is that when you walk away,
Speaker 1: that you set things up, then they are otherwise who
Speaker 1: succeed you? Sup, there's a goal all along. And as
Speaker 1: they addressed the new problems, and they're if we look
Speaker 1: at what's having today that the change in the industry
Speaker 1: because of what two things. One is the pandemic hitting
Speaker 1: just as as a streaming is really taking off, changes
Speaker 1: the economics and the dynamics considerably. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of work to figure that out. And I was going
Speaker 1: in on a regular basis, just a mentor or check
Speaker 1: in with people because a lot of friends there and
Speaker 1: I love them so much. And then once the pandemic hit,
Speaker 1: I'm at home and the zoom doesn't work for that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So the answer is right now, I'm
Speaker 1: not playing a le at it. But is anyone going
Speaker 1: into the studios right now or during the pandemic? Well,
Speaker 1: what they they were fairly well along on soul when
Speaker 1: it took place, so there was a productivity hit. But
Speaker 1: as they figured things out, they got better at it.
Speaker 1: So there's certain things where they did need some some
Speaker 1: meetings to go in be in the studio. But as
Speaker 1: you would guess, there's some fairly strict rules in terms
Speaker 1: of safety and so forth, and there's more and more
Speaker 1: get inoculated, then more things will happen in the studio.
Speaker 1: So let's trying to figure that out. And like a
Speaker 1: lot of companies, it's there's a recognition that we just
Speaker 1: ran through a forced experiment. So while Zoom and other
Speaker 1: sort of tele conference and have been available for a
Speaker 1: while with certain features and abilities, there's a question like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: how much do we want people to work at home?
Speaker 1: Is there an advantage? And you know, you don't know
Speaker 1: how far to go, what the advantages are or disadvantages are,
Speaker 1: and it's easier to imagine the disadvantages. But when the
Speaker 1: pandemic hit, we don't have a choice. We have to
Speaker 1: run the experiment, and in the process then the tool's
Speaker 1: gotten better faster than they would have otherwise. We also
Speaker 1: found that some things were a little better if you
Speaker 1: did them remotely, just because of the nature of the information.
Speaker 1: It's like, you don't need to go waste the time
Speaker 1: going there. You know, you get on there and you
Speaker 1: talk with somebody and it is just as productive with
Speaker 1: easier use to mean less impact on the environment. There
Speaker 1: are things like that. There are some things that work, okay,
Speaker 1: they're not as good. They work okay. There are some
Speaker 1: things where it's clear that you should be industry if
Speaker 1: you can, or at work, and there are some things
Speaker 1: where you just plan cannot do them over tell conferencing.
Speaker 1: So one of them I was. I mentioned these two
Speaker 1: day off sites. The way they were structured and the
Speaker 1: way they worked is not replicable with conferencing. It's a whole.
Speaker 1: It was a powerful way of developing the stories, and
Speaker 1: it was gone for that year. And another example would
Speaker 1: be something that we kind of take for granted. I
Speaker 1: have a study he's about ready to graduate from high school,
Speaker 1: so his final year of high schools during the pandemic
Speaker 1: and basically the last year of high school where kids
Speaker 1: are ready to start moving on mentally. But there's something
Speaker 1: about the social element of that last year's school that
Speaker 1: holds things together. The social element was gone, and for
Speaker 1: high school seniors around the world, like this really screws
Speaker 1: things up. And even if they can go back into
Speaker 1: school with some schools let them do. They've got these
Speaker 1: social distance things, certain restrictions on the social abilities. It's
Speaker 1: not replicable. It really screwed things up. And so I
Speaker 1: watched these seniors, not is my son, but various others
Speaker 1: around it. It's like, oh, this is actually terrible experience
Speaker 1: for the last year. So there's that range of stuff
Speaker 1: like it just doesn't work at all, to oh it
Speaker 1: was better this way and now we're now we've got
Speaker 1: that information and at least in this country, is I
Speaker 1: think we've reached what more than fifty percent of at
Speaker 1: least you received at least one inoculation, Is that right, John? Yeah? Actually,
Speaker 1: what I'm in Marine County, I think are about eighty
Speaker 1: percent network where I'm living right now. Now, well, California
Speaker 1: is like the best in the cory in the country
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah, so it's and so now you see
Speaker 1: things starting to open up, and it's say, California has
Speaker 1: been pretty thoughtful right from the beginning to work through this,
Speaker 1: even though it's you know, something they haven't always had
Speaker 1: to do before. So it's a god awful mess. And
Speaker 1: there a whole bunch of mistakes make along the way.
Speaker 1: But when I see the mistakes, and it comes back
Speaker 1: to this, yeah, are you willing to take risks? A
Speaker 1: lot of people look at somebody else and say, well,
Speaker 1: they shouldn't have made that mistake, and they shouldn't have
Speaker 1: done that, so they screw it up. But none of
Speaker 1: us knew we were doing. So you try something and
Speaker 1: see what doesn't work, and some stuff isn't going to
Speaker 1: go right. You know, it's just and there's always somebody
Speaker 1: that wants to hold somebody quote accountable. First, I hate
Speaker 1: the word accountability because it has two meanings. One of
Speaker 1: them is, this is the positive meanings. If you have responsibility,
Speaker 1: and if you're responsibility do something, then you really should
Speaker 1: deliver on it. That's the positive meaning. The negative was
Speaker 1: if you say hold accountable, that means like, oh, you
Speaker 1: just screwed up and you need to go to jail. Right,
Speaker 1: just desserts, that's right. So we use the term typically
Speaker 1: in its negative breaks, which actually diminishes the value of accountability.
Speaker 1: And so we said, we want to hold somebody accountable
Speaker 1: if they made a mistake in the terms of you know,
Speaker 1: whether it's you know, in COVID or or treatment there.
Speaker 1: But if people got the right intense intentions then and
Speaker 1: they're going to make mistakes and okay, we all learn
Speaker 1: from them. Let's custom slack. Let's not politicize something because
Speaker 1: we accept sort of the reality of what happens, and
Speaker 1: the fact that we're trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 1: If we can pull it back to the folks on
Speaker 1: the problem rather than this being a personal or politically
Speaker 1: then then I think we can move forward. There. We
Speaker 1: love that you're not a big fan of cancel culture.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what it means. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: either I don't hear this term cancel culture. But what
Speaker 1: do they mean because both sides are both sides are
Speaker 1: using it being used to mean, Oh, I don't like
Speaker 1: You're saying, so I'm going to stop buying your product. Okay,
Speaker 1: that idea has been around for a long time. I
Speaker 1: don't like your show, I'm not going to watch it. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's always been true. What in the hell is cancel culture?
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any sense. You're canceled means, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: In some cases people can get their jobs fired, I guess,
Speaker 1: and they can be fired from their jobs. So there
Speaker 1: is an explicit meaning of it in that sense of
Speaker 1: a clearer meaning, But in other senses, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: more just like I don't I don't like you, and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do it like follow you in
Speaker 1: anything you do. Yeah, so it has multiple meanings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's I mean, it's it's been true before this.
Speaker 1: And there's certain things that one does environment which are
Speaker 1: fireable offenses. M But that's been true for a long time.
Speaker 1: If anything. The problem with a lot of cases, a
Speaker 1: lot of cases is people have done things that were
Speaker 1: fireable offenses and they weren't fired. They weren't they weren't
Speaker 1: held accountable in the second, that's right. Yeah, So that's
Speaker 1: why I said the cancel culture was like one of
Speaker 1: those words that instantly was turned into a hammer without meaning.
Speaker 1: It's a weighty hammer without meaning, just as accountability is
Speaker 1: like a a hammer without wisdom applied to it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hear you. I hear you. What do you see
Speaker 1: as the future of anomation? Like where at things sitting?
Speaker 1: I know you can't tell me the secret the secrets,
Speaker 1: but you know, but what can you tell me about
Speaker 1: where Pixar is heading and what you see fifty years
Speaker 1: from now what we could have in store for us.
Speaker 1: Well that means first of all, the obviously, if we're
Speaker 1: making a movie, then we don't go out and tell
Speaker 1: people at a time what it's about. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's an industry that's pretty small and people move around
Speaker 1: for a variety of reasons, and so the notion of
Speaker 1: secrecy doesn't mean a lot as much. That's not true
Speaker 1: and everything like you're dealing with national security issues and
Speaker 1: secrecy means something different or in the case of like
Speaker 1: Apple's Dot products and and their secret amounts. So here's
Speaker 1: the interesting thing that and most people are unaware of
Speaker 1: this and the logic behind it, because Steve has thought
Speaker 1: of as a very secretive person and he was pretty secretive,
Speaker 1: but he had a reason for it, and it was
Speaker 1: very explicit, was that if you hold things secret, especially
Speaker 1: something that's known about in the world, but the details
Speaker 1: are of important, then when you tell people about it,
Speaker 1: it actually gives you this enormous stage in which to
Speaker 1: make presentations and give attention. And Steve was very aware
Speaker 1: of that process of how do you get people to notice?
Speaker 1: And I say this because while Steve had this intuition
Speaker 1: about how he told the story of where his products
Speaker 1: or the films are going, same time, y'aan Pixar well
Speaker 1: at Pixar, and this started at first, even before Lucasfilms.
Speaker 1: I was at New York Tech. We published everything, and
Speaker 1: the president of the school's line of that. And then
Speaker 1: we got to Lucasfilm. We published everything at Cigarette George
Speaker 1: was fine with it. Now we spent off his Pixar.
Speaker 1: We published everything. Steve never said anything about it. We
Speaker 1: went on to Disney. Nobody at Disney said why are
Speaker 1: you publishing everything? And for the last several years Disney
Speaker 1: and Picks are published more papers than any other company
Speaker 1: in Siagram. So what was the difference. Well, in the
Speaker 1: case of of Apple, Steve had a reason for the secrets,
Speaker 1: and he knew what the reason was. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: because the nature of being secretive or paranoid. It's like
Speaker 1: he had a reason for why he was working that way.
Speaker 1: The reason he didn't ask us about our publishing, which
Speaker 1: is basically saying we're giving away all of the secrets,
Speaker 1: is that we were playing a different game. What we
Speaker 1: were trying to do was to get the best people
Speaker 1: in the to to come join us. I absolutely did
Speaker 1: not care about any particular technical idea because it was
Speaker 1: going to get discovered or found out by somebody another
Speaker 1: year or two anyway, So who cares what you want
Speaker 1: of as extraordinary people who think of these ideas. And
Speaker 1: Steve knew that, so Steve never said, oh, don't publish
Speaker 1: your giving away our ideas. That wasn't what we were
Speaker 1: trying to do. And also if you take something like
Speaker 1: around a two week as an example, suppose we told
Speaker 1: people early on that we were going to make a
Speaker 1: movie about a wrath that wanted to cook. How much
Speaker 1: damage would it do to us for our competitors to
Speaker 1: know that we were making a movie about a wrath
Speaker 1: that wants to cook. Zero? It would not have mattered
Speaker 1: because it's you know, it's a story that they discover
Speaker 1: along the way, and it's that discovery and they're bringing
Speaker 1: their personal stuff into it. You really see in terms
Speaker 1: of the look of the film, Yan Pinka is the
Speaker 1: one who conceded the idea and the one who delivered
Speaker 1: the final film was brad Bird. And that story is sick.
Speaker 1: You know you brad Birds stolen personality come out. What
Speaker 1: was the secret? There wasn't one. And in terms of
Speaker 1: how we work, if inters like the brain Trust, oh
Speaker 1: we tell people how work, there's no secret there. What
Speaker 1: do you see is the future you know of of
Speaker 1: of Pixar and of animation and exciting and new horizons.
Speaker 1: So don't tell me secrets, because I get it, there
Speaker 1: are no secrets, But tell me what you think. What
Speaker 1: don't I know? Oh, I mean, it's the thing I
Speaker 1: don't know. Also, because the hope, of course is the
Speaker 1: culture has got the ability to adapt, and the challenge
Speaker 1: they have is that that making work for streaming is
Speaker 1: number one. It's an opportunity because there's sort of an
Speaker 1: insatiable appetite. It's sort of like television has an satiable
Speaker 1: appetite for content. But the economics are different. Our animated
Speaker 1: films are fairly expensive to produce because all the attention
Speaker 1: and the care that goes into them. So can we
Speaker 1: hold onto that or do we fall into the trap
Speaker 1: of saying, oh, this is about purely about the economics,
Speaker 1: and so you end up shipping off the work to
Speaker 1: be done some other place where they can make it
Speaker 1: for less money, coming out of a culture where everybody
Speaker 1: is part of making the film. So our kitchen crew,
Speaker 1: for instance, you are employed by the company and they
Speaker 1: get of the credits the end of the film because
Speaker 1: we're all in together, all right. Well, now the world
Speaker 1: just got turned upside down in terms of the economics,
Speaker 1: and now it's distributed and and so the question is, Okay,
Speaker 1: how did they adapt to it? So it just there's like,
Speaker 1: how do I think it's gonna end up? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I honestly don't. It's hard. It's hard to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where it's all going. And you see more and more
Speaker 1: of a appreciation for inclusivity of like diversity of characters. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, don't you see that friend continuing? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: a that's uh, that particular started some time ago because
Speaker 1: we have this awareness that picks are basically what we
Speaker 1: had were essentially initially all male directors and the people
Speaker 1: who were in the in the studio, the theater schools
Speaker 1: on the animation side were largely male, and so we
Speaker 1: represented the state of where it was about when when
Speaker 1: we started. But we realized, well, actually we have a
Speaker 1: responsibility because our job isn't to represent the current data
Speaker 1: things that we have a social impact in the world.
Speaker 1: So what do we do to actively bring in other
Speaker 1: ethnicities and bring in women in different roles and to
Speaker 1: be very active about that process? And uh so a
Speaker 1: lot of change you know, got or was put into place.
Speaker 1: It's definitely had an effect. Obviously you see it with Soul,
Speaker 1: but there are a couple of other films for those
Speaker 1: from a cultural point of view, a lot of attention
Speaker 1: to represent the real culture. So Leon Critch and the
Speaker 1: team working on Coco spent a lot of time in
Speaker 1: southern Mexico and villages because they didn't want to base
Speaker 1: a film based upon stereotypes. They wanted to capture the essence,
Speaker 1: which meant visiting people as well as having a lot
Speaker 1: of cultural consultants who grew up there and nothing and
Speaker 1: experienced things that we didn't know. And likewise, Muana was
Speaker 1: the same thing for Oceana. Okay, so how do you
Speaker 1: capture the essence of a culture? So you then go
Speaker 1: back to the people they are representing, You show the
Speaker 1: film and are they happy with what they see? Or
Speaker 1: do they WinCE that's what they see? So there are
Speaker 1: a lot of elements into getting that ride, but it
Speaker 1: comes along with our own social responsibility to do something
Speaker 1: which is honest and impactful, which also means that it's
Speaker 1: going to affect us if we're honest about it. Then
Speaker 1: it comes from the fact that say, well, I honest,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So that's why you have to have
Speaker 1: people who've got different cultures or you know, different genders,
Speaker 1: you know, as part of the making of the films,
Speaker 1: because they represent their richness and no person has got
Speaker 1: all those understanding. And it was one of the lessons
Speaker 1: for me Is I was getting near the point of retirement,
Speaker 1: was it reach tomorrow? I felt kind of guilty because
Speaker 1: I fell into some traps, and then I realized, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I it isn't my job to know everything.
Speaker 1: That's actually I trap itself. It's to understand deeply the
Speaker 1: people have got experiences and knowledge that I can't possibly
Speaker 1: have or cannot possibly get. And it's by trying to
Speaker 1: make an environment where that comes out that you end
Speaker 1: up with something which is powerful and impactful. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: also include a neurodiverse people on the team as well,
Speaker 1: like people who like dyslexic people tend to be incredibly
Speaker 1: creative in their own way. You know, autistic people people
Speaker 1: call autism just the whole range, So include them in
Speaker 1: the table as well. That yeah, well there's nothing that
Speaker 1: actually It's the funny thing. It was one of the
Speaker 1: last things I did is as I was retiring, I
Speaker 1: went to every single group at Disney and picks off.
Speaker 1: So these are like three kids of people in a
Speaker 1: group to give my farewell thoughts. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I discovered some time ago that I don't have the
Speaker 1: ability to visualize, as when I close my eyes, I
Speaker 1: can't see me just and and when I discovered this
Speaker 1: was actually surprising to me because they came up with
Speaker 1: the surfaces that we use for making that's pretty ironic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it isn't just animated films, but it's also
Speaker 1: for special effects and all those things. The computer animated
Speaker 1: films of this surface that I did, and I didn't
Speaker 1: do it by math, and I didn't know by visualizing
Speaker 1: something was something else in my brain. So I took
Speaker 1: the test of visualization. I asked people to fill it out,
Speaker 1: and it was It was very surprising. But it turns out, frankly,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of correlation between your ability to
Speaker 1: visualize and creativity or in your your ability to draw
Speaker 1: imagination either. Yeah. Well, it's like one of the films
Speaker 1: nominated for an Academy Award yesterday was Blank. Len Keen
Speaker 1: was the director that took Place in the Moon, very
Speaker 1: really lovely film and Len King is one of the
Speaker 1: best hand round animators of all time, and he completely
Speaker 1: lacks the ability to visualize. So if you watch him,
Speaker 1: the way he works is he scribbles the drawings, so
Speaker 1: what's inside of his brain comes out like to embody
Speaker 1: through his interaction with the paper, and it converges on
Speaker 1: this phenomenal work of art. And he's working side by
Speaker 1: side with people who've got these amazing visual abilities, where
Speaker 1: if they don't like one of them, he's only what.
Speaker 1: He never sees a movie more than once because once
Speaker 1: he's seen it, it's all it's in his hand. So
Speaker 1: you've got this range from this it's called hyper fantasia,
Speaker 1: and they're to having no ability whatsoever, and it's not
Speaker 1: strongly correlated with your ability to be creative or thoughtful
Speaker 1: or insightful. That sounding, which I thought was was cool.
Speaker 1: So we can any of these misconceptions. Well, obviously somebody
Speaker 1: who as an artist has to be really good at visualizing.
Speaker 1: No they don't, that's not true. And the co founder
Speaker 1: of Pixar can have a difficulty with visualization too. That's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I have. But if you talk, if you include
Speaker 1: in visualization, which some neurologies do, spatial ability, then are
Speaker 1: very high have very strong spatial ability. But sure, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, but the deeper things are manifested in
Speaker 1: different ways. Absolutely, how do we enable it? How to
Speaker 1: make it so that people feel fine about it? If
Speaker 1: you could build a dream K through twelve school based
Speaker 1: on what you know about the creativity, the creative process
Speaker 1: and the importance of including people neudiverse and other forms
Speaker 1: of diversity, like, what would the kind of such a
Speaker 1: school look like? Have you ever thought about that? Well? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: hard problem. All the rest of my family's in education.
Speaker 1: My father's a high school principal. My brothers and sisters
Speaker 1: or teachers. So I was a black sheep in the family.
Speaker 1: Black sheep because I didn't go into into education. But
Speaker 1: I do believe in the diversity and approaches because there
Speaker 1: are so many different ways that people thinking and teaching
Speaker 1: that I don't know that the goal is to come
Speaker 1: out with the right curriculum to be spread around the
Speaker 1: country about how to teach kids. The fact is there
Speaker 1: are some teachers who are extraordinarily good. Has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the curriculum. They just have an ability to
Speaker 1: touch and affect people and it's individualized. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like the visualization, they do it in different ways. How
Speaker 1: do we create create an environment to allow that to happen?
Speaker 1: And frankly, the biggest impediment to it, it's just the economics,
Speaker 1: is that people in general don't want to pay for
Speaker 1: education and always bug the hell out of me over
Speaker 1: these years when I would see a funding bill for
Speaker 1: schools up for voting, and almost always the funding bills
Speaker 1: are defeated. That there's a you know, they don't hit
Speaker 1: a majority of the people who feel like this is
Speaker 1: worth doing for the future, and so it always leaves
Speaker 1: them on the short side, not having enough. And then
Speaker 1: you've got this consequence of it is that in certain areas,
Speaker 1: and it's not true when I grew up into when
Speaker 1: I grew up there were only public schools, and the
Speaker 1: richest kid in the school and the poorest were all
Speaker 1: in the same social group. That is that and for me,
Speaker 1: this felt very naturally. We're all this together. It's not
Speaker 1: not that everything necessarily was hormonious, everything was right, but
Speaker 1: everybody was in these together. But there wasn't a bias
Speaker 1: because this person they were special, because their family was
Speaker 1: wealthy or in this girl's case, her family was very poor.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter. But now I go to other places
Speaker 1: like here in California, where you say, well, there's high school.
Speaker 1: Assuming the public schools have got some issues. So the
Speaker 1: kids from the families where they're are paying more let's
Speaker 1: say money, and this is those families are pulled out
Speaker 1: into the private schools to the detriment of the public schools.
Speaker 1: What do you what do you do about that? You like,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're a parent, then you want the
Speaker 1: best thing for your child, which means you're going put
Speaker 1: them typically in a private school. But as a society,
Speaker 1: that's actually not a good thing to have happened. These
Speaker 1: are there just tough issues. So you're asking me a
Speaker 1: question where a different things. But that's is this is
Speaker 1: a it's a hard one and an important one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're trade offs than anything. And yeah, no it's it's
Speaker 1: a hard one. But I mean, if I could frame
Speaker 1: the question a little bit differently, and it's just like
Speaker 1: Pixar movies, it's still such a sense of wonder and
Speaker 1: all in the viewer, you know, like how can we
Speaker 1: pause simply designed schools to make the learning process more magical?
Speaker 1: Like watching a Pixar movie, do you see what I'm saying, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we did something at Pixar. We formed this group they
Speaker 1: and they made a series of short films about the
Speaker 1: making of our film. And it was the person at
Speaker 1: the time who was the head of Picture University at least, Cleidman,
Speaker 1: and the person was the head of the R and
Speaker 1: D for the ten Tony de Rose have this really
Speaker 1: strong passion for elementary or k th twelve education. So
Speaker 1: they produced a series and we entered into a relationship
Speaker 1: with con Academy. It was called Pixar in a Box.
Speaker 1: So they had a series of lessons where they'd have
Speaker 1: somebody was doing the lighting or the modeling or the animation,
Speaker 1: the animation and you would actually see this and there'd
Speaker 1: be some lessons to go along with it, and some
Speaker 1: tools on the website to connect with something and using
Speaker 1: the films to get there or to hold them their attention.
Speaker 1: And it was really a pre extraordinary program they made it.
Speaker 1: I forget. I think they did some with ILM because
Speaker 1: at this point it was part of Disney, and also
Speaker 1: they did some with WBI, but when a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of changes took place, then the program wasn't continued. So
Speaker 1: Tony and at least went out to formal company for
Speaker 1: educational purposes to produce those kinds of things, either for
Speaker 1: companies or for school So part of it is where
Speaker 1: they want the education. In part is it's a practical
Speaker 1: or how they funded this company. They got some initial
Speaker 1: support from Learning Jobs and she's very interested, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: she's has a strong, very strong interest in an education.
Speaker 1: Actually it's very remarkable. But that's a I love that
Speaker 1: concept and I think it's it's scalable too, But how
Speaker 1: does one get the funding from the places that might
Speaker 1: do it? But is what you want is something which
Speaker 1: is relevant culturally so that people want to watch it
Speaker 1: and follow through with the lessons. But you're using something
Speaker 1: with the lessons to introduce the technology or the art,
Speaker 1: or relationships or how you think about things or how
Speaker 1: you use tools, and it takes a certain kind of
Speaker 1: expertise to do that. The expertise he used to make
Speaker 1: them is not all that broadly spread, so the schools
Speaker 1: don't have enough expertise to make it. It was one
Speaker 1: of the things that Tony de Rowe's found early on
Speaker 1: as he went out to give talks. As he was
Speaker 1: giving talks about the math of the movies, and he
Speaker 1: came back with the observation is that the teachers, like
Speaker 1: the math teachers, he's dying for tools like this. Where
Speaker 1: can they get them? Because they want something, so it's
Speaker 1: just like how they get it. Also, I should say
Speaker 1: that that we also did something with the Museum of
Speaker 1: the Science Museum in Boston, and so there was an
Speaker 1: exhibit about the making of the films. And again our
Speaker 1: teamate picks our work with their team at the museum,
Speaker 1: who had this incredible relationship. They work very well together.
Speaker 1: It was very impressive, and then they produced this exhibit
Speaker 1: at the Boston Science Museum and it was an extraordinary
Speaker 1: Well well, I was still touring, but I think it's
Speaker 1: now to be back in Boston again for another couple
Speaker 1: of months. But it's been turning around the world and
Speaker 1: so it's a success. But it took the passion of
Speaker 1: somebody to sort of push it through and then took
Speaker 1: the ability of Pixar to say go ahead, like, we'll
Speaker 1: fund you to do that. But where do you get
Speaker 1: the combination of both passion and the funding to help
Speaker 1: do something which engage children And isn't that really an
Speaker 1: important thing to do for me? The answers. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean I just wish people invested more into education.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of priorities. There's a lot, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of money out there. It's just it's how do
Speaker 1: we convince people that this is a priority. Yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: yiah Ed. Thank you so much for coming on the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcasting spend so much time with me, and for
Speaker 1: the just truly pioneering work you've done for animation and
Speaker 1: the movies, and just for understanding of creativity itself. Well
Speaker 1: my pleasure. Thank you so much. Enjoyed talking with you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in on the
Speaker 1: discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology
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Speaker 1: on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.