For years, Pixar implied the highest standard in animation. A fifteen year run that spanned from Toy Story to Toy Story 3 included such classics as Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, Wall-E, Ratatoiulle. For most studios, that amount of #winning would be tantamount to a lifetime of work. And though Pixar’s latest efforts have been middling at best (the trifecta of Cars 2, Brave and Monsters University marked a major low point for the animation studio’s creative juices) Inside Out (full review here) has arrived to return the studio to its former glory.

I sat down with director Pete Docter (whose past directorial work includes Monsters, Inc. and Up) and long-time Pixar producer Jonas Rivera to talk the “Pixar Tear”, watching their kids grow up, how creative process comes about at Pixar, the weight of winning Pixar back the crown, ideas left on the cutting room floor and the pressure of getting Inside Out right.

Up is one of those movies, that every time I turn it on, I end up tearing up. When I went and saw Inside Out, same reaction. It was like, “Oh, here it comes. The classic Pixar tear.” Is that something you guys actively go for? When you’re in the Pixar boardroom, are you like, “We’ve got to make the adults cry now”? Or is that the result of good storytelling?

Pete Docter: I like to picture it coming from the board room director. “Alright, gentlemen time to cry…” It really kind of comes from the story, and every director’s different. On this film, starting to watch my daughter grow up, we knew that it would go there at some point. We’re all parents, we all struggle with the idea that our kids are going from a point where they’re really cute and little, to much more sophisticated and changed, and all that is difficult. It felt pretty evident from early, early on that at least we were gonna reach for that.

Jonas Rivera: That’s emotional even to say it. Maybe we’re just saps, but there was just something about that —specific to this movie. I’m a parent, I have three young kids. Pete’s kids are older. I don’t know, if you could as a parent, the feeling I have sometimes is I’d make time stand still if I could; I’d freeze time. Obviously, you can’t do that. But that said, the thing about personifying emotions, we wanted this to be a lot of fun. That made me think of movies I loved growing up, or some of my favorite movies, like ET or something, which is really emotional, but it’s not depressing; there’s humor in it. It’s a Wonderful Life does that; the movies I love do that. On that level, as filmmakers, those seem like rewarding movies to watch and experience, and that’s something we like to try to do.

With so many successful Pixar films, is there a concern that you don’t want to mess one up? Does that ever get into your head?

PD: Constantly. Oh yeah. On every one of them, at some point, we’re convinced, this is the one that’s gonna blow up. Part of the process we’ve developed is it means the films can be a mess at some point, and we just expect it, and we know that it’s gonna take a big community effort to get it on its feet and make it work.

JR: All the films, there’s nine or ten versions of this movie that you’ll never see, that were what we cut together over the years. The script before, there was a lot of visuals. It was a tough thing to describe; I remember Louis Black saying when we were at a film festival, that when he first read it, he thought, “Sure, I’ll be in Pixar’s first failure.”

PD: You do have to kind of be willing to take creative risks; you have to be willing to fail. And the great thing about [Edwin] Catmull and John Lasseter that set up this system, is that they’re expecting us to fail; it’s not a surprise. It’s not like, “Oh, we gotta replace them, and change the movie.” Every movie is gonna stink. We know that it’ll happen. We believe in the people and we believe in the concept and where it’s going.

So you got the idea of the movie by looking at your teenage daughter, and saying, “She’s going through this massive transformation. What’s going on in her head?” And that’s an idea that’s incredibly abstract, and yet I think in the execution of the film, it’s very palpable what you’re getting across—and narratively coherent, which it could easily not have been. What are the biggest hurdles creatively and narratively to getting the film made as coherently as you did?

PD: It was one of the things we realized pretty early on, that we’re taking an abstract concept and making it physical. We’re putting nuts-and-bolts, tactile things down for what are very abstract ideas, like personality, and just running with that. Connecting the outside world to the inside world was incredibly difficult: just as we were writing this script, we realized, Joy loves her kid like a parent loves their kid. Riley—in the case of this story—doesn’t even know that Joy exists; she’s completely unaware, and yet, her actions need to change Joy’s journey, and Joy’s actions need to affect Riley. And so this handshake back and forth meant that we had to design a world that reflects who Riley is. So we realized early on, Riley’s personality’s what’s at stake. So the islands were a way of representing, as they crumble away, Joy not only is physically now having to go further to get back; but she’s also mourning the loss of the thing that she holds most precious. That was not easily arrived at; that was a struggle. I think we did at least a dozen other physical designs for the landscape of how that would look, how it would be represented. That was one of the more difficult things.

Were there aspects of Riley’s journey that were more personal to you than other ones?

PD: Yeah. For me, growing up was difficult. I don’t know about you guys. Junior High was a time when my parents moved us from Minnesota, where I grew up, to Denmark. So not only was I in a new town, I didn’t understand what anyone was saying, literally. So by the time I finally acclimated to that, we moved back to Minnesota; and now all my friends were somewhere else, and I didn’t understand what’s cool. And that set me off on three or four years being a bit of a loner, and I felt like, this may be why I got into animation, because it was easier to draw than to talk to people; and yet I was still kind of desperate to communicate and connect with people in some way. Now that’s getting off topic. Some of those elements I just talked about—moving, and being out of step, and wanting connection—I think, are ultimately what this feeling is about.

JR: I think it’s on topic, because as a producer of the movie and figuring out how to get it done and rally some people around it—always knowing it was coming from a personal place, and knowing it was more out of observation of things Pete had felt that other people do, too. My wife’s dad was always in the military and always moved. I never moved, so I understood that was really impactful as a kid. That always made it easy to come to work: that no matter what happens, things are coming from a place of truth.

Forgive me for being blunt, but the last five years of Pixar have marked a creative and critical lull; in terms of, they haven’t been going into the Oscars, sweeping up each and every award and they’ve been focused more on sequels than original ideas. Did you guys feel monumental pressure to get things back on track, to restart the Pixar Golden Age?

PD: It’s funny, because this movie was born as we finished Up.  This came—we were like, let’s do something totally new, totally different—so we didn’t really think of it like I thought in those days, like, “Let’s restart this because it’s exciting and new.” It was like, let’s just do another one, and there were five or six other films in various stages of development—we worked on all those films as well—so we didn’t really think of it as that. It’s funny: this is our fifteenth film, and we’ve been very blessed at the studio. They all seem to have been received very warmly—some not as much as others—but we go into this—we never really talk about this—we go into each film with equal rigor, like this is gonna be the last film we’ll ever make, so let’s make it as good as we can make it. We didn’t start this thinking, let’s make a movie that people are gonna like more than Up, or that makes more money than Up or Brave or whatever. We’re like, let’s make it, and hope it’s good enough that they let us make another one. That’s our metric.

JR: It’s a little like having kids. Like, we’re gonna make this kid.. He’s gonna be more talented, and cuter…

PD: They are like our kids. You raise your kid and put ‘em in the world, and think, “I hope they behave, and get along.”

JR: And don’t offend anybody.

PD: And they all have varying degrees of success. I’ll also say this: Brave – I have two young girls. I was so proud of Up. And I’d often say, “You wanna watch Up?” And they said, “No, Daddy. Brave!” But there’s pressure on all of them. And sequel or not, we try to apply the same rigor of this has got to be the best movie it possibly can be.

JR: Actually, Pete pulled off this movie in the early stage to go on to Monsters University and help shape that. So it’s all of our hands in all of these…

So for both of you—both processes are different, as a producer and as a director. What’s the first thing you do when you come on to a project like Inside Out?

JR: The first thing I do is try to envision where we need to be and at what time. I think of it as Pete pitches the movies. I think, “What do we need to do that? I know Pete, and I know what he’s kind of after. I think, what do we need to achieve that? What kind of resources do we need, and what would our time limit be? So, I immediately put it into filmmaking concepts. That’s great. By next year we need to be pushing clay in an editorial, to watch a version. How do we get that? So I start tracking the seasons of production, I call that. And thinking of all the things that go under the hood. When would we cast? What do we back out of? I know how long it takes to animate a movie—that means in three years from now, we have to stop talking theoretical, and start talking—on this frame, she’s here—so I just try to guide it creatively, and put up the temple around that.

PD: And every film is different, so depending on what it needs, you’re gonna look for different things. If it’s an action film, we’re gonna want these people. If it’s more of a comedy, we’re gonna want those people, ‘cause everyone has different skills and talents. You really have to be able to see the potential in this fledgling nugget of an idea, ‘cause it’s not there all at the beginning. You only have this concept and an idea of where it could go, but what you’re trying to do is get the right team to discover it, to be able to put it up on its legs.

JR: I remember sitting in a story room with Pete; and we’re pretty good partners. A lot of the words he describes stuff—in the early days, a room like this with just whiteboards: how things feel. It’s less of how things look, and more how things feel, was the verb. OK, and I started to think, the people at Pixar who are good explorers are who we’re gonna want…who are those people who can hunt for things? I knew the Art Department was gonna need to be built a little differently.

So I know when Pixar started as a studio, you said, “These are the ideas we had. This is our plan.” You basically had everything lined up until Up or Wall-E. How early in the process did Inside Out come along? Is this something you’ve been thinking about and had an inkling for for ten years, or is it much less than that?

PD: The story you’re probably referring to is the little trailer-teaser they did for Wall-E, which was a little colorful storytelling, elaborating. We didn’t have one lunch, and say, “Here’s the next five films.” What happened was there was one lunch, and then another lunch…

JR: There were a hundred lunches.

PD: There were a lot of lunches. This came from developing three different ideas, and this kind of snuck in as a fourth idea, right as we were ending Up. So, I feel like this film was essential that I be where I was when I started it. In other words, I was a parent of an eleven-year-old who was going through a big change; and I wouldn’t have made this movie ten years ago, and I probably wouldn’t in ten years from now. It was really specific to that struggle, and that period of time. There’s a lot of ideas I come up with, and think, “Oh, this is great,” and then I put it away; and a couple years later I come back, and say, “I remember liking that, but it’s not speaking to me now.” I feel like the movies have to have some unanswered part of them that you’re not fully, 100% aware of why they’re calling out to you. There’s something undiscovered, and you go into the movie, and you have your best sense of where you’re going, but a lot of it is discovery along the way. So there has to be something calling you to that quest to go discover, to talk about what it is you’re talking about. So this movie, like I say, came in in 2009, just as a very early concept. We assembled a team, and it was in probably the next three years or so that we really discovered what it was.

One of the things that always fascinated me about Pixar is that it’s always very unique concepts. I’m always curious what concepts don’t make it. Are there any that didn’t make it into Inside Out?

PD: We had a number of really cool ones. One was about music. If you play music to a dog, you know the dog is like, what’s than noise? But for us, we tear up; we feel our heart race; it really says something. So there must be a part of the mind that processes music; and we wanted to send Joy and Sadness there, and they then became part of the process themselves. It was really cool. It ended up visually a little redundant with abstract thought.

JR: Fantasia-like. It was a fun idea. There’s so many ideas…We had this one, like a train of thought, like there would also be a stream of consciousness, a boat ride. But that we ended up cutting—I don’t even remember why.

PD: I think the mind changed in such a way, that the river would no longer work.

JR: It was more of a Grand Canyon.

PD: It was also a descent into the subconscious. So there were a ton of things like that, that we would try to capture. Things that felt like, you’d need to see this if you were in the mind. And as we pared down the storytelling, unfortunately some of those things fall away. Maybe we’ll make a ride at Disneyland.

Pixar, as a studio, is really unique in terms of the total, complete, collaborative nature that you guys have. Your creative core is unmatched across other studios because you guys are really working together. How has that dynamic changed since Toy Story all the way to Inside Out?

PD: I think what was cool about Toy Story was that we were all on equal footing in our ignorance. And so none of us had done this before. John had had experience animating on a feature, but he’d never led one. I think Joe Ranft, who came on a little later, was the only guy who had seen one all the way through. So we were really finding our own way as a group. And then, as we moved on and did other stuff—I went on to Monsters, Inc. and Andrew onto Finding Nemo—we knew that we all had each other’s back. And if we got into trouble, we could call the old gang back together.

JR: It’s awesome to watch those guys get together; there’s a shorthand there. They’re all great filmmakers. They’re movies, in a way.

PD: What’s happening now is we have more and more people as members of that core team. Bob Peterson was fairly early on. Mark Andrews and [Dan] Scanlon, and people who have joined more recently. And they add new shades and new skills and talent levels; so I know if I need some kind of sophisticated humor, I can go to Dan. And he just wasn’t a person that was available. So I think they add more facets and shades to the mix.

JR: It’s kind of cool, too, because we also have writers that come in—really good writers. One of the writers we brought in, Meg LeFauve—we brought her in, and we had this big meeting with Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter. And she’s like, “I’m not going to go in there and tell Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter what’s up.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” In her mind, we were too in Hollywood or something. And she sat at the table, and I remember fifteen minutes into it, she said something, and Jon was like, “Yeah, yeah. What? Chase that down.” It’s an example—I mean, things aren’t perfect at Pixar—but it was an example of, there’s no real rules or people being shut out. It’s this sort of craving of opinions and thought, especially structurally and narratively. I think that’s why it works, because those guys are all pretty good listeners, actually, as well as they are directors.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

For more Silver Screen Riot interviews, check out more of our “Talking With…” series here.

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter