Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I can't look at 'WALL-E' or 'Finding Nemo' or 'Up' and look at in the same way as people outside of the company would look at it. Each one of them had angst.
You can give a great film idea to a mediocre team and they may screw it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will turn it into a great film.
When you take a director off a project, that makes a person feel humiliated because everyone knows it. But we're responsible because we put them in that position.
Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out.
I love solving the problems of having groups work together and removing barriers. But to actually turn around and be in the center of that is an awkward place to be.
One of the effects Pixar University has on the culture is that it makes people less self-conscious about their work and gets them comfortable with being publicly reviewed.
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough.
Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.
I started off life at Pixar with interesting technical problems. But as time has moved on, I found that the social and management problem was far more complex and interesting.
One of Pixar's key mechanisms is the Braintrust, which we rely on to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk.
Throughout Pixar's history, we've had major meltdowns and crises. It's happened throughout our history: you reach a certain point, it doesn't work, and you start all over again.
I worked closely with Steve Jobs for twenty-six years. To this day, for all that has been written about him, I don't believe that any of it comes close to capturing the man I knew.
People say they want to be in risky environments and do all kinds of exciting stuff. But they don't actually know what risk means: that risk actually does bring failure and mistakes.
If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.
The problem is some of our riskier films just don't make as much money. But if you only make films that will just be commercially successful, then you can also sink yourself as a studio.
I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.
Every Pixar movie has its own rules that viewers have to accept, understand, and enjoy understanding. The voices of the toys in the 'Toy Story' films, for example, are never audible to humans.
I don't think most of our films should be realistic, but you want that as an artistic possibility. Then, the artist can take the realism of the world and push it in ways that we can connect with.
The trick is, in everything we do, there are things we love. And sometimes the things we love get us stuck. And it's only if we let go of some of those things that we free the movie up to become greater.
I've certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don't have a clear goal.
I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.
When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar's track record is unique. In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation.
For me, one of the great tragedies is the conclusion studios have drawn about traditional animation. I believe that 2D animation could be just as vital as it ever was. I think the problem has been with the stories.
The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of 'Toy Story' - John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft.
We've always had ups and downs at Pixar, starting with the high we felt doing something we'd never done - 'Toy Story' - and the low we felt right after when we realized we'd messed a bunch of things up along the way.
We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.
In the early 1970s, I headed to graduate school at the University of Utah and joined the pioneering program in computer graphics because I realized that's where I could combine my interests in art and computer science.
Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it.
A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Our decision-making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group.
We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.
One reason for keeping Disney animation separate from Pixar was that by solving their own problems when they finished a film, Disney could say, 'Nobody bailed us out; we did it.' And it's a very important social thing for them to do that.
In life,you're going to have risk, so you have to say, 'My attitude going forward is how to I fix the problem.' And it's not trying to cling onto the past. When I look around, most problems happen because people are trying to cling onto the past.
A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They're in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing.
I know that with most companies that have a lot of success, it tends to throw you off, and you can become more conservative. One of our questions is, How do we keep from being pulled into conservatism because we're afraid of not being successful again?
Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback, and the iterative process - reworking, reworking, and reworking again until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.
I use a progressive alarm that makes a soft sound at first and then progressively gets louder. But I usually wake on the first sound, so it doesn't disturb my wife. When I used a loud alarm clock, I was more likely to hit it on the head and go back to sleep.
With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.
I exercise in the gym about three times a week. I vary the workout every time, but I'll always do some type of circuit work with weights. It gets my heart rate up without putting too much stress on my knees, which for some reason seem to be older than the rest of my body.
It's pretty popular today to say that everybody should learn to fail and that failure's a good thing. Intellectually, it's an obvious thing. But in fact, it gets conflated with another meaning of failure, so when we grow up as kids, failing in school was a really bad thing.
While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.
My best advice came by examples. A supportive environment at home, school, and grad school. Support at the New York Institute of Technology, then George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Bob Iger. The examples meant that I should support other people, even when things aren't going well. It will pay off.
We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.
Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.
One term that's used in this industry a lot is this notion of 'feeding the beast.' You've got all of these people whose livelihoods are dependent on it. There are enormous pressures to keep material going into it, and the pressures to feed it are not irrational. They're the basis of your business.
At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire.
After Pixar's 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.
If you put out 20 films, you hope that a number are successful. It's like human reproduction versus frog reproduction. Frogs produce thousands and hope a few succeed. Humans don't produce many babies but put a lot of energy into them, which is kind of where we are. They still don't always succeed, but you try a lot harder.
If you see a bad live action film, what are the conclusions you draw? Typically, it is that they made a bunch of mistakes, a bad script, wrong casting. You get into 2D, and you get a few films that are not strong films. And what is the conclusion? That it's 2D? I beg to differ. It's a convenient excuse, but it's just wrong.
Outsourcing, in and of itself, isn't responsible for the erosion of America's high tech infrastructure. The short-term thinking that led to a lot of bad outsourcing decisions is the root cause. And short-term thinking isn't a problem confined to the executive suite. It's a problem in Washington and in our society as a whole.
What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies.