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Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I ve got an invitation for you.
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Join me at this year s Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness.
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This is the one time a year
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that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful, transformative weekend.
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People come from all over the world, and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jaspreet Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Cinchero, and many more.
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You ll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.
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So if you re ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023.
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Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I ll see you there.
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At Pixar, well, we also say that failure is part of the process.
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It does happen.
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We don t actually use the terminology very much.
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Now, there are times when you have something which actually does fail, so we don t avoid it.
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You have to, like, if something really fails, you say it.
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But the terminology of making a film is, since we know they ll have problems, is we re trying to solve the problem.
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Hmm, that solution didn t work.
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Let s try this.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness.
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Very excited about our guest today.
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We have the inspiring Ed Catmull in the house, the co-founder of Pixar Animation and the New York Times best-selling author of Creativity, Inc.
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Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration.
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I m so glad that you re here.
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Thank you so much for being on the show.
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I m really happy to be here.
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We were just chatting for the last 30 minutes before this conversation, and I m fascinated by your story, by your life, and the things that you ve seen, witnessed, overcome in building a business, but also just building a beautiful life of your own.
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You were surrounded by some of the most brilliant creatives, leaders of industry since you were in college, and you essentially grew up with these individuals.
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in chasing after, envisioning, manifesting, creating a dream of yours to make animated films, which took you a long time.
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And then you ve now done over 32 films since your time of starting at Pixar, I believe, and Disney, 31, 32 films.
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Is that correct?
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Yeah.
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And it s incredible to know the influence you ve had on the lives of, I m assuming, billions of people who have consumed your stories.
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So I just want to acknowledge you for the incredible amount of work that you ve created, the incredible amount of things that you ve had to overcome in building the first animation film to
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you know, building a massive company and all of the unseen forces of thousands of creative individuals coming together.
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The incredible magic that happens with that, but also the challenges you ve had to overcome as well.
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So I m so excited you re here.
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And we were talking about one of my favorite moments from Pixar, which was Toy Story 3 at the end.
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that made me so emotionally captivated, so moved to tears at the end of this movie.
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that I remember watching the first time thinking, how am I crying watching a cartoon?
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Like how is this making me feel so deeply about my own life and imagining my own life?
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And it s just amazing what you and the entire team has been able to create.
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So I m excited you re here.
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I m excited for the book that has the expanded edition to it, which talks about what you learned in the last 10 years of leading Pixar and Disney Animation as well.
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And yeah, welcome again to the show.
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Very excited.
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Well, I m very happy to be here.
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Although I also want to be careful that I don t take credit for what those other people did.
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Of course.
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But being the leader, being co-founder, leading the charge, and casting a vision, and overseeing the vision is a big responsibility.
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Well, that was the fun part.
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Yeah.
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Was, OK, how do you have these rather amazing people work well together over a long period of time, and it never changes?
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Today s problem is not like yesterday s problem.
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And it keeps changing.
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Right.
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Right.
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What was the biggest challenge you had in starting that first movie?
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Because I remember you saying it took about 14 years
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of time of like saying, when will we be able to actually create this animation?
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I think it was 14 years from your prediction.
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What was the biggest challenge in waiting that long and actually putting out the first movie with Toy Story?
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Well, when I first started, it was like, this was the goal was to make a film.
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And I naively thought that it would probably take 10 years.
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And I very quickly, within two or three years, was disabused of that.
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Like, that was just wrong.
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But I didn t replace it with another estimate.
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It s like, I really didn t know.
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So it was more of, okay, how do I think about the people, how we work together and, but also what are the economics of it and what are the technical problems that need to be solved?
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Because initially I thought of myself as a researcher.
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I was thinking in terms of what are the problems that we need to solve to get there.
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And then,
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Uh, while doing that, I just thought I was in your tech was after I left Utah.
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I, uh, I also found that, um, because I was now over this group and I was kind of avoiding actually being the manager of the group.
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So I was trying to have a both ways.
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Yeah.
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I wanted to be the person that was solving the technical problems.
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And I kind of liked being a leader to be honest.
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So I have these theories about how to manage.
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But I also found that I liked figuring out these kinds of problems too.
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That is, the relationships between people and what made them work was really interesting.
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So I didn t have to give up one over the other.
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It s more like a time allocation.
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But I would say there was a phasing over time.
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But I stayed pretty deeply involved in technical issues probably for the next 10 or 15 years.
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On the technical side.
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On the technical side.
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Before launching the first film.
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Before launching, well, yeah, before launching the first film.
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Yes.
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Because we had this rather amazing group there.
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And I worked on having a culture like it was open and we published everything we did.
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Now at this point, because we re new in the industry, there were some people who thought we re pretty close.
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And I just felt like, well, we re not close at all.
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So some people were secretive about their breakthroughs.
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And I just thought, well, breakthroughs, shmreakthroughs, we re years away.
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So the best thing to do,
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was to publish everything we did and completely participate in this community.
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And I ll have to say that a lot of my deepest friends come out of academia.
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Because we go to the same conferences, we ve known each other for 50 years.
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But by publishing everything, we also became the place to come to.
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So we were bringing in the best people.
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And then finally Star Wars happened.
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And when Star Wars happened, then George Lucas was the first person in the film industry with credibility who thought that technology was going to affect the industry.
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Like the number one.
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And believe me, we had tried.
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And to anybody else, we were utterly and completely irrelevant.
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It wasn t like they didn t think we could do it.
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It was, they didn t even think about it at all.
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So George thought it was going to be possible.
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So he hired me in because we had this rather amazing group.
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This is late 70s now?
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Uh, this would have been, uh, yes, late 70s.
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Um, because I joined Lucasfilm in 1979.
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Okay.
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And when I left New York Tech, um, and trying to create this environment, I realized at that point that half of what I thought was actually worked really well.
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It became the foundation of what we built on.
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And half of what I thought was a complete crock.
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Did it work at all, right?
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But the most important thing for me was that when I went to Lucasfilm, I came away with the insight that about half of what I did was right and half was wrong.
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I was gonna hang on to the things that were right, but I was gonna try something new.
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But I believed that my ratio of right to wrong would probably remain 50-50 and would probably continue to be true for the rest of my life, which I have found to be true.
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And it isn t as if I have a way of keeping track.
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I mean, you don t really know how to put numbers to this, but it felt like the value to me was understanding that I was right, or excuse me, I was wrong more than I thought I was.
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You were wrong more than you thought, yeah.
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Yeah.
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So at Lucasfilm now, it s a new educational opportunity.
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And George wanted to bring technology into film editing, uh, to digital audio and into computer graphics.
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And now it s another educational opportunity because now you ve got three customer groups.
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One of whom hated what we were doing.
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They didn t like the idea of it.
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So these are the video editors.
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George knew video editing.
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He s the one that wanted it.
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but the person they put in charge of doing it thought it was a terrible idea.
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So, okay.
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So that did not end well, even though we did something which was way advanced or anything else in the industry, we didn t have a customer wanting to use it.
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The digital audio had a guy who loved the idea and basically worked with this really well.
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But the third group was ILM.
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And ILM was neutral.
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Their view was, well, your resolution is too low, but if you ever get to be good enough to be used in the films, we ll use it.
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So now we re the driving force.
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Our goal is to meet their needs, to be good enough
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for what they were doing because they were the best in the industry.
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And if we could make them happy, then we would have succeeded.
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So we became the driving force, nobody else.
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That was our motivation.
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And so those were the kinds of lessons.
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And the other lesson was that as a representative of the Lucasfilm, I got to visit all these different companies, supercomputer companies,
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Cray, CDC, companies that most people either haven t heard of or don t remember.
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And also the emerging workstation companies.
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And they wanted to sell the Lucasfilm, so I can go in and talk with the leaders of the companies, because they wanted to sell the Lucasfilm, because Star Wars was sexy.
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And for lunch or for dinner, I d meet with the engineers, because they knew that I was actually a real technical person.
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What I found was at every one of these visits, I got two different views of a company in the same day.
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And I became aware that in a lot of companies there was like a class structure, not a term they would use.
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People would never say, well, we re first class here.
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There are people who say we re treated second class.
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Okay.
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But you can see this going on in companies.
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And I remember thinking, this can t be good.
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So as we continue to grow, and at some point we began to bring in artists, especially when we became Pixar, then the one thing that was clear to me is we needed to make sure that we didn t have a notion of first class and second class.
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That we really had to make sure right from the beginning that we gave the message of valuing everybody.
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And that isn t the same thing as saying that everybody is the same.
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They re not.
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They have different skills, different capabilities, and so forth.
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But the notion that some people are better than others or different class, not a good thing.
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So the basic principle was that you actually make the assumption that everybody can be better.
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Not to say that everybody can be better and that that is not a high risk proposition.
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It is worth doing.
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So basically, we were learning as we were going through this.
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And then we got to the point where George, because he got divorced and his cash position was now completely different, then he needed to sell us.
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So this is a year-long stressful period for us.
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It s a very stressful period.
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But part of that was by this time we had reached a level of quality, because we had built some hardware in order to do high quality images, that ILM was starting to use what we had.
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And so part of the deal, as we spun out, was they had the rights to use the software that we had.
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And they used it in the film.
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I think the first major one was The Abyss.
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Although we had done something earlier for them, like for Star Trek, there was that thing where you flew over the planet and it turned lifelike.
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Sure.
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So we d done a couple of things for them, but I found somebody to help run the graphics group.
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We were never part of ILM, but they needed somebody in ILM as they started that transition to digital technology.
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So we were acquired by Steve Jobs.
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Wow.
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What year was this now?
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This would be 1986.
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1986, Steve Jobs acquires you.
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And you d known Steve before then.
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Well, I met him once.
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And then he just disappeared at the time we were now starting to get sold.
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Now, I didn t know why he disappeared.
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Later, of course, I learned the reason was he was in this internal struggle, which resulted in him being removed at Apple.
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So this was basically a public humiliation for Steve.
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And it largely had to do with the way he related with people.
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So that s kind of the mythology around Steve.
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And I knew Steve when he was like this, that is his behavior around people was not empathetic.
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And that kind of behaviors is frankly kind of, it s interesting and people like to tell stories about it and write about it.
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It s sort of like the bad boy behavior.
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And it s unfortunate because it doesn t capture the arc of Steve s life, which is far more interesting and impactful.
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Instead, the focus on the outside of whether it was movies or writing about him or articles was about a period in his life.
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And that was a period in which he was kicked out of Apple.
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He started Next Computer.
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And next, he did some brilliant things, like his software choices, it turns out, were fundamentally, ultimately changed, not only next, but later Apple.
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His hardware choices were questionable, and he made some poor business choices.
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And choices in which he thought these were really big wins,
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But I was looking at them and thinking, oh, this cannot be a good idea.
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Right, right, right.
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But he bought you guys.
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He bought Pixar.
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Yeah, then he bought Pixar after we got them.
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So we knew Steve when he was like that, but we didn t have any choice.
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Like, we d been spending a year.
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This was an utter disaster.
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I mean, it s a long story itself, like the things he went through.
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But the end result was that Steve,
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acquired us.
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When he acquired you guys, were you excited or were you more nervous based on his personality from the past?
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Well, we were excited to keep alive and keep going.
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So that was the excitement part.
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The dream.
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Yes.
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And, and Steve is like, he is, um, I mean for us in, in various, I had a great relationship with Steve.
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So I think I worked for Steve longer than anybody else.
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Wow.
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And I never had an argument with Steve.
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Never.
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Never.
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Wow.
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We disagreed at times, but we never had an argument.
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And my style with Steve was that if I didn t agree with him, first of all, I knew, I was self-aware enough to know that I absolutely could not think as fast as he could.
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He s really smart.
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You re not gonna debate him, you re not gonna jump in here.
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Yeah, so, I mean, there are people who actually can push back with him and argue with him successfully.
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So there s something that s not known about Steve, but he actually values people who push back on him.
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But I can t think that fast.
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So instead, he d shoot down what I say, and then I would say, well, let me get back to that.
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And I d wait a week.
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So I d think about my next sentence.
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Right, for a week.
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For a week.
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And then I would give it to him, and he d shoot it down.
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Let me get back to you.
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So this might go on for weeks.
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In the cover case, it went on for months.
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And there d be one of three outcomes.
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I d say each one was about equally likely.
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One of them was we reached a point when I would say, oh, I see what you re saying.
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You re right.
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And that ends it.
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About a third of the time, he would say, okay, got it.
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You re right.
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End of discussion.
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It s like you just bought what I said and that was it.
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I didn t explain it very well the first time.
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And one of the reasons I would do this is I never confuse the personal power that somebody might have or their position with what was right.
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So it didn t matter if somebody was a better debater or could think faster than I could, or they were in a senior position, as I didn t mean they were right.
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So it just meant that I couldn t argue at the same rate.
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So I just didn t give up as long as I knew that I was right.
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And if I wasn t right, then I would change.
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So the other third of the time is we didn t reach a conclusion.
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So in that third, I just did what I wanted to do.
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And Steve was okay with it because we had discussed it.
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And that s how it worked for all those years.
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How many years did you work with him?
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We, he acquired us at that time, we were then a public company, so we were a public company until we were acquired by Disney.
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And then at Disney, the terms of it was that we had the equivalent of a board of directors, but we re just now a group within Disney.
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And I had a dual report to Bob Iger and to the head of the studio, well,
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But we had this steering committee.
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And so this steering committee was John, Steve, and me, and then Bob Iger, the chairman of the studio, and the CFO of the company.
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Well, so like every month to begin with, and it slowly got there.
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But now this group would come in, and they were like our board of directors.
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So that continued up until the end of this life.
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How many years total time in that range is that?
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When you first- From 86, and I forget what year he died.
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Wow.
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The Tanner, I think her.
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Yeah.
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Something like that.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So 30 something years.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It s amazing.
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Um, what were the biggest, three biggest lessons you learned from observing Steve Jobs, from communicating with him and from the way he left the world?
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Well, in the case of, what are the lessons?
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One of them, which he understood intuitively, which was that when you re wrong, you change.
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Now, I mean, there s different ways of phrasing it.
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It s like that there s no upside in being wrong.
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And some people think they need to win the argument.
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And Steve actually understood that was never the point.
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It was, you want to get to the truth quickly.
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But he also understood that at an intuitive level, that because of the power of his personality, it actually could distort the process.
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And that was part of his learning as he went through this, was him recognizing that his abilities, his superpowers, could actually get in the way of him finding out things.
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So I ll give a couple examples.
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One of them which would surprise people
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was that we had a board of directors, because in 1995 at the end, we went public.
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And this is like a big public offering.
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We were the second largest IPO of 1995, only after Netscape.
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And when did Toy Story come out?
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In 95.
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95.
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So we went public one week afterwards.
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Wow.
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So when we were doing the road trip,
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And part of the road trip was, well actually it wasn t showing the movie.
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It was telling people that we had a new technology that was going to change filming.
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So now it s a complete confidence this film is going to be a big success.
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Wow.
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But he could say to them, nobody else can do this.
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There isn t anything like it.
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SPEAKER_00
It s going to change the industry.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we ve got the people that change the technology, and they re doing the content.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what this company is.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re not going to go public until after the movie comes out.
2
SPEAKER_00
because we think that we should show you how big this is before we go public.
2
SPEAKER_00
Smart.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that was what we did for the few months leading up to going public.
2
SPEAKER_01
You were telling a story about the story.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that we were going to prove it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you guys did.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we did.
2
SPEAKER_00
You proved it big.
2
SPEAKER_01
What was that first week like?
2
SPEAKER_01
Toy Story launches, box office, and then you go public the next week later.
2
SPEAKER_01
What was that week like?
2
SPEAKER_01
It was surreal.
2
SPEAKER_01
What were the numbers of the box office and then going public?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, interestingly enough, what I remember at the time, because our whole group at the time would go to our computer graphics conference, which is SIGGRAPH, and for the most part, it s showing the newest technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we believe firmly, because we made short films and they were actually, you know, Academy Award winning short films and they re quite impactful, but they re short.
2
SPEAKER_00
And people would always pay attention on the outside to the technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when the film came out, the biggest question that we had, and everybody was looking for it, and all of the technology people were looking for it, was what are the reviewers going to pay attention to?
2
SPEAKER_00
And what we found was that almost every review
2
SPEAKER_00
there was at most one or two sentences about the new technology and the rest of the review was about the movie.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that for all of us was like, that s the win.
2
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t about the technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was about being a great movie.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if we had done that and we got people to buy into this world and watch it and feel it, then that was the win.
2
SPEAKER_00
and everybody understood it at every level in the company.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s what I remember, was reading those things to find out whether or not we had really accomplished what we wanted to do.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s incredible.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, what I m curious about is how were you able to tap into the human mind and create emotional connections with audiences through these animations?
2
SPEAKER_01
How was this studied and executed
2
SPEAKER_01
for the last 30 years at such a high level and how did you do that for that first movie?
3
SPEAKER_01
there is some luck in that group that first came in.
3
SPEAKER_01
We had always, in the history of both at New York Tech and then at Lucasfilm and then at Pixar, was to say we really want to hire the very best.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I would say, well, we want to hire people who are smarter than I am.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I know other people say that, but because like, what does that even mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
But it means that you don t want to be threatened by the people that you hire.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they just have to have these extraordinary skills.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so when they were building out our technical group, they were just really good.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they had passed me in terms of their understanding of the technology.
3
SPEAKER_01
And John understood that, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
So when he did his first hires,
3
SPEAKER_01
The first person he hired was Andrew Stanton.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the second was Pete Docter.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then Joe Ranft came in, and then we brought in, really, to be an editor, except he turns out to have been one of the best storytellers ever, is Lee Unkrich.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is this amazing group of people that came together.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, part of it was we really had established a culture where this was the right thing to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
You weren t even thinking about them as, okay, who s going to be second to me?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay, who s really good?
3
SPEAKER_01
It turns out that Andrew had this extraordinarily structural sense.
3
SPEAKER_01
We didn t know that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It emerged because of the challenge.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Pete Docter had this incredible emotional core, and still does.
3
SPEAKER_01
So he went on to do Up, Inside Out, it s like getting the emotion right, it s like who he is.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Lee has this actually phenomenal filmmaking sense of, okay, we re doing this, but you really have to get all these pieces right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the person that was Sharon Callahan initially, who was thinking about the lighting, and people aren t often aware of this, but the lighting,
3
SPEAKER_01
is really important for conveying the emotions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the artist that we had, Ralph Eggleston, had a color palette for the movie because it turns out the basic color changed throughout the movie and it s this subtle thing that s affecting your perceptions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, this is this amazing group of people
3
SPEAKER_01
And the interesting thing about it was that none of these people had ever made a feature film before in their life.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh my goodness.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we hadn t used computer graphics, but they also hadn t done a 2D film.
3
SPEAKER_01
They hadn t done any film.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s unbelievable.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everybody is a beginner.
3
SPEAKER_01
They all had to figure it out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re leading them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, how do you know
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, yeah, the emotional, the emotions you re able to pull out of people, you know, in these films, through, you re a technology guy, but through the tech, through the art, through the color, through the lighting, through the sound design and the music, through the tonality of the voice actors, and bringing it all together to create a cohesive emotional story is unbelievable how you guys did this.
3
SPEAKER_00
And how you continue to do it, but how did you,
3
SPEAKER_00
know how to put it all together.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, the way I thought at the time was, is how do you have a group that works together?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I m not a filmmaker and I would, you know, over time we developed a way of, of helping people was, which ended up being called the brain trust.
3
SPEAKER_01
But
3
SPEAKER_01
My view was, when I went to these meetings was, how do we make sure this group works together?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, what are the things that make it work together and what takes them off the rails?
3
SPEAKER_01
So it was to work out some principles for that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s fun to give notes to movie, but the truth was, there s only one movie in all those movies that I gave a note that I felt so strongly about that I had to push really hard to get it in there.
3
SPEAKER_01
What was that?
3
SPEAKER_01
It was in Monsters Incorporated.
3
SPEAKER_01
What was the note?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, the note was, at one point near the end, the monster, Sully, has to scare this dummy, which is being videoed.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like a training video.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you may recall that when he does this, he then looks up and he sees that the girl s right there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he scares the bejesus out of this little girl, the one he loves.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he didn t mean to do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the original thing, what she saw was that she saw him on the monitor.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I looked at this and I said, you can t do this because anybody that has a child
3
SPEAKER_01
remembers there are times when they may have done something where their child was in danger, either because of themselves or it happened to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when that happens, it sears into your soul and you never forget it for as long as you live.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that for Sully, he needs to see that he was the cause of the thing that scared her.
3
SPEAKER_01
That it was not good enough to have her see it by the monitor.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there s some pushback on it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I talked with Andrew and Andrew said, no, this is actually critical to the film.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I just felt, oh, good.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I can look at it and say, well, I did one at least.
3
SPEAKER_00
One note of 30 movies.
3
SPEAKER_01
But that wasn t my job.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re the filmmakers.
3
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t my job.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was to say, OK, is this group working well together?
3
SPEAKER_01
Why isn t derailing?
3
SPEAKER_01
When does it go well?
3
SPEAKER_01
When doesn t it go well?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so that was the whole time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then when Jim Morris came in, initially over, he came in as a producer and then he was our head of production and then he was our general manager and then he became the president.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was like, we re both like, you know, we re in there just looking at the process and what works, what doesn t work.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re just evolving it over time.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you got pretty animated during this retelling a story with Monsters, Inc.
3
SPEAKER_00
What movie?
3
SPEAKER_00
left you with the deepest amount of emotion when you watched it after it came out or in the process of making it?
3
SPEAKER_00
What was the movie that captivated you the most?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m sure that s hard to say which one you liked the most, but was there a moment in a movie that really touched you in a way based on your own life experience, different than the other emotional moments in movies?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it was, um,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a little hard to say because any emotion in a movie connects to watching the people go through this.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I can t even watch a movie in the same way that others do because I m actually seeing what took place.
3
SPEAKER_00
the creators, the producers, the everything.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they re just, you know, these fellows all at the beginning have problems.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just one thing after another.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we go through multiple steps and with giveaways of, of trying to fix the problems.
3
SPEAKER_01
And in fact, it was one of the things I was, I wanted to like clarify with the, the expanded edition of the book was that,
3
SPEAKER_01
I talked a fair amount about failure and how it s part of the process, but I realized that it doesn t actually capture what takes place because we all know that we learn from failures.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, failure is kind of popular talk nowadays about a way of learning.
3
SPEAKER_01
The reality is that
3
SPEAKER_01
we have two meanings to failure which are deeply built into us.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s one meaning which is that we know that we ve had failures and we learn from them and it s part of the process of learning.
3
SPEAKER_01
The other meaning is the one that we got in school and that is if you fail a class it s because you screwed up, you didn t work hard enough,
4
SPEAKER_01
or you re dumb, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
None of those are good meanings.
4
SPEAKER_01
All right, now you go out into business, bridges fail, relationships fail, companies fail, and in politics and business, failures are used as bludgeons with which to beat opponents.
4
SPEAKER_01
There is real and palpable fear behind failure.
4
SPEAKER_01
All right, so if we talk about failure, then it is almost possible for most people to emotionally disconnect those two concepts.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I realized that, that s what I observed, that at Pixar, while we also say that failure is part of the process, it does happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
We don t actually use the terminology very much.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, there are times when we have something which actually does fail.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we don t avoid it.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to, like, if something really fails, you say it.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the terminology of making a film is, since we know they all have problems, is we re trying to solve the problem.
4
SPEAKER_01
that solution didn t work.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s try this.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the iterative process is we re trying it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s try this.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, uh, as long as the team is working well together, even if they haven t solved the problem, if they re working well together, we say, okay, keep going.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a tough problem.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, uh, and they know that they know we have their back.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the only real clue we have that we have to do a major change.
4
SPEAKER_01
is if the crew begins to lose the confidence that a leader can actually get them there.
4
SPEAKER_01
They may like the leader, and this is not, you know, I like, I don t like them.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s more like, I just don t have the confidence we re gonna get there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And those things start to build.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we are aware of some of them because people will come and talk about some of the problems they ve got.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you then start off, how do we help the person?
4
SPEAKER_01
How do we supplement them?
4
SPEAKER_01
Could we add somebody to the team to remove somebody?
4
SPEAKER_01
What are the things we can do behind the scene to help them?
4
SPEAKER_01
And if we get to the point where we can t do it, then we ll do a bigger change and we essentially have failed.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s tough because we picked the person to be the failure because we believe they can do it because they re very good.
4
SPEAKER_01
So for them, it s actually a very difficult process to go through.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we ve only had a couple of the directors who could survive this to stay with the company.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they re very valuable.
4
SPEAKER_01
And those who have stayed were actually incredible contributors.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s emotionally hard for them to go through.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
But one of those was with Ratatouille.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the man who designed it seemed to the idea of a lovely man.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very good.
4
SPEAKER_01
In fact, the look of the film that you see came from this guy, Molly.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the film was stuck and they couldn t get out of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so at that point, due to other reasons that we re on, Brad Bird had finished Mission Miss Impossible.
4
SPEAKER_01
He did that later.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
He had actually finished The Incredibles.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we asked him to take it on.
4
SPEAKER_00
Interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, when the movie is stuck, do you mean it s stuck in the beginning stages, or it s in post-production, or it s like the story needs to adjust?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the story is stuck.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the story s not complete yet.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you ve got the story, but you re like, well,
4
SPEAKER_00
We need changes here, or it s not really fully emotionally connecting, or the journey doesn t work.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is that what you mean?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
But in the meantime, we re building the models.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you call the asset?
4
SPEAKER_00
You re building the characters, the backgrounds, the animation.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re building it without the story complete.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there are pieces of it that we think are working, so we ll start to make them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because you can t make the whole thing at the end, so you need to start to make it.
4
SPEAKER_01
You make like one scene.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you like this part, we think this will work.
4
SPEAKER_01
We think it s going to work.
4
SPEAKER_01
We might be wrong, so sometimes you may throw that away.
4
SPEAKER_01
Really?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s expensive.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like shooting a scene that you don t use.
4
SPEAKER_00
But you ve got a thousand people animating something and working on...
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a try things, you figure them out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because what is delighting?
4
SPEAKER_01
What s the character going to look like?
4
SPEAKER_01
How is this going to work?
4
SPEAKER_01
So they re doing all this work, but you can t get too far ahead of yourself.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t want the story complete.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a tricking balance.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s always a tricky balance.
4
SPEAKER_01
Life is a tricky balance.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, in this case, the characters look beautiful, everything s gorgeous about it, it s not working.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there are a few things that are just fundamentally wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of them was that originally, that chef, the chef Gusteau, was alive throughout the whole movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he kind of sold a soul.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was actually a highly rated chef, but he was making money because of advertising and using his name to sell products.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so... And he was consulting on the movie, is that right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or the chef that was... No, the chef in the movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
Got you.
4
SPEAKER_01
The chef in the... The fat guy.
4
SPEAKER_00
He was alive.
4
SPEAKER_00
He was alive.
4
SPEAKER_01
Got you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because there was a consultant, I think I saw a photo over here of a consultant showing you how to make... Oh, that s separate.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the research we do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Got you.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re trying to learn what takes place.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sure, but the chef it s based on, he s alive.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, no, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
We made up a chef.
4
SPEAKER_01
Got it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Gusteau.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s this fat guy, and he s kind of lost his way.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then there s this rat that wants to cook, who just happens to end up being in his kitchen.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And because of the passion of the rat, then it actually causes the chef to realize he went down the wrong path.
4
SPEAKER_01
Ah.
4
SPEAKER_01
So now you ve got this problem throughout a lot of the movie is,
4
SPEAKER_01
is this movie about the rat who wants to cook with that passion or is it a redemption story for the chef who has lost his way?
4
SPEAKER_01
And then the other problem that they were wrestling with was that the rat has a family.
4
SPEAKER_01
The rat doesn t talk to humans.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he s going through, he s meeting people and learning things in the restaurant
4
SPEAKER_01
But because he can t talk, you don t know what he s thinking.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then he goes back to his family and he explains what he just went through.
4
SPEAKER_01
But you just saw this.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re watching a movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just saw this.
4
SPEAKER_01
And now it brings the movie to a dead halt because he s explained to them the things that you just saw.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s not good for filmmaking.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Brad Bird entered the picture.
4
SPEAKER_01
Brad looks at it, and the first thing he does after working with a good friend of his who is a good screenwriter, they kill the chef.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the chef died for some reason.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, but he s still on these TV programs and because he d been teaching on whatever the channel was and the rats inspired by it, but because the chef is dead and Remy knows the chef is dead.
4
SPEAKER_01
then the chef is now a figment of his imagination.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what this means is that this figment of his imagination can sort of pop up and he s interacting with what he thinks the chef is.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it answers, it takes care of two huge problems.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of them is we now know who the movie s about.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s about the rat that wants to cook.
4
SPEAKER_01
So problem number one is solved.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the second one was because he can now talk to the figment of his imagination and it doesn t feel unnatural because it s not like he s talking to a ghost.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s actually, you know that he s talking to himself or so it sounds clear.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the, uh, that means that he doesn t need to go back and explain anything to his family.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you know what he s thinking at the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
So now the pacing starts to work.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now that s the brilliance of Brad Bird is to come in and say, oh, here s what we re going to do for good storytelling every step of the way.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so now this film, which has these interesting elements about it, turns into something which is brilliant.
5
SPEAKER_01
Brad has has has his own take about Art and what it means to critique art that its impact of it and he puts this in the movie if you re watching this movie thinking well Like where s it going?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because a rat can there never really run a restaurant in Paris like it isn t gonna happen So that s what makes it hard so he takes this hard concept and he turns it into this
5
SPEAKER_01
thing at the end, which is profound.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then when the audience sees it, it s like, oh, I didn t see this coming.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this is beautiful.
5
SPEAKER_01
What I remember about the movies is actually going into the audiences, because I remember we had the big opening in Paris.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s cool.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I would get to that moment, and what I would do is I would turn around and look at the audience.
5
SPEAKER_01
That was the rewarding part.
5
SPEAKER_00
As they re watching the final scenes or the whole movie?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, it s that final scene.
5
SPEAKER_01
I d look at them, and they were going like this.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because they didn t see it coming.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s what it was.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s rewarding, when something like that happened.
5
SPEAKER_00
Was there ever a time you cried watching your own premiere?
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I did for Toy Story 3.
5
SPEAKER_00
Really?
5
SPEAKER_00
For Toy Story 3.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I did it for Coco.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh my gosh, that s my favorite movie.
5
SPEAKER_00
Coco s a, I ve got a Mexican girlfriend and so her whole family is from Mexico and yeah, just whenever they come over to our house, it feels like I m in Coco.
5
SPEAKER_00
in America.
5
SPEAKER_00
And whenever I go to Mexico, it feels like I m in Coco.
5
SPEAKER_00
So for me, that s one of my favorite movies of all movies.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, I was, you know, it was, uh, Lee Unkrich.
5
SPEAKER_01
It actually created a problem because it was so good that afterwards, Lee says, where, where do I go from here?
5
SPEAKER_01
It was unbelievable.
5
SPEAKER_01
Uh, but, uh, you cried in Coco.
5
SPEAKER_01
And incidentally, he, he directed both of those films.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
You cried in Coco.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
What part made you, well, it was, um,
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The thing about any good movie of this sort or the kind of movies that we try to tell is that you are trying to connect to our own personal emotions, but you re also trying to bring in something new and original.
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Because to be honest, there s unfortunately sort of this bias against the Mexican culture because what do people hear about on the news in terms of immigration or various things at the border?
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They don t represent Mexico.
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And they don t represent what takes place like in Southern Mexico with, you know, the Day of the Dead.
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And if you say the Day of the Dead in America, it s like, oh, it s kind of odd, you know, the Day of the Dead.
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So, but it means something entirely different there.
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It s like the respect for the people that came before us.
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That s what it s about.
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So, and you actually get that in the movie.
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So they went down into the villages in Southern Mexico and they spent a lot of time getting to know the people, talking with them.
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We had a group in California that were like Mexican advisors because we wanted to get it right.
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And essentially you ve got these people from North America going down into Mexico.
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I m sure they re in North America too.
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So you ve got people from America going down.
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Well, how are they gonna tell that story?
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So they work really hard to try to capture that.
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This day was true with like Moana.
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It s like- Another great movie.
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Incredible.
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And you re actually trying to get something from the culture because you don t want to work off the biases.
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Right.
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You want to work off of what other people are thinking.
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And the same was true with Ratatouille.
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We all know cooking in the home.
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We ve watched our parents cook or we cook.
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We watch the cooking channel.
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You can see the chefs in the kitchen.
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But what is it like to actually be in a highly rated fancy restaurant in any place?
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What s the culture like?
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We don t know that.
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So for Ratatouille, they went into those restaurants, they got to know them, and they also were given some work.
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Like at the French Laundry, they actually spent time in the kitchen, and they were given jobs to do.
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And so they were capturing that.
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Now what s interesting about it is that, is even though we know a lot about cooking,
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We don t know whether or not what they re saying in the kitchen, the way they re acting, is true.
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All right?
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We just don t know.
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But they sense that it is.
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If you ve actually done your research and you put that in the film,
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then there s something that is conveyed to people because you took the time to find out something in the way original.
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So in the case of Coco, it was to go down and find out how do they feel about it?
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What are they doing?
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What are they thinking?
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And, uh, I remember this is when the movie came out because we went down to the, the premiere.
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And one of the things I appreciate is that when Americans make movies about Mexico, they don t know the difference between the Mexican proud brimmed hat and the Spanish one.
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So they like to interchange them.
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But in Mexico, they know.
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So they went down there and they wanted to get those details right.
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And most of the audiences, they wouldn t know, but they felt like they needed to have the people who would know, know that it was right.
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Sure.
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What was, what was the part of the movie that emotionally captivated you the most in Coco?
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Well it was, because the intent was, it actually is the respect for these people that came before.
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Because it was real.
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You know, he d learned something.
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He d figured out something about the people that came before him.
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He also felt like he was able to fix some things that were wrong.
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But it was also emotional for me for a couple of other reasons, too.
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One is in the storytelling was that initially, Lee was going to make this as Pixar s first musical.
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Because Pixar really doesn t have musicals in their DNA.
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Disney does, and Pixar doesn t.
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And one of the things I want to make sure is that we didn t try to make one studio like the other.
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We also weren t trying to say, you have to be different.
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So they had to evolve in their own way.
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So if one wants to make a musical, then they can.
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And at Pixar, if they want to make a musical, they can.
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And so Lou was going to be the first person to do that.
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We got these brilliant two people who also had done something down at Disney, something they were, you know, good and close and we d worked with them before.
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And so they wrote the first song for his movie, which is called Remember Me.
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Incredible.
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And so, but as a filmmaker, he said, okay, that s thematic for the movie.
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So now he builds a story using this song throughout it, all right?
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So it s now a key element of where did it come from?
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Why was it written?
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And the notion was that, you know, if his great-grandma dies, that the last person, she s the last person who will know where the song came from.
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And she s got... Oh my God, she remembers it, yeah.
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And she s got Oliver.
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It s so emotional actually.
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I know.
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But by playing it and she remembers, it actually gives him life.
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So, wow.
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Just seeing that and conveying that.
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It s beautiful.
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It s powerful.
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Yeah.
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And the other interesting thing about the story, which is a separate thing, was like, how did he even start it?
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So one of the things we figured out, this is very early on in Pixar, when we started our second movie, well the second was Bug s Life,
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Third one was going to be a sequel.
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No sequel had ever been successful, right?
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An animated sequel had ever been successful.
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So the thought was originally by Disney was that this was going to be a direct video.
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So we start to make it, but right away it s clear that the people working on it at Pixar are very upset because
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To work on a sequel at a studio where we want to have the highest standard of quality means that we re working on something where the expectations is much lower.
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We don t want to do something where there are low expectations.
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We want there to be, we want it to be, you know, at a high level.
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So Disney agreed to that.
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So we then started to make this film, and we frankly had several problems with it, because we were building on some assumptions that we got from the first film.
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Because the first film had been built knowing nothing, but we drew some conclusions from it, and some of the conclusions we drew from it were not correct.
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So we built, we started the sequel based on those assumptions only to find that we were wrong.
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We just uncovered a bunch of things to question or challenge our original ideas.
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So, and in the process of doing that, we had to restart the movie really late in the game and remake it.
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It was like a brutal, brutal effort to remake this movie.
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We had to make it eight months starting from scratch almost.
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Oh yeah, it was a nightmare.
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We had like a third of our people injured with RSI.
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Oh man.
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But one of the things that came out of that was,
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the realization that the way we were starting films is we were trying to do what other studios do, which was to have a development department looking for good scripts.
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And so our thought was, why are we trying to copy the model of other studios?
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First of all, the success rate of films of other studios isn t very high.
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Low, yeah.
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We said, let s do it a different way.
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So what we did was we re going to pick somebody who we think can direct a feature film.
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And then we re going to say to them, pick three ideas to develop.
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So now the reason we say three is instead of saying, pick an idea that you want to make into a film,
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Well, what happens to all of us when we do something tough or in school or something like that?
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You start to bang your head against, well, you get stuck.
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So the reason we said three is that if you get stuck,
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you can switch to a different idea.
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So they d have an artist, and at some point they may have a writer come in and work with them.
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So it s like a really small team spending a year.
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And they have some help with the development department.
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We still had the development department, but they were no longer looking for scripts to turn in the movies.
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Their job was to help support this small group.
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So they read scripts,
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But all they were looking for was good writers who can join the team.
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But we never made anybody else s script.
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We always... Started from scratch.
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Started from scratch.
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Wow.
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So they would then spend that year going back and forth between their three ideas.
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Hmm.
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And at the end of the year, they would come in, the two or three people who were now the leaders over this, and they would pitch it to the creative leadership of the company, say some of the other directors.
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So there may be like 10, 12 people in the room.
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These three ideas.
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The three ideas.
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And the way this works is there s a story room,
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There s a table in the middle and so essentially you can hold like 12 people in the room.
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And there are two long walls and there s storyboards along the wall and they would cover them up.
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So they put the material, the conceptual ideas.
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for the film on the wall and then take like 20-25 minutes present the idea then be in brief discussion on it and then we go through the three films.
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Now the process started and they all did this even though they ve been on the other side like they ve been on the
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the creative leadership side, and then there d be time when they d paste their ideas.
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And they d all start saying the same thing.
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They would say, I love all three ideas equally.
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It doesn t matter to me which one you pick.
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Now, it s not true.
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They do like one better.
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And the debate when they leave the room is not which is the best idea to make in the film.
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It is, which one do they really want to make?
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And I think we ve always called it right because we d come back and then go, yes!
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I was hoping you d pick that one.
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Sure.
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But in the case of Coco,
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Pete came in and he pitched an idea which was related to an idea that he had pitched before he did Toy Story 3.
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And then when we had the ability to make Toy Story 3, he was asked to direct it and so he switched over along with the writer he worked with, Michael Arndt, a brilliant writer.
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And they developed a good relationship.
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So basically Lee was pitching that idea they originally had.
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Then he pitched his second idea, which was to be a full-on musical, that interesting concept, challenging concept.
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And then the two walls were up, so then we go into the other room.
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So we open the door, and when we open the door, the table, the ceiling, both walls and the end wall are filled with Mexican artwork.
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Really?
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So,
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There isn t a single word that s said, and everybody knows which movie we re making.
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Yeah, there s a poster of the first two, but this one is a whole experience.
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That s right.
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You walked into Cocoa World.
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That s right.
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You walk into Cocoa World.
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Wow.
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Now, the interesting part, which this is the way it works, is the final movie actually was very little like that first thing.
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It didn t matter.
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Right.
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Because you start off with a concept.
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You re going to learn something.
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The whole idea of all these trips to Mexico was to learn something because everything else was sort of based on, you know, kind of things you knew.
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Right.
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Because you re interested in stereotypes and so forth.
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So you expect it to change pretty dramatically in the process of doing it.
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So when he pitched Coco,
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Um, and you guys went back and decided like, okay, this is the movie where we re choosing of these three.
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Was there a debate or was everyone just like, Oh, we know he s the most passionate about this idea.
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Let s run him.
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Let s let him run with the thing he s most passionate about.
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I think in that case, there probably wasn t any debate.
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I would say with others, there is some question about, okay, which one is it?
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And that s probably more than normal.
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There d be a little debate about it.
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Um, right.
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And also not everybody goes through the process.
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Like if.
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If Andrew Stanton says he wants to make something, it s like, okay, Andrew, you can make whatever you want.
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I hope today s episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it s time to go out there and do something great.