Meet the man behind Pixar’s most crucial film yet
Only Pixar could create an animated movie about the end of childhood that makes the little ones laugh – and the adults cry, writes Brooks Barnes
JOHN Lasseter, a notepad in hand, settled into his seat in a dimly lit screening room at Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, California in July 2012. Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, was there to evaluate progress on Inside Out, a new film set inside an 11-year-old girl’s mind. Had the filmmaking team cracked the unusual concept? It did not take long for the air to frost over. “We got up and said, ‘We’re not going to show you a screening because the film is not working,’” recalled Pete Docter, who turned to Inside Out after his Oscar-winning Up.
Talk about guts: Docter’s movie had already been in the works for more than two years. “I saw John do this,” Docter said, scowling and crossing his arms. “It was scary. Not happy.”
Solving creative puzzles is a Pixar hallmark, and the studio may have done it again. In its finished form, Inside Out is expected to become Pixar’s 15th consecutive blockbuster. (Analysts predict US ticket sales alone of at least $250 million.) The bittersweet film, which received a euphoric response from critics at the Cannes Film Festival, could also become an Oscar force, and not just in the animation category.
But a triumphant Inside Out would mean more to Disney-owned Pixar than money and trophies. Success would prove that the little studio’s soul is undeniably intact, despite worries by some fans and critics about a brain drain and an increased reliance on sequels. Last year, for the first time in nine years, Pixar did not release a film because of problems with an entry called The Good Dinosaur. (Its director was replaced, and the film is to arrive later this year.) Increasing the stakes, the rival Dreamworks Animation has struggled badly in the time Pixar has been absent, leading to chatter that the computer-animation genre is in a funk.
“The pressure on Inside Out is tremendous,” said Maija Burnett, the director of the character animation programme at California Institute of the Arts, Docter’s alma mater. “Audiences now have extra-high expectations of computer animation as an art form.”
Notably, Inside Out is Pixar’s first original film to come to fruition almost entirely without Steve Jobs, a Pixar founder who was a powerful presence at the studio until his death in 2011. The Pixarians also had to make do with less Lasseter, who in recent years worked to fix a floundering Walt Disney Animation. (He accomplished it in 2013 with a little film called Frozen.)
“For a while, there was a sense in the halls like, ‘Oh, Daddy has a new wife and family down in Los Angeles, and he loves them more than us’,” said Docter, who joined Pixar in 1994, becoming its third animator. “John has done a really great job balancing, an almost superhuman job, but for a while he was inevitably not part of the films on a day-to-day basis as much.”
Docter, 46, is not the type to swoop in with stereotypical director bravado – stand back, I’ve got this. A gentle Minnesotan who comes across like Tom Hanks in Big, Docter is more likely to talk about his self-doubt. “I’m not the typical, take-charge, silver-backed-gorilla director,” Docter said over a breakfast of eggs and fried chicken at a greasy spoon near Pixar last month. (Yes, fried chicken.) “I often think I’m on the verge of getting fired. And then I’ll think, well, maybe I should just quit: ‘It’s been nice, guys. I’ll miss you.’” But those are just voices in his head. Inside Out tells the story of Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger and Sadness. They run a girl named Riley from a control centre inside her mind, stepping in to keep her safe or make her feel happy or stand up for what’s right – all except lethargic, lumpy Sadness. Nobody knows why she is there. Could she actually be bad for Riley?
Then, just as Riley’s family moves to a new city, Sadness and Joy (voiced by Phyllis Smith of the US version of The Office and Amy Poehler) get lost in the far reaches of Riley’s mind, a through-the-looking-glass place populated with dancing cupcakes, a French fry forest and an out-of-work imaginary friend made of candy floss. As the lost pair navigate regions like Long Term Memory and Abstract Thought in a quest to return to the controls, Fear, Disgust and Anger (Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Lewis Black) remain in charge.
Stand back: the result is a petulant, prepubescent Riley.
An animated movie that tries to make sense of the adolescent mind? Even for Pixar, it was an ambitious proposition. Too cartoony, and adults would probably revolt. Too intellectual, and children would find it boring. (Cue Disgust.)
Like Up, about a septuagenarian coping with the loss of his wife, Inside Out seeks to both entertain and leave viewers with a deeper understanding of themselves. The success of Up, which took in $731 million (£472m) worldwide in 2009, is one reason Pixar was willing to let Docter tackle another sophisticated story, part of which will undoubtedly go over the heads of young viewers.
Inside Out again finds Docter grappling with loss – the end of childhood bliss.
“We knew from the first pitch of this idea that it had the potential to be really special, but in the same breath we knew it would be really hard,” Lasseter said. “It turned out to be one of the most difficult films we’ve ever made.” As for the bumps along the way, he said: “We’re always tearing up work and starting over. At Pixar we trust our process, and we trust each other.”
If anyone could pull it off, said Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, it was Pete Docter. Perhaps more than anyone at the studio except Lasseter, the shy Docter is imagination incarnate. “But it’s not just creativity,” Catmull said. “Pete has always had an intense focus on emotions, and the ability to convey those emotions to those he works with and to the audience.”
With his first film in 2001, Monsters, Inc., Docter set out to answer a question: What if the creatures under your bed were really nice guys? Up made tying balloons
to a house and floating off into the South American jungle believable. Docter, who is married with two children, also has writing credits on Wall-e and Toy Story.
“I guess you may know that he lives in a tree house,” Catmull said dryly in response to a question about Docter’s childlike, cynicism-free sensibility.
Docter, who is 6ft 5in and drives a tiny Smart car, built a home in 2008 partly on a secluded hillside in Northern California and partly tucked into the branches of an adjoining 60ft-tall artificial tree; a suspension bridge connects the two. “I had a dream to live in a treehouse when I was a kid, and that dream never quite went away,” he said at the time. (Don’t even think about it: You can’t see anything from the road.)
As a boy growing up in Minnesota, he dreamed of turning his bedroom into the Enchanted Tiki Room, a Disneyland attraction where animatronic birds serenade guests. So he did. “I harvested some bamboo during a summer trip to California, and my parents hauled it across the country strapped on the top of the van,” he said. He powered his version with an air compressor bought with his confirmation money.
“I always felt this awkwardness and shyness, and so I kind of retreated into my own little world,” Docter said. “That’s part of why I gravitated toward animation. It was easier to draw something that expressed how I felt than to say it out loud.”
To understand how Inside Out came about, it helps to start with Docter’s childhood. When he was in the fifth grade, his parents, both teachers, moved the family to Denmark for a year so his father could study the chorale music of Carl Nielsen. While his two younger sisters (both now professional musicians) had an easier time, Docter felt out of step, a feeling that would last until late high school.
“That was the most difficult time of my life,” he said. “Suddenly, bam, your idyllic boyhood bubble is popped, and you’re aware that everything you do and everything you wear and everything you say is being judged by everyone else.”
Flash forward to late 2009, when Docter noticed his preteenage daughter, Elie, experiencing a similar transition. “She started getting more quiet and reserved, and that, frankly, triggered a lot of my own insecurities and fears,” he said. “And it also made me wonder what was going on. What happens in our heads during these moments?”
Docter and his Inside Out team, including Jonas Rivera, a producer, and Ronnie Del Carmen, a secondary director, started to research how the mind operates. They spent time with psychologist Paul Ekman, who is renowned for his research on emotions, and Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
So while Inside Out may look like a cartoon (the emotions, especially Joy, are stretchy and covered in tiny, effervescent particles, and the film’s bright, retro art design is meant to recall Broadway musicals of the 1950s), the movie aims to make basic scientific sense. For instance, scientists believe short-term memories are transferred to longer-term space during sleep; when Riley goes to bed, her memories, each one represented by a marble, get processed through a series of chutes and ramps.
But with a dose of reality came responsibility. “We initially considered sending Riley into a deep depression,” Docter said. “But we realised that was not appropriate.”
The big story problem involved Fear and Sadness. For a long time, Docter said, the movie had Joy and Fear getting lost together. “It seemed like the funniest choice,” he said. But as work progressed, the pairing felt wrong. Docter said he went for a walk one Sunday and began catastrophising: his firing was imminent. He knew it. (“That’s a feeling we all share from time to time,” Lasseter said. “It’s so difficult, especially with something original, to put yourself out there and show unfinished work.”)
While on his stroll, Docter started to think about his friends at Pixar and what he would miss about them. “I love them,” he said. “They make me happy. But these are people I have also been angry at. I’ve gone through sadness with these people, especially when we lost Steve.”
He continued: “At that moment, I realised that Sadness was the key. We were trying to push her to the side. But she needed to be the one going on the journey. Joy needed to understand that it’s OK for Sadness to be included at the controls once in a while. It’s only the interaction and complexity of all of these emotions that brings a real connection between people.”
Docter gave the Pixar brain trust a longer version of his epiphany that summer day in the conference room. “By the end, John uncrossed his arms and said, ‘Yeah, that’s the right decision’,” Docter said. “And he smiled.”
Inside Out is released in cinemas from
Friday, 24 July
© NYT 2015