A Conversation with Andrew Stanton

0:00we have no idea how to start these we don't there's not a there's not a format no no not a little theme there's well i guess we'll do the theme but then usually i do a quote from the

0:30movie i butcher that that's how it starts but we're not talking about a specific film here today you could like pretend laugh like you just were telling jokes or something before you got started oh you want it you want to wtf it yeah yeah uh ask about the traffic on the way over here yeah it was the traffic did you take the subway i took the r oh there you go got here in 25 workman like train you know the r she's nobody's favorite it was uh 30 seconds from my apartment and then about

1:01it's very close 25 seconds from the dream yeah from the stop here to get in the r just ideal trundles along though like you're never on the r like great we're about to pick up speed the r does yeoman's work it's a yeoman's work train by by a long shot three boroughs local all the way you often say that the queue is kind of default the best train here's great train not your personal favorite not my personal favorite it's a great train why is the queue though is an express um yeah yeah and uh i think that the the line it goes down in brooklyn is very attractive like it's very it's

1:32very nice sort of the curves of that queue no it's it's outside it's uh the outside is really nice it's um it's a special if you want me to get really nerdy there's not a lot of um uh parts of the subway that are like the queue because the queue was a very very old steam railroad so it's just open cut in the ground so it's not elevated which you know is cute but like you gotta go up and down these stairs you know and it's not underground it's really nice the brighton line sims is a fan of the um new york transportation i'm a new york kid did you know before they put the subway system in there was a pneumatic tube system between postal stations yes yes they inaugurated it with a live

2:06cat a live cat to make sure the cat like didn't die yeah exactly i didn't know yeah the cat was like the the leica was like the animal put it in a little cage like a box and shot it down wow and the other guys were like we got her that's what they say that's what they say okay i think we should go back to pneumatic tubes i do too they're fast yeah okay griff doesn't have a take no i'm just thinking does anyone still use them or i think a lot of places still use we did when we were building the studio for pixar in the late 90s uh we did wired magazine was kind of au courant at the time and

2:40they did a whole thing about how pneumatic tubes actually still exist and boeing uses them in like a huge scale and advanced technology send engine parts like half a mile down their property so we were like let's put that in the building and steve was like no no no no and then we got whittled down to like can we just have one loop and it just goes nowhere and we just pay the receptionist to like put a little envelope and into a tube and shoot the capsule and then just do it every 15 minutes and does it go back down to her yeah exactly okay can we just have that yeah no yeah i was in chicago

3:11recently and i bought weed the weed shop congratulations yeah really cool you know what that actually makes a lot of sense i i do think that's how we bring the pneumatic tube back it makes sense to go hand in hand with the legalization of weed yeah those stores shouldn't be pulling a thing out of a drawer right or going in the back yeah even if it's just a guy blowing a thing through a tube from the back that's what it should be pixar is in the bay where's pixar pixar is in technically in emeryville right like a industrial piece of real estate that's about a mile maybe a

3:44quarter of a mile high and maybe a mile wide and it connects oakland and berkeley so if you go across the bay bridge from san francisco there's a right below it is a big ikea store and right behind that is us is that good being far away from hollywood like quote unquote far away that's further away that's part of the secret sauce yes that you guys were sort of insulated yeah and uh and it's a lot of other factors but uh it also kept it still does keeps most of the employees grounded because when you leave the waiter's not trying to sell a script or run a roll you know you're not meeting other

4:20people in the business i mean it's become kind of tech bro everywhere but uh but there's nobody trying to make movies uh so it kind of keeps you appreciative of what you get to do every day we're here with andrew stanton who and this is a fact is the director that we have been covering for the last six weeks that's so true films correct uh yeah just six features i should have opened with this but explain to me can art can i just yeah please can i just say can for the rest of this

4:51episode can i call you flick lover 98 absolutely because that wait you listen to a patreon episode that cracked me i'm sorry i wasn't i was big into it yeah sorry i was that's that's you should have led with that when you met me griffin a gentleman's character we should establish the backstory at first i thought there were 97 lovers of flick but then i realized oh it's the year the year you made it right right it was the year the film came out it was the year the film came out yeah yeah i needed

5:22that flick lover 98 you can indeed call me you're the one person who's allowed to call me that let's clear the air on this you're the co-director of that film yes oh that's a good question that does mean you are not the director because like some people will sort of say like well why won't you cover this film they're a co-director and i'm like i think that title like it means signifies that you're not the director exactly right the way i explained it is we came up with it because that's my beer um and then that question um because during toy story the team that had been

5:54doing commercials together was john lassiter pete doctor and myself and john and i just really clicked and like i was a really good jiminy cricket like a good conscience for him i was always say i'm like the devil on his shoulder and joe ramps who god bless him was like angel on his shoulder but i was able to kind of always help him keep thinking in the right direction or avoid the wrong direction and so i kind of was invisibly that role uh without knowing it because we didn't

6:26we were all learning what the roles were on toy story so after it was over we said can we make this official and so i said well let's let's make sure it's not a disney only new dual directors i was gonna yeah but we didn't know when we didn't we didn't want to make up a title that was new so we just said we just know what the role means co-director means deputy and you're just there to be help the director be in two places at once like if you do the role right if somebody talks to me and say what should we do i i'm not pushing my vision i'm pushing the

6:57vision of the director and i'm helping keep moving along but it's sort of a little different from like an assistant director which is a very defined no assistant director is a very very very very different role and so uh so that's unique to pixar it's just it's something people get hung up on to this day but i think because of the uniqueness it's all semantics right but we've always been consistent since the first movie that like sometimes we there and i'm the same way like i found out on nemo i worked better having lee unkridge who i'd always had as an editor to confer with when john was

7:28busy to have him uh at the ready so he came on board like the last year and a half does every pixar projects have a co-director no right it's so it's the director's choice right it's it's lit there is not a stamped way it's done and uh it's more like we are very individual visionary based like filmmaker based and we do whatever will make that filmmaker work better so i the one beef i have that you guys fall accidentally into it's my only beef and it's for the greater good when you use the

8:04the word they for pixar it's like you don't do that with nolan you don't say they for the universal studios or they for a part like yes there is no star chamber of people going you've got to do this and everybody wants there to be even internally pixar people want that to be with disney but there isn't it's like we are we take the the high risk we take is we invest in that visionary filmmaker yes and then we will support them or kind of sometimes cast them and put a group around them so that they

8:36will succeed because we can't afford to fail but we also can't afford not to follow a singular artist vision we learned that from the first movie so it's toy story is a john lassiter movie you know it's always bugs life uh toy story three is a is a lee unkridge movie uh toy story four is the josh coo movie there's no they it's not like pixar had nobody knew that they were going to make a two nobody knew we were going to make a three there isn't a great map there's one of the great wisdoms of growing up and getting older is realizing nobody's flying the fucking plane and you go oh

9:08and so we're just trying to make the best smart decisions we can at the time and maybe hopefully not pay for it later you know but it's you're victims of your own success i mean the reason people including us are like well pixar is because pixar's run was so unique so it's treated more like a it's treated like a sports team i know it's a dynasty right and so i know i'm i'm fighting a losing battle but i just the idea that like there is a it is a group sport to make a movie but that's still everybody believes when live action that there is a one person that is running

9:40that movie the barbie's a greta gerward movie yes and so so are the pick i can't speak for any other animation studios but i can speak for pixar and going that individual was the director and visionary of that film but but also that's why you know we covered you and we're not a podcast going like let's do a 25 film series on pixar well that's true and we did right we did ron clements and john musker and we did brad bird and we did brad bird and yeah we've done like and i know i know you get it it's just using the trap of they absolutely okay but here's my big question why was red's dream

10:13never in front of a movie like what the hell like david brings this up every day why can't red have his everybody was probably i can't speak because i why you can speak for red no i just i wasn't there when it was made okay fair enough all right it's a really old i have a feeling it was because it was a downer ending it is a downer in that they were still stuck in the bike shop you still have to convince disney who has the money and the distribution that you this is the great the best choice to put as a short in front of them because i get people amped they put all the

10:44classic shorts nobody wants to depress the audience right before you start rolling because that's your favorite did we realize look at we loved it on its own but as a lead-in to tee up something yeah it was just something that i saw at a young age for some reason it must have been on some compilation yeah i don't know why tiny toy stories very taken with well that just shows you were you were destined for art house movies seriously it's true it's like the the french sort of best yeah it's very much existential movie that uh that sparked for me yeah yeah i just but you

11:18didn't you didn't even work on red stream so i won't hound you but you were you were the second employee is that correct or the second anime the animation department i was the second and the ninth employee second anime so what was the first thing you worked on i was hired with this thinking that we had no idea that there would be uh a future of film we just thought that this is this new thing that they were the inventors of which is called cgi which is like what the heck does that mean it means computer graphics all i knew is it could look photorealistic at the time we thought it did now our eyes so trained it looks like crap um but we were uh the first of maybe only two other houses uh that could

11:56do that medium for possible advertising was the only way to make an income so they had uh i got hired to animate and think up commercials and so my first thing was a trident commercial with a ice cube that played jazz while a mint leaf scat sang on the top of the 90s folks this was when we did we did have it figured out god damn it what happened to saxophones what happened to scatting the 90s everything was just like there needs to be a saxophone in this commercial in this like you know the wb is going to

12:29launch all jazz why isn't there a blue m&m and why isn't he voiced by john goodman we had it figured out i i now pay if i can just grind an axe for a second i pay for every option i get to remove ads from any streaming service if the ads were still the ads from the 90s i'd pay extra to get them back yeah that's true yeah if it was the what's the commercial where they need the air conditioner i'll call now what's that one sears you know i don't remember this one oh i'll show you later i'm always i wanted

13:00to pitch this to disney like they own abc i don't know about the ads of it but wouldn't it be great if you could just pick a year and just watch abc with the commercial cuts like the actual content like i would watch that all the time service where it's just this is june 21st yes show me tgif yes 1997 right i want to write the block i want our whole experience of just having it on exactly the toy commercial yeah sure yeah i would think that would be a very profitable thing to do it

13:30would be incredible yeah i used yes i mean i used to tape movies off of tv and watch them over and over again i rediscovered them when my parents moved those vhs's and i put it in and immediately knew every word of every commercial isn't that crazy it's incredible no okay are you a baseball fan this is all i care about fair weather but i was you're gonna hate me because i'm a socks fan that's fine i don't care i was just wondering because you're you're up in oakland you know if you feel for the a's but no you don't you don't really uh many people i work with uh are still in mourning yeah yeah and don't want to talk about it rip a's okay yeah all right all right i'm

14:04in the studio with us i'm david sims do we say our names great cool ben hosley's here hey there looking great by the way thanks i haven't seen you in a while but he's looking particularly good right for the listener this is our first time seeing griffin and since uh end of uh june six weeks since the stand series started yeah i mean i saw you all i went away i come back we're ending it yes um and uh andrew's joining us uh toy story 5 has come out and went now it's done great all about spider-man it is so funny that you just made a cash billion dollars and it's like

14:38a month later it's like spider-man in the odyssey who cares you did get to be the highest grossing film of the year so far yes i mean it's it's not going to be that at the end of this thing but you got to be it was anointed sure yeah you got that little badge like i have nothing to complain it seems the movie did complain about did beyond expectation beyond totally did terrific highest grossing toy story film yeah before inflation yeah made my daughter very sad really yeah in a way that she couldn't articulate because she's only five oh well i don't count five as movie going yet

15:12well fair enough i guess she can go just a dark theater is can be traumatizing for a child in my child's defense she's a very experienced theater goer we like we see lots of movies together and usually when we exit the theater she's just kind of like best movie great loved it every minute was great obviously because we're seeing things like super mario or what were some anime the great sports drama goat uh two or three five she was just upset she was like i want mom like she was just like clearly thrown by it i think because of the friendship stuff you know just because it was about

15:47interpersonal relationships kid drama yeah and most of the things she sees are more about interpersonal kind of like star fox or mario drama minion drama she's very wrapped up in the star fox drama flippy frog uh and like the emotions in toy story 5 are subtler and like are i'm not you know i'm not trying to like tell you something you don't know here he's not trying to like bill you for therapy i'm more investigating like my it's like my kid walks out of you know star super mario and it's like i like that luigi's scared like she gets that you know it's just a very loud emotion

16:20like i think toy story 5 she was like trying to process it all like what was going on with bonnie hopefully they'll watch the movie again when they're older and it'll be a different form no this is great i'm saying this is this is a compliment she liked it it's just it's just intense i said flippy frog instead of slippy toad andrew here's jesus i know i just need to correct myself before i'm fired from this podcast here's a red stream related question and then i and then i want to get more focused on things what's red stream red stream you cited the the pixar oh red stream i'm sorry i was hearing red stream can we get the shorts back in front of the movies

16:53oh yeah sure the movies are a little longer i feel like the the pixar movies have inflated in length there was a period of time where we had a lot more being made and and just the theatrical experience was a little more for sure and then i think between having to make things for less and being in a questionable still space of theatrical although it's starting to feel like a good year it's feeling good it may come back but that's that's a lot they're not cheap to make

17:24yeah and they they they take a year and a half to make a short and that's longer than some live action movies are to take so it's it's it's it's harder and harder to justify wasn't the uh wasn't obvious sorry wasn't it often the idea that like with the shorts you're testing some sort of sometimes sometimes but we're at a place now where it's kind of now you can use to i mean the stuff we could do like i was away for 10 years or eight years but 10 if you count going in like when last time i was like in production at uh and i thought we could do everything looks wise

18:00back then in 2014-15 and now i i just like as a kid in a candy store working on this one i was just like wow we can we can do anything i i think wally still looks incredible but it is wild when we do this podcast i often will go back and read the reviews from the time and at the time everyone went well they've cracked it it's never going to look better than this every single thing has technically been accomplished now on this film yeah yeah i i i i'm of the belief that like a about

18:30yeah maybe 10 years maybe a little longer um it's all still costly just manpower wise but uh you can if you can think of it you can make it it's just in the eye of the beholder now it's it's if you don't like the look of something you got to blame the artist not the paints was it weird though like coming back 10 years later or was it freeing or fun or like cool to open up the old toy box like it was fun toy box it was fun to be in the production of it it was fun to work i

19:00love i mean i love production i love working with other artists i i've always been that kid that love love putting on a show in the backyard kind of equivalent or making our movies with in with your super eight and so that's the drug what i knew i wouldn't love and was confirmed only about two years in was i don't like how long it takes uh as you you just mentioned before i'm not giving anything away you're 40 i am uh no no time time gets faster at 40 and then it gets even faster at 50 and or or and so four years at 60 is just too long because then suddenly half a decade's practically

19:39over and i i can count on one hand how many more times i could do this like it's time that's made me kind of anti-animation at this point here's correct and you don't think children should have be fun or have fun or be happy too so you're anti-animation for that no i think children should have a lot of fun but i'm not worried about being the bearer of that yes it's not your responsibility anymore no i'm making films for myself the press you did the press runs for the two movies you had this year you you talked about this a lot and how growing up you never specifically were interested

20:11in animation in a singular way that was never the exclusive goal of what you wanted to do and how you feel like this might be your last animated film because of the time issue this is maybe a very stupidly broad question but how did you realize you had the capacity to do animation because it is the kind of thing unlike live action directing where it starts with needing to have some facility at doing the technical uh it's easy to look back 2020 now and go i was jack of all trades a master of none like i love i was going to be an actor i was going to be a musician i was

20:46going to be an artist i could do all three of those things and none of them went great to the to such mastery in my teens that i knew that this was calling me and i didn't but i liked doing all of them and i i definitely love the arts and uh and i went to the movies like freaking church every it was and you're in massachusetts yeah it's so it's like what sports are for sometimes to bond uh parents and the kids and the family uh movies were that our our whole family would jump into the station wagon go up what we said up the line to the movie plex and they would we didn't even think

21:19about what was that playing we would just go see it and and you worked at an art house theater as well yeah by the time i got old enough to be employed yeah and uh and so all of that i didn't want to give up and so it's because i found out and this is you got to remember so far before the internet before knowledge of anything you know they have handbooks was the only way you could find out about colleges or somebody went somewhere and told you about something and so it was my junior year of high school and my guidance counselor had to meet me to say what i'm going to do with my life where am i

21:50going to go i didn't know and he was late to the office i sat there and i stared at this bookcase and there was this binder with a fluorescent hot fluorescent orange binder and i pulled it out and it was for cal arts and i learned i learned oh my god they teach animation i draw which is sort of like acting i like to act uh it's all about timing and uh i've got good rhythm i like music and it's ultimately on film and i love film and i was like suddenly i was like i don't have to give up any of it was literally all in that one it was it was all in that one and then i became like devil's tower like i had to go

22:24and because i had fucked off most of my high school and i was really bad student i didn't get in and so i spent the next i got into one school to hartford hartford art school which is basically a business school and there's this one little oasis that took me and i learned and it kicked my ass foundations wise i was probably their best student because i was trying to make a portfolio to just get the hell out and so the next year i got into college so i have the rejection letter from one year and stuff but then the the conclusion to that story is you jump to 2003 nemo comes out cal arts wants to give

22:55me an award at the red cat theater my suite mate for one year was don cheadle don cheadle's doing well and so don starts to uh presents me with the award and i give this same speech about how i found out about cal arts and then i say at the end of it i said so whoever in 1982 in the admissions department decided to make the binder fluorescent orange uh thank you and this guy in the back went that was me wow nice so it was very nice closure pop full circle cheadle was he what was he doing yeah yeah cal arts is like fame yeah cool and i don't know if that means anything no no means

23:30are you aware i dropped out of college he dropped out of color how long did you go i went for nine months just what made you drop out uh what made me drop out i went for for live action film directing which i think was the wrong choice for me and school and i also think i didn't want to be in school who was running the program then uh uh steve anchor sandy mckendrick was running it when i was there okay believe that i mean who was um sweet smell of success monty monty hellman was teaching

24:01at the time and uh james benning it was like an incredible faculty you also didn't drive so getting around this was quite challenging that's a problem yeah california andrew it was maybe 50 percent of the reason i dropped out okay i was i didn't go to school in the north like why didn't you go to school over here because i didn't like the idea of going to a school where i could come back home and hang out with the same people on the weekend uh i know i guess that i grew up here and almost everyone i knew was doing that and i i was feeling very um uh defiant about i'm

24:33going to go somewhere different i'm going to make a new life for myself and i i had i got locked onto calarts because i thought i wanted to be animating and i had some facility for it but i didn't have the the discipline i found ultimately um i think i could have done experimental but i had locked into character and then when i felt like i'm not good enough at this then i shifted to live action and then when i was there i started going i feel like i want to act and so it was also at a weird transitional

25:05time in my life but i'm very familiar with uh uh all of the the places you're listing and also who the alumni are ed harris david also went to cal arts uh peewee herman yes paul rubens yes absolutely and lots of it i know cal arts for a hot minute with david hasselhoff really yeah that's true these pairings are incredible and now somebody should write a book yes really yeah and i know it's just like what was it like you know my roommate was uh joss glennie smith who was who's an actor he's still

25:36working actor uh great yeah should we just stick on this no absolutely not okay um but but i you're calling out a thing that i think isn't discussed enough which is how much of animation is acting yeah no i always have to explain to the actors that i'm working with that um you're half the equation you know and that i'm going to have a conversation with what i call the shy actors which are the animators not in front of the camera and but they have to be cast as appropriately as anybody you know

26:07that old adage of if you can get the script and the casting rights uh for a movie then they're halfway there uh it's kind of true also for your animators uh you know they they have the things that their strengths are and and aren't and uh and it's almost a little tougher because you have to you usually have a team so like there's not one person animating woody or one person animating jesse it's it's a group of people so uh we adopted at the very beginning of the whole studio was uh what disney

26:41which uh you have dailies every morning where all the animators watch everybody's work in the middle of their project the middle of their working on it so that if there's notes from me uh about what i would think the character would or wouldn't do everybody hears it so they all think the same and but that's also a chance to be inspired and you and you get a little competitive you're like wow look at what they did with uh smarty pants in that shot i never knew you could do that with the handle and that you could make it look like he's you know flipping them off or something and that would inspire them to like go and so it's just a win-win and so there's this sort of

27:16it's almost like summer stock like everybody's got to learn all the roles yeah and uh but it's actors you talk to them just like actors this is your mark this is where you're coming from this is where you're going to and uh and you're not trying to get into it too much you know because you don't want to get too much into their head this is something that i feel like is a defining aspect of your films in particular is and and maybe it goes back to that kicking yourself in the ass you're at hartford but by design giving yourself characters who are going to be incredibly difficult

27:49to animate i feel like there's a lot of self-imposed challenges of like you go to the the double a gang in toy story 5 is three characters that do not lend themselves yeah to animation they're characters that don't have traditional limbs you know two of them don't or one of them doesn't have a traditional face uh wally and eve certainly um you talked a lot about with nemo not wanting to cheat yeah and and kind of personize them more and then i feel like sometimes in the opposite direction you have a character like like hank where the challenge is a whole different one yeah yeah yeah yeah of

28:22extremity but that's not a thing you consciously sort of throw at yourself i not i'm not in the i mean i i'm sure there's an element of challenge that i just want for anything um i think i'm a little bit more it's it's more that i'm just not afraid of it i i just go with what logically makes sense to i i look at i was charmed like everybody else at least that was around at the time that they first saw that luxo lamp i was like there's so much personality in this simple lamp do it with this mic right now and i felt

28:54seen because i felt like i had been anthropomorphizing everything as since i was a little kid like my bike was cold in the rain as far as i was concerned and my that leaf falling was afraid of heights when it fell like that just was how i thought i didn't like learn that and so i realized i had a tribe and these are these are my people and i also was lucked out that i was the first generation sesame street kids that came out in 69 i was four years old and to me the muppets just always existed yeah i learned everything entertainment and timing wise and and and and if you go back and watch on youtube any of

29:29the original first season like they were little adults there was nothing kidified like i always have this theory that elmo fucked it up for everything because it started a kiddie voice and everything had to be young and everybody started thinking about the kids and i'm like nobody thought about the kids at least and it's still good without him it was clever like and so like they were tired new yorkers yes they tired and they're opening up their jackets saying like you want to buy a cue you know i mean we're talking about 50 it's a great character really yeah but anyway what i was quickly going to connect to was how much personality came of just doing an open

30:01mouth with your hand yeah just a hand puppet like just taking a napkin and like and like so i just was raised going i'm seeing a million subtleties of acting and reactions from just a hand puppet so i i've never thought you couldn't do it with under extreme you logically just run i just like it's always existed and so i've never really thought about it but i do have arguments with or not arguments but i have to like convince animators sometimes that i realize oh they don't all think like that they they have to logic it out and i'm i'm clearly i'm clearly more right-brained

30:37than left-brained because people want to go down rabbit holes about like well if they did this why did they do that and i just go well i'm already starting with a story that fish are talking so can we i'm not gonna i'm not gonna left-brain this like it's an illness though about pixar that people are like well i want to impose reality on it it's like but we're outside of reality and it makes realize maybe they're right and i'm wrong but like i never think like that so i'm not going to start thinking like that i just want to have fun and i want to just not be distracted while i'm watching it and i feel really bad for somebody that is that's a curse because i i just want to go

31:10along for the ride or any movie i'm watching so i'm just going like all right they're they're look at one of the arguments that goes that's what you're kidding people on the internet i'm always fascinated because like there's an aesop's fable of that starts out there once was a sausage and a bird and a mouse and it lives in a house and you go and it's amazing if you start that way everybody goes okay okay right and and and you're like and so like so it just shows you that if you made if you made people have questions about it then you're just telling the story badly this is what i always say it's not the story is bad you're just telling it badly i think what pixar movies

31:45sometimes do and again i am using pixar monolithically here so feel free to yell at me but right but it doesn't pose some logic which is part of the fun right it's like let's but just enough let's expand out the world exactly like we live in a we're inside of a child's you know brain like let's what would what could that look like we're you know we're inside of uh the axiom or you know like whatever like let's there'll be some logic but you need to you know embrace the fantasy as well i can i you guys can speak better to this but i i can only surmise that because the gaming world is so

32:17immersive and and thorough that you will want that same truth to be on any movie you want i've been thinking about this a lot look i mean cars is the one i think that broke everyone's brain but no but i've been thinking about this a lot that i do think there is as games became more cinematic and less their own art form entirely they start working more of the language of films into them and people have control and autonomy within yes yes nolan did this interview recently i just saw the chinese interview it's fucking right where he said like i think there is this problem of people feel like

32:49if they're able to recognize a trope of storytelling that invalidates it uh yes right weird i mean i that's sad yeah but it's so true and it's such a sickness in sort of modern media of now that we can slow everything down and look everything a million ways and you know like you know i i can look at youtube at any clip i want yes i can show you patterns and then you'll be smart you'll see the patterns like i see the patterns and it's like there's nothing interesting about you seeing the patterns of course there's patterns to storytelling and when you're when you're playing

33:22the patterns you compliment them if they work properly because you go that's fun that this pattern challenged me and i beat it i said this on blue sky like an idiot you know i'm i made a social media post even though i don't really do that anymore where i was just like if you're a critic the least interesting thing that any the last thing anyone wants to hear from you is i'm smarter than the movie like that's not criticism that's just you talking about yourself who cares like i don't care if you're smarter than the movie i want you to tell me what this movie means either to you or to the culture or to what you maybe perceive in the filmmaker what you know like that's fine i don't care that

33:55you you're like well this is these are tropes i know so i'm smart you know like that's not you're not telling anyone an interesting story that's all i agree with that yeah sure great uh i guess i'll get out of here okay if i if i can put my my flick lover 98 hat back on because we had we had you know there was the argument of whether or not to include a bug's life and a lot of it for me was just i wanted to cover bug's life right i mean you could you could almost get away with it because we john was very gracious and we were a team on that even more so but at the end of the day you know i

34:26i it's it was it's his movie my i it was not to discredit that but it was more that i thought it was an important step in your arc in sort of the the journey of screenwriter yeah it was a second step yeah because you sort of fall into it i mean bug's life was a chore for you or for everybody for all of us only in comparison to how what's fascinating is we all i remember during a bug's

34:59life is complaining like i wish i was as dumb and as eager as i was making toy story because we knew nothing and so we kept saying we were like the young engineers that put a man on the moon at nasa we just didn't know you couldn't do it yeah and that got us through that was our fuel so even though i bet you on paper it was harder to make toy story than a bug's life it felt funner because we were just young and like we're making a movie like we didn't think we'd do anything more than that and it was came

35:30from such a natural inspiration like the the well of like what like i remember us and the story changed five different ways after this but this didn't it was what if it was your favorite toy on a top of bed and suddenly a new toy got brought in for a birthday and it got thrown off like just that sense like you suddenly realized the it evoked such feelings of of empathy about jealousy and and how that felt when your your next sibling came in when a new kid came on the playground like it just

36:03was so organic and natural it was like literally striking oil and so we never had that on a bug's life it was a intellectual exercise like what if we turned the ant in the grass up around its head it could go a little seven samurai could go a lot of all these things but like just that was an intellectual left brain didn't yeah you didn't have the emotion didn't evoke the emotions yeah and i learned and so it was we we got there but it was always like trying to draw water out of a stone so i learned that like oh it's to our benefit especially if we're going to work on it

36:35for three to four years and you're going to get out of bed with it not working most days you got to be ideally on top of a well of something that is more natural of a geyser of emotion and or not do it not do it yet yeah and so that's why a lot of our movies sometimes take forever before we really start committing to them it's because we haven't found that well i'm not going to want to spend five years on this yeah exactly and then toy story 2 you guys made in like five minutes right that was a notoriously easy one you know the more the more i look back at that i realize that the

37:05perfect storm of that was they had tried so many other versions that there was about 30 of the movie that was worth keeping not in not in linear but like yeah little bits and then the other was we literally got had two version two other versions of toy story we'd thrown out like two other not like wholesale but there was so much in the costume box left from the first and then the biggest factor was we got literally the band back together we got everybody back from stem to stern that had made

37:39the first one so we were psychic so you just put us in we had a costume box of leftover material we had building blocks that made a lot of sense but i looked i was cleaning out my email last year like it goes all the way back to 92 but like it's less and less because we weren't using it so much then um and i was freaked myself like i'm talking about it's november of 98 i'm doing post at skywalker on

38:11bugs life but i'm being asked to help do the outline for this monster movie that he's doing so i'm doing that on the side by december there's rumblings in the email that something's amiss across the street with the other production by the holidays john's calling me into like we got to talk by the january we're like we are going to have to take it all over by the end of february i've written the whole thing by march i'm off and i'm starting to help this thing that's now called monsters incorporated and i

38:46have this idea for a fish like that and i had two kids i had two little kids and i look under like and i just go i wouldn't have believed it if i hadn't i like i always put all those things in that era but not so tightly together and just to clarify for the listener toy story 2 comes out november of that same year you're describing like of 99 yeah right it's made like we i was writing pages on a monday it was delivered the story by the end of monday like top of the day monday tuesday morning at the latest by wednesday thursday it's cut in by friday it's being refined like so it was just it was insane

39:21i don't know how we did it is my default incredible that the movie's so good like it just doesn't really make sense that the movie again it's like if you said you you all have the shorthand went on tour and played so hard and then left and do something else and they said come back and do exactly what you did before and just keep it going that's why i mean it's not only my favorite toy story movie it's maybe my favorite movie i often default to that as my answer i i answered this recently when the five drunk finance bros in madrid asked me you like movies what movie you like

39:52uh and then proceeded to drop three beers uh while i answered um but i i think i've always pinpointed is that there is a feeling of mania to that movie well that's also a reflection of us because we were left disney said basically go with god yeah let you and nobody was there to stop us that's us left alone like that was the the core original group and all we cared about was cracking each other up we cared about the film we cared about emotion but not ever at the expense of cracking each other up

40:24like entertainment mattered greatly to us everything went through an entertainment filter so even if we're doing this sad moment and by the way the jesse being sad is to emulate what it's like to be the empty nester fascinating so that's why you don't get with it right now john because you haven't had to be an empty nester like who's who's that drawing from well there was a range of people yeah of ages yeah we had we had people that were already grandparents people that were not single that was all over the map but we were just going with the truth of the arc of life of giving up your kid

40:59and having to see them go away my my kid's not going anywhere she's gonna you just keep telling yourself yeah she's gonna go to our joke in the family is like she'll go to mega rivers which is like the community college down the street basically it's like yeah no she can move there she's gonna go to sims university yeah exactly like i know she can go to college you can go to college like one neighborhood over mass hilarious yeah the twins i'll just they'll live in the basement right they'll just i don't know we gotta bring up the twin connection oh what's that because i i brought up to you david having twins i have you have twins i have twins yeah i have three kids i have three kids

41:34i have an older daughter and younger sons and how old are the sons uh they did just turn two okay so my younger brothers are identical twins oh so and you're you're so what happened to me happened to your family and what's going to happen to your daughter i'm telling you now okay is that you're going to look back at photos yeah when they're little and toddlers you're twins and you're not going to be able to say who is who right and she will yeah that's like you always knew your i can still look at photos with just the back of their heads and i go that's my brother that's my brother nathan wait so what's the age difference between five years okay yeah so you really my

42:07daughter was like three and a half like the other thing that's fast i don't know what the minutes apart but my brothers were born 10 minutes apart and that might as well been 10 years apart so whenever there was a lineup of us the pecking order was who was came out first who came out last it's great my kids were born one minute apart wow and yet it is there's a c-section you know just one than the other and it is nonetheless crazy that the the the younger one is the baby you refer to him as the baby of course he's the baby but maybe in every way he's littler he's like you

42:39know whatever and they do they they my brother one brother has all the signs of the baby brother one has all the signs of middle child i don't understand it it's very strange so far but yes no the older one is the alpha yeah well your parents survived though they barely survived yes yeah i get that i hear that like and there was a story once where uh they figured out in their separate cribs how to put one to push their cribs across the room and my mother came in and the dresser drawers had been used like steps and they got into the vaseline and baby powder and it was

43:11just like horrifyingly par and feather all like the combined intelligence and that was when they they would speak baby talk to each other and you could hear in the inflections that they were actually having a back and forth conversation my kids do that yeah it's fascinating weird it's right they they they right they babble stuff at each other and you're like oh right this is like communication like that we will never understand it's it's very strange having twins uh twin parents get at me is that in the family in any not at all on either side no we always joke right because it's like i should wear a t-shirt like not in the family we didn't do ibf you know

43:44because like those are the questions it's the same thing as when someone says like oh i'm i'm sick right and you're like oh i'm so sorry so do you like smoke cigarettes you know like people immediately are like is it gonna happen to me what happened to you you know like they just nicely start to ask questions like and is it genetically like do you guys have that and it's the same with the twins where people like does it run in your family nope just happened we're older parent like you know it was an old apparently it's more common the older you get uh because your body basically just sort of starts you know getting rid of all the eggs not to be like biological about

44:15it but uh yeah that's all i don't know there's a part of africa where people eat a certain yam that um makes twin pregnancies incredibly common i learned that you're just making shit up i'm not i can send it to you wow yeah what's the yam how do i how do i get something you want twins i know it's working out really well for you uh it's working out okay they're crazy yes it's uh yeah parts of africa particularly the yoruba people in nigeria uh have a diet rich in native yams and those have hormones called phytogestrogens uh which some people stimulate multiple egg

44:52production anyway uh we have interest in here we're talking twins we're talking twins not the movie not the movie okay so we talked bug's life we talked we're saying the uh oh the the crunch of right right yeah a bug's life you're consciously coming in as a screenwriter from the get-go i get like uh yeah i learned uh screenwriting by watching josh whedon do it for the year and a half he worked with us right uh and he was sort of at the top of his powers he was a 90s or whatever

45:22he was sort of a boy he was rising right he was still rising but it was obvious uh because we had had script writers before that failed miserably and so we were getting a lesson on what good screenwriting was and what would be fascinating is we'd sit in a room together the four or five of us including joss we spitball something and we'd play it out for ourselves he'd nod he'd go off into a room play soundtrack music really loud for a while and then come back out and you'd read these two or three pages and the way they were written you were just compelled to see it exactly the way we had

45:58talked about it it wasn't and it was and it sucked you in like i it inspired me like oh there is a way to do i called it cinematic dictation like oh i failed in english in high school so i thought that writing was for smart people no offense but uh uh then i realized oh it's cinematic dictation yeah it's like i've always seen the movie there's just a way to do it that makes other people see it the way you want to see it and it can be done and if it's done poorly you don't see it the way that they want even though you had it in your head so that's what i i just became determined to be good at that and i

46:31and i was honest with somebody recently i said some of it was self-preservation because there was no guarantee this company was going to last and that we were going to be beyond we were such a startup so we didn't know how the movie was going to do at the time and i was like i need to learn a trade i can use somewhere else so i thought screenwriting is applies to other places beyond just learning how to computer animate and so i just started doing it without anybody asking nobody

47:01was asking me to be the writer uh after joss left for the last year and by the time it was done they weren't going to give me credit so i went to the current script of everything and i highlight everything that i they had kept and it was 75 of the script was what i did and so i convinced them and then uh that then they said okay so bug's life was like the first time they officially okay that i could play that role and from the beginning yeah yeah yeah and then right because you're credited on toy store you're credited on monsters inc as a writer right uh that was that

47:33just you and pete or no daniel gerson right okay isn't the legend on monster on monsters inc monsters was basically daniel gerson and uh let's see jim jill colton jeff pigeon ralph eggleston i'm just looking there's a lot of story by because there's a lot of rebuilding by and i just was part of their helping i mean i didn't i wasn't the founder of any of that was there a moment where you were supposed to direct that idea in a different form no okay they had real trouble at the beginning outlining it and getting it to have an engine and the only thing

48:04i can really take credit for the engine is screams just well david that's what it that's really yeah i i came up with i said you need a motivation that creates greed and all the emotions that happen in the real world and so scream is gotta what if you put scream in there so that it's treated like oil is in this country what was the movie before that because that does feel foundational too like well here's why the monsters do this you're like right but you're smarter right now than any of us we were all in our 20s just learning how to do it so it was a new story it wasn't a buddy film

48:39and we just had to learn how to you know i was we were still reading every screenwriting book going to mckee classes like we were just we were you're watching us learn as you watch those first three movies i mean a lot of what why i watch those movies incessantly and also why i think people sometimes will ask because i dropped out of cal arts like where did i learn story structure stuff when i ran away from academia trying to teach me that kind of thing and so much of it is from

49:09watching all of the dvds that you guys put together the talks that you guys have done the commentary i think we were so excited to learn yeah you guys were real we wanted to pass it on right yeah because that's for a long time uh for like almost the first 20 years but definitely the first 15 it just felt like we just got to continue film school and so we just promoted that atmosphere and anything we did maybe this is a dumb question but you talking about the the identification of

49:40the oil spring that you had from the beginning with toy story that you felt like you couldn't find with a bug's life for a while how do you know when you found it is it just from the reaction from other people is it within yourself you just go i the story now kind of explains itself you can definitely tell you just feel it it it usually evokes an involuntary response from not only yourself but when you when you put the peanut butter with the chocolate and you pitch just the basics to somebody else even in its rarest golden book form you see investment happening from the

50:16person you're pitching to and that that tends to be the proof is that there's there's gold in the hills because you talked about in this recent press tour that toy story is one of those things where if you sit in a room for an hour you start coming up with new ideas of what could happen in that universe and it does feel like it's it's an infinitely fertile playground it can be i've one of the reasons i think i get pulled in is because they've skipped the abcs like they've gone

50:46straight to like other letters in the alphabet and they've and they've just made understandably they're trying to be different or trying to be interesting or trying to go they think literally going to new territory will give us new ideas and i'm like what was free in the beginning was just the fact that toys came to life like just like that was like wow and i get to witness that and you have to and now we've kind of from that movie on messed up for generations everybody thinks toys come to life like there's that there is no wow factor for go watching a toy story movie it's a given

51:18now so the other thing that's behind that that i have to remind them on is that the secret sauce is in the mundane i said if you take collectively the hours spent watching toy story movies even if you put five with it now it's about what six hours maybe seven that's seven hours of a toy's life that's one day and they have spent if there are toys in your life like for five years or six years or maybe even eight in your house that's a lot of hours in the day not accounted for i used to like i

51:52remember thinking there'd be a lot of humor when we were trying to come up with the first movie of like just the boredom of being in the room while the kid's gone and making it treating it like jury duty yeah we had a joke of like if i have to read pokey the little puppy one more time i'm going to kill somebody and like just but like that's where the humor starts to come from is like the the mundane and seeing it from that perspective 100 percent look how disrespectful we're being right now like you could do a whole sequence just about being trapped in that ziploc it's why those movies

52:23make people dizzy sometimes right because these are intellectually developed conscious creatures that are basically little grown-ups living in a child's room yeah kind of bored all day right and then one day they might be trash or they might be in a box or you know yeah the way people describe seeing star wars in theaters for the first time and and seeing the runner go over and feeling like the world has exploded like my mind explosion moment was woody starting the meeting in the first toy story yeah there's something that just activated in me and oh they're acting like grown-ups this isn't for me

52:58we did a sequence early on before we had all whether we had that scene where we thought we'd start with the birthday party but because this had recently happened at pixar there would have been two layoffs uh a couple years prior so everybody was kind of very savvy now to what layoffs felt like in the company and it was getting the axe and so we treated we did a scene of introducing woody in the and his bedroom with everybody going is it me you know who am i gonna you know and and we suddenly loved like that we were capturing something about adult life but the metaphor of what it's like for the toys

53:33and it made complete sense and we were told it was too juvenile by disney at the time so we had to axe it and everybody knows about the black friday and it not going well and everything like that and that's whenever that was year uh you know months of going down to what was supposed to be like adult humor or to fight the notion yeah and when we had to like rescue the film and to save our asses and we had like two weeks to like try to resurrect it we went back to that layoff scene and we said

54:06there's something muppety and just really which is now we all know is toy story now right but we said the we we think our gut was right on that mojo and we're going back and it became woody's meeting plastic corrosion awareness i mean all that stuff which is just not none of it is inappropriate and even as a small child i recognized there was something funny in why are the cartoon characters talking like my parents right right right yeah uh that there yeah that there are there is a kind of clock in clock out vibe should we ask about finding nemo the movies he's directed i mean geez

54:39we're asking a lot of general but yes finding nemo it's a perfect movie in my opinion yeah i was just downhill from after that not true yeah you followed it up with wally what were you thinking that that you know piece of junk you would have thought you would have thought i had at the time was that the feeling uh at the previous screening for wally there was a lot of anxiety it got the lower marks and like pixar generally right tended to i mean and you'd had and that's when i had to swap i was gonna say it's before you do the final acting yeah yeah and you know again learning curve wait wait

55:15remind me i'm sorry i'm sure the final act was well i'll let you explain you directed the film wally is it pretty much scene wise played out similar uh but it was missing two things we kept treating wally in the third act like he had to be the hero and so he rescued eve and we thought eve wasn't going to be alive and then uh he put her together at the end or no no no he he got still got smashed by the time he got to the alito deck but we also didn't have him like losing his personality right

55:54which is the the true kind of like oh my god like in your stomach so we we knew it you could feel it and so but i was at a i was just you know it's three and a half years or four years by now and i was just beat down i didn't know it just felt like i'd come tried everything and uh but it was the same guys that i'd always had in the room to like cover my ass before and so we really just stayed in the room and thought and hammered it out until we realized oh uh wally's more like chaplain like he changes everybody else and then you have to have the payoff of that and then losing his identity at the end it

56:31all seems obvious now but no it does the losing his identity thing it feels so obvious that it's so it's making movies is crazy because like you telling me that wasn't always part of the movie i'm like i can't believe that well but but at the if you think about it when you start writing a movie nothing was in the movie right and so like it's just that's why i always equate writing to an archaeological dig and it's very ethereal where you just feel like you're you're saying that the story already exists out there but i really do believe that it's it's very much like the angel in

57:03the marble and da vinci or when uh michelangelo chipping it away and letting it fly and uh he always saw it in the cube of marble and uh and i've just seen that happen so many times uh at pixar where you've uncovered these bones you're just digging all the time trying to build this dinosaur that you claim is in the ground or the story and then you don't have a say for what you find and when you find it you can only give yourself credit for digging in the right place

57:34and for how hard you're working at digging things up but you have to be sort of open-minded to like the answers don't come when you want them to you just got to be ready to do something about it when they do i saw uh rashida jones was doing press for the invite and she cited something that you said to her uh the the mountain metaphor but it was something to the extent of your your job in constructing a story or finding what the story is is exploring every possible okay when you're trying to figure out the path around the mountain you're going to go up it around it down at whatever just move the

58:04mountain like sometimes you just have to restructure and let oh yeah yeah like sometimes you're like why are we i can't figure this why did we put this mountain here right let's just go somewhere else and it's like right you're a writer you can just be like you know what the matter is right yeah yeah you can easily trick yourself into thinking like that's cheating or that you're a failure for not uh acquiescing to the story gods that like oh there was a different path that i just wasn't thinking about here's a question i have for you your animated films have started with your idea right john carter you write but it's an adaptation obviously and in the blink of an eye starts with

58:39a script from colby day and there are the other live action films that you've been attached to over the years which were almost always scripts that were out there in the ether have you ever tried sitting down and starting a live action script on your own is there a reason you feel like you're more attracted to or is that just the nature of how it's so fucking hard i've shaken out yeah i i all i've known my career mostly is stuff that i either was a party to very from the get-go or was mine and everything that gets criticized everything that gets changed everything that you know

59:16because it's it's you take it personally even when you think you're not you you debate whether you're a failure whether you're right it just takes so much out of you emotionally and once i found out you could actually i said wait a minute some of my favorite directors never wrote what they worked on and and uh and i and i realized um oh i don't have to like die on this hill every time i make something and so i started looking at things some of it was

59:47television some of it was scripts and uh there were a lot of scripts i tried to get made that were other people that never got picked up and just kind of did the more traditional route of like i would love to see this film i could totally see how this film should be made and it was still hard but it was so much it was so easy not to make it about me it was so easy to be objective does tv feel particularly liberating in that sense it is in the just that i enjoy the doing right just the i enjoy being on set i enjoy the the making of the older you get the less you're

1:00:19like i'm not here to like talk about my career or or look it back like i've got this much time left while i'm still standing i'm still healthy and i'm sorry for making you look back at your career i apologize no but but you know what i mean like i love the doing and like and i and i was like it takes four years and then i finally you know uh in a in the same building with the same people like it can it can get a little maddening and you feel like time stands still and i just love the the camaraderie and the uh summer camp put on a show that you get on and and i love the brevity i

1:00:54mean in two months i've gone away to do tv which is about two to three months max and i've come back to pixar and nobody knew i left like that's happened several times and i equate it to being a session player like oh i get it i'm basically somebody else's album this is how they want or you know this is how they want to play it and they they're asking me to come in as a session player and play on this one song out of their all their tracks and i thrive because i just feel so unshackled and

1:01:25i'm burdened by is it about me what does it say about me what do i think like i just you're doing the opposite it's right it must be so easy it's not even easy but it's it's enjoyable it's taking a lot of things that i thought were burdensome yeah and making them enjoyable because i realized telling the joke for me is half the fun not just having to write the joke so a lot of times it's freeing and and and i get to use my muscles and i get to get outside to just work on a tv show try different

1:01:55stuff yeah yeah are you gonna do any more of that or yeah i'm gonna be on one this uh fall that i can't talk about right now fair enough but i wasn't looking for but it's one of my favorite shows so i was like psyched and uh and um so i don't know if i'll do them more but because it's it's also no life for two months three months because it's just yeah whereas animation to be fair it's banker's hours nine to six nine to five yeah you can be gotta go to the doctors that day you can be you know like but it's for three or four years yeah and it and not only that there just must be a frustration and like

1:02:29oh i want to fix this okay well yeah that's gonna take a while versus like hey you give an actor direction and the next take they do it different or whatever this is mean but they're on a hard on a day where i'm frustrated with another show i'm going like you kind of have no excuse not to fix this guys you have all the time in the world so let's put a time limit on like if you haven't gotten somewhere by the end of the month or the end of the week like but that's the other thing that i took back to toy like toy story 5 is the fastest we've ever made a movie outside of toy story 2 which was

1:03:00under duress yeah right uh how how quick what are we talking about three and a half months i'm three and a half years three and a half months you're pretty impressive that would be very impressive doing it all the time it was about three and a half years with me away for half uh for six months of that to finish up finish blank yeah and uh because i learned on tv to measure time differently like in in tv any problem any issue they go you talk in the terms of minutes days minutes hours days

1:03:30and if you're talking days you know you're in trouble so you're always talking like can we fix it minutes and hours in animation you're talking days weeks months and so the it's too easy to just push it down the road or take longer than you need to so i applied the minutes days hours a minutes hours days to coming back and it was a little aggro little aggressive but it was still a better place to be we people were excited that they were getting things solved and getting more times at bat and figuring things out you know when you have to fix wally how long does that take you know fix but you know

1:04:04what i mean that was under duress because our our all our uh audience previews are usually set with about six months left to till release which means only three months left in production and that's like your last week in in in regular terms that's like you you've got friday left so you hope you know that you're going to change something you have you have it on the books it's almost like reshoots built in you you know there's going to be something you're going to change hopefully about 10 percent of the movie max uh or less and it's strategic where and what you do uh and that was about a 30

1:04:42percent change yeah no that was how i was that but every it was a hard it was worth it it was worth it was a hard conversation to have with my crew who was ready to be done yeah i feel like there's video on on there's probably video of everything i don't want to know about of you apologizing before the demand uh there's probably put that on the dvd but those dvd yes that's what i'm saying i would want like especially obviously the two uh you know brad bird's two movies in the 2000s between your between nemo and wally you've got incredible zen ratatouille and those dvds he's pretty up front

1:05:13about like i'm a pain in the ass like i'm really yeah i'm really demanding and like you know and like i as a kid or as a teen i was a teen and i was interested in movie making i was fascinated watching them being like this is very up front about like it's not just like oh yeah we're all so happy to be doing this he came up with the adage pain is temporary film is forever i quote it all the time yeah it is it's memorable yes it's but like obviously in brad's movies you see that in his movies right like it's like that that character like makes it across the line you

1:05:44know in terms of the stories he tells or whatever emotions he's driven by or you know and i feel like that's what makes the best pixar movies the best and that's what makes your pixar movies good it's like they all have your kind of you just have a very funny sensibility and like i mean that is the highest compliment like it's it's because at the end of the day that's what comes out of us naturally it's it's like um i was talking on another podcast and i was saying like i i don't feel worthy equating us to the beatles but you nobody nobody questions that the beatles were just making they just made

1:06:18like if they never got out of their basement or the or paul mccartney's family bathroom they would make hummable tunes that everybody would remember immediately like that's just what came out of them yeah they didn't change for the audience they just tapped into something that they naturally did that worked great for the rest of the world and and so when you put us together the infamous brain interest everything we did got more entertaining like we're just naturally entertainers and people discredit that they treat they treat it like costumes to put on after the fact but we're like

1:06:51if you do it right it's essential like you you the joke is telling the story is being part of the machinery and part of the entertainment and the core of it the sequence in nemo of the story getting spread across the ocean which leads into nigel telling that night which that this is the thing i feel like this is one of those legendary stories in your career of how does the word get from one side of the ocean to the other and you end up voicing like three different characters in that sequence well just for the just for the the uh proof of concept my co-writer was bob peterson who's one of the funniest

1:07:25men i've ever met and he makes me funny or brings out the funny in me that i can't seem to access fully on my own and it's no different than being with a great improv partner like you just throw me the challenge you know so we like we were like how do we do this and we it was like six o'clock or something five o'clock in the afternoon and we had to have something up on the reels the next morning and so it was you treated like an improv challenge like how would you make the news get across and then then you just were like we can draw really fast we're we're our own scratch voices so we just

1:08:01put mics up like this in the room and just crap it we crap out stuff all the time that take only a few hours we just put this real high bar challenge to like all right you got to solve this exact problem and you got to do it in an entertaining way and we've done plenty of those where they didn't stick but this one stuck i mean but equating it to improv ben and i both come from improv backgrounds among other things many things we've done but but it makes sense in that sort of the game is how quickly can you identify the truth in what has now been set up in front of you right yeah and that

1:08:35sequence is such a dynamic like speed rounding of well what would that type of fish be and what would they do and how would they do it and what would they sound like and the escalation of that and the build of that and the series of correct identifications that all feel right to the audience which then leads into the most emotional moment in the movie to me which is more effective because it's coming off of nema realizing marlin's coming for him right yeah it is verbal gags in a row that are all character and behavioral that was steve job's favorite part of the movie yeah well

1:09:08because it's it should just be the most like shoe leathery kind of this is this is just story weight how to get from point a to point b and instead all of it is is personal well i gotta give most of the comedy props to bob bob's just so funny he he could just see spitting out and i'm such a structuralist bob peterson right yeah that uh i think again when we're together we're both able to like speak each other's language but we're able to like i was just you know how does this build was my probably my

1:09:40biggest driver even though i'm still trying to be funny bouncing off of him and he's like how to make it funnier and but he cares just as much about building but we because the emphasis on the sentence was different for us um that just showed you how strong we were chemistry wise working together and then i'm such a i'm such a uh film score nut that i'm always thinking about is there a way the music can do this is there a way the music can be involved is there a way and uh it's one of thomas newman's best scores yeah yes and i was and i i wrote to two pieces of music or two composers um

1:10:17all the time for nemo and that was uh 90 of the time or 80 of the time was anything thomas newman had scored because i just was like and so he became a character in my mind any in particular though any jams shawshank and but particularly meet joe black oh that's a great score score i mean it goes over the top at the end and that's why i love it i mean that movie's crazy yeah and then um and then i would listen to nine inch nails the fragile oh yeah all right because i kept saying i'm this is is this have you ever met trent yes yeah i told him that i told him that on the red

1:10:51carpet that's so funny uh year but uh i just was so afraid my biggest fear for making that movie was that it was going to be treacly and be an after school special because we had to go cute for a lot of it and innocent and sweet and adorable and i just was worried about tone and the balance being right because my i grew up in the ocean i grew up being scared of the ocean but fascinated by at the same time i remember putting on a little diving mask and you know in knee-deep shallow water and

1:11:24ducking my head under and then being freaked out because things started to disappear so quickly in the void and you didn't know what was behind you and i all and i that was the first thing i ever typed was and it's the i think it's still in the first page of the script i just typed the void and i wanted that that was the big bold the two big bold things at the time i remember really early on was like i want to like not do the circle of life fuck that it doesn't exist things are out of life is one of the most bananas it's gorgeous it's very impressive but you're like i'm sorry what the

1:11:57animals have a king the theory that some of them don't talk i just like things are out to get you it's a predatory world and there's a reason we're always scared about our kid crossing the street and so the ocean is the perfect you have to live in it but you can't you have to be afraid of it all the time so i said can i keep that alive throughout the movie and then the other thing was can i make the parent the main character not the kid and that seemed radical at the time it's a fair point yeah usually it's like the kid loses the parent either permanently or temporarily

1:12:29and has to figure something out to grow up so that's um and that happens in emo and that's why i listened to the fragile because it would remind me how dark the and i found out from him that he wrote that album listening to la mare and debussy was suicidal when he wrote la mare by the ocean side and so the whole thing has this dark dark deep connection but it would ground me like that that's that 10 20 percent would just bring me back to going don't be afraid to be scary don't be afraid to be tense don't be afraid to be unpredictable because that's part of the point of this movie is that

1:13:01you're in the real world and the whole driving thing of this main character is fear and we have to be afraid too or else it's just theory it's a it's it pervades the movie but not too much you know like it doesn't overwhelm it which obviously i know with a lot of the movies you guys make that can happen right where it's like oh woody's woody's coming off a little too agitated or villainous or whatever you know anxious and same with the marlin marlin's too worked up like he's too negative whatever there's a balance to find every time i watch nemo and he gets lost i go this

1:13:38is impossible right like he'll never fucking find the stakes couldn't feel i remember when i'm more insurmountable i was still trying to solve the movie and bob peterson came on about a year or two in and he was like the thing that blows me in mind about this movie is oh you just spend the whole time going how yeah yeah yeah which is i mean which is the magic of a lot of this you know like dory too uh just like you know and wally like these movies where it's like a great distance is going to be traveled by a tiny thing and every time you're kind of like i don't know how they're gonna do

1:14:08this and characters with toy story obviously pretty much always is like hey the toy got taken across the street and you're like across the street the um the machinations of the moving truck chase and toy story was mine it's so good and i boarded that out roughly and then everybody came in to clean it up because we had to do it under duress and i realized then and it's only proven all the way told toy story five that that comes more readily to me is the crazy engineering of how things will

1:14:41all fit did you and monsters inc too did you have any because a monster zinc also has the like we're somehow crossing dimensions and you know all that and there's i'm not the only person but that's just if you had to get down to where what comes out of me the easiest not easy but easiest is how is this going to ultimately pay off how can i hide it as a setup how can it like not be seen right away is that the right brain thing is that just i don't know my dad was a yeah it was an engineer chemical engineer who was basically worked for a skunk's work top secret company that could solve

1:15:14had to solve things for the government when they run out of time so i think i got that from my dad what did your mom do my mom was a frustrated uh actress so you're like spielberg the artist and the scientist yeah he and i've actually had that comparison and uh but i realized i don't know science and math like my dad did so that part of the muscle goes towards abstract story building yeah story structure so i think that's why people would love me to stay in that lane because i'm good

1:15:45at it but you live long enough and you're not interested in scratching the same itch all the time like i'm also a hopeless romantic i'm also a sci-fi nut i'm also uh love drama just good drama and in in new ways of finding tension and drama and so exploring stuff that wouldn't come readily to me but i would love to see as a as a as an audience member is why i take chances whether they hit or miss on carter or blink is it that's making me feel as adventuresome and satisfied as i was on the first

1:16:21two animated movies i ever got to touch is there an ultimate at least i shouldn't say ultimate is there at this moment and it's your most eager to scratch that you haven't gotten to within your films yet because you've mostly worked in sci-fi when you've done live action even even in tv you've done some like you did three body and you did uh yeah i also argue that toy story is low-key sci-fi yeah a little bit um something i i clearly lean that way um i i try not to think too hard about it i'm i've been enjoying not having anything planned i didn't plan toy story 5 i didn't plan

1:16:55any of the tv shows that got offered to me and i didn't plan the scripts that suddenly i read and i was like oh i want to try and make that you know there's for a long time i was trying to get this movie made called uh revolver that was written by kate trefi yeah we that came up in our research is that that's the beatles like still stopping in alaska or something yeah it's a great script and uh and i got i got paul i got the beatles estate okay for four songs i got ethan and maya hawks yeah which songs uh they were pre revolver because it's all about because that alaska moment

1:17:28happened and they hadn't released revolver yet nobody knew that they were making that and uh um so it was like stuff from uh rubber soul and and stuff like that and uh but uh i got ethan it was a kind of a paper moon relationship between father and daughter so i got ethan hawk and mine hawk to attach to it and nobody bit this was this was right before and then during the pandemic and so just the whole world just rocked and nobody bit yeah and it's still to me like such an obvious

1:17:59win of a movie you never see the beatles in it yeah right which is always it's all about this fear right because this really happened there was a in 64 i think there was a nine point something earthquake it's the largest earthquake ever on the north american continent or around in alaska right alaska if you go to alaska they never shut up about it there's signs everywhere but like yeah but there was they were still in recovery a year later and there was one functioning hotel that you could stay and the beatles were flying to japan to do to do their last nobody knew their last

1:18:32touring and they got rerouted by a typhoon and had to land in alaska and they stayed for a night and a day in this uh hotel in anchorage in 1965 and so the kate trefice from anchorage and her mother was there when that happened and so she sort of elaborated because her mother had a crush on george harrison so her main heroine character is just her goal is to get into that hotel and sleep with george harrison and it's this beautiful coming-of-age story just beautiful and i still

1:19:05wish i could make it and uh was it chairman spaceman what was that was something searchlight asked me to be involved in okay and so i was heavy on the uh and that was before i read blank so it was my my shot at getting something else made and so it was from an based on an article uh from uh the new yorker and uh and we worked on many iterations of the script with the author of the of the piece and and he's a great script writer and it just it was clear what he wanted and and what searchlight wanted

1:19:40weren't matching and to be fair the world changed like to do something about a billionaire going into space is was fascinating and then it just became off-putting and then it became reality yeah and so it just was one of those ill-timed things those those ill-timed things now i'm seeing here in 1994 you worked on the episode cookies ookies lookies what a tv show two stupid dogs oh oh wow okay and that was important that was uh while i was working on toy story early days and so uh i had

1:20:13friends now there were two stupid dogs in that show one big one long i've had the griffin david relationship it was a friend of pete doctors that was working on that show and he needed some boarding done and we just wanted to help out so it's always so funny with animators where like you look back in their career it's like all this great work and it's like yeah and then also just some random cartoon that was a good show that was a funny show i remember that show the the uh secret squirrel segments on that rings about so you were the prime audience i mean we were like seven years old or

1:20:43whatever you worked on the back sheet mighty mouse oh yeah right what was that experience that was a murderer's row of people on that show if you could you couldn't hire that's pretty much your first credit yeah yeah yeah um i right out of college uh my friend jim murden who would go on to be a major director uh on simpsons uh and rich moore were working on it and uh rich moore who did ben wreck it ralph yeah that's right yeah we all went to school together and uh so they were uh ralph

1:21:14had this uh pattern of coming into hollywood it's all through the 70s into the 80s where he would come into hollywood off of just his fritz the cat uh fame or lord of the rings fame and get money enough to get something started and then burn all those bridges and then leave town once it failed and then wait for the regime change which would happen about every five years until nobody knew who he was again except for his credits and then he'd come back out to california and start over again and we were on this iteration because he had worked on the original mighty mouse as a young guy

1:21:49okay and i think it was tarry tunes was here in new york i think if i have it right he worked on it new york wasn't it was it in tarrytown maybe maybe you guys are in front of the yeah we got we got devices but anyway he got the rights to it and wanted it to be remade so john chris felushi was his it was his guy bruce tim was on there vicky jensen worked there oh those are yeah like all of us became somebody in animation but no but we were all nobodies then it was crazy it was a crazy time

1:22:19we worked in an abandoned uh preschool in van nuys that's what that show feels like yeah it feels like it it came out escaped something and the intercom system was still working and he took ralph took the principal's office and he was this huge guy from the bronx i think i want i don't want to if he's bronx or brooklyn yeah that's the vibe he had um out of burro and he had a bit of a a lisp and you would he he considered us 20 something he wanted writers cheap so this is like 86 87 so we would have legal pads and pencils and we'd sit in this windowless teacher's lounge that

1:22:55clearly had still all the smoke from cigarettes from all the previous teachers that had ever worked there in it and uh he he would just hit the intercom and go guys in my office right now and and suddenly pick up and you'd go into his office but he would keep pulling out his old friends that he had made in the 70s so one day he was like guys this is frank for that i'd like you to meet frank for that and we're like and it's guys chain smoking comes in we're like eating frank for setta and then then they guys because this is this is amos he sells cookies and it's like and famous amos comes in dressed exactly dressed exactly like he is on the package yeah with the samples in

1:23:32a in a bag he had cookies on and it turns out he worked in wow in post and sound when he worked on and he was one of the sound engineers are thinking for one of his movies in la and then he's he was and he said and ralph was saying like yeah he's trying to tell me he's gonna start the cookie business i'm like get out of here and like you want to put money in the cookie business i'm not gonna put money in the cookie business he was like a music manager and he made the cookies as like gifts to his clients yeah and everyone's like yeah sell the cookies my guy and he and he made a killing uh jim would say uh it was every day was an interesting story working yeah is there anything

1:24:06i i want to let you go because yeah we already have a second we're gonna chat with you a little more in depth about um john carter obviously at the screening tonight so obviously we can sort of dip into that more there but yeah what it would any anything else you wanted to bug him because you terrified the two stupid dogs question yeah that was really important that was high on the list it's been sitting i don't remember it at all i really don't know you you texted me after finding me mo and you said you guys got things mostly correct oh sure yes i'm wondering if there is a thing because we were talking right before we started recording about how when you do these press

1:24:40tours you have to condense stories and then you create a myth that then circulates for decades and you have to correct your own myth is there a thing that you have heard us say as you terrifyingly have been listening to the episodes on you yeah please don't do that that you feel like we have helped to be fair i haven't listened to the carter or the blink because i can't mind it's too soon therapy it's too soon for me yes yes uh but uh i can't remember what the nemo things were there was nothing there was nothing egregious it was just more like oh that's a little off it can be is there a myth that you wish you could correct here we're trying to get you to say

1:25:15something so we can fire jj are we're really trying to fire oh i see yeah yes he spelled your name pandrew stanton can we fire him for that yeah no p he is silent p is silent um i would have texted you with the correction if it was that egregious no i always let jj know that he did a good job he's a good he's a good guy he's a good guy yeah and you're you're you're very very very nice to bless us with your presence on this show you're really it's a hilarious show i i'm showing my age i don't get half the references half the time please anytime you want to get one of the references

1:25:48but that's just text me and i'll explain the references but i'm impressed i'm impressed with your film knowledge thanks i'm impressed with your film analysis that means a lot thank you impressed with your running gags as i said i mean i truly a lot of the analysis comes like backwards retrofit from hearing you explain things over the years like a a wildly disproportionate amount of it comes from the way you have kind of open sourced your sense of story specifically well again it keeps coming back to uh i have a sixth grade education and i if i can get it then i feel there's hope for

1:26:24anybody else to get it so i kind of try to pass it on that's about that's that's our podcast but with like a second grade education uh thank you for doing this thanks guys thank you and uh looking forward to tonight i'm excited i've never seen the film on the screen since and i was so you're gonna do it we're gonna tough it out oh yeah all right i it's it's not hard for me to watch okay not far for me to watch any of my movies i know why i made them and i know why i made the choices and i don't usually regret the choices i just some people are like no no i'll never i never watch my stuff back like i'm

1:26:57like that about the most like i can't watch toy story 5 again sure because you just watch like 5 billion times yeah i literally one of our editors uh assistants kept track and i'd seen it 95 times oh my god so i mean to be fair i've seen some of your movies close to that many times because so maybe it's to be fair i've seen it 91 times like uh like nemo took me seven years before i was to go watch some of it's just because you just want to see it like do i have even fighting chance of seeing it as a movie yeah all of them are a yearbook they're just a yearbook like i remember

1:27:28where i was when i shot that i remember every choice and when it's long enough of a time passing you uh it becomes fond memories it's like opening up an old photo album and you're just like oh yeah and it triggers memories that you had forgotten about it so it's very just great that's just great yeah that's lovely but like just collecting all the photos that i'll oh yeah is uh it was like i i found stuff i forgot i had which was exciting are you in touch with anyone left on that oh yeah samantha more than i i just uh and she's having so she i gave her such kudos uh

1:28:01for cersei pretty incredible probably the highlight highlight of the movie and it's a great movie and i'm so happy for her it's like it's like a whole nother generation is learning how great she is absolutely and um um friends defoe i haven't talked to him in a while but uh he's a good new yorker pal and um we all loved working on that movie and it was hard but it was we enjoyed it till the day it came out and then and uh we all had plans which i'll talk about tonight about what we were i found the outlines

1:28:33for the other two yeah and i'm like oh we really knew what we were where we were going and what we're going to do and so there's any there's a lot of not a lot but the critique some of the critiques about the first one are actually because we just knew where we were going with the second one and we weren't going to give away all the marvels or or do what you would normally do in a standalone film so which you know is a naive mistake of ours to have done but i'm excited to see it i'm excited to see all the stuff you dug up especially with an appreciative crowd i realize this may never

1:29:03happen again i mean sold out sold out right away right away at a second showing as i said we had right we are doing a second showing yeah sweet thanks guys thank you thank you so much sir blank check with griffin and david is hosted by griffin newman and david sims our executive producer is me ben hosley our creative producer is marie bardi salinas and our associate producer is aj mckeon this show is mixed and edited by aj mckeon and alan smithy research by jj birch our theme song is by lane montgomery in the great american novel

1:29:40with additional music by alex mitchell artwork by joe bowen ollie moss and pat reynolds our production assistant is minick special thanks to david cho jordan fish and nate patterson for their production help head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit join our patreon blank check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes follow us on social at blank check pod subscribe to our weekly newsletter checkbook on substack this podcast is created and produced by blank check productions

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