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Interview: Pixar's Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera

Carl Fredericksen in Up
  • Posted at 5:13pm
  • 05 October 2009
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 2 comments

I met Pete Docter, 41, co-director and writer of the new Pixar/Disney animation Up, and his producer Jonas Rivera, 38, to talk about their influences, the Pixar philosophy and the process of making a film about a septuagenarian, Carl, flying to South America in a house tied to a bunch of helium balloons, with an eight-year-old boy scout on board…

AC: In Up there is an early shock, when, during a montage, we discover that an adult couple cannot conceive. Was this your attempt to create a "Bambi's mother moment"?

JR: "I've been thinking about Bambi's mother since the day I first saw it!"

PD: "We sort of backed into that. We started with the image of the house floating away. That was the central core. We worked backwards to a theme, which was this man who has never gotten to go on this amazing journey, and he worries that he failed as a husband because he never took his wife on this amazing adventure.

"So we realised we had to show that relationship, and the downs were as important as the ups. We did an experiment where we took [the infertility moment] out, and you didn't feel it as deeply; you didn't feel the need that Carl has to go on this journey, and even to connect with this kid, Russell, having never had any of his own. It worked nicely as a set-up to that, as well."

How are younger audiences reacting to it?

PD: "The kids I've seen don't react to that moment at all. The 'no kids' beat, and the fact that the wife dies, they just kind of sit there.

"A friend of mine was talking to his kid, who really loved the movie and laughed and thought it was great, and the dad said that he found it really emotional too, and the kid said, 'Yeah, me too.' And the dad was surprised, and he asked, 'Which parts?' And the kid said, 'When the bird got bit on the leg, that was really sad.' It was cool that kids connect on a different level."

All the classic family movies operate on two levels, one for the kids, one for the mums and dads.

JR: "You mentioned Bambi: as a kid that was very much a different film than the one that plays now. You react to it very differently as a parent. It changes the way you see it."

Can we talk about the technicality of the 3D, because it's getting to a point now where audiences expect computer animation to be in 3D. Do you feel hidebound by that expectation?

JR: "We don't feel bound by it, because we don't let ourselves be. In fact, we chose creatively, and technically, to ignore it. We did enough work to make sure it would work, and that it would look really good. We built a stereoscopic team of guys that are super passionate about it, and we gave them three rules and they just followed us - but we wanted to make sure that it worked in both mediums. I guess you could feel hamstrung by that if you let that drive it, but we didn't. We put the 3D in the service of the story.

"I hope that's what other directors and producers do, because if that's the case I'll go and see anything in 3D. If not, if it's just about the gimmick, or about the technology, it'd be like saying, I'm OK with paying money to go and see a screen saver as opposed to a CG movie. But you don't go to see the computer graphics.

"I love that Toy Story was the first computer graphic feature and we're very proud of that, but we're more proud of the fact that kids still walk around carrying Woody dolls. That's what really warms us up.

"So we're gonna continue to do that, and if the audience wants to see a movie in yellow crayon, we'd think about it, and maybe do a movie in yellow crayon. I love that 3D drives people to the theatre - that's the movies, that's what we grew up doing. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark with people standing in the aisles. That was great! If we can drive that, or help that, right on, let's go!"

Pixar/Disney have announced that next feature The Princess and The Frog will be a return to hand-drawn animation. Are you assuming the kids will see past the technology and enjoy the story?

JR: "Absolutely. I've been showing my three-year-old daughter the Mickey Mouse shorts from the 30s, and she loves them. She doesn't say, 'Gee, these are good for the 30s'! They're just funny to her, and sweet.'

PD: "Yeah. I was talking to Joe Grant, who I got to know…he's in his 90s, but back at Disney he got to work on all the Silly Symphonies, Snow White, Dumbo, all those…and was talking about how the popularity of animation comes in these waves. About every eight to ten years they get very popular and then they die out for a while and then they come back."

JR: "Animation tends to start eating itself, and you see the same patterns, and that will eventually bring it down, and then somebody comes along and does something new, and it pops it back up: The Little Mermaid may have been one of those points where what was old was new again."

PD: "We've analysed to death what happened there - a lot of [Pixar] guys, Brad Bird, John Lasseter, were at Disney at the time, and it's great hearing their stories about it. They sort of fell into routines, and started asking themselves, 'What would Walt have done?' "That's where we have an advantage, being Pixar and still relatively new, we're blazing a trail as opposed to trying to follow something. Every time we do one of these we try to make it new and different, so that we're not repeating ourselves, so almost everything we do, we have to come up with some way of working that we've never done before. There's always some technical challenge, like the balloons, or some story challenge…"

Do animators tend to be solitary personality types?

PD: "You see that a lot. You talk to our head of story, Ronnie del Carmen, he almost has an obsessive compulsion to draw. The animators tend to be frustrated actors, some of them are more outgoing, and a lot of them are kinda shy, but they express themselves so originally and fully through their work."

JR: "It's sort of like The Lost Boys…all this love of showbusiness and animation and I always wonder how many more of them are out there that we haven't found! Or haven't found us!"

PD: "It is a unique group of talents that you need to have. Where we are it's less about draftsmanship and more about the inquisitiveness that makes you take apart tape recorders and disassemble your lawnmower or whatever, that kind of curiosity about how things work, and computer savviness."

JR: "And a sense of wonder, you know. That feeling you got when you saw those movies: I will never forget seeing Star Wars, or Snow White, ever. I remember the feeling like it was yesterday. I was six. And I've always thought, that is my job."

John Lasseter says he always hires people that are smarter than him. There must be an incredible hunger for the next wave of talent. You were once that wave…

PD: "And now there's a bunch of new, smarter people! We're the old guard."

JR: "We've been very lucky, because of the success of the early films, we've attracted a lot of great talent, top animators and designers and computer scientists and programmers, so it's somewhat built in: people just come. Every day there's something new, and you're almost a little nervous - what is it? What is the next wave going to do? Where's it gonna go? The sky's the limit, so…"

PD: "Brad [Bird] brought in a bunch of people when he did The Incredibles, people we'd not worked with before, and they were amazing talents, Pete Sohn, Teddy Blackman…"

JR: "That was the biggest wave, the Incredibles wave."

PD: "And his way of working really shook things up too…"

JR: "We almost treat it like a live action movie, we build a set - say, Andy's room in Toy Story - and we get a camera, we actually 'location-scout' it, check out all the angles with the characters on the bed, or whatever, and we take that back and start building a layout based on that, and shots comes and go.

"Whereas Bird is like, 'This is the exact shot I want, then I want this shot, and then this shot, and I don't want to see one pixel over to the right. He's precise! It took a while for Pixar to get that. There was a reason for it. The scope of The Incredibles was so big: for example, Monsters Inc had 31 sets, The Incredibles had 89, that's a lot of work. Brad was willing to sacrifice flexibility for scope."

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  • Posted on 05 November 2009
  • at 10:20pm
  • by freckletooth

Andrew Wherve you been

  • Posted on 09 October 2009
  • at 10:00pm
  • by lastgang

A welcome return of Andrew's blog - it's been missed

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