A Conversation with Andrew Stanton

We have no idea how to start these we don't there's not a there's not a format no theme. I do a quote from the movie. I butchered 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 a WTF. Yeah. Yeah. 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. You got here in 25. That's a workman like train. You know, the R she's nobody's favorite. It was 30 seconds from my apartment and then about it's very close. 25 seconds from a dream. Yeah. From the stop here to get in there. It's just ideal. Trundles along though. Like you're never on the RL. 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 time. No, I free borrows local all the way. You often say that the Q is kind of default the best train. Q's great train. Not your personal favorite. Not personal favorite. It's a great train. Why is the Q? So is an express. Oh, yeah. And I think that the line that goes down in Brooklyn is very attractive. Like it's very it's very nice sort of. Oh, the curves of that Q. No, it's outside. Yeah. The outside is really nice. It's it's a special. If you want me to get really nerdy, there's not a lot of parts of the subway that are like the Q was the Q was a very, very old steam rail road. So it's just open cut in the ground. So it's not elevated, which you know is cute, but like you got to go up and down these stairs, you know, and it's not underground. It's really nice. The Brighton line. It's the fan of the 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 cat, a live cat to make sure the cat like didn't die. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I didn't know. Yeah. The cat was like the the Leica was like they put in all the cage box and shot it down the aisle. And I mean, the other guys were like, we got her. 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 off. Does anyone still use them? I think a lot of places still use them. We did when we were building the studio for Pixar in the late 90s. We did a wired magazine was kind of au courant at the time. And they 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're like, let's put that in the building. And Steve was like, no, no, no, no, no, we got whittled down to like, can we just have one loop? As it just goes nowhere and we just pay the receptionist to like put a little envelope and then to a tube and shoot the capsule and then just do it every 15 minutes. And just go back down to her. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. I mean, we just have that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was in Chicago recently and I bought weed. The weed shop. You know what? That actually makes a lot of sense. 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 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 Emoryville. Right. It's a North Oakland piece of real estate that's about a mile, maybe a quarter 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 it's a lot of other factors but it also kept and 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 people. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's become kind of tech broy everywhere. But there's nobody trying to make movies. So it kind of keeps you appreciative of what you get to do every day. We're here with Anderson who, and this is a fact, is the director that we have been covering for the last six weeks. That's so true. That's correct. Yeah. Just six features. I should have opened with this but explain to me or can art can I just, yeah, please can I just say can for the rest of this episode, can I call you flick lever 98? Yeah. Absolutely. Because that, wait, you listen to a Patreon episode. That's it. I'm sorry. It wasn't a big one. I was big into it. Yeah. Sorry. I was that type. That's great. You should have learned with that when you met me, Griffith. A gentleman's character. We should have stopped the back 48. At first, I thought there were 97 lovers. But then I realized, Oh, the year you made it. It was also the phone came out. It was the year the phone came out. Yeah. Yeah. I needed that flick lever 98. You can indeed call me. You're the one person who's allowed to call me that. Yeah. 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 being signifies you're not the director. The way explained is right. We came up with it because that's my beer. And then that's a question. Because during Toy Story, the team that had been doing commercials together was John Alacita P. 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 always say I'm like the devil on the shoulder and Joe Ramp, 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 without knowing it because we were all learning what the roles were on Toy Story. So after we said, can we make this official? And so I said, well, let's make sure it's not Disney only new dual directors. But 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'm not pushing my vision. I'm pushing the vision of the director and I'm helping keep moving a little off. 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 that's unique to Pixar. It's just it's something and people get hung up on to this day, but I think because of the unique. It's all semantics. But we've always been consistent since the first movie that like sometimes we they're and I'm the same way. Like I found out on Nemo, I worked better having Leonkrich who had always had as an editor to confer with when John was busy to have him at the ready. So he came on board like the last year and a half. Does every Pixar project have a co-director? No, it's so it's a second choice. Right. It's it's lit. There is not a stamped way it's done. And 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 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 like yes, there is no star chamber of people going you've got to do this. And everybody wants there to be even internally picks that people want that to be with Disney. But there isn't. It's like we are we take the high risk we take as 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 will 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's a John Lassiter movie. You know it's always bugs life. Toy Story 3 is a is a Lee Anchorage movie. Toy Story 4 is the Josh Cool 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, 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 your 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 like a sports team. I know I get it. It's a dynasty. 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 let there is a one person that is running that movie. The Barbie's a Greta Gerwig 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. That's true. - And we did, right, we did Ron Clements and John Musker. - And we did Brad Bird. - Yeah. - We've done, like, and Clements, I know you get it. - Right, no, no, but where is it? - You're just using the trap of vague. - Absolutely. - Okay, but here's my big question. - Why was Red's dream never in front of a movie? - Like what the, like David brings up every day. - Why can't Red have his moment? - Everybody was probably, I can't speak, 'cause I, why, but I speak for Red. - No, I just, I wasn't there when it was made. - Okay, fair enough, right? - So really, I have a feeling it was because it was a downer ending. - It is a downer ending. - In fact, you 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 a movie. - 'Cause I get people amped out. - They put all the classic shorts in front of a movie. - Nobody wants to depress the audience right before you start rolling. - It's your point. - 'Cause that's your favorite? Did we realize that? - Look at, we loved it on its own, but as a lead into tee up something. - Yeah, sure. - It was just something that I saw at a young age for some reason, it must have been on some compilates. - Yeah, I don't know why. Tiny Toy Story is very taken with. - Well, that just shows you were destined for art house movies. - Yes, seriously. - It's true, it's like the French sort of vest. - Yes, it's very much. - Existential movie that sparked for me. - Yeah. - Yeah. - But you didn't even work on Red, so I won't hound you about Red Street. - But you were the second employee? Is that correct? - Second enemy. - Second enemy, the animation department, I was the second. - And the ninth employee second enemy. - So what was the first thing you worked on? - I was hired with this thinking that we had no idea that there would be 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 know is it could look photorealistic at the time we thought it did, now our eyes. So trained, it looks like crap. But we were the first of maybe only two other houses that could do that medium for possible advertising. It was the only way to make an income. So they had, I got hired to animate and think up commercials. And so my first thing was a trident commercial with an ice cube that played jazz while a mint leaf scat sang on the top of the game. - The 90s, this was hoax. This was when we did, we did have it figured out. - We had it, got it. - We had it, got it. - What happened to saxophones? The 90s, everything was just like, there needs to be a saxophone in this commercial in this place. You know, the WB is gonna launch all jazz like, you know. - Why isn't there a blue M&M? And why isn't he voiced by John Goodman? We had it figured out. 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 pay extra to get them back. - Yeah, that's true. Yeah, if it was the, what's the commercial, would they need the air conditioner? I'll call now. What's that one? Sears? You know, I don't remember this one. - I'll show you later. - I've always, I wanted to pitch this to Disney, like the 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. - A service where it's just, this is June 21st. - Yes. - Show me TGIF, 1997. - Yes. - I want to, right, the block. - I want the whole experience of just having it all. - Exactly. - The whole point commercial, right? - Yes. - Yes. - I would think that would be a very profitable thing to do. - It would be incredible. - Yeah. - I used to, 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 VHSs and I put it in and immediately knew every word of every commercial. - Isn't that crazy? - It's incredible. - No, okay. Are you baseball fan? - This is all I care about. - Fair weather, but I was, you're gonna hate me 'cause I'm a soft fan. - That's fine, I'm gonna rage, I don't care. - I was just throwing 'cause you're up in Oakland, if you feel for the A's, but no, you don't realize. - Many people I work with are still in mourning. - Yeah. - And don't want to talk about it. - Rip A's. - Okay. - All right, all right. - Can I? - All right, interesting. The studio with us, I'm David Sims, are we here? - I'm Griffin and Mike. - I'm great. - Ben Hossley's here. - Hey there. - Looking great, by the way. - He's always looking at you in a while, but he's looking particularly good. - All right, for the listener, this is our first time seeing Griffin and since End of June or whatever. - The answer restarted, I mean, I went away, I come back, we're ending it. - Yes. And Andrew's joining us, Toy Story Five has come out. - Come and win, now it's done great. - Not all about Spider-Man right now. - It is so funny that you just made a cash billion dollars and it's like a month later, it's like Spider-Man in the Odyssey. - What are you talking about? - You did get to be the highest grossing film of the year. - So far. - Yes. - I mean, it's not gonna be that at the end of this thing. - What you got to be- - Or was it anointed? - Sure, yeah. - You got that little badge, I have nothing to complain about. - It seems the movie did, beyond expectations. - Beyond expectations. - Totally beyond expectations. - It did Terrific. - High-scrusting Toy Story Film. - Yeah, before inflation. - Yeah. - Made my daughter very sad. - Really? - Yeah, in a way that she couldn't articulate 'cause she's only five. - Oh well, I was- - But I don't count five as movie going yet. - Well fair enough. - I guess she can go. - Just a dark theater is- - It can be traumatizing for a child. - In my child's defense, she's a very experienced theater girl. We see lots of movies together. And usually when we exit the theater, she's just kinda like- - Best movie, great, loved it. Every minute was great, obviously, 'cause we're seeing things like Super Mario or what are some anime. - Go, go, go. - The great sports drama, Goat. Toy Story 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 interpersonal 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. - Yeah, she's very wrapped up in the Star Fox drama. Flippy frog. And like the emotions in Toy Story Five are subtler. And like our, 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. Like I think Toy Story Five, she was like trying to process it all. Like what was going on with Monham? - Hopefully they'll watch the movie again when they're older and it'll be different for him. - No, it's 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. - Yes, you're Jesus. - I know. I just need to correct myself from fire from this podcast. Here's a red stream related question. And then I want to get more focused on that. What's red stream? - Red stream, you cited the Pixar show. - Oh, red stream, I'm sorry. I was hearing red stream. - Can we get the shorts back in front of the movies? - Oh yeah, sure. The movies are a little longer, I feel like. The Pixar movies have inflated in length. - There was a period of time where we had a lot more being made 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, though it's starting to feel like a good year. - It's still in good? - It may come back, but they're not cheap to make. - Yeah. - And 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 hard and hard to justify. - Wasn't the, was it obvious? - Sorry, wasn't it often the idea that like, would the shorts you're testing some sort of? - Sometimes, but we're at a place now where it's kind. - Now you can, I mean, the stuff we could do, like I was away for 10 years or eight years, but 10 if you can't go in, like when last time, I was like in production at, and I thought we could do everything looks wise back then in 2014, 15, and now I just like as a kid in a candy store, working on this one, I was just like, wow, we can do anything. - 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 cracked it. It's never gonna look better than this. Every single thing has technically been accomplished now on this film. - Yeah. Yeah, I'm of the belief that like about, yeah, maybe 10 years, maybe a little longer. It's all still costly, just manpower wise, but you can, if you can think of it, you can make it. It's just in the eye of the beholder now. It's, if you don't like the look of something, you gotta 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 love, I mean, I love production. I love working with other artists. I've always been that kid that love putting on a show in the backyard, kind of equivalent, or making her movies 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. As you just mentioned before, I'm not gonna give anything. Away, you're 40. - I am. - No, no, time gets faster at 40. And then it gets even faster at 50. And so four years at 60 is just too long because then suddenly half a decade's practically over. And I can count on one hand how many more times I could do this. It's time that's made me kind of anti-animation at this point. - Here's the kind of thing 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 talked about this a lot and how growing up you never specifically were interested in 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. It's easy to look back to 2020 now. I'll go, I was jack of all trades and master of none. I was going to be an actor, I was going to be a musician, I was going to be an artist. I could do all three of those things and none of them it great 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 definitely love the arts and I went to the movies like fricking church every, it was in your master's shoes. Yeah, it's so it's like what sports are for sometimes to bond parents and the kids and the family. Movies were that our whole family would jump into the station where I can go up what we set up the line to the movieplex and we didn't even think about what was that playing. We would just go see it and you worked at an art house theater as well, right? By the time I got old enough to be employed. 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, it's so far before the internet, before knowledge of anything. They have handbooks. It 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 going 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 cowl arts and I learned that I learned oh my god, they teach animation. I draw, which is sort of like acting. I like to act. It's all about timing and I've got a 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. 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 and 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, the Hartford Hartford Art School, which is basically a business school and there's this one little oasis that took me and I learned in a kick 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 Cal out. So I have the rejection letter from one year and stuff. But then the conclusion of that story is you jump to 2003 Nemo comes out. Cal out wants to give me an award at the red cat theater. My sweet mate for one year was Don Cheetle. Don Cheetle is doing well. And so Don starts to presents me with the award and I give this same speech about how I found out about Cal out. And then I say at the end of it, I said, so whoever in 1982 in the admissions department decided to make a binder fluorescent orange. Thank you. And this guy in the back went, that was me. Wow. So it was very nice closure. Pop. That was closure. Cheetle was he, what was he doing? I think he was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cal out is like fame. Yeah. And I don't know if that means anything. No, no, means. Are you aware? I dropped out of Cal out. He dropped out of Cal out. How long did you go? I went for nine months. Just what made you drop out? 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? Steve Anker. Sandy McKendrick was running it when I was there. I can't believe that. I mean, who was sweet smell of success? Monty Helman was teaching at the time. James Benning, it was like an incredible faculty. You also didn't drive. I didn't drive. That's a problem in California. Andrew, it was maybe 50 percent of the reason I dropped out. Why didn't you go to school? Why didn't you go to school over here? Like the idea of going to a school where I could come back home and have the same people on the weekend. Almost that. I grew up here and almost everyone I knew was doing that. And I was feeling very defiant about I'm going to go somewhere different. I'm going to make a new life for myself. And I had I got locked on the calories 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. 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 time in my life. But I'm very familiar with all of the places you're listing. And also who the alumni are. Ed Harris, David also went to Cal Arts. Pewie Herman. Yes, Paul Rubens. Yes, absolutely. I know Cal Arts. I mean, for a hot minute with David Hasselhock. Really? That's true. These parents are incredible. And now somebody should write a book. Yes, Ellie. Yeah. And I know it's just like what was it like? You know, my roommate was a Joss Glenny Smith who was an actor. He's still working actor. Great. Yeah. Should we just stick on this? No, absolutely not. Okay. But 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 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 with, you know, the old adage of if you can get the script and the casting rights for a movie, then they're halfway there. It's kind of true also for your animators. You know, they they have the things that their strengths are and aren't and 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 we adopted at the very beginning of the whole studio was what Disney did, which you have daily's 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 about what I would think the character would or wouldn't do, everybody hears it. So they all think the same. And but there'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 the smarty pants in that shot. I never knew you could do that with a handle and that you could make it look like he's, you know, flipping them off or something. And that wouldn't fire them to like go. And so it's just a win-win. And so there's this sort of it's almost like summer stock like everybody's got to learn all the roles. Yeah. And 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 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 the defining aspect of your films in particular is 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 to animate, I feel like there's a lot of self-imposed challenges of like you go to the double A gang in Toy Story 5 is three characters that do not lend themselves to animation. They're characters that don't have traditional limbs. You know, two of them don't. One of them doesn't have a traditional face. Wally and Eve certainly. You talked a lot about with Nemo not wanting to cheat. Yeah. And and I kind of put the person eyes 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 extremity. But that's not a thing you consciously sort of throw at yourself. I'm not I'm not in the I mean, I'm sure there's an element of challenge that I just want for anything. I think I'm a little bit more it's it's more that I'm just not afraid of it. I just go with what logically makes sense to look at I was charmed like everybody else at least that was around of the time that they first saw that Luxo lamp. I was like there's so much personality in this simple lamp with this mic right now. And I felt seen 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 the original first season, like they were little adults. There was nothing kidified. Like I always have this theory. The Elma fucked it up for everything. Yeah, you're right. A kitty 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 so good. And without it was clever. Like green and so like the guys were tired New Yorkers. Yes, they tired and they're opening up their jackets. They like you want to buy a cute. Yeah. But anyway, what I was quickly going to connect to was how much the came of just doing an open mouth with your hand, just a hand puppet, like just taking a napkin 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've never thought you couldn't do it with under extreme logic. You logically just run there. It's always existed. So I've never really thought about it. But I do have arguments with, not arguments, but I have to like convince animators sometimes that I realize, oh, they don't all think like that. They have to logic it out. And I'm clearly more right-brained than 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 I'm not going to, I'm not going to left-brain this. It's an illness though about Pixar. The people are like, well, I want to impose reality on them. It's like, but we're outside of reality. It makes me 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 just want to go along for the ride or any movie I'm watching. So I'm just going like, all right, they're looking at one of the arguments that goes. That's good. Well, I'm always passionate because like, there's an asop's fable that starts out. There once was a sausage in a bird in a mouse and lives in a house. And you go, and it was amazing. If you start that way, everybody goes, okay, okay. And 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 think. It's not the story is bad. Well, you're just telling it badly. I think what Pixar movies sometimes 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. It's like, let's just enough let's expand out the world exactly like we live in a, we're inside of a child's brain. What could that look like? We're inside of the axiom or whatever. Like, there'll be some logic, but you need to embrace the fantasy as well. You guys can speak better this, but I can only surmise that because the gaming world is so immersive 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 breath. 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 that. Yes. Yes. Nolan did this interview recently. I just saw the Chinese interview. It's fucking incredible. Right. Where he said like, I think there is this problem of people feel like if they're able to recognize a trope of storytelling that invalidates it. That's such a weird, I mean, I, that's sad. Yes. But it's so true. And it's such a sickness and sort of modern media of now that we can slow everything down and look everything in a million ways. And, you know, like, you know, I can look at YouTube, but any clip I want to, 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 the patterns, you compliment them. If they work properly, because you go, that's fun. That this pattern challenge. I said this on Blue Sky, like an idiot. You know, I'm, I made a social media post, like, 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. You know, like, that's fine. I don't care that you, 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. I guess I'll get out of here. This is the, 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 bugs 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, I, it's, it was, it's his movie. 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 journey of screenwriter. Yeah. It was a second step. Yeah. Because it was where you sort of fall into it. I mean, bugs life was a chore for you or for everybody, for all of us, only in comparison to how, what's fascinating is we, I mean, all I remember during a bugs life 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, we kept saying we were like the young engineers that put a man on the moon in 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 bugs 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 from 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 in 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 you're, when you're in your next sibling came in when a new kid came on the playground, like, it just was so organic and natural. It was, like, literally striking oil. And so we never had that on a bugs life. It was a intellectual exercise. Like, what if we turned the ant and the grass up around its head, it could go a little seven samurai, it could go a lot of all these things, but like, just that was an intellectual left brain. Didn't evoke the emotion and the emotions. And I learned, and so it was, we got there, but it was always like, trying to draw water out of a stone. So I learned like, oh, it's to our benefit, especially if we're going to work on it for 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 to do it, not do it yet. Yeah. So that's why a lot of our movies sometimes take forever before we really start committing to them 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 in the first place. You know, the more I look back at that, I realize that the perfect 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 linear, but like, yeah, little bits. And then the other was we literally got, I had two versions, two other versions of Toy Story. We'd thrown it like two other, not like a whole whole tale, 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 the 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. And I was freaked myself out of like, I'm talking about it's November of 98. I'm doing post at Skywalker on Bugs 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 have 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 believe it if I hadn't. I'd like, I always put all those things in that era, but not so tightly together. And just to clarify with the listener, Toy Story 2 comes out in November of that same year you're describing like of 99. Yeah. It's made like we, I was writing pages on a Monday. It was delivered to 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. So it was just, it was insane. I don't know how we did. It is my default incredible at the movie. So good. It just doesn't really make sense that the movie's okay. Again, it's like if you said you all had the story and 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 is my answer. I answered this recently when the five drunk finance pros and Madrid asked me, you like movies? What movie you like? And then proceeded to drop three beers while I answered. But I think I've always pinpointed is that 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. Like let you, nobody was there to stop us. That's us left alone. Like that was 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. So like 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 empty nester. - It's fascinating. - So that's why you don't get with it right now. - John, you haven't had to be an empty nester. - Who's that drawing from? - Well, there was a range of people of ages. We had people that were already grandparents, people that were 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 and having to see them go away. - My kid's not going anywhere. She's gonna, you just keep telling yourself that. - Yeah, she's gonna go to the art joke in the family. It's like she'll go to mega-revers, or just 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, yeah, no, she can go to college. She can go to college. Like one neighborhood over mass hilarious. The twins, I'll just still live in the basement, right? They'll just, I don't know. We've got to bring up the twin connection. - Oh, what's that? - 'Cause I brought up to you, David, having twins. - I have twins. - I have twins, yeah. - Do you have three kids or three kids? - I have an older daughter and younger sons. - And how old are the sons? - They did just turn two. - Okay, so my younger brothers are identical twins. - Oh, so what happened to me happened to your family? - And what's gonna happen to your daughter? I'm telling you now. - Okay. - 'Cause you're gonna look back at photos when there are little toddlers through your twins, and you're gonna be able to say, who is who? - Right. - And she will. - Yeah, that's fast. - Like, you always knew you're so much. - 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 you? - Five years. - Okay, yeah, so your, my daughter 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 have been 10 years apart. So whenever there was a lineup of us, the pecking order was who was came out first and came out last. It's my kids were born one minute apart. - Wow. - And yet there was a C-section, you know, just one and the other. And it is nonetheless crazy that the younger one is the baby. - You were firm as the baby. - Of course he's the baby. - He's the baby in every way, he's littler. He's like, you know what I mean. - And they do. - My brother has all the signs of the baby brother, one has all the signs of a 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. And there was a story once where they figured out in their separate cribs how to push their cribs across the room. And then 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, it was like-- - This is horrifyingly plausible. - Hard feather. - Like the combined intelligence. And that was when they, they would speak baby talking to each other and you could hear in the inflections that they were actually having a back and forth conversation. - My kids do that. - It's fascinating. - It's weird. It's right, they babble stuff with each other and you're like, oh right, this is like communication like that we will never understand. It's very strange having twins. Twin parents get at me always. - Is that in the family in any? - Not at all. - On either side? - No, we always joke, right? 'Cause it's like, I should wear a t-shirt. Like, not in the family. We didn't do IVF, you know what I mean? 'Cause like, those are the questions. But it's the same thing as when someone says like, oh, I'm sick, right? And you're like, oh, I'm so sorry. So, do you like smoke cigarette? People immediately are like, is it gonna happen to me? What happened to you? They just sort of nicely start to ask questions like, and is it genetically like, do you guys have that? And it's the same with the twins. People like, does it run your family? Nope, just happened. We are older parent, like, you know, it was an old, apparently it's more common the older you get because your body basically just sort of starts, you know, getting rid of all the eggs, not to be like biological about it. But yeah, that's all. I don't know. - There's a part of Africa where people eat a certain yam that makes twin pregnancies incredibly common. I learned that. - They're just sick and shit up man. - I can send it to you. - Wow. - Yeah, what's the yam? How do I get something? Why do you want twins? I know it's working out really well for you. - A little bit. - It's working out okay, they're crazy. - Yes, it's a, parts of Africa, particularly, the Yoruba people in Nigeria have a diet rich in native yams and they also have hormones called phytogestrogens, which some people stimulate multiple egg production. Anyway, we have interest in here. - We're talking twins. - Not the movie, not the movie. - Okay, so we talked bugs life, we talked. - We're saying the, oh, the crunch of, right, yeah. - A bugs life you're consciously coming in as a screenwriter from the gecko. - I get, like, yeah, I learned screenwriting by watching Josh Weedon do it for the year and a half he worked with us. - Right. - And he was sort of at the top of his powers. - He was a boy, he was sort of, he was sort of a boy. - He was rising. - Right, right. - He was still rising. But it was obvious 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 Josh, and we spitballed 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 talked about it. It wasn't, and it sucked you in, like, it inspired me. Like, oh, there's 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 then I realized, oh, it's cinematic dictation. 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. - Just to fix it. - 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 just became determined to be good at that. And I was honest with somebody recently, I said, some of it was self-preservation because there was no guarantee this company was gonna last and that we were gonna be beyond, we were such a startup. So we didn't know how the movie was gonna do at the time. And I was like, I need to learn a trade. I can use somewhere else. (laughing) So I thought screenwriting is applies to other places beyond just, don't know how to computer animate. And so I just started doing it without anybody asking. Nobody was asking me to be the writer after Josh left for the last year. And by the time it was done, they weren't gonna 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 they said, okay. So Bugs Life was like the first time the officially okay that I could play that role. - And from the beginning. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And then right. 'Cause you're credited on Toy Story, you're credited on Monsters Inc as a writer, right? Was that just you and Pete or no Daniel Gerson, right? - Isn't the ledger on Monsters Inc. - Monsters is basically Daniel Gerson and let's see, Jim. - Jill Colton, Jeff Pigeon, Ralph Eggelston. I'm just looking at it. - There's a lot of story by, 'cause there's a lot of rebuilding by. And I just was part of their helping. I mean, I wasn't the founder of any of that movie. - 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 I can really take credit for was the engine is Screams. - Well, David, that's what it, that's what it really is. - 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? 'Cause that does feel foundational to you. - Well, it's why the Monsters do this. - You're right, but you're smarter and right now than any of us would have been. - No, but I am, I'm excited. - We were all in our 20s just learning how to do it. So it was a new story, it wasn't a buddy film. And we just had to learn how to, you know, I was, we were still reading every screenwriting but going to McKee classes. Like we were just, we were, you're watching our learn as you watched those first three movies. - I mean, a lot of what? Why I watch those movies is fascinating. 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 watching all of the DVDs that you guys put together, the talks that you guys have done, the commentaries. - I think we were so excited to learn. - Yeah, you guys were real sure we wanted to pass it on. - Right. - 'Cause that's, for a long time 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 identification of the 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, the story now kind of explains itself? - You can definitely tell. You just feel it. It usually evokes an involuntary response from not only yourself, but 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 person you're pitching to. And that tends to be the proof that there's golden in the hills. 'Cause 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 an infinitely fertile playground for Toy Story. - One of the reasons I think I get pulled in is because they've skipped the ABCs. Like they've gone straight to like other letters in the alphabet 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 win a million things for 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 no wow factor for go watching a toy movie. - It's a given now. 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 toyster 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 remember 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. We had a joke of like, if I have to read "Pokey the Little Puppy" one more time, I'm gonna kill somebody and like, just put, like that's where the humor starts to come from is like the mundane. And seeing it from that perspective. - 100%. - Look at this respectful we're being right now, right? - Yeah, I'll put them all in. - Like you could do a whole sequence just about being trapped in that Ziploc. - It's why those movies make people dizzy sometimes, right? Because these are intellectually developed conscious creatures that are basically little grownups living in a child's room, kind of bored all day, right? And 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 seeing the runner go over and feeling like the world's 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 grownups. This isn't for me. - We 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 to Pixar, there would have been two layoffs a couple of years prior. So everybody was kind of very savvy now to what layoffs felt like a company and it was getting me next. And so we treated, we did a scene of introducing Woody in the Andy's bedroom with everybody going, is it me, you know, who am I gonna, you know. And we suddenly loved like that we were capturing something about adult life, but the metaphor what it's like for the toys and it made complete sense. And we were told it was too juvenile by Disney at the time. So we had to act it. And everybody knows about the Black Friday and it not going well and everything like that. And that's whenever, that was year, you know, months of going down to what was supposed to be like adult humor or - To fight the no sad, you know. - And when we had to rescue the film to save our asses and we had like two weeks to try to resurrect it, we went back to that layoff scene and we said there's something Muppety and just really, which is now we all know is Toy Story now. But we said, we think our gut was right on that mojo and we're going back and it became Woody's meeting class to corrosion awareness. I mean, all that stuff, which is just not, none of it is inappropriate. And even as a small child, I recognize there was something funny in why are the cartoon characters talking like my parents? - Right, right, right. Yeah, that there, yeah, that there is a kind of clocking clock out by, should we ask about Finding Nemo? If you ask about the movie, he's directed. I mean, geez. - Yeah, we're asking a lot of general, but yes, Finding Nemo is a perfect movie in my opinion. - Yeah, I was just downhill from after that. - It's not true. Yeah, you followed up with Wally. Oh, you think of that, you know, piece of junk. You would have thought, you would have thought I had at the time. - Was that the feeling? - At the preview 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 going to say. - I did this before you did the Final Act change. - Yeah, and you know, again, learning curve. - Wait, wait, remind me, I'm sorry. - That the Final Act was, well, I'll let you explain. - Oh, sure. - You directed the phone, Wally. - It pretty much, scene wise, played out similar, 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 he put her together at the end. Or no, 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. - Which is the true kind of like, oh my god. - And your stomach. - So we knew it, you could feel it. And so, but I was at a, I was just, I was 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 up, tried everything. And, 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, Wally's more like Chaplin. Like, he changes everybody else and then you have to have the payoff of that. And then losing his identity at the end. It all seems obvious now. - No, it does. The losing is identity thing. It feels so obvious that it's making movies is crazy. 'Cause like you telling me that wasn't always part of the movie, I'm like, I can't believe that. - But if you think about it, when you start writing a movie, nothing was in the movie. And so of course, that's why I always equate writing to an archeological dig and it's very ethereal where you just feel like you're saying that the story already exists out there but I really do believe that it's very much like the angel in the marble and the Vinci or when a Michelangelo chipping it away and letting it fly and he always saw it in the cube of marble. And I've just seen that happen so many times. It picks out 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 and 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 Rashida Jones was doing press for the invite and she cited something that you said to her the mountain metaphor. But it was something to the extent of your job in constructing a story or finding what the story is is exploring every possible way. - Okay. - When you're trying to figure out the path around the mountain you're gonna go up it, around it, down it, whatever, just move the mountain. Like sometimes you just have to restructure and let something go. - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you're like, why are we, 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 maximum is in the middle of a place. - Right. - Yeah, you can easily trick yourself into thinking like that's cheating or that you're a failure for not 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 then the blink of an eye starts with a square from the whole 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 things are? - Yes, it's so fucking hard. - I've shaken out. - All I've known, my career, mostly, is stuff that I either was a party too, very from the get-go or was mine. And everything that gets criticized, everything that gets changed, everything that, you know, 'cause you take it personally even when you think you're not, 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, and I said, wait a minute, some of my favorite directors never wrote what they worked on. And I realized, oh, I don't have to die on this hill every time I make something. And so I started looking at things. Some of it was television, some of it was scripts. And 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 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 mind joy being on set. I enjoy the making up. The older you get, the less you're like, I'm not here to like talk about my career or look it back. Like I've got this much time left while I'm still standing. I'm still healthy and I love. I think you look back at your career and I apologize. But you know what I mean? Like I love the doing. And like, and I was like, it takes four years. And then I finally, you know, in the same building with the same people, like it can get a little maddening and you feel like time stands still. And I just love the camaraderie and the summer camp put on a show that you get on. And I love the brevity. I mean, 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 unburdened 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 enjoyable. It's taking a lot of things that I thought were burdensome 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 I get to use my muscles and I get to get outside to just work on a TV show. Try different stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to do any more of that? Yeah. I'm going to be on one this 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 and so I don't know if I'll do 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, you can be, got to go to the doctors that day. You know, like, but it's for three or four years. Yeah. And and not only that, there just must be a frustration and like, oh, I want to fix this. Okay. Well, yeah. And you take a while versus like, hey, you give an actor direction and the next take they do a different or whatever. And 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 guy. 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, five is the fastest we've ever made him over the outside of toy story, too, which was under duress. Yeah. Right. How quick? What are we talking about? Three and a half months. Yeah. I would be doing it all the time. It was about three and a half years with me away for a half, for six months of that to finish up. And blank. And because I learned on TV to measure time differently, like in TV, any problem, any issue, they go, you're talking the terms of minutes, days, minutes, hours, days. And if you're talking days, you know you're in trouble. So you're always talking like, can we fix it in 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. We've applied the minutes, days, hours, a minutes, hours, days to coming back. And it was a little aggro, a little aggressive, but it was still a better place to be. 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 what I mean? When it was under duress because our audience previews are usually set with about six months left to tell release, which means only three months left in production. And that's like your last week 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 know there's going to be something you're going to change, hopefully about 10% of the movie max, or less, and it's strategic wear and what you do. And that was about a 30% change. Yeah. No. That was how it was, but every, it was a hard, it was worth it. It was worth it. 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 the probably video of everything I don't want to know about of you apologizing before the demand. Yeah. Well, there's probably put that on the DVD. But those DVDs, I think it would want like, especially obviously the two, you know, Brad Bird's two movies in the 2000s between your, between Nemo and Walla, you've got Incredibles and Ratatouille. And those DVDs, he's pretty up front about 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 it fascinated watching them being like, this is very upfront 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. Yeah. Hold it all the time. Yeah. It is. 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 know, 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 so it 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 because at the end of the day, that's what comes out of us naturally. It's like, I was talking on another podcast and I was saying like, I don't feel worthy equating us to the Beatles, but you nobody, nobody questions that the Beatles were just making, they just made like if they never got out of their basement or Paul McCartney's family bathroom, they would make humbable tunes that everybody would remember immediately. Like that's just what came out of them. Yeah. And so when you put us together, the infamous brain trust, everything we did got more entertaining. Like, we're just naturally entertainers and people discredit that they treated it like costumes to put on after the fact, but we're like, if you do it right, it's essential. Like, you, the joke is telling the story is being part of the machinery and part of the entertainment in the core of it. The sequence in Nemo of the story getting spread across the ocean, which leads into Nigel telling tonight, which 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 proof of concept, my co-writer was Bob Peterson, who's one of the funniest men 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 you just were like, we can draw really fast, we're, we're our own scratch voices. So we just put mics up like this in the room and just crap that, 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 it makes sense in that sort of, the game is how quickly can you identify the truth and what has now been set up in front of you, right? And that sequence is such a dynamic like speed rounding of, well, what would that type of fish be? And what would they do? 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 Neema realizing Marlins coming for them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It is verbal gags in a row that are all character and behavioral. That was Steve Jobs' favorite part of the movie too. Well, because 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 got to give most of the comedy props to Bob, Bob's just so funny, he could just see it's bidding out. And I'm such a structuralist. Bob Peterson, right? Yeah. Yeah. 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 biggest 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 of the, the emphasis on the sentence who is different for us, that just showed you how strong we were chemistry wise working together. such as I'm such a a 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 it's one of Thomas Newman's best scores. - Yeah, and I wrote to two pieces of music, or two composers all the time for Nemo, and that was 90% of the time, or 80% of the time was anything Thomas Newman had scored, 'cause I just was like, and so you became a character in my mind, any particular though, any jam. - Shawshank, but particularly meet Joe Black. - Oh, that's a great score, I mean, it goes over the top of the end, and that's why I love it. - I mean, that movie's crazy, yes. - And then I would listen to Nineage Nails La Fragile. (laughing) - All right. - Because I kept saying, is this-- - Have you ever met Trent? - Yeah, I told him that. I told him that on the red carpet at the Wally and-- - That's so funny. - You're, but I just was so afraid, my biggest fear of making that movie was that it was gonna be trickle-y 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 the tone and the balance being right, because I grew up in the ocean. I grew up being scared of the ocean, but fascinated by it at the same time. I remember putting on a little diving mask, and, you know, in needy, shallow water, and ducking 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, 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, but it's 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 to eat food. - Circle of life is one of the most banana sequences ever. - It's gorgeous. - It's very impressively-- - You're like, I'm sorry. - I'm sorry. - What? - The animals 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 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. - That's a fair point. - Yeah, usually it's like the kid loses the parent either permanently or temporarily and has to figure something else to grow up. - So that's, and that happens in Nemo. - And that's why I listened to the fragile, 'cause it would remind me how dark the, and I found out from him that he wrote that album listening to La Mer, and debut C was suicidal when he wrote La Mer, by the ocean side. And so the whole thing has this dark, dark DNA connection, but it would ground me like that, that's that 10, 20% 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, 'cause that's part of the point of this movie is that you'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, 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 what, you know, anxious, and the same with the Marlins, Marlins too worked up." Like, he's too negative, and like, there's a balance to find. - Every time I watch Nemo and he gets lost, I go, "This is impossible." - Right, like, he'll never fucking find out. - The stakes couldn't feel, I remember I'm more insurmountable. I was still trying to solve the movie, and Bob Peterson came on about a year or two, and he was like, the thing that blows me a 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, just like, you know, and Wally, like these movies where it's like, "A great distance is gonna be traveled by a tiny thing." And every time you're kind of like, "I don't know how they're gonna do this." - And characters with him toy story, obviously, pretty much personal laws. - Is like, "Hey, the toy got taken across the street," and you're like, "I crossed the train!" - 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 a dress, and I realized then, and it's only proven all the way itself, toy story five, that that comes more readily to me, is the crazy engineering of how things will all fit. - And Monsters Inc too, did you have any? Because Monsters Inc also has the like, we're somehow crossing dimensions and all that, and I'm not the only person, but that's just, if you had to get down to what comes out of me the easiest, not easy, but easiest is, how is this gonna ultimately pay off? How can I hide it as a setup? How can it not be seen right away? - Is that the right brain thing? Is that just-- - I don't know, by the way-- - My dad was an engineer, chemical engineer who was basically work for a Skunk's work, top secret company that could solve, had to solve things for the government when they'd run out of time. So I think I got that from my dad. - What did your mom do? - My mom was a frustrated actress. - So you're like Spielberg. - The artist and the science. - Yeah, he and I have actually had that comparison, and 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 at 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 love drama, just good drama, and 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 an audience member, is why I take chances whether they hit or miss on Carter or Blink, is that's making me feel as adventurous some and satisfied as I was on the first two animated movies I ever got to touch. - Is there an ultimate, at least, I shouldn't say ultimate. Is there at this moment and itch your most eager to scratch that you haven't gotten to within your films, yeah? - Right, 'cause you've mostly worked in sci-fi when you've done live action, even in TV, you've done some like you did three body, and you did a- - Yeah, I also argue that Toy Story is low-key sci-fi. - Yeah, a little bit. - Something. - I clearly lean that way. I try not to think too hard about it. I've been enjoying not having anything planned. I didn't plan Toy Story 5. I didn't plan into 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 wanna try and make that. There's for a long time, I was trying to get this movie made called Revolver that was written by Kate Treyfoye. - Yeah, we came up in our research. That's the Beatles, like, still should be done. - In the last year or something? - Yeah, it's a great script. And I got the Beatles estate okay for four songs. I got Ethan and Maya Hawks, which songs? - They were pre-Revolver, because it's all about, 'cause that Alaska moment happened, and they hadn't released Revolver yet. Nobody knew that they were making that. And so it was like stuff from Rubber Soul and stuff like that, but I got Ethan, it was kind of a paper moon relationship with father and daughter, so I got Ethan, Hawke, and Maya, and Hawke, to attach to it. And nobody bit. - This was right before and then during the pandemic. And so the whole world just rocked in, - It was a rough, tidy bit. - Yeah. - And it's still to me, like, such an obvious winner movie. You never see the Beatles in it. - Yeah. - Right, which is always the biggest beer. - 'Cause 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 Alaska, right? - In Alaska, right? - In Alaska. - If you go to Alaska, they never shut up about it. There's signs everywhere, but like, it's like an earthquake gap, but 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 their last, nobody knew their last touring. And they got rerouted by a typhoon. I had the land in Alaska and they stayed for a night in the day in this hotel in Anchorage in 1965. And so, the K-Tree Fies 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, he's just her goal is to get into that hotel and sleep with George Harrison. And it's this beautiful coming of age story. It's just beautiful, and I still wish I could make it. And was it Chairman Spaceman? What was, that was something searchlight asked me to be involved in. Okay. And so, I was heavy on the, and that was before I read blank, so it was my shot at getting something else made. And so, it was from a, based on an article from The New Yorker, and we worked on many iterations of the script with the author of the piece, and he's a great script writer. And it just, it was clear what he wanted and what searchlight wanted weren'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. And so, it just was one of those ill-time things, those ill-time things. - Now, I'm seeing here in 1990, 24 you worked on the episode cookies, cookies, blockies, what TV show two stupid dogs? - Oh, oh wow. - Okay. - That was important. - That was while I was working on Toy Story early days. So I had friends that-- - Now there were two stupid dogs in that show. One big one long. - I had the Griffin David release. - It was a friend of Pete Dofters that was working on that show and he needed some boarding done and we just wanted to help out. So it was 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 for the 90s show. - That was a funny show. It's a good show. - The secret squirrel segments on that. - Here it is. - Here it is. - So you were the prime audience there. - I mean, we were like seven years old or whatever. - You worked on the back sheet mighty masterful. - Oh yeah, oh yeah. - What was that experience? - That was a murderous row of people on the show. If you couldn't hire that-- - Yeah, that's pretty much your first credit. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, right out of college, my friend Jim Merton who would go on to be a major director on Simpsons. And Rich Moore were working on it. And-- - Rich Moore who did Ben wreck it Ralph. - Yeah, that's right. - Yeah, great, great. - We all went to school together. And so they were Ralph had this pattern of coming into Hollywood. So all through the 70s and the 80s where he would come into Hollywood off of just his Fritz the Cat 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 'cause he had worked on the original mighty mouse as a young guy. - Oh my god, okay. - And I think his territory was here in New York, I think. If I have it right, he worked on it in New York. - Wasn't it in Terry Town? - Maybe. - Maybe. - You guys are in front of the. - Yeah, we got devices. - But anyway, he got the rights to it and wanted to be remade. So John Chris Felucci was his guy. Bruce Tim was on there. Vicki Jensen worked there. - Oh, those are, yeah. - All of us became somebody in animation but we were all nobody's then. It was crazy. It was a crazy time. We worked in an abandoned preschool in Vanna. - That's what that show feels like. It feels like it came out. - Yeah, 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 don't wanna, if he's Bronx or Brooklyn. - Yeah, that's the vibe out of Burr. - And he had a bit of a list and he'd considered us 20 something. He wanted Striders cheap. So this is like '86, '87. So we would have legal pads and pencils and we'd sit in this windalous teachers lounge that clearly had still all the smoke from cigarettes from all the previous teachers that had ever worked there. And he would just hit the intercom and go, "Guys, I'm on my office right now." And suddenly pick up and you'd go into his office. But he would, he pulling out his old friends that he had made in the '70s. So one day he was like, "Guys, this is Frank Fleta. "I like you to meet Frank Fleta." And we're like, and this guy's chain smoking comes in. We're like eating Frank Fleta. And then they guys, this is the same as he sells cookies. And it's like, and famous Amos comes in. Dressed exactly, dressed exactly like he is on the package with the samples in a bag giving out cookies on. And it turns out he worked 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 was, he said, and Ralph was saying like, yeah, he's trying to tell me he's gonna start the cookie business. And I'm like, get out of here. 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. And everyone's like, yeah, sell the cookies, my guy. Any, any made of killing. Jim would say, was, every day was an interesting story working with him. Is there anything I wanna let you go because we already have a second turn in the game. We're gonna chat with you a little more in depth about John Carter, obviously, the screening tonight. So obviously we can sort of dip into that more there, but yeah, anything else you wanted to budget him. Because you turned on the two stupid dogs questions. That was really important. That was high on the list. It's been sitting there. I don't remember it at all. I really don't know. 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, 'cause we were talking right before we started recording about how when you do these press tours, 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've 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 prepare, I haven't listened to the Carter or the Blink. 'Cause I can't mind too soon. Therapy. Too soon for a minute. Yes. But 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 some things so we could fire JJ. We're really trying to fire. I see, yeah. Yes. He spelled your name, "Pandrew" Satan? Can we fire him for that? Yeah, no, he is silent. He is silent. 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 guy. He's a good guy. And you're very, very, very nice to bless us with your presence on this show. There really is. It's a hilarious show. I'm showing my age. I don't get half the references, half the time. Please. Any time you want to get one of the references-- But that 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. That means a lot. Thank you. Press with your running gags. As I said, I mean, truly, a lot of the analysis comes, like backwards retrofit from hearing you explain things over the years, like 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 going back to-- I have a sixth grade education. And if I can get it, then I feel there's hope for anybody else to get it. So I've kind of heard it pass it on. That's our podcast, but with a second grade education. Thank you for doing this. Thanks, guys. Thank you. And looking forward to tonight, I'm excited. I've never seen the film on the screen since. And I was like, are you going to do it? Are you going to tough it out? Oh, yeah. All right, it's not hard for me to watch. Not hard 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, no, I'll never-- I never watch my stuff back. I like that about the most-- Like, I can't watch Toy Story 5 again. Sure. Because we just watched it like 5 million times. Yeah, I literally-- One of our editors' 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 I'm maybe a kid. But to be fair, I've seen it 91 times. Nimo took me seven years before I was able to watch it. And 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, of course I shot it. All of them are a yearbook. They're just a yearbook. I remember where I was when I shot that. I remember every choice. And when it's long enough of a time passing, you-- it becomes fun 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-- Which is great, that's just great. But yeah, that's lovely. But just collecting all the photos that I'll know. Oh, yeah. It was like, I found stuff I forgot I had, which was exciting. Are you in touch with anyone left on that movie? Oh, yeah. She made it more than I-- And she's having so she-- I gave her such photos for Cersei. Pretty incredible. That's probably the highlight of the movie. And it's a great movie. And I'm so happy for her. It's like a whole 'nother generation is learning how great she is. Absolutely. And I'm French Default. I haven't talked to him in a while. But he's a good New Yorker pal. And we all loved working on that movie. And it was hard, but we enjoyed it till the day it came out. And then we all had plans, which I'll talk about tonight, about what we were-- Yeah, what you do next. I found the outlines for the other two. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, we really knew where we were going and what we were going to do. And so there's a lot of-- not a lot. But some of the critiques about the first one are actually because we just knew where we were going with the second one. And we were going to give away all the marbles or do what you would normally do in a standalone film. So which is a naive mistake of ours to have done. But-- I'm excited to see it. 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 happen again. I mean, sold out right away. Right away, out of second showing. I'm excited. Right, we are doing a second showing, yeah. Sweet. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. Lankcheck with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hossley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas. And our associate producer is AJ McKean. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKean and Alan Smithy. Research by JJ Birch. Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ali 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, blankcheck special features. for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social @BlankCheckPod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter checkbook on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by BlankCheck Productions.