Pete Docter: Pixar Movies Are Lousy … at First

It’s a trick of the timing that Pete Docter is in position to become the first Pixar director to see his film win a best-picture Oscar nomination; the 41-year-old filmmaker, after all, just happens to be the guy who directed the latest in Pixar’s string of classics in the year when the Academy expanded the category from five to 10 nominees. But his film “Up,” the unexpectedly wrenching story of a cranky old man who flies his house to South America to fulfill a promise he made to his late wife, was picking up best-of-the-year buzz even before AMPAS decided to super-size the best-pic field.

Docter, who won a Student Academy Award in 1992 and has four Oscar nominations for his work on “WALL-E,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Toy Story” and the short “Mike’s New Car,” has been part of the core at Pixar for almost 20 years. He is one of a small handful of directors – including company founder John Lasseter (“Toy Story,” “Cars”), Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo,” WALL-E”) and Brad Bird (“The Incredibles,” "Ratatouille") – who have made the studio the dominant force in animation over the last two decades.

Are you a baseball fan?
No.

Oh. Well, I’ll tell you my theory anyway. With the World Series about to start, I’ve decided that Pixar is the New York Yankees of the Oscar season.
(laughs)

Historically, the Yankees have been so successful that it’s not enough for them to get into the playoffs – they have to win the World Series, or the season has been a failure. And for Pixar, you’ve set the bar so high that it’s not enough to just get an Oscar nomination for best animated feature – you have to win, and this year you have to get a best-picture nomination to boot. Do you feel extra pressure, representing that company?
Well, I mean, the main job in what we do has already been done, right? We made the movie, and we were happy with it before it even hit the streets. Which seems like an airy-fairy thing to say, but it’s true. We set out to make the best films we can, and so far, our instincts have been pretty good. Anything else that happens, knock on wood, is just gravy on top.

In 2002, when Randy Newman won an Oscar for the first film you directed, “Monsters, Inc.,” he made a comment about how Pixar had made four good movies in a row, and how rare that is.
Yeah.

Seven years later, you could argue that the streak is still intact.
The truth is that every one of our movies is lousy at some point. It’s just that we allow ourselves time to fix it. And we have this co-op of directors who are all doing their own thing, but who together at certain times to analyze and assist with everyone. On “Up,” for example, about every four months we would show the film to John Lasseter and Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton, and then we’d go upstairs and talk about what was wrong with it.

You want as many people as possible to not only boost you up, but also poke at the soft spots: “Hey, you’ve got some dry rot over here, let’s get the wood putty.” You end up with a big heaping pile of notes, some contradictory, and as the director I’m left to decide what points I agree with and which solutions seem good.

Were there specific things about “Up” that changed because of that process?
There were a lot of things. Like, we knew early on that even though she’s not on screen, Ellie is really a driving character in the film. She’s the thing that propels the whole story. And if you’re not on board with that, the film could meander and fall away. So we got a lot of notes about how to strengthen her presence in the film, sometimes through very simple things: music cues, the house, the badge … That was something we kept coming back to and reinforcing, so that her presence was felt through the second and third acts – particularly in the middle, because the second act is always the tough part.

The early Pixar movies were based on great, simple concepts: What if your toys came alive when you left the room? What if there really were monsters in your closet? But a film like “Up” isn’t so simple or high-concept. It’s more complex, more emotional, maybe more personal.
Yeah. It was not an easy sell. We joked at the time about going to Los Angeles, going into a studio and saying, “Listen, J.C., I got a great picture for ya! It’s about an old man, 78 years old, he floats his house to South America!” (laughs) There was no way that would ever happen. So we did a lot of work really selling the emotional backbone.

Speaking of emotion, the film opens with a montage, without dialogue, that’s pretty melancholy and very uncharacteristic for a movie with a big kids’ audience.
It was something we felt pretty strongly about. Early on, [screenwriter] Bob Peterson wrote a series of small scenes, and as we workshopped it and went to the storyboard, I remembered that my own parents, when I was growing up, took Super 8 films.

 

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