Excerpts:
This is the whole genius of the movie, that you're going to let time elapse in real time, so that Andy will have grown up, and he's going off to college, so ten years in real time is ten years in screen time, and that way you are giving your characters a real problem.
Now, it's not like the toys go to outer space or Japan or something like that. The toys have to deal with what seems to be the end of their natural life, and facing these fears of obsolescence, of being replaced or being disposable.
When I first got there, I was like, 'is it the people or is it the system? Where's the genius?' And to a degree it's the combination. Obviously you have a lot of smart, hard-working people all over the place, and you also have animation companies that use the same animation system, so it's this combination of the two.
It really is to a degree like lightning in a bottle. I mean, every Pixar film…I've been there when films weren't working, and you go 'Oh my god are they going to be able to pull this off?'
And it's so collaborative, and I don't think that you can actually point to any one person. The metaphor I could use is that writing one of these scripts or making one of these films is like building a Cathedral. It really is the expression of a whole creative community.
Until you get there you can't imagine how much work goes in, and not even just making the movie, just putting the story together is such a laborious process. And it's really because you make the film like seven or eight times.
There were some scenes where I wrote sixty drafts, just because you are always honing and honing and polishing so that it just works.
You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.
AT: How long did that take? It took three years to write?
MA: Yeah.
And then—and this is always sort of the hardest scene to write in screenwriting—you have your fun in the beginning, and then your characters actually have to sit down and have a conversation.
As soon as you have something - well, they start boarding almost immediately. Almost immediately they bring in people to start boarding stuff.
You do sketches of an entire film, you do initially scratch recording, then you start layering the characters, you do scratch music, you do sound effects, and you basically create a movie in a rough form.
And then—this is what's so crucial to the process of animation and what makes it so different from live-action, is—I'd actually finished my script, I sent it out to everyone, everyone reads it on their own, and reading is sort of a private experience, you know, and everyone writes up their notes on their own, and it's a hub-and-spokes system.
Everyone sends their stuff back to me, but it's everyone's individual reactions, unmediated by anyone else's experience. And at Pixar, you show it in a big theatre with everybody sitting there, so when everyone laughs you feel the laughter, or when everyone is bored, you feel the rustling, or hopefully, when it's moving at the end, you can hear people sniffling. Just as a writer you get a sense of what's working and what's not working.
AT: So how many times does that happen?
MA: Seven or eight.
AT: And that's the whole movie?
MA: The whole movie. In a very rough stage, but with the thematics. But as problems start getting solved, for example there's that one scene that I did seven drafts of and we're like, 'its done, it does what it needs to do.' And then you can go, 'OK this is approved for production.'I'm still writing, which means you're still going back to the actors for recording dialogue, and you're still going back to guys sketching and just throwing it up on screen to see if it will work. It is such a luxury as a writer to be able to make mistakes, put it up on screen, go back, have a huddle and try again.
And then the last part of the process is you screen it in public and you get together in a room and you've got John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Doctor, you know it's like, my metaphor is that it's as though the Harlem Globe Trotters are in your living room, and you just have ideas like flying all over the place and jokes flying all over the place and you can—I've said this before- - you can feel the story getting better on a minute-to-minute basis, because a lot of times when things are going well you just feel this energy in the room.
The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.
So that all these pieces of the machine are all talking to each other at the same time, it's like a real dialogue. In live action you do all your writing, then you do all your production, then you do all your editing, and if you're a writer, a lot of times you just get thrown out, so that's why it's very gratifying to be a voice in that process, a part of the ongoing process.
AT: At what stage do your pages get turned into animation?
MA: What happens is you break the script into twenty-five sequences, so it's like these are all solid, don't worry about them, here are your problem sequences, work on them.
So lets say I'll attack three or four scenes, and what I'll do is I'll write a draft and hand it in to Lee the director and he'll go, 'eh, X, Y and Z.' So then I go back and I'll go through that very small two-person feedback loop for five or six passes, basically, until Lee finally goes, 'OK, I think that's it.'
And then he'll take it from me and hand if off to the story guys and they'll start sketching it and they can add jokes, they can add visual stuff, they figure out how to frame it, if there is a way you can communicate information visually rather than verbally, so I was embarrassed sometimes to find the scenes come back to me shorter because things can be done visually instead of having to rely on dialogue.
Michael Arndt Digs Into Toy Story 3 and the Genius of the Pixar System - Thompson on Hollywood
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