"Pete Docter: Pixar Movies Are Lousy … at First," Part 3

Part 3, the final installment of an interview with Pixar writer-director Pete Docter where he picks up with his discussion about the movie Up:

Much of the comedy in the film comes from the dog whose electronic collar lets him “talk.” Did the concept for that character change much over the process?
No, not really. We sort of inherited him from another project that Bob and I had developed that didn’t go anywhere. We said, there’s something about that dog character, let’s try to get him in here.

A lot of the challenge was taking all these elements, and seaming them together so that it made sense. On the one hand, the goal always is to make the audience think, where is this going? The tricky part is, it can often seem like you have no compass for where this movie is going. So we tried to take elements that were very entertaining but unconnected, and pull them all together.

What did it take to do that?
It was a lot of weaving back and forth. You would have something at the end of the film that you’d want to buy into. So we would go back to the beginning and try to plant little hints, little pointers. Like the talking dogs. You introduce these dogs, and they talk because of their collars – which is hopefully very entertaining, but kind of bizarre. So what we did was we went back to the newsreel at the beginning, and made the dogs’ owner, Muntz, have these mechanical canine walkers, and a mechanical bath-giving machine, and all this stuff. You hint that he’s a wacky inventor and he loves his dogs. There was a lot of that kind of thing, going back and trying to set things up invisibly.

That's a good lesson about how to work set-ups and payoffs. And as Docter explains, often a writer hits on the payoff first, then goes back in the story to lay in the set-up.

I hear that parts of Buzz Lightyear were based on you.
I was supervising animator on that show. Most of the animators have mirrors on their desks, so you end up doing faces as you’re developing the character. And as we developed that film, Andrew kind of put a lot of himself into Woody, and I was a little more Buzz. There’s just something about that character that resonated for me.

So what aspects of Buzz come from you?
Well, he’s a little more clueless. He’s a little bit off in his own world, and not always turned into the reality of what’s happening, that’s for sure.

(laughs) The thing that was a revelation for me on “Toy Story” was just how much work goes into something that eventually seems as though it sprang fully-formed from somebody’s brain. It’s a completely messy, hodgepodge, weird process – and in the end, if it’s done well, it feels as if it was meant to be exactly what it is.

And we come full-circle -- from "Pixar movies are lousy at first" to "It's a completely messy, hodgepodge, weird process." This provides a perfect segue into one of my favorite screenwriting mantras:

"Trust the process."

It's messy. It's a hodgepodge. It's weird. Your story may feel lousy. But you have to trust that your story is 'in' there somewhere. It wants to be found.

You may feel lost. Disheartened. Depressed. But think on this - again: The storytellers at Pixar go through that same range of feelings as you. The writing process drives them crazy, too.

If you're stuck... hit a dead end... don't know what to do... take a deep, deep breath and give yourself over to your story.

Trust the process.

See where that takes you.

For more of the Docter interview, go here.