Quotes by Pete Docter - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Character
Strong
Thinking
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I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production... And yet I was sitting there in editorial going this is not working. I'm a failure.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Moving
Screening
Sitting
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I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion. In fact, that was - at the very beginning of this process, we realized, man, we really don't know very much about this subject so we better do some research. And we started looking around online.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Men
Guilt
Research
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When people go to the theater, they don't want to think 'I know exactly what I'm gonna get,' and then they get it and then they walk out. I think you want to walk in going 'I don't really know what this is about,' and have the fun of discovering it.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Discovering
Exactly What
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I always feel like if you have a smaller crew, you can not only get to know the individual strengths of people more specifically, but then, you also give them a longer runway to be able to apply the knowledge that they have learned to subsequent work.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Crew
Runway
Smaller
Specifically
Strengths
Subsequent
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It is one of those weird social things. Even as parents we say, oh, don't be sad. You know, come here, we'll distract you with some ice cream or something. And I don't know if that's always the best thing. But it's certainly - you understand why people do it.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Ice
Parent
People
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It's, like, you know, if you're sad, it's a way of connecting with other people. And we - a lot of times we sort of feel embarrassed by being sad, and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves. But, really, it's a way of re-establishing relationship.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Being Sad
People
Way
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I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping it fresh.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Animation
Pixar
Time Doing Way
Time Way Doing
Disney
Group
Opposed
Studio
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Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Cutting
Drawing
Writing
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And usually I'm not watching the screen. I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to' cause it's - as Joe Ranft used to say, you know, animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs
Pete Docter / Film Director
Laughing
People
Years
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And it's about a three-month process every screening. And that way we have seven or eight chances at the film before we have to actually build the models, build the sets, do the animation and all of that. So it's a - I think that's a real key to the way we make films.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Keys
Real
Thinking
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The drive of the story is sort of hinted at the beginning, is Joy and Sadness and those two characters. Especially Joy starting to understand that there's more to life than being happy. And so that's based on real life observations and things that we've learned as adults.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Character
Real
Sadness
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I mean, I've - these other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I'd miss my house and I'd miss going to work. But I think the thing that I realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Mean
Missing
Thinking
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I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Feels
Fleeting
Remember
Sky
Very
Accidentally
Much
Balloon
Disappeared
Even
Off
Having
Letting
String
Temporal
Watching
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Dr. Paul Ekman, who worked in San Francisco - still does - which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six. That felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Nice
Sadness
Writing
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And so not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn't even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation. It was a lot easier to draw people than to talk and interact with them.
Pete Docter / Film Director
People
Talking
Thinking
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When I was in fifth grade - so, about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark. And so not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn't even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Animation
Denmark
Difficult
Fifth
Folks
Moved
New Friends
Path
Surroundings
Talking
Grade
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So we can sit with Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton, and all the other folks and experience what the film is going to be like. And then we go away into a room, and we talk about what worked and what didn't. And then we take all of those findings and we do that whole process again.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Film
Going Away
Rooms
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In a regular theatre, you'd be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that's like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into consideration so that it would be done properly.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Be Kind
Consideration
Massive
Properly
Screen
Suddenly
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The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Ideas
Memories
Real
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The idea kind of started with me just thinking about what would be fun to see in animation, you know - what have I not seen? For some reason, I got thinking about the human body and realizing, well, I've seen, like, traveling through the bloodstream and into the, you know, stomach and things.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Fun
Ideas
Thinking
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'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Animator
Drinking
Extremes
Reaching
Drawings
Glass
In-Between
Poses
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You know there's always that kid in your class — and every class has one — the kid who draws all the time and is really good? That was not me. I was a lousy draftsman. But as soon as I figured out that I could make things come alive, like using the corners of my math book to make flipbooks, I was hooked.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Kids
Book
Math
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And it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives, and that's our relationships. And so we had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion, you know, fear keeps you safe. It deals with uncertainty.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Jobs
Important
Keys
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I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Action
Adventure
Animation
Drama
Film
Genre
Japan
Little Bit
Pixar
Stories
Surprise
Bit
Itself
Whatever
Number
Hoping
Medium
Tell
Unto
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The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Dialogue
Effects
Pixar
Version
Essentially
Shoot
Move On
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Anger is about fairness. If it feels that you're getting ripped off or taken advantage of, that's when anger comes up. Sadness deals with loss. And I suddenly had this new revelation - it felt like to me - that those are all true, but the real, deeper reason we have emotions is to connect us together. And that felt big to me.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Real
Sadness
Taken
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In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Animation
Capture
Photograph
Reduction
Simplicity
Al
Caricature
Likeness
Strongly
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Well, the film initially - we had decided to pair joy with fear because I don't know about you - for me fear was a major motivator in junior high. So we thought there's probably some good stuff there... As the film went on, we had developed all these great scenes that were really funny, but in the third act, it wasn't adding up to anything.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Joy
Juniors
Stuff
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Yeah, we were looking for a way to represent adulthood and the passing into adulthood. And I think, for me personally and a lot of the folks that I work with, childhood is kind of a sacred, special kind of point in time that has a real joy and purity to it. And we sort of long on a daily basis to reach back and kind of grab onto that in some way.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Long
Real
Thinking
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Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Mom
Grandfather
Memories
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Well, what if we did this in the mind as opposed to the brain? So instead of blood vessels and dendrites, what if it was consciousness and dream production? And that would allow us to have characters that represent emotions. And that felt like, man, that's exactly what animation does best - strong, opinionated, caricatured personalities. And that just got me excited.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Death
Dream
Men
Character
Strong
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However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Memories
People
Taken
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People are funny -- they are able to project personality onto anything. I remember as a kid I spent a $ 5 bill once and felt so bad because the other $ 5 bill was now going to be lonely without all the other bills I had in my wallet, you just invest these dead things with life and that is our tendency as people. So animation takes advantage of that, grabs on to it, and runs with it.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Kids
Life
Running
Lonely
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It's like you run into this dark tunnel, trusting that somewhere there's another end to it where you're going to come out. And there's a point in the middle where it's just dark. There's no light from where you came in and there's no light at the other end; all you can do is keep running. And then you start to see a little light, and a little more light, and then, bam! You're out in the sun.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Running
Dark
Tunnels
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We actually needed the memory - if you see the film - as a very different kind of a plot device of revealing some information to our main character. So we chose to represent it as these sort of beautiful little snow globes, which kind of, weirdly, that's the way we think of memories - at least, most of the folks that we talked to. You think of these memories as being very pure and absolute and unchanging. That's not actually real life.
Pete Docter / Film Director
Beautiful
Memories
Real
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