People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things - in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movieâs writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.
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The process of developing a story is one of discovery,â Pete says. âHowever, thereâs always a guiding principle that leads you as you go down the various roads. In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling - the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problemâ - in this case, Sulleyâs quest to return Boo to her own world - âhas been solved. You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end youâve developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone. I knew I wanted to express that, and I was eventually able to get it in the film.â
While the process was difficult and time consuming, Pete and his crew never believed that a failed approach meant that they had failed. Instead, they saw that each idea led them a bit closer to finding the better option. And that allowed them to come to work each day engaged and excited, even while in the midst of confusion. This is key: When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work - even when it is confounding them.
We are a filmmaker-driven studio, which means that our goal is to let the creative people guide our projects. But when a movie gets stuck and it becomes clear that not only is it broken but its directors are at a loss as to how to fix it, we must replace them or shut the project down. You may ask: If it is true that all the movies suck at first, and if Pixarâs way is to give filmmakers - not the Braintrust - the ultimate authority to fix whatâs broken, then how do you know when to step in?
The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew. About three hundred people work on each Pixar movie, and they are used to endless adjustments and changes being made while the story is finding its feet. In general, movie crews are an understanding bunch. They recognize that there are always problems, so while they can be judgmental, they donât tend to rush to judgment.
When we are making a movie, the movie doesnât exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; itâs not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it. In a fundamental way, the movie is hidden from us.
Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isnât my experience at all. Iâve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I canât remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started.
In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.
Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, and I have had an ongoing dialectic about the way he envisions his job. He compares writing a screenplay to climbing a mountain blindfolded. âThe first trick,â he likes to say, âis to find the mountain.â In other words, you must feel your way, letting the mountain reveal itself to you. And notably, he says, climbing a mountain doesnât necessarily mean ascending. Sometimes you hike up for a while, feeling good, only to be forced back down into a crevasse before clawing your way out again. And there is no way of knowing where the crevasses will be.
I like a lot about this metaphor - except for its implication that the mountain exists. Like Andrewâs archeological dig, it suggests that the artist must simply âfindâ the piece of art, or the idea, that is hidden from sight. It seems to me to contradict one of my central beliefs: that the future is unmade, and we must create it. If writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain blindfolded, that implies that the goal is to see an existing mountain - while I believe it should be the goal of creative people to build their own mountain from scratch.