The Interview: Ed Catmull, Founder and President of Pixar

In this conversation, I spoke with Ed Catmull, co-founder and longtime president of Pixar, and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. We dig into Pixar’s creative process and talk about why Pixar didn’t start by picking ideas, but by picking directors. We also go deep into what it actually meant to support those directors even when their ideas were messy, broken, or barely formed.

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Listen to this interview: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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Finally, we spend time on the Pixar Braintrust. We talk abou what it is, what it isn’t, and why candor and feedback are essential to Pixar’s success. This episode is about creativity as problem-solving, and what it takes to build a culture where great work can survive its earliest, most fragile stages.

Jason Aten: Ed, Thanks so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

Ed Catmull: I’m doing very well.

We were just joking. It’s a lot warmer where you are than where I am.

Yes, I’ve lived in a winter climate before. I’ve become acclimated to it. I will say that at the moment, I am not acclimated to winter.

Yeah, I live in Michigan, so we are permanently acclimated to winter, but that doesn’t mean that we always enjoy it. I’m jealous. I can see the sunshine.

Well, it might rain at some point. It does get rough weather here. Great. Wind and rain.

You know, I did live in the San Francisco Bay Area for a period of time. And the thing I noticed there is that whenever the weather wasn’t what I wanted, I could drive about 40 minutes in any direction and I’d either be at the beach or the mountains or the desert. And so you could just kind of pick what weather you wanted on any given day. Is that still true for you?

That’s true. You just select your dial. What do I want to be like today?

That’s great. So, Ed, I’m going to guess that most people who are listening to this podcast have some idea who you are. But I start every episode by asking my guests to give us sort of the short version of kind of who you are, what it is that people would know you for. And then we’ll kind of unpack that over the next 45 minutes.

Okay, so I’m a co-founder of Pixar. I was the president of Pixar until I retired. So that was over 30 years. The last 13 of those years, I was also the president of Disney Animation. We kept the two studios separate for a reason. And then I retired from Disney and Pixar in 2019.

Obviously, most of the people who are listening to this have heard of Pixar. Pixar, I think it’s fair to say that there was a period of time when Pixar had what was probably the most successful run of films of any studio that I can think of in terms of the batting average, the hit rate there. Pixar was revolutionary in its technology, but most people think about Pixar in terms of the stories that they’ve fallen in love with over the years. But Pixar really started as a technology company that was, I’m curious what it was that, that made that marriage of storytelling and technology possible when you think back to sort of the earliest days of Pixar.

Well, I was very aware, even growing up, that Walt Disney thought that technology did inspire the art. And you saw this, not only in his adoption of technology, but also in the theme part. The next person to actually believe that technology was inspirational to art was George Lucas. That’s a long time later. But George invested in this, and George is not a technological person, but he believed it was going to make a change.

So we came in as a technical group into a film company, and then we spun out. But in observing that, we could see in various companies a sort of class structure. Like if you’re a technical company, but you employed artists for various reasons, they were not working on the important product. They were like second-class. They wouldn’t use that terminology, sure.

But the same thing was happening in all the studios. The people there who were valued as providing technical service in the making of films were not central. They weren’t the stars; they were second class. And they thought of themselves that way.

So as we started Pixar, it was actually more of a determination of how do we build ourselves out so that as we bring in artists, we’re all doing this together. And that became a really important cultural touchstone for us, that the technology and the art are tied together, and they aren’t that different. And the mindset of the people and the way they think is roughly the same. I’m not saying every person’s the same, but if you look at them as a group, they’re both creative. They both are passionate, and they have a great relationship because they’re working together. One wasn’t in support of the other.

The real goal was to make great art or to make a great film. And so this notion of, well, okay, what kind of person does the best thing? Isn’t it irrelevant? And it’s not that it’s irrelevant. It’s a damaging path to take.

For a company like Pixar, the form of storytelling was so dependent on the technology, right? It was that technology to think in a lot of ways. Because animation before that was hand-drawn, maybe some computer stuff. But it does feel like in a lot of ways, the technology piece of Pixar really unlocked new forms of storytelling. Was that an intentional... How did that cycle work?

Was it, “hey we have this new piece of technology that will allow us to tell a story that we couldn’t tell before?” Or, was it that we have a story we want to tell, and let’s see if we can figure out the technology to make it happen.

What’s leading me to this question is one of the things I love in the book, Creativity Inc., which you wrote, that you describe creativity as just problem-solving. And so that’s not just a storytelling or an art thing, right? You can be creative in the way you solve problems on a technical side. But I’m just curious, which was driving which most of the time?

Well, for us, it was the clarity of: we were trying to tell good stories. Now, from a technical point of view, this was an entry into the field that we wanted to be in, because I would not have been able to come in based on my skills. I was actually a reasonably good artist, but I was not at the level that I was going to get what they got to.

But the studios also had a pattern and a thought process about the way they made films. But that was actually stuck. So if you actually look at the stories themselves, then a lot of this would apply to any other project, including live-action or hand-drawn animated films. But the mindset of the people who were leading it was, This is the way we do it.

Well, what happened when the technology came in is that it broke the mold. And the people who joined in this didn’t like the old mold. So when we start off with, you know, there was John and Andrew and Pete Docter. They weren’t stuck in any way of thinking. They’re now freed up to it.

When Disney acquired Pixar, they had the best hand-drawn animation artists there were. It turns out that the directors there wanted to do something new. So we tried to keep the old form alive in terms of hand-drawn animation. But our fundamental belief was that we have to be led by what the creative impulse is. And the directors wanted to use the new technology and the new techniques to make films. But really, the process of making the films or the stories is the same. It could be the same in TV series or something like that. In fact, some of the series operate a little more like we did, certainly more than other movie studios did.

So I’m going to make an assumption that every story, every movie starts at some point with an idea, right? Somebody’s like, here’s an idea that I think would make a good story, and that story would make a good movie.

You described those ideas at the beginning phase as, I think you said, they’re called “ugly babies,” right? Which is just a fun way of thinking about that. I’m going to let you explain what that is in a second because I’m really interested in how those ideas become something real. And in Pixar’s case, that would be a movie. But first of all, what is an ugly baby? I know you talk about it in the book, but in case there’s someone who hasn’t read the book, let’s start there.

Well, if you’re going to do something really original rather than derivative, then it doesn’t fit into any norm. It’s just an idea. What we do for the films is we will pick somebody who we think can lead a story team and make a movie.

We’re making a bet on a person because we think they can do it. And the general notion is we want something that they really believe is important. So the standard is we ask them to come up with three ideas. They get a couple of artists. They’ll get a writer. But it’s a very small team come up with three ideas. And they’ll take a year to do that.

And these ideas are pretty wonky and unlikely. But in our view, that’s a good thing. So we’ll go through this process, and in the end of pitching the three ideas to the creative leaders of the studio. And they will pitch it.

They’ll start off every time saying they love all three of their ideas equally. They’re lying. They know they’re lying. They’ve seen others do it, but they still have to do it.

Then we listen to the pitches. This is about an hour and a half long process. And at the end, they leave the room while the rest of us discuss it. And the discussion is always, which one is it that the director really wants to make? It’s not which is the best idea because the final film is usually radically different than the idea.

The first versions of it, they all suck. They have serious problems. So that’s the ugly baby part. But what it means is we can’t judge whether or not something is good at the beginning. And that’s a hard concept for some people to get.

The only thing we can judge is, do they really want to do it? And what’s the spirit of the team? And as long as that team believes that they can solve the problems, we keep supporting it, even though all along the way, it’s got various levels of things that don’t work. They are broken, and everybody’s trying to help, and they’re trying to fix it.

We’ve had times when the director has lost the team. It’s difficult, but that’s the only sign of failure, is if the team around them I no longer believe they can solve the problem. But until then, it’s ugly and you got to keep trying to fix it.

So at the beginning, you’re not necessarily—if I understood you correctly—looking to figure out which idea has the greatest chance of success. You’re looking to see, we’ve made a bet on this person that we believe could see this idea through, even though right now it might not make any sense, or it’s broken. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Okay. Are there, I was curious, has anyone ever walked in and said, I have three ideas? This is the one I think you should make, but you made me come back with three. So here’s two other ones also.

That happened once, but I mean, there are a couple of cases where they want to do something. So, like Andrew Stanton, as an example, has said, I want to make a film about fish. And that was, you know, his first solo. And then, he said, okay, well, we knew he was really good. He’s the one who wrote our scripts for others. He was an extraordinarily creative person.

And he said, this is what he wants to do. The idea or the reason for the three idea pitch was that we know that if you’re trying to solve a problem, you can beat your head against the wall. You know, almost all of us have experienced this. You get stuck.

So if we say come up with three ideas, then when they get stuck, they move on to something else, and it helps free them up. So often, the first thing they thought they wanted to do is probably the thing they do. Everything else is about having them get unstuck.

That’s helpful. And Andrew Stanton is the writer of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. And then the fish movie you’re talking about, obviously, is Finding Nemo. People should be familiar with his name, but just in case they weren’t.

I normally call it Finding Nemo, but ‘fish movie” just came to mind. But that’s an example. Like a movie about fish.

But some of these stories at these early phases, and Ratatouille would be an example of one. Ratatouille was one of three ideas that were pitched, but it’s also a very unlikely idea. And this was a case where it was so hard that we did need to change directors. But the final movie that was made, actually, really was the fruition of the idea that was originally pitched. And of course, done superbly well.

Every one of these films has a completely different arc. So we’re just making it up as we go in response to the reality of who they are, what they come up with, and the dynamics. So none of these films is easy, and they don’t follow the same pattern.

So, who at Pixar or at Walt Disney Animation—because you had the experience of leading that later—ultimately would decide if an idea is good enough? Because you’re making movies, and these are expensive. They take a lot of people, a lot of resources, a lot of time. The production pipeline for one of these movies is measured in years, not weeks or months, even. But who ultimately says, yep, a fish movie. Let’s do it. Let’s go for it.

Well, the first critical decision is, do we think this person can direct a movie? Okay. That’s before there is an idea, or at least an idea that we’re aware of. At that point is what do we do to make sure the person succeeds? When they make their pitch to the creative team, the whole creative team decides. There are people who are more senior and carry more weight just because of their experience. But as a group, I’d say almost every single time there was a unanimity of this is the idea that we think they want to make and that we will support it. And sometimes the final film bears only cursory resemblance to the original idea. Coco would be one of those.

How so?

To Lee Unkrich, he would say that the final film that he had, other than the fact that it was about the Mexican Day of the Dead, really wasn’t much at all like the original concept. In fact, the original concept was going to be a full-on musical. We went down a different path.

So that requires an awful lot of trust from the creative leadership, right? You have to really have trusted your directors to be able to make those kinds of decisions. Creativity has a sense of filling all of the space that it’s given, I think. And in some ways, just because you could do something doesn’t mean that you should do something. I’m guessing that when you have someone like Lee Unkrich who had worked on films that have turned out okay, that gives you a measure of trust in that person. But did you ever find yourself having to say to someone, hey, you know, at some point, this has to actually be a movie? This might be very creative, it might be very artistic. But at the same time that you’re making a piece of art, it’s a movie that you have to hope that people want to go and see, right?

How do you balance that sort of tension?

Well, we’ve been careful. We don’t make any product placement or anything like that, and the marketing department doesn’t try to tell us this is what you need to do in order to make this a marketable film.

If I take Ratatouille as an example—because to me it’s one of our finest films—the original director, Jan Pinkava, had a great idea. He’s the one who designed the look of the movie. And it’s one of the unfortunate things about filmmaking is the accolades are given to the final person there, as contrasted, say, with baseball, where you’ve got the beginning pitcher, and the closing pitcher. They’re all important.

But it would be an example of where they were trying to solve a problem—and yes, we’re trying to make a movie—and there are principles of what it means to have people engaged in a film because there’s a structure for film. It’s different than for writing stories. It’s different from stage plays. But there is a structure that you only violate if you know what you’re doing.

But in this case, it was stuck. And they kept trying to solve the problem. And it was a whole team trying to solve the problem, including the people around them—like the brain trust—who were not on the film.

Everybody’s trying to figure out how to get it unstuck. And the problem was that we couldn’t get it unstuck. Nobody could fix the problem. And then at this point, we needed to make a change, a director change.

It was extremely difficult because there was this wonderful man that we picked because of his capabilities and what he’d done. And we put Brad Bird in it. And Brad met with another outside writer who was a friend of his. And they came up with a concept which unstuck the movie.

And all of a sudden, all the pieces came together. And it met the concept. and the premise that Jan originally had, and that Brad Bird immediately liked the first time he heard it. He thought it was a great idea.

So, taking the premise, he could use that as his own personal driving force to add his own views about creativity, the reviewing process, how it’s appreciated, and why people do things for the art itself. I mean, for me, it was magnificent. It was really the combination of a lot of people. But the ones driving it were the people working on the film. We weren’t getting somebody from the outside.

I mean, at that time, we were a public company. Disney was the distributor. But then, later, we were part of Disney. But there wasn’t anything other than us saying, what does it take to make a good movie?

How do you know—when you get to that point where you’re stuck—how do you know the difference between we need to make a change versus, yeah, this idea actually just isn’t a movie. Because I remember reading the book that you say, there are times when you get there, and you go through production, and you just realize this is a movie that’s just going to have to stay on the shelf. It’s not going to work. How do you figure out that difference? I mean, obviously, you have someone like Brad Bird who has done The Incredibles, which was a very creative and very successful film. Then maybe it makes it easier to say, let’s try to fix this. But how do you decide between those two things?

Well, at the time that I was at Pixar, there were 22 films that were started, of which 21 were completed.

Okay. So generally, you’re like, we can fix this.

Yes. Now, there was one that didn’t quite reach the start stage. You get to the three-picture things, and the things he was coming on with, we said, we’re not going to make a movie. So we did abort one of them at a very early process.

And of the 22nd film, like all the others, we did try to restart it. And because they couldn’t solve the problem. Again, it was one of those really hard ones. We couldn’t solve it.

And so the responsibility to restart it was given to Pete Docter. And Pete made a first pass at it, but then he said, “You know, basically, we’re starting right back at the beginning, and I think I’ve got an idea which I think is more interesting. And it’s about the emotions that take place inside the head of a little girl.”

So the one film that we didn’t complete actually became the starting point for Pete to make Inside Out. So that’s the ratio if you use this process in terms of supporting them and solving the problems. For Disney, in the time I was there, we completed 10 of the 11 that were started.

When you, so like Pete, Doctor, obviously, Inside Out, very, very well done. And probably at that point, I mean, you sound like you have a lot of affection for Ratatouille. I would say I have a lot of affection for Inside Out. And maybe because I have four children, it helped me unlock in my own mind some of the things that I see in them.

Actually, Inside Out 2 is, in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made. Have you ever sat down with any of the directors and say where do these ideas come? How do people like Pete Docter, or Brad Bird, or Andrew Stanton, or any of them—where do where do they find ideas? Where are the most creative people in the world finding these ideas?

Well, first of all, I don’t know. But the trick is to realize that a lot of people have ideas. They just need support.

Sure.

I do fundamentally believe that, given the chance, everybody can be better at what they do. They can’t do everything. I can never be a linebacker for the 49ers. And people have different skills, but there’s something about unlocking the potential that people have.

And so the processes are about unlocking the potential. And one of the blocks that people have is that they have preconceptions about what a good idea is. And we have tried judiciously not to have rules about how we do things. We have guidelines, regular things we do, but we will change them all the time.

And I believe, and this is one of the things I had coming out of the University of Utah, because my experience in graduate school there was a phenomenal experience. I came out of it thinking that kind of environment is what I would like to have for the rest of my life. And so I used that for meas a North Star.

And when I left New York Tech to go to LucasFilm, because George hired me when he wanted to bring technology into the film industry. When I left New York Tech, I realized that half of my decisions in building that group were a crock. So now I want to go to Lucasfilm, and I can fix the mistakes.

But I felt that going to Lucasfilm, probably half the things I tried there would also not work. And that would probably be true for the rest of my life. And I said this to an executive recently, and the executive said, oh, no, no, your success rate’s much better than 50-50. I didn’t think fast enough, but I realized, no, actually, that’s not the point. The point is, half my ideas are a crock.

And the trick is, if you know that, then I think it makes you more likely to say, okay, what do I do now to fix the things that don’t work?

If you recognize that when you try something, whether it’s painting or drawing or writing or whatever, there are things that don’t work. You’re iterating, and you’re changing. You try something new.

If you’re being creative, it’s not derivative. It’s not the same thing as what somebody else did or even what you did in the past. So by its very nature, you have to be in the mindset, I’m going to keep trying something, and I’m going to get a lot of it wrong. But if I acknowledge that and address it quickly, then I can make it a lot better. Or maybe even go in places I didn’t even imagine when I started.

Last week, I was speaking with Tom Donaldson, who is the head of Creative Play Lab at LEGO, and he said something similar. They assume that their idea is probably wrong, as opposed to assuming that they’re right and looking for reasons to reinforce that.

I was thinking about that as I was re-reading through your book, where I think it was maybe Andrew Stanton, who says that the most important thing is to figure out that you’re wrong quickly, right? If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong or fail fast so that you can figure out the next right sort of solution.

And it seems like that goes along with what you’re saying. If you’re going to be wrong 50% of the time, then the most important skill isn’t just imagining ideas, because great, imagine as many as you want. It’s going into it with a mindset that half of my ideas are probably going to be wrong, I should just figure out which half as quickly as I can, instead of holding on to the ones and becoming too attached to them.

Yes. And there are a couple of things that we’ve learned along the way. I wrote about failure in the book, but I realized after I wrote the book that that probably did a disservice because the way we talk about it in making the films is we don’t use the terminology of failure. It’s not that we avoid the word because sometimes you actually do have a failure, you have to do a major thing there.

But normally, when we’re screening or looking at something, the terminology in the room and the mindset in the room, which people learn once they get comfortable, is that we try this and it doesn’t work. So it’s not like the person failed; this just doesn’t work.

So the focus is turned to solving the problem, and a particular solution may not work. So we try something else. And because we don’t want the person to feel like they’re failed, or they’re being personally judged, it’s the idea that’s being judged as to whether or not it’s effective. It takes some confidence to know that people there aren’t there to judge you. They’re there to help solve the problems, the difficult problems.

So let’s talk about the Braintrust for a minute, because that’s kind of like Pixar’s solution for solving those problems when you have a movie that’s stuck or a problem that a director can’t figure out how to solve. I think it’s fair to say that of all of the ideas that have come out of Creativity Inc., the Braintrust is both the sort of light bulb moment, like, hey, we should do this, but it’s also the thing where people are like, yeah, we definitely can’t do that.

I think that the reason is that if you have built a team of people or if you have built a culture, it is hard to change that. The mindset that you describe going into a brain trust, is it that you had the right group of people to be able to do that—that the creative people in that room were all just willing to be brutally candid with each other and fix problems?

Or was that something that you think you could teach to other people and recreate that in other places? I know you said that you did that at Disney at later on, but it does seem, for a lot of people, that I won’t have any friends left if I try to do this.

Well, I think that’d be the wrong conclusion to reach, but if I take Pixar and Disney as examples, with Pixar, we were extremely fortunate in that first group of five people already were that way with each other. So when they were working on Toy Story, and I remember being in rooms with them, and they’re in these heated conversations with each other. It’s all about solving the problem. And it’s clear that they’re enjoying it, even when they’re disagreeing.

It was actually the disagreement, and solving the problems was a bonding experience. I think it was, honestly, a certain amount of luck. But the other was that I’d say to some extent that there was also a part of a technical legacy. That is, it was more the way a lot of technical people would work in trying to solve problems. These weren’t contentious battles about how to do things. That does happen in technology, to be sure. But the general case is, how do we solve the problem?

It was probably because the problem solution is more identifiable. Whereas when it comes to storytelling, opinion might be stronger and get in the way of that collaborative process. But that wasn’t the group we started off with. And they had a bonding with the 10 other people working together. As we got into this, I think mentally we thought that we should be like the big guys, like the other studios in terms of our development and how we made film. But it was with Finding Nemo that we could fully let go of the concept of trying to be like the big guys at the other studio.

This success rate of finishing or making good films actually wasn’t terribly good. I mean, there’ve been a lot of great films out there, but there’s a lot of crap. They’re doing it like it’s a portfolio—some are good, and some aren’t. The good ones pay for everything else.

But as a small company, that wasn’t the model we should even try to emulate. And we also recognized that we had something. I’d say probably Andrew and I saw the clearest was that we had an outside force in the name of Tom Schumacher, who was the president of Disney Animation at the time, who wanted us to succeed. He would push back on what we were doing in a helpful way. But he wasn’t lost in the story.

It was very useful to have an outside force who had our vested interest in mind and was completely candid about what he saw. But we also recognized that, as we were starting to succeed and doing better than Disney at the time, that at some point we would lose Tom as an outside force. And in fact, he was then made head of the musicals on Broadway. He was the Broadway person.

Making The Lion King is what you’re saying.

Yes. So he went off to be in charge of that. And the problem is, we no longer have an outside force. And I’m saying this in the context of creativity and unlocking people. A lot of this is the psychology and recognizing the vulnerability that people have when they’re suggesting things, with new ideas and working on things that don’t work. And knowing that there are people around who can judge you, either in a positive or negative sense.

But often there’ll be feelings that they have on their own about the quality of their work, even if it’s not intended by the other people around them. It’s just this psychology.

So you’ve got things going on that people don’t talk about. But our job is to think about what’s standing in their way. And it is helpful to have somebody outside who’s objective, who can just tell you what they say. You may disagree with them, but you do want to hear what they have to say. So it was with that, that we thought, well, let’s have this original group of people be the outside force for the new directors that are coming along.

So the term braintrust was coined by Andrew Stanton. And that was his purpose—to be an outside force. In fact, it didn’t work as an outside force because they weren’t outside. They were inside, and they saw everything along the way. So they didn’t actually have objectivity. However, in the process of trying to solve a problem about an outside force, we found that we had an immensely powerful group providing guidance and help when they were stuck. And so the Braintrust was not a group of people, it was a way of giving feedback at a particular moment in time.

And there’s an emotional weight behind it. We then kept adapting this as we brought in new people. We had some rules about how it worked, but one of them was that we wanted to keep the power out of the room. The reason for keeping power out of the room was that we wanted the director not to feel threatened.

So the rule was that the group, the brain trust, could not tell the director or the creative team on the film what to do. And we were good about that. They did ultimately have to fix problems that didn’t work. But we didn’t tell them what the solutions were because, in the moment, in a short period of time, you don’t actually know.

You can point out a problem, but the problem may not be the thing itself. It may be that the setup or something ahead of it wasn’t done right to support that. And then when it finally surfaces as a problem, you can’t do that right in that particular brain trust meeting. They’ve got to go back and mull it over and think it through.

So we’re just trying to make suggestions and find what things don’t work. So that meant that the people who actually had power or had a powerful voice were not supposed to talk for the first 10 or 15 minutes.

So, in particular, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton weren’t supposed to say anything at the beginning. And the reason is that if a powerful person expresses a view at the beginning, it sets the tone of the meeting, which is not what you want. It’s better to enter a discussion, and then entering a discussion, it’s going in a really fruitful direction because a lot of people are already engaged in it.

There’s also just a recognition that the people coming in felt rather exposed and vulnerable. And I know different companies have different ways of trying to arrive at insight or truth. This is the one that we found effective.

So now to move on to Disney, Disney had a group of good directors, but those directors knew that the approach they had wasn’t working because it was driven by production needs. So the notion of the ugly baby was actually coined in contrast to feeding the beast, which is all the production people. You have people who you’re paying, and they need work to do.

So at Disney, the production people were running the creative in order to satisfy the needs of production. Well, that’s backwards. So the directors and production were happy to come in and see that there’s a separation. You protect it when it’s not working, and in protecting it, you give them something; they’re going to have something better to work on.

So there really wasn’t resistance to coming in and bringing a Braintrust, which they call the Storytrust.

You said two things there that feel like they’re really key to this working. And I imagine that there are a lot of people who looked at the Braintrust as “It’d be fun to have a lot of people to help me come up with ideas.”

But that’s, that’s not what the Braintrust was. The Braintrust was a group of people who were trusted, for a lot of reasons—they were very good at what they did. And they also were doing the same types of things that the director of the movie that had a problem was. And so it feels like there was a lot of trust there.

But it also seems like that part where you said they couldn’t tell the director what to do is really important. Like you still own this. You still have to fix it. We will tell you what we see. And if you would like a suggestion, we’ll brainstorm some ideas of ways to do that, but that it’s ultimately, it removes that power dynamic where you’re, where you’re trying to grow or convince someone that you have to take my idea or force someone to take their idea. They were just a trusted group of, as you said, they weren’t outside, but they were certainly more objective than the person who couldn’t figure out.

It was a very conscious and spoken view that these were peers meeting together to solve the problem. They’ve all been through it. They all knew what it was, and there were a lot of different personalities.

And the size of the brain trust meeting would vary. If everything is going pretty well on a film, we will invite more people into the room because we want them to understand the trust mechanism, how it works, and to feel comfortable.

Now, the truth is, as you know, in any group, there are some people who respond to the group because they might either be performing themselves or they’re trying to show they’re good. You know, they’re just different psychological things that go on, and it gets exacerbated with a larger group. So if we have a knotty problem, we may reconvene with a small group.

So we’re both trying to train, but at the same time, the priority is we have to fix the problem. So we will adjust accordingly.

One of the things you wrote about in the book, you talked at the beginning about the most powerful people in the room were not supposed to talk at the beginning. And that makes a lot of sense. If you are looked at as sort of the leader, people automatically, once you’ve expressed your opinion, think, okay, well, that’s what we have to do—even if the rule is, I can’t tell you what you have to do.

But one notable rule that you had was that Steve Jobs was never allowed in these meetings. And in the book, you explain it, and it seems like it was a very quick thing, and everything worked out really well.

But most people who think about Steve Jobs think of his superpower as being a good editor of ideas. They think that he could quickly look and see something that was good or was bad and diagnose how to fix it. That’s at least the mythology. But at Pixar, his role, I think you described it as more of a protector. And I’m just curious if you could talk about why the dynamic was different at Pixar versus the way people see him in his role when he was at Apple?

Well, I worked for Steve longer than anybody else. And I wrote about the changes over the course of his life. But the one thing that was always true was that he knew what he didn’t know. And this concept of being right or wrong, he also understood that at a very deep level. As soon as he learned something that would indicate that he was wrong, he would switch on a dime very fast.

He knew that he wasn’t a filmmaker, and he knew that he’d never marketed films before. So he didn’t come in as a person who was superb in other areas and act as if he knew more than others, which to me was this incredible feature. It was a very strong self-awareness on his part.

Now, he’s extraordinarily articulate. He can think very fast. Doesn’t mean he’s right, but he can think fast, he can explain it quickly, and he can push back hard on any idea, which means he needs to be interacting with people who are able to be in that kind of environment.

So here’s what’s unusual. Almost nobody knows about Steve, and I hope this corrects some of the narrative about him. Pixar was a public company for 10 years, and in those 10 years, Steve fired two members of the board of directors. And the reason he fired them was that he said they never disagreed with him. And if they don’t disagree with him, then they don’t bring any value. And he really understood that.

These are words that any company might say, but he really believed this. He’s like, I need to hear contrary ideas. And because he has such a powerful voice, some people sort of wilt in the clarity of his logic at the time and aren’t really capable of pushing back. The truth is, in real time, I couldn’t do it with Steve, so I did it. And Steve appreciated this. I did it slowly.

Asynchronously, right?

Yeah, so these conversations might go out weeks or months. And at some point, he would say, oh, you’re right. And sometimes I’d say, oh, I get what you’re saying. But if it was neither of those two—that is, it was sort of a draw—he just let me do it the way I wanted because we had discussed it.

So, now I mentioned before, the Braintrust actually wasn’t an external force. Well, then we were a public company, and Steve became the outside force because he wasn’t in there. Most of the time, he’s down at Apple.

The reason we asked him not to be in those Braintrust meetings was that, unlike John or Andrew, there was no time at which Steve could enter into a discussion in a brain trust meeting that wouldn’t alter the dynamics of the room. And he accepted the fact that that was a trait that he had and that it was not helpful to the Braintrust.

So he didn’t come.

When he did see the film, though, it was when we had a board of directors meeting, and we would scream the film. We would always bring in some people from the company who hadn’t seen it. There are a lot of people in the company, but only a certain number in the theater at a time, because we always wanted fresh eyes. And you also want an audience when you’re viewing the film, because it alters your perception of how things are working.

Then, after Steve and the rest of the board of directors would see it, we would go up into the board of directors meeting, and the producer and the director, and maybe the head of story would come up, and Steve would give his notes and get feedback from the other members of the board of directors.

Steve would always say, you could ignore everything I say. And then he would dissect the movie, giving his view. And he was so articulate, it was like a gut punch to some of them. Now it was a curious phenomenon—when he said, you can ignore everything I say, that he really meant it. And they often did. Because he would say he’s not a filmmaker. And the fact is, they were filmmakers.

Now, there was this weird observation that took place, which was that often directors would say that Steve told them things that they had never heard before. But I was in every one of those meetings, with or without Steve. There was nothing that Steve ever said in any of those meetings that had not been said by somebody else, some of the other directors, before. And what the implication is, when a group gets together, they also sometimes learn to not hear each other. In other words, they might dismiss something. And when Steve would say they couldn’t dismiss it, but they hadn’t heard it the first time.

What happens is they’re so busy thinking about all of the things that they weren’t paying attention when one person said it to them, but everyone was paying attention when Steve was saying it.

Yeah. Because I mean, the reality is if you’re working on a complicated project, artistic project, like a story, it’s these big, massive ideas, like the giant ball of yarn in your head. And if you pull on some threads, the whole thing can collapse and fall on the floor. And you’re trying to protect it. You know, it doesn’t work, but you don’t want everything to collapse. So Steve can just yank harder on the threads.

All right, so my last question for you is, when you look back at your time at Pixar, I would love for you to tell us what your favorite movie that you were part of making was and why. But if you’re not willing to do that, because I understand that’s a tricky question, just what is your favorite part of the overall Pixar legacy?

Well, I mean, I obviously have been asked the question a lot. Like, what’s my favorite movie? What makes it more complicated, besides the fact that you want to say what your favorite child is? But that’s really not the issue. The issue is two things.

One of them is that for me, with every one of these films, it’s intertwined with the making of it. So I look at a film through the lens of having watched it made and what took place along the way.

Now, among the movies that came out, trying to be objective as a filmmaker, there isn’t a single one, but there were several of them that really stood out, just because, emotionally, they worked for me.

So, you know, obviously, you mentioned Ratatouille. Toy Story 3, the way they pulled that together, was probably, if anything, the one that had the fewest problems along the way because they did come up with a great idea at the beginning, and it was recognized as a great idea.

Basically, Pete Docter films—you mentioned Inside Out. Inside Out, for me, was also a truly brilliant film and insightful, and incidentally, that’s one that was having trouble up until near the end. And then at that time, we changed a rule. Our rule was that we tried to keep the studios quite separate from each other for morale purposes. That is, we wanted Disney to solve their own problems, Pixar to solve their own problems, but not to have an existential threat by the other so they could share ideas and did.

Not because we were mandating best practices or anything like that. We just didn’t do that.

But on this particular film, we were a little stuck. It wasn’t quite working. So we showed it to the Disney directors, who operated in the same manner in terms of their Storytrust.

So it was showing it to people, all of whom knew each other and liked each other and wanted the others to succeed. And there were two people in particular down there who picked at a few things in Inside Out that weren’t working and why. And when Pete was in that one, and he heard them say that, then it clicked. He understood exactly what they were saying and came back and made a large number of small changes, which dramatically impacted the film.

One of the things that made it profound was that the thing that got fixed was that originally, Joy was working really hard to get back to headquarters, where she belonged. But they pointed out that that made her appear to be self-serving. She was doing it because she should be there. And the observation was that everybody else wants her to be there. And they can be the ones who are trying to get her back there.

And that then ties into the deep concept for parents. And for me, I would say, or any of us would say to our child, where’s my happy boy or where’s my happy girl? And, this is saying that at that point, that’s not the right thing to say. It’s not obvious to people because your instinct is, you know, you want your child who’s unhappy at this time to be happy. So we’re saying be happy, don’t be sad.

And I’ve never had any film like this, which has had a lot of child psychiatrists say thank you because you’ve now given a language with which to explain things to families.

Well, and I actually love that in the second movie—now that you just said that—knowing that that was one of the things they fixed, that there’s almost a callback to that towards the end when Riley’s having the anxiety attack, and she’s asking for Joy, right? She wants Joy to be the one who comes in. So it’s really cool to just see that learning in the first one led to what is certainly the climax of the second movie, but also one of the greatest pieces of storytelling, I think, in almost any movie. So that’s very cool.

Yeah, and so that was that one. It was all part of that process of working together. The other was Coco, where they worked very hard to capture the essence of the culture, and there are some very interesting stories behind that, but there’s only a limited amount of time on this.

But because of that experience with Inside Out, when Disney was having a problem with Zootopia and came up to Pixar, and Pixar then became sort of like the outside force to get them to do something. I mean, people had recognized it inside, but now it was this strong group of people at Pixar who pointed out a problem that they needed to fix. Big Hero Six also worked really very well for me, the first Frozen.

Yeah, every parent thanks you for the first Frozen.

Well, and it was interesting because you know, we do research for films. Well, for that one, the research was to have all the women who had sisters come in, then talk about the relationship with their sister. That’s the research.

That’s awesome. Well, Ed, thank you so much for your time. This has been such a fun conversation. It has been really revealing to kind of peel back the curtain and just sort of see the way that Pixar made movies and Disney as well. I appreciate you joining me and thank you so much.

Well, I appreciate talking with you, and I hope it’s meaningful to some of your audience.