Interview: Inside Out’s Pete Docter (Director) and Jonas Rivera (Producer)
Ahead of the Inside Out DVD and Blu-ray release on November 23 (2015), Johannes Wolters caught up with director Pete Docter and producer Jonas Rivera to discuss the concepts behind the film, inspiration and emotions…
I have to admit, that your film moved me on a very personal level. Last year my mother died of dementia, she lost her memories and she changed very much in her personality during her illness. Inside Out has a very similar theme – how to deal with loss and sadness and the setting is the mind.
Pete Docter: I am very sorry about your loss. I think this is probably one of the most painful ways to lose somebody. That is awful.
Jonas Rivera: I lost my Grandmother while making this film, with the same thing, and it did make me think while we were talking about memories in the movie – it was a bit of a mind warping experience. I have to apologize for that.
No, please, of course not
Pete Docter: That is the purpose of Sadness and on one level we played right into that in the film, of course. On one level you don’t want to feel sad, and so you try to push away and avoid the things that are going to make you feel that. And yet the purpose of Sadness from an evolutionary standpoint, from a biological standpoint – this is from the research we did – the purpose of it is to help you deal with those inevitable losses. You cannot go on with life now your mother is gone, right? Things are going to be different. So sadness forces you to slow down, to recover, to allow for healing and to reassess – “how am I going to approach my life now, after this change has happened?” So it is a very important and vital step and self-protection, really. So to avoid it is to do yourself a disservice, I think. That is what the film is all about!
And you disguised it as a funny comedy!
Pete Docter: Yes. “Just” a fun movie.
(Citing from the movie’s dialogue) “about a dying dog”
Pete Docter: Yes!
How did you come away with that?
Jonas Rivera: When you (turns to Pete Docter) first pitched it to me, it was wonderful – I was sitting forward in a chair because it was just a really simple top line pitch of “what if we could personify emotions and tell a story about a little girl”. But she is the setting, not the main character.
Pete Docter: That is just the concept!
Jonas Rivera: Yes, that is just the concept. And based on an observation you had on your daughter, who I know and have seen grown up and change. And my kids are young and all of a sudden, after a few days, it became this fun but deep well and it was really all about fun and comedy. These emotions will be our seven dwarves if we can pinpoint them down – and then when we begun to dug in, we all started experiencing “Oh! this might be a deeper well than we may have thought” and “Oh, we might have a shot here – noT only to tell a fun story but we have a little bit of something to say” I guess. This is one way to say it!
Pete Docter: The initial attraction was just the comedy, the potential of these comedic characters, of what animation really does. You know, strong opinionated exuberant exaggerated characters. And then the next step was discovering: “Wait a minute! We can go into the mind!”, which is somewhere everyone kind of thought about but no one has seen before. This is our chance to bring something that people are familiar with, but do not know what it looks like. So that is a great place to be. Because if you do something so weird and wild – for example, characters melting and every building being on fire – you are kind of like “Hey! Ah, what is this?” But if it is so familiar that you are bored with it, that is no good either, so this was right down the middle. I remember specifically one walk that I went on, when the film was not working, realizing that the thing that is to me the most crucial in my life are relationships and the thing that is at the heart of the strongest relationships that I have are not just joy, but sadness, anger and fear. All the different emotions are what create a real depth and the connection between people, and so the subject matter that we have choosen is the bedrock of the most important thing in our lives.
Being a typical German I thought, you started with the philosophical ideas first and then you blend the comedy in later…
Pete Docter: Well, we did! In fact we still have pictures of this whiteboard room we had in the beginning: “We want to be happy in life!” – that was our thesis! And then our antithesis was: “But life is not like that! It is full of loss and pain!” So the third act is: “The only way to deal with all of that is to fold it to that, all of it is part of the joy of life!” But this is easy to say and it is another thing to actually make it come to life on a screen in a dramatic way.
Jonas Rivera: With a character that is appealing. Because this is a story about being in denial a little bit. It took a long, long time to feather that in, did’t it?
Pete Docter: Hmmmm!
Very interesting. This reminds me somehow that animation as a medium seems not yet explored much like live-action is. There are many more possibilities to tell a story…
Pete Docter: Totally! Yeah! That is what drove us to push Toy Story as a buddy movie, at that time, there was an unwritten rule: ‘if it is animated, it has to be a musical’. There is nothing wrong with musicals but I think animation can do as Brad Bird’s fun saying: you can do a horror film! You can do action adventure, you can do any numbers of things and yet we seem to continue to head down that road! I think we are guilty of that too, we could really push things!
Do you think we will see that horror movie in the future? Or something like an Ingmar Bergman Film, because you pushed the limit here very much towards this direction?
Pete Docter: There has been already a couple of interesting movies. What’s the name of the Israeli movie? Waltz with Bashir! They are very personal, and while computers become more accessible and cheaper – maybe not in the sort of lavish, lush style that Pixar films – but there are a lot of different ways you could create great looks and I think that would be really fun to see.
Jonas Rivera: Yes I think so, too. Tomm Moore´s films are very sophisticated, almost like Lullabies of folk tales. But I also look back and I think Cinderella in the 1950s is almost like a Douglas Sirk family melodrama with a happy ending. There have been moments in those films, on one level they have been Disney films with songs, but on another level there is a real sophistication to them. And that is sort of what I think that is exciting. We have done our best to push things forward and we look forward to doing that more.
I think, you will win the Academy Award for best animated feature film because of this terrific dinner sequence in the beginning, but I think also that you should win Best Film because of the Bing Bong character and everything connected to that. This was, in my opinion, new unchartered territory, something I have not seen before. Worse than death, he is forgotten. How did you come up with this?
Pete Docter: That was in stages. Bing Bong was initially part of a larger group of characters that were no longer relevant to Riley. Riley as a three or four year old kid would draw certain characters like this funny stick figure of a woman, a dog, a corner of the sun. You know, how kids will draw the sun, the corner of the sun coming on the page – the character then would move into the frame and that is all he was – a yellow pie slice!
Jonas Rivera: They were in jail! It was really funny!
Pete Docter: Yes, they were in jail. And then that story changed and the Bing Bong character came somehow forward. And then we realized what he is doing. He is presenting the spirit of childhood. So when Joy had to get out of the dump – oh my gosh, I knew exactly how this was going to play through. So it was one step at a time. In the end I hope that he is not completely forgotten. The events and certain memories Riley has of playing with Bing Bong represents the spirit of childhood, which as much as we want to preserve and hold on to that, is one of the sadnesses of life. When you grow up you know you cannot hold on to that forever, you can hold on to the spirit of it but the reality is you have to live and exist in the adult world
Jonas Rivera: What I like very much, in the face of the event that Riley is going through, is when he is gone – she recovers and there is a nice moment there.
At this moment, the film becomes all grey and monochromatic, a very uncomfortable moment and then you bring in the comedy again by the character of fear breathing into a bag to calm himself.
Pete Docter: Oh this was Ed Cadmull´s joke! That is the one joke that Ed Cadmull has ever written into one of our movies.
Jonas Rivery: And you have to know that Ed is not known for his comedy charms!
It is unbelievable how clever you establish the entire world of the movie in the first 15 minutes, which culminates into this fascinating dinner sequence. How long did that take?
Pete Docter: This is largely the work of my co-director Ronnie Del Carmen while we were exploring the idea, he came up with this set piece of a dinner. From the beginning John Lassetter had recognized the fun of going to different people’s minds to show the outside versus the inside. Combined, that brought the dinner to life. In terms of where it went into the film we played around with it for quite some time but Ronnies first pass was pretty accurate. It was very early on but he made a great job to embed it into the film took.
This must be hell to choose from all the ideas and gags, all those possibilities. You can see all the stuff, the ideas in the movie, for instance the brilliant gag about the crates filled with facts and opinions, to choose must be hell!
Pete Docter: Fortunately, a lot of times the story kind of tells you what belongs where. I put that joke I wrote into the movie three other times and it fell fell flat. It was crafted incorrectly and it was in the wrong place and finally I remember Kevin, our editor, said to me: “Really? You want to try this again?” and I responded: “Yes, Yes. It can work this time!” And for whatever reason it found the right place, so…
Jonas Rivera: A quick thing I can tell you about that joke: my son is four, and this joke is one of those moments people say this is for adults, but he was seeing it for the first time sitting on my wife’s lap and he laughed hysterically and I was thinking: “There is no way that he could have understood this”, and I asked my wife: “He laughed at the facts and opinions joke?” She said: “He laughed because they spilled the crates!” Great – for him somebody knocking something over is funny – when he gets twelve or so, though, he will get the real joke then!
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