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Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer and Oscar-winning director of “Up,” “Inside Out,” and “Soul,” first learned to face his fears on his debut, “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), the buddy comedy about monsters coming out of closets to scare kids. Docter’s obvious knack for channeling personal problems into universal stories helped propel the films to both Oscars and staggering box office. It also helped shape Docter as a person, something not unfamiliar to Pixar’s fans.
“When I started on the film, my wife and I had our first kid, and bringing him home was horrifying for me, because obviously kids are appealing and cute and all that, but I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this thing is counting on me and my wife to take care of it,’” Docter told IndieWire during a recent interview. “So it was an echo of what I was starting to play with.”
He continued, “I would work until all hours of the night and loved what I do. And then suddenly you find yourself saying, ‘Wait a minute, there’s this kid at home who just spoke, he sat up for the first time today, and now today he said some word and I wasn’t there, and how do I do both these things?’ It was that struggle between the sort of duty of work and then the love of a kid that really kind of became the heart of what ‘Monsters’ was about.”
Docter conceived the original pitch for “Monsters, Inc.” during a 1994 brainstorming lunch toward the end of production on “Toy Story.” Back then, it was a very different idea: It was about a 35-year-old accountant who hated his job and was frightened by monsters who came to life, inspired by drawings he made as a kid.
“I think the thing that was attractive to everybody,” Docter continued, “was this idea that much like we all secretly harbored a belief that our toys came to life when we weren’t around, we also believed that there were monsters living in our closets or basements. And at first, they seem like a pain in the butt. But then, as the story goes on, he starts to kind of empathize and ultimately like these guys while he cures himself.”
This evolved into a buddy story between a large hairy monster and a 9-year-old girl (inspired by “Paper Moon”) to make the crucial link between monsters and kids, with the girl leading the monster around. Then, during a 1998 story summit in Burbank with executives from Pixar and Disney, the story switched gears again, and they landed on the idea of a one-eyed buddy (Billy Crystal’s Mike) for the hairy monster (John Goodman’s Sulley).
The idea didn’t sit well with Docter, who thought it was too much like “Toy Story,” but he eventually warmed up to the emotional stakes of the pairing when the girl chaotically came between them. She was aged down to toddler Boo to simplify language barriers. The setting, meanwhile, became a scare factory in the monster world of Monstropolis, where fear powers the city.
Yet the tall, lanky, soft-spoken Docter never thought he would direct “Monsters.” Like the other animators, he assumed the task would naturally fall to Pixar creative chief John Lasseter, who directed “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “Toy Story 2.” But when the studio was expected to make one film a year after the success of “Toy Story” — the first CG-animated feature — Docter landed the gig.
“I don’t remember anybody turning to me and going, ‘Alright, you’re directing,’” Docter said. “It just evolved into that during ‘Toy Story 2.’ It was crazy, because I think I was 27 or 28 when I started on it. I watched John come out of the gate with ‘Toy Story,’ which was tough, because it was the first computer-animated film ever. But he was such a force at the studio and was so confident and knew what he was doing by the time I stepped in.”
But directing a feature was “intimidating as hell” for Docter. “I would daily just go home thinking it was a disaster, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m gonna get fired, this movie is gonna bomb,” he said. “Not any of those things were true, but it was definitely a learning experience. Luckily, everybody was very patient, but I do think there were one or two times where, if they could have, they would have relieved me of duty because it just wasn’t working out. But they stuck with me and, in the long run, I figured it out.”
In the early pioneering years, Pixar wonks created the computer tech as they went along, conquering one photorealistic Holy Grail after another. On “Monsters, Inc.” it was fur and cloth. The studio started a simulation department built around the software called Fizt (short for “physics tool”), which handled Sulley’s enormous and complicated fur and Boo’s oversized outfit. For cloth, this required wrinkles, creases, tangles, and collision. But it also meant Sulley and Boo embracing at the end without colliding.
“In their wisdom, Pixar decided we’re gonna embrace this 100 percent,” Docter said. “There were like 1,500 shots of Sulley with fur, so it was a massive task. But the team stepped up, and like with most stuff that we do around here, we just say we’ll figure it out and we start going.”
With his second feature, “Up” (2009), Docter found the perfect vehicle to channel his desire to escape the pressures of directing. In the comedy adventure, 78-year-old grumpy widower Carl (Ed Asner) floats to South America in his house tied to balloons with 8-year-old stowaway Russell (Jordan Nagai).
“I think what inspired it was being a somewhat introverted, shy kid,” Docter said. “I didn’t really realize that the job of the director is to go around and just talk to people all day, and so by the end of each day, I would just be overwhelmed and kind of want to hide under my desk. My basement is still full of all these books of people who either were marooned or marooned themselves on tropical islands. Well, what if I could float my house up into the sky? That’s something really attractive.”
The image of the house floating to the sky with balloons was arresting, but Docter needed to reverse-engineer his story around it. After many ideas (including a floating planet and a Soviet-era air airship), Docter and writers Bob Peterson and Tom McCarthy landed on Carl and Russell going to South America to honor an unfilled promise Carl made his late wife, Ellie. There they encounter the mad old explorer Muntz (Christopher Plummer), the talking Golden Retriever Dug (Peterson), and the exotic bird Kevin (Docter).
Yet Carl needed to be humanized, so they created a prologue with Ellie about their life together. “When you base it on a relationship, when you get to watch this guy fall in love and live a life, and then never really achieve what he wanted, I think you have this rooting interest as an audience,” said Docter. “And it was a great joy to achieve that.”
Peterson wrote a 30-page scene that they knew would need to be cut down, but Ronnie del Carmen, head of story, suggested making the prologue silent. Docter and Peterson were apprehensive, but del Carmen won them over, and the result was one of Pixar’s most sublime moments. “We created this four-and-a-half minute silent film that is the emotional anchor of the entire movie,” added Docter.
Docter has always been enamored of stylization and caricature — the more graphic, the better. This began on “Up” and got more ambitious and imaginative on “Inside Out” and “Soul,” as the director explored different shape languages to express psychological complexity.
“I’ve been perpetually frustrated by the realism that computer animation seems to bring,” Docter admitted. “I mean, on one hand, it’s super amazing and kind of blows your mind when you first see it. It’s what drew me to Pixar. But then I’ve been long advised to embrace some of the stylization of filmmakers of yore: all the stop-motion and UPA and Czechoslovakian films. They’ve all been able to embrace abstraction in a way that we still struggle with, and so I was really pushing to make much more graphic and simple images. I think the challenges for us were we built this main character who’s essentially like a square head and that was all meant to represent who he was as a person, too. He’s rigid, unyielding, he wants to do things his way.”
He added, “And then his wife was more kind of a balloon shape. She was always moving up, and very energetic, and that’s what she brought into his life. And Russell is also round. So [we were] using the shapes to try to echo or emphasize what’s going on emotionally in the characters.”
Technically, it took 20,000 balloons to pull off the lift and 10,000 for the flying sequences. Yet the demands of cloth simulation for caricatured people were much higher, and new software programs were created to simulate the cloth and Kevin’s iridescent feathers.
“We had to find a way kinda to hold hands with realism to some degree,” Docter said, “so you could still get scope and scale and fear of death and things like that. But then simplify it, so that it would really fit with the style of the character. It was a big effort, and Ricky Nierva, who was the production designer, and Don Shank, who was the art director, spent a long time figuring out exactly what kind of house could believably be lifted by balloons. We figured cinder block or brick would be too heavy. Eventually, we found a few houses around Berkeley that were models for the thing. That was a lot of fun. And I think a real contributor, even to the storytelling, the visual look of it was a major part of the development.”
As always, Docter eventually figured it out.
