Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. 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.
To understand why the Braintrust is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. A basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process–reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.
We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass.
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Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. Think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise driven. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so–to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor.Ĭandor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Over the years, its ranks have grown to include a variety of people–directors, writers, and heads of story–whose only requirement is that they display a knack for storytelling. After the release of Toy Story 2, the Braintrust evolved from a tight, well-defined group working on a single film into a larger, more fluid group. Most crucially, they never allowed themselves to be thwarted by the kinds of structural or personal issues that can render meaningful communication in a group impossible. They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid when arguing with each other. From Pixar’s earliest days, this quintet gave us a solid model of a highly functional working group. The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of Toy Story–John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. And when they do, you must address them squarely. The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against–they all have a way of reasserting themselves. This part of our job is never done because you can’t totally eliminate the blocks to candor. While I attend and participate in almost all Braintrust meetings, I see my primary role as making sure that the compact upon which the meetings are based is protected and upheld. Published by Random House, a division of Random House LLC Reprinted from Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace.
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