Pete Docter Quotes & Sayings

They're expecting us to make mistakes, and they've set up a process that allows us to correct for that and do it again and iterate. So I think that's a real key to the films that we've made. — Pete Docter

And so not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn't even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation. It was a lot easier to draw people than to talk and interact with them. — Pete Docter

'Toy Story' we found, sorta by accident, because we didn't know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point. — Pete Docter

I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion. In fact, that was - at the very beginning of this process, we realized, man, we really don't know very much about this subject so we better do some research. And we started looking around online. — Pete Docter

You know there's always that kid in your class - and every class has one - the kid who draws all the time and is really good? That was not me. I was a lousy draftsman. But as soon as I figured out that I could make things come alive, like using the corners of my math book to make flipbooks, I was hooked. — Pete Docter

And it's about a three-month process every screening. And that way we have seven or eight chances at the film before we have to actually build the models, build the sets, do the animation and all of that. So it's a - I think that's a real key to the way we make films. — Pete Docter

The idea kind of started with me just thinking about what would be fun to see in animation, you know - what have I not seen? For some reason, I got thinking about the human body and realizing, well, I've seen, like, traveling through the bloodstream and into the, you know, stomach and things. — Pete Docter

The drive of the story is sort of hinted at the beginning, is Joy and Sadness and those two characters. Especially Joy starting to understand that there's more to life than being happy. And so that's based on real life observations and things that we've learned as adults. — Pete Docter

My father was working on his Ph.D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research. — Pete Docter

We've tried to regulate things so that you at least get to go home at night and not have to pull all-nighters and see them on weekends and things. So, you know, like everything in life, it's a balance. — Pete Docter

I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you. — Pete Docter

I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better. — Pete Docter

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens. — Pete Docter

It's, like, you know, if you're sad, it's a way of connecting with other people. And we - a lot of times we sort of feel embarrassed by being sad, and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves. But, really, it's a way of re-establishing relationship. — Pete Docter

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction. — Pete Docter

You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road. — Pete Docter

People are funny
they are able to project personality onto anything. I remember as a kid I spent a $ 5 bill once and felt so bad because the other $ 5 bill was now going to be lonely without all the other bills I had in my wallet, you just invest these dead things with life and that is our tendency as people. So animation takes advantage of that, grabs on to it, and runs with it. — Pete Docter

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened. — Pete Docter

Yeah, to bring families together I need to go away. — Pete Docter

It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same. — Pete Docter

Sometimes suffering is a weird attraction. — Pete Docter

I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production. And yet I was sitting there in editorial going, this is not working. I'm a failure. — Pete Docter

Dr. Paul Ekman, who worked in San Francisco - still does - which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six. That felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. — Pete Docter

When people go to the theater, they don't want to think 'I know exactly what I'm gonna get,' and then they get it and then they walk out. I think you want to walk in going 'I don't really know what this is about,' and have the fun of discovering it. — Pete Docter

And it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives and that's our relationships. And so we had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion - you know, fear keeps you safe. It deals with uncertainty. — Pete Docter

And as I was sort of doodling, I was thinking, surprise and fear - probably fairly similar so let's just lose surprise. And that left us with five. — Pete Docter

Well, the film, initially, we had decided to pair joy with fear because - I don't know about you - for me, fear was a major motivator in junior high. So we thought there's probably some good stuff there. As the film went on, we had developed all these great scenes that were really funny, but in the third act, it wasn't adding up to anything. — Pete Docter

I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people. — Pete Docter

Yeah, we were looking for a way to represent adulthood and the passing into adulthood. And I think, for me personally and a lot of the folks that I work with, childhood is kind of a sacred, special kind of point in time that has a real joy and purity to it. And we sort of long on a daily basis to reach back and kind of grab onto that in some way. — Pete Docter

It's like you run into this dark tunnel, trusting that somewhere there's another end to it where you're going to come out. And there's a point in the middle where it's just dark. There's no light from where you came in and there's no light at the other end; all you can do is keep running. And then you start to see a little light, and a little more light, and then, bam! You're out in the sun. — Pete Docter

We found some scientists think that there are basically three emotions. Others went up to 27. Others had 16. Some were in the middle. So we were kind of left with no definitive answer to our basic question - how many are there? — Pete Docter

The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially. — Pete Docter

There's something really emotional about not having any sound. That allows, I think, the audience to participate more actively and kind of imagine what are they talking about there? — Pete Docter

So this idea of moving seemed like a good way to sort of represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade - so about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark. — Pete Docter

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all. — Pete Docter

In a regular theatre, you'd be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that's like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into consideration so that it would be done properly. — Pete Docter

Traditionally, animation has been dominated by men in the past. I don't know why it attracted guys. — Pete Docter

Well, what if we did this in the mind as opposed to the brain? So instead of blood vessels and dendrites, what if it was consciousness and dream production? And that would allow us to have characters that represent emotions. And that felt like, man, that's exactly what animation does best - strong, opinionated, caricatured personalities. And that just got me excited. — Pete Docter

It is one of those weird social things. Even as parents we say, oh, don't be sad. You know, come here, we'll distract you with some ice cream or something. And I don't know if that's always the best thing. But it's certainly - you understand why people do it. — Pete Docter

And in part that's good but then, like any emotion - and this is something we learned from the research as well - there are positive and negative aspects to all of these. — Pete Docter

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible. — Pete Docter

One of the other experts we consulted with, this guy named Dacher Keltner, he was big on sadness as community bonding - I think is the word he used. — Pete Docter

It might have been introduced slowly over the course of the years as you recall this memory over and over. So that was a very cool but complex idea that we thought about representing in the film but could not find a way to make it work. — Pete Docter

So we can sit with Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton, and all the other folks and experience what the film is going to be like. And then we go away into a room, and we talk about what worked and what didn't. And then we take all of those findings and we do that whole process again. — Pete Docter

A lot of the issues I faced in junior high was what got me into animation. It was easier to sit on the side and draw cartoons than to engage with people. — Pete Docter

I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping it fresh. — Pete Docter

When I was in middle school, I liked to make cartoons. — Pete Docter

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable. — Pete Docter

We actually needed the memory - if you see the film - as a very different kind of a plot device of revealing some information to our main character. So we chose to represent it as these sort of beautiful little snow globes, which kind of, weirdly, that's the way we think of memories - at least, most of the folks that we talked to. You think of these memories as being very pure and absolute and unchanging. That's not actually real life. — Pete Docter

I mean, I've - these other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I'd miss my house and I'd miss going to work. But I think the thing that I've realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends. — Pete Docter

I wanted to make sure that 'Up' wasn't a 3D movie about a man who sails his house to South America. It's a movie about an old man who sails his house to South America that also happens to be in 3D. So the first thing is always the story. — Pete Docter

Any great movie you watch has some element of darkness or loss or some suffering in it. That's what makes the fun parts fun. — Pete Docter

Anger is about fairness. If it feels that you're getting ripped off or taken advantage of, that's when anger comes up. Sadness deals with loss. And I suddenly had this new revelation - it felt like to me - that those are all true, but the real, deeper reason we have emotions is to connect us together. And that felt big to me. — Pete Docter

Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film. — Pete Docter

I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise. — Pete Docter

Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent. — Pete Docter

If you were feeling sad right now and you recall a sad - or, a very happy memory from the past, it will be tinged with more sadness based on your current feeling. So we felt like that was actually on solid scientific ground . — Pete Docter

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal. — Pete Docter

Does Mike Wazowski blink or wink?? — Pete Docter

But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it. — Pete Docter

Walt Disney wasn't making films for kids. Neither were the Muppets. A lot of the great, really cool films, they weren't making them for kids. — Pete Docter

'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story. — Pete Docter

Well, we try to - we definitely try to have a balance. And I think things have gotten a lot better at Pixar. When we did "Toy Story," that was an all hands on deck situation that really was time intensive. — Pete Docter

Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name. — Pete Docter

And usually I'm not watching the screen. I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to' cause it's - as Joe Ranft used to say, you know, animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs — Pete Docter