The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.
Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.
That’s what great art does – it inspires other artists to do great art, and that’s what it should do.
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
Working at Pixar you learn the really honest, hard way of making a great movie, which is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you, much more talented than you, and incite constructive criticism; you’ll get a much better movie out of it.
The way Pixar has always worked is that we think of an idea and then we make it. We don’t develop lots of ideas and then pick one.
There’s nothing that you like in this world that wasn’t influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.
Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.
I had never touched a computer in my life before I came to Pixar.
I’ve been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can’t translate a book literally to the screen. It won’t work because it’s a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse.
I’m also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.
Most people know me at Pixar as the guy that doesn’t like to do sequels or very reluctant to do sequels.
I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldnt get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.
I’ve always felt you unearth story, like you’re on an archeological dig.
And I’m not anti-sequel, but I just feel like there are very few ideas that are meant to be continued.