This article was first published in the August 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
This man is Pixar's secret weapon. Pete Docter joined the animation studio straight after graduating from university in 1990. Having helped develop Toy Story, he went on to co-write WALL·E, direct Monsters, Inc and Up (for which he won an Oscar) and has spent the last six years making Inside Out, released on July 24. Set inside the mind of 12-year-old Riley, it shows what's happening -- chemically -- through the perspective of her emotions (including joy, anger, fear) as she hits adolescence. Pixar tackles feelings, dreams and memories as uniquely as you'd hope: it's fun, inventive and surprisingly intense. WIRED met Docter in California to talk about the research behind it, designing the characters and why it's his most personal film yet.
WIRED:Inside Out isn't like anything you've done before. How confident were you that you could make a film about emotions?Pete Docter: I think I was delusionally confident. I didn't know how difficult it was going to be to make it all connect. Even design-wise, making these characters look like the emotion they were supposed to represent turned out to be really hard.
You were inspired by seeing your daughter hit adolescence and become withdrawn. When did you start thinking about it as a film?Pretty early on. And, early on at Pixar we look at these as little therapy sessions, where we talk about what the idea means to us and how we could use it for storytelling, to relate to people. For myself, junior high school was a really dark place.
You had a rough time?I did. I felt very out of step and didn't understand what the rules were. Looking back, I don't think I really had any friends, I didn't know how to connect and reach out to people. So when I saw my daughter starting that way, I was like, "Oh, she's got my genes... she could go through that same thing. That sucks."
**How old is she now?**She's 16. And as it turned out she was much better adjusted than I was. She never went to a really dark place, I don't think. But for me it was really a formative time, and it's why I ended up in animation, frankly. I didn't have the ability to sit down and talk to other people. So I reverted to my drawing in my room, and I would make these little films to work out stuff that I wanted to say but didn't know how.
How did you go about designing the film's characters?We wanted the characters to look the same way emotions feel. We did some early experiments, making them appear vaporous and ghostlike, but they looked too much like ghosts. So we came up with these bubbly little things, it kind of feels like soda-pop fizz, or atoms -- a nucleus, electrons roiling around.
You worked with psychologist Paul Ekman. What was his input?He had done a notation system [in 1978]: the Facial Action Coding System. What that meant was he could look at the expression a person is making and say, "It's a 14+12, because you're raising this eyebrow a little bit and you've got a little sub-orbital muscle there." That was fascinating to me as an animator because that's the kind of language we deal with. We also worked with [psychology professor at University of California, Berkeley] Dacher Keltner about understanding what makes people happy. The things we think will make us happy like wealth and whatever are usually not at all the true things that bring you deeper happiness.
Science suggests that what really makes a person happy is a good relationship**...** I'll tell you a story: there was a dark point about three years into the making of the film. The pressure was mounting. We were approaching a screening and I went for a walk the weekend before, going, "Shoot, it's just not working. What if I just quit and move to Mexico -- what would I miss the most?" And I thought, well, my friends. But then I thought, the people I really feel close to are the people that, yeah, I've felt happiness with, but also they are people that I've been pissed off at, and scared for. The subject matter I'm dealing with in this movie is the key to relationships. So I got electrified, went back, talked to the guys, we rewrote the script, and that was a major turning point in the film.
Having an epiphany after hitting rock bottom. Have you ever had that before while working on a film?I have, on almost every film. [Laughs]
You researched memories and dreams as well -- what particularly surprised you?With memories, certain people are trying to get eye-witness accounts thrown out of court cases because it's notoriously unreliable. What you feel convinced of, like, "I know this happened" is as likely as not partly a product of your own imagination. Every time you recall something, the way the mind works is it diffuses the original and re-encodes it, so it's like a Xerox of a Xerox. There's dissension among scientists as to the purpose of dreams. You talk to Freudian analysts and they're talking about working out issues, and neurologists say it's just the random firing of neurons. But who knows exactly? In that case we just went for entertainment.
Has working on Inside Out made you more aware of how you think and feel in real life?At times. Since the film I've definitely become more aware and I feel like it's changed the way I think. Paul Ekman pointed out that the whole system of our mind is designed to keep us unaware of what's going on subterraneously. I think it's made me more understanding of other people -- my daughter, myself and relationships.
Inside Out is out on July 24
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
