A Conversation with Andrew Stanton

We have no idea how to start these.

There's not a format.

No.

No theme.

I usually do a quote from the movie.

I butcher that.

That's how it starts.

But we're not talking about a specific film here today.

You could pretend laugh like you just were telling jokes or something before you got

started.

Oh, you want it?

You want a WTF.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ask about the traffic on the way over here.

Yeah, it was the traffic.

Did you take the subway?

I took the R.

Oh, there you go.

Got here in 25.

That's a workman-like train.

You know, the R.

He's nobody's favorite.

It was 30 seconds from my apartment and then about-

It's very close.

25 seconds from the dream.

Yeah.

From the stop here to get in.

They are just ideal.

Trundles along though.

Like, you're never on the R.

Like, great.

We're about to pick up speed.

The R does Yomans work.

It's a Yomans work train by a long time.

No, I free borrows local all the way.

You often say that the queue is kind of default the best train.

The queue's great train.

Not your personal favorite.

Not my personal favorite.

It's a great train.

Why?

We do that bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus bus

This is a fan of the New York Transportation.

I'm a New York kid.

Did you know before they put this away?

System in there was a pneumatic tube system

between postal stations.

Yes, yes.

They inaugurated it with a live cat.

A live cat.

Yeah, to make sure the cat like didn't die.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't know.

Yeah, the cat was like the the Likah was like the animal.

They put in all the cage box and shot it down the aisle.

And I mean, the other guys were like, we got her.

That's what they say.

That's what they say.

Okay.

I think we should go back to pneumatic tubes.

I do too.

They're fast.

Yeah.

Okay.

Griff doesn't have a take on this.

Does anyone still use them?

I think a lot of places still use.

We did when we were building the studio for Pixar in the late 90s.

We did a wired magazine was kind of O'Korant at the time.

And they did a whole thing about how pneumatic tubes actually still exist and Boeing uses them

in like a huge scale and advanced technology.

Send engine parts like half a mile down their property.

So we're like, let's put that in the building and Steve was like, no, no, no, no.

And we got whittled down to like, can we just have one loop?

As it just goes nowhere and we just pay the receptionist to like put a little envelope

and into a tube and shoot the capsule and then just do it every 15 minutes.

And just go back down to her.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And we just have that.

Yeah.

I was in Chicago recently and I bought weed.

The weed shop.

Congratulations.

You had pneumatic tubes.

Yeah.

Really cool.

That's crazy.

You know what?

That actually makes a lot of sense.

I do think that's how we bring the pneumatic tube back.

It makes sense to go hand in hand with the legalization of weed.

Yeah.

Those stores shouldn't be pulling a thing out of a drawer or going in the back.

Yeah.

Even if it's just a guy blowing a thing through a tube from the back, that's what it

should be.

Pixar is in the bay.

Where's Pixar?

Pixar is in technically an emeryville.

Right.

It's like a North of the West Coast.

It's a piece of real estate that's about a mile, maybe a quarter of a mile high and maybe

a mile wide.

And it connects Oakland and Berkeley.

If you go across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, there's a right below it is a big

IKEA store and right behind that is us.

Is that good being far away from Hollywood?

Like quote unquote far away.

That's further away.

That's part of the secret sauce.

Yes.

That you guys were sort of insulated.

Yeah.

And it's a lot of other factors.

But it also kept in still does keeps most of the employees grounded because when you leave

the waiter's not trying to sell a script or run a roll.

You know, you're not meeting other people.

Right.

Right.

I mean, it's become kind of tech broy everywhere.

But there's nobody trying to make movies.

So it kind of keeps you appreciative of what you get to do every day.

We're here with Andrew Stan who, and this is a fact, is the director that we have been

covering for the last six weeks.

That's the truth.

Six films, correct?

Yeah.

Just six features.

I should have opened with this, but explain to me.

Can art can I just, yeah, please?

Can I just say can for the rest of this episode, can I call you flick lever 98?

Absolutely.

Because that, wait, you listen to a Patreon episode that's it.

That's it.

I'm sorry.

I wasn't a big one.

I was big one too.

Yeah.

Sorry.

That's, that's, that's, that's great.

You should have learned with that when you met me, Griffith.

A gentleman's character.

We should have stopped with the back for you.

At first, I thought there were 97 lovers.

No, but then I realized, oh, the year you made it.

Right.

It was also the phone came out.

Ninety-nine.

It was the year the phone came out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I needed that flick lever 98.

You can indeed call me.

You're the one person who's allowed to call me that.

Let's clear the air on this.

You're the co-director of that film.

Yes.

Oh, that's a good question.

That does mean you are not the director.

Because like some people will sort of say, like, well, why won't you cover this film?

They're a co-director and I'm like, I think that title, like, it's being signified

for your not the director.

Yes, that means right.

The way explained is right.

It came up with it because that's my beer.

That's my question.

That's my question.

Because during Toy Story, the team that had been doing commercials together was John

a lacid repeat doctor and myself.

And John and I just really clicked.

And like, I was a really good, Jiminy Cricket, like a good conscience for him.

I was, I always say I'm like the devil on the shoulder and Joe ramps who God bless him

was like angel on the shoulder.

I was able to kind of always help him keep thinking in the right direction or avoid

the wrong direction.

And so I kind of was invisibly that role without knowing it because we didn't, we were all

learning what the roles were on Toy Story.

So after it was over, we said, can we make this official?

And so I said, well, let's, let's make sure it's not a Disney only new dual directors.

I was going to say, yeah.

But we didn't, we didn't want to make up a title that was new.

So we just said, we just know what the role means.

Co-director means deputy and you're just there to be helped the director be in two places

at once.

Like if you do the role right, if somebody talks to me and say, what should we do?

I'm not pushing my vision.

I'm pushing the vision of the director and I'm helping keep moving a little on.

But it's sort of a little different from like an assistant director, which is a very

defined.

No, this director is a very, very, very, very different role.

And so that's unique to Pixar.

It's just, it's something and people get hung up on to this day, but I think because

of the unique things.

It's all semantics, but we've always been consistent since the first movie that like

sometimes we, they're, and I'm the same way.

Like I found out on Nemo, I worked better having the Anchorage who had always had as an

editor to confer with when John was busy to have him at the ready.

So he came on board like the last year and the half.

Does every Pixar project have a co-director?

No, no.

It's just the second choice.

Right.

There is not a stamped way it's done.

And it's more like we are very individual, visionary based, like filmmaker based and we do

whatever will make that filmmaker work better.

So I, the one beef I have that you guys fall accidentally into, it's my only beef and

it's for the greater good.

When you use the word they for Pixar, it's like you don't do that with Nolan.

You don't say they for the Universal Studios or they for like, yes, there is no star

chamber of people going, you've got to do this.

And everybody wants there to be even internally picks up people want that to be with Disney,

but there isn't.

It's like we are, we take the high risk we take is we invest in that visionary filmmaker.

And then we will support them or kind of sometimes cast them and put a group around them so

that they will succeed because we can't afford to fail.

But we also can't afford not to follow a singular artist vision.

We learned that from the first movie.

So it's Toy Story is a John Lassiter movie, you know, it's always bugs life.

Toy Story 3 is a Lee Unkrich movie.

Toy Story 4 is the Josh cool movie.

There's no they it's not like Pixar had nobody knew that they were going to make a

two.

Nobody knew we were going to make a three.

There isn't a great map.

There's one of the great wisdoms of growing up and getting older is realizing nobody's

flying the fucking plane.

And you go, oh, so we're just trying to make the best smart decisions we can at the time.

And maybe hopefully not pay for it later, you know, but it's your victims of your own

success.

I mean, the reason people, including us are like, well, Pixar is because Pixar's run was

so unique.

And then it's more like a sports team.

Yeah, it's a dynasty.

So I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but I just lay idea that like there is a it

is a group sport to make a movie, but that's still everybody believes when live action

let there is a one person that is running that movie.

The Barbie's a Greta Gerwig movie.

Yes.

And so so are the pick.

I can't speak for any other animation studios, but I can speak for Pixar and go into that

individual was the director and visionary of that film.

But also that's why you know, we covered you and we're not a podcast going like let's

do a 25 film series on Pixar.

Well, that's true.

And we did right.

We did Ron Clemens and John Musker and we did Brad Bird.

Yeah, we've done like and I know you get it.

Right.

No, no, no.

You're just using the trap of vague.

Absolutely.

Okay, but here's my big question.

Why was red stream never in front of a movie?

Like what the David brings up every day?

Why can't red have everybody was probably I can't speak because I why you can speak for

red.

No, I just I was made.

Okay, fair enough.

It's a really old.

I have a feeling it was because it was a downer ending.

It is a downer.

That they were stuck in the bike shop.

You still have to convince Disney who has the money and the distribution that you this

is the great, the best choice to put as a short in front of a lot.

Because I get people and they put all the classic shorts.

Nobody wants to depress the audience right before you start rolling.

Because that's your favorite.

Did we realize that?

I look at it.

We loved it on its own, but as a lead into tee up something.

Yeah, it was just something that I saw at a young age for some reason.

It must have been on some compilates.

Yeah.

Tiny toad I was very taken with.

Well, that just shows you were you were destined for art house movies.

Seriously.

It's true.

It's like the French sort of.

Yeah, it's very much existential movie that sparked for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just but you didn't you didn't even work on reds.

No, so I won't hound you about.

But you were you were the second employee.

Is that correct?

The second enemy, the animation department.

I was the second and the ninth employee second anime.

So what was the first thing you worked on?

I was hired with this thing that we have no idea that there would be a future of film.

We just thought that this is this new thing that they were the inventors of, which is

called CGI, which is like what that does that mean?

It means computer graphics.

All I know is it could look photorealistic at the time we thought it did.

Now our eyes so trained.

It looks like crap.

But we were the first of maybe only two other houses that could do that medium for

possible advertising was the only way to make an income.

So they had I got hired to animate and think up commercials.

And so my first thing was a trident commercial with a ice cube that played jazz while a

mint leaf scat sang on the top.

The 90s.

This was when we did we did have it.

We had a dammit.

What happened to saxophones?

Ninety half of the scatting.

The 90s everything was just like there needs to be a saxophone in this commercial in this

place.

You know, the WB is going to launch all jazz like it.

Why isn't there a blue M&M?

And why isn't he voiced by John Goodman?

We had it figured out.

I I know pay.

If I can just grind an axe for a second.

I pay for every option I get to remove ads from any streaming service.

If the ads were still the ads from the 90s, I pay extra to get them back.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

If it was the what's the commercial, would they need the air conditioner?

I'll call now.

What's that one?

Sears?

You know, I don't remember this one.

I'll show you later.

I've always I wanted to pitch this to Disney like the own ABC.

I don't know about the ads of it, but wouldn't it be great if you could just pick a year

and just watch ABC with the commercial cuts like the actual content?

Like I would watch that all the time.

A service where it's just this is June 21st.

Yes.

Show me TGIF 1997.

Yes.

I want to write the block.

I want our ball experience of just having it all.

Exactly.

I would think that would be a very profitable thing to do.

It would be incredible.

Yeah.

I used to, yes.

I mean, I used to tape movies off of TV and watch them over and over again.

I rediscovered them when my parents moved those VHSs and I put it in and immediately

knew every word of every commercial.

Isn't that crazy?

It's incredible.

No.

Okay.

Are you baseball fan?

This is all I care about.

Fair weather, but I was you're going to hate me because I'm a socks fan.

That's fine.

I don't care.

We're all throwing it because you're in Europe and Oakland, if you feel for the A's,

but no, that you don't really know.

Many people I work with are still in mourning.

Yeah.

Don't want to talk about it.

Rift A's.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

and don't want to talk about it.

Rip A's.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Interesting.

And here in the studio with us, I'm David Sims.

Are we here?

I'm Griffin.

Great.

Ben Hossley's here.

Hey there.

Looking great by the way.

Thank you.

I'm looking great.

Well, but I'm just looking particularly good.

Right.

For the listener, this is our first time seeing Griffin

in since end of June or whatever.

Since the stands are restarted.

Yeah.

I mean, I saw you on.

I went away.

I come back.

We're ending it.

Yes.

Mm hmm.

And Andrew's joining us.

That toy story five has come out.

I'm in wind now.

It's done great.

All about Spider-Man right now.

It is so funny that you just made a cash billion dollars.

And it's like a month later.

It's like Spider-Man in the Odyssey.

It's like a month later.

You did get to be the highest gross in film of the year.

So far.

Yes.

I mean, it's not going to be that at the end of this thing.

But you got to be.

For a while.

It was anointed.

Sure.

You got that little badge.

Like, I have nothing to complain about.

It seems the movie did.

I think you should complain about it.

Did beyond expectation.

It totally did.

It did terrific.

High-scratching toy story film.

Yeah.

Before inflation.

Yeah.

Made my daughter very sad.

Really?

Yeah.

In a way that she couldn't articulate because she's only five.

Oh, well, I don't count five as movie going yet.

Well, fair enough.

I guess she can go.

Just a dark theater is.

Can be traumatizing for a child.

In my child's defense, she's a very experienced theater girl.

We see lots of movies together.

And usually when we exit the theater, she's just kind of like.

Best movie.

I loved it.

Every minute was great.

Obviously, because we're seeing things like Super Mario or what are some animals?

Go, go, go.

The great sports drama, goat.

Two or three five, she was just upset.

She was like, I want mom.

Like she was just like clearly thrown by it, I think because of the friendship stuff.

You know, just because it was about interpersonal relationships.

Kid drama.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And most of the things she sees are more about interpersonal kind of like Star Fox or Mario

drama.

She's very wrapped up in the Star Fox drama.

Flippy frog.

And like the emotions in Toy Story 5 are subtler.

And like our, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to like tell you something.

You don't know here.

He's not trying to like bill you for therapy.

I'm more investigating like my, it's like my kid walks out of, you know, Star Super Mario

and it's like I like that Luigi scared.

Like she gets that, you know, it's just a very loud emotion.

Like I think Toy Story 5, she was like trying to process it all.

Like what was going on with Bonham?

Probably they'll watch the movie again when they're older and it'll be different form.

No, it's great.

I'm saying this is a compliment.

She liked it.

It's just intense.

I said Flippy frog and said a slippy toad.

Andrew, here's Jesus.

I know.

I just need to correct myself from tired from this podcast.

Here's a red stream related question.

And then I, and then I want to get more focused on that.

What's red stream?

Red stream.

When you cited the, the Pixar stream.

Oh, red stream.

I'm sorry.

I was hearing red stream.

Can we get the shorts back in front of the movies?

Oh, yeah, sure.

The movies are a little longer, I feel like.

The Pixar movies have been flated in length.

There was a period of time where we had a lot more being made and just that theatric

experience was a little more for sure.

And then I think between having to make things for less and being in a questionable,

still space of theatrical, though it's starting to feel like a good year.

It's still in good.

It may come back, but that's a lot.

They're not cheap to make.

Yeah.

And they take a year and a half to make a short.

And that's longer than some live action movies are to take.

So it's hard and hard to justify.

Wasn't the, was it obvious?

Sorry, wasn't it often the idea that like, with the shorts you're testing some sort

of, sometimes, sometimes, but we're at a place now where it's kind of, you can,

you used to, I mean, the stuff we could do, like I was away for 10 years or eight years,

or 10 if you count going in, like when last time I was like in production at, and I

thought we could do everything looks wise back then in 2014, 15.

And now I, I've just like as a kid in a candy store working on this one.

I was just like, wow, we can, we can do anything.

I think Wally still looks incredible, but it is wild.

When we do this podcast, I often will go back and read the reviews from the time.

And at the time everyone went, well, they cracked it.

It's never going to look better than this.

Every single thing has technically been accomplished now on this film.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I, I'm of the belief that like about, yeah, maybe 10 years, maybe a little longer.

It's all still costly, just manpower wise.

But you can, if you can think of it, you can make it.

It's just in the eye of the beholder now.

It's, it's, if you don't like the look of something, you got to blame the artist, not

the paint.

Was it weird though, like coming back 10 years later, or was it freeing or fun or like cool

to open up the old toy box?

It was fun.

Boy box.

It was fun to be in the production of it.

It was fun to work.

I love, I mean, I love production.

I love working with other artists.

I've, I've always been that kid that loved, loved putting on a show in the backyard, kind

of equivalent or making our movies with, with your super eight.

And so that's the drug.

But I knew I wouldn't love and was confirmed only about two years in was I don't like how

long it takes.

As you, you just mentioned before, I'm not giving anything away, you're 40.

I know.

No, no, time gets faster at 40 and then it gets even faster at 50 and, or, or, and so four

years at 60 is just too long because it then suddenly half a decade is practically over

and I can count on one hand how many more times I could do this.

Like it's time that's made me kind of anti animation at this point.

Here's a kind of, and you don't think children should have be fun or have fun or be happy

too.

So you're anti animation for that.

No, I think children should have a lot of fun, but I'm not worried about it.

Fair enough being the bearer of that.

Yes, it's not your responsibility anymore.

No, no, I'm making films for myself.

The press, you did, the press runs for the two movies you had this year.

You, you talked about this a lot and how growing up you never specifically were interested

in animation in a singular way that was never the exclusive goal of what you wanted to

do and how you feel like this might be your last animated film because of the time issue.

This is maybe a very stupidly broad question, but how did you realize you had the capacity

to do animation because it is the kind of thing unlike live action directing where it starts

with needing to have some facility at doing the technical.

It's easy to look back to 2020 now and go.

I was Jack of all trades and master of none.

I love I was going to be an actor.

I was going to be a musician.

I was going to be an artist.

I could do all three of those things and none of them it great to such mastery in my teens

that I knew that this was calling me.

And I didn't, but I liked doing all of them.

And I definitely love the arts and I went to the movies like Frickin Church every, it

was in your master's shoes.

So it's like what sports are for sometimes to bond parents and the kids and the family.

Movies were that our whole family would jump into the station wagon, go up what we set

up the line to the movieplex and we didn't even think about what was that playing.

We would just go see it and you worked at an art house theater as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By the time I got old enough to be employed.

Yeah.

And so all of that I didn't want to give up.

And so it's because I found out, and this is, you got to remember it's so far before

the internet, before knowledge of anything, you know, they have handbooks was the only

way you could find out about colleges or somebody went somewhere and told you about something.

And so it was my junior year of high school and my guidance counselor had to meet me to

say, what I'm going to do with my life, where am I going to go?

I didn't know.

And he was late to the office.

I sat there and I stared at this bookcase and there was this binder with fluorescent,

hot fluorescent orange binder.

And I pulled it out and it was for cowl arts and I learned that I learned, oh my God,

they teach animation, I draw, which is sort of like acting.

I like to act.

It's all about timing and I've got a good rhythm.

I like music and it's ultimately on film and I love film.

And I was like, suddenly I was like, I don't have to give up any of this.

It was literally all in that one.

It was all in that one.

And then I became like devil's tower.

Like I had to go.

And because I had fucked off most of my high school and I was really bad student, I

didn't get in.

And so I spent the next, I got into one school, the Hartford Hartford Art School, which

is basically a business school.

And there's this one little oasis that took me and I learned in a kick my ass foundations

wise.

I was probably their best student because I was trying to make a portfolio to just get

the hell out.

And so the next year I got into Cali.

So I have the rejection letter from one year and a half.

But then the conclusion of that story is you jump to 2003.

Nimo comes out.

Cali wants to give me an award at the Red Cat Theatre.

My sweet mate for one year was Don Cheetle.

Don Cheetle is doing well.

And so Don starts to, he presents me with the award and I give this same speech about

how I found out about Cal Arts.

And then I say at the end of it, I said, so whoever in 1982 in the admissions department

decided to make a binder fluorescent orange.

Thank you.

And this guy in the back went, that was me.

Wow.

So it was very nice closure.

It was a new pop.

That was closure.

Cheetle was, what was he doing?

I didn't think it was saying that.

Cal Arts is like fame.

Yeah.

And I don't know if that means anything.

No, no, means are you aware?

I dropped out of Cal Arts.

He dropped out of Cal Arts.

How long did you go?

I went for nine months.

Just a one-man-g-drop.

What made me drop out?

I went for live action film directing, which I think was the wrong choice for me and school.

And I also think I didn't want to be in school.

Who was running the program then?

Steve Anker.

Sandy McKendrick was running it when I was there.

I didn't believe that.

I mean, who was sweet smell of success?

Monty Helman was teaching at the time.

Lavenda Hillmob.

Lavenda Hillmob.

And James Benning, it was like an incredible faculty.

You also didn't drive.

So I didn't drive.

This was a quite challenging thing for you.

That's a problem in California.

Andrew, it was maybe 50% of the reason I dropped out.

Oh, okay.

Why didn't you go to school in the North Sea?

Like, why didn't you go to like, I'm school over here?

Like the idea of going to a school where I could come back home and get the same people

on the weekend.

I guess that.

I grew up here and almost everyone I knew was doing that.

And I was feeling very defiant about I'm going to go somewhere different.

I'm going to make a new life for myself.

And I had, I got locked on the Keller because I thought I wanted to be animating.

And I had some facility for it, but I didn't have the, the discipline I found ultimately.

I think I could have done experimental.

But I had locked into character.

And then when I felt like I'm not good enough at this, then I shifted to live action.

And then when I was there, I started going, I feel like I want to act.

And so it was also a weird transitional time in my life.

But I'm very familiar with all of the places you're listing.

And also who the alumni are.

Ed Harris, David also went to Keller.

Pee Wehrmann.

Yes, Paul Rubens.

Yes.

Absolutely.

I know Carol.

I'm going to be a hot minute with David Hasselhock.

Really.

Yeah.

That's true.

These parents are incredible.

And now somebody should write a book.

Yes.

Ellie.

Yeah.

And I know it's just like what was it like?

My roommate was a Joss Glenny Smith who was his actor.

He's still working actor.

Great.

Yeah.

Should we just stick on this?

No, absolutely not.

Okay.

But, but I, you're calling out a thing that I think isn't discussed enough, which is how much of animation is acting.

Yeah.

No, I always have to explain to the actors that I'm working with that you're half the equation,

you know, and that I'm going to have a conversation with what I call the shy actors, which are the

animators not in front of the camera.

And, but they have to be cast as appropriately as anybody, you know, the old adage of if you

can get the script and the casting rights for a movie, then they're halfway there.

It's kind of true also for your animators, you know, they have the things that their strengths

are and aren't.

And it's almost a little tougher because you have to, you usually have a team.

So like there's not one person animating Woody or one person animating Jesse.

It's a group of people.

So we adopted at the very beginning of the whole studio was what Disney did, which you

have daily's every morning where all the animators watch everybody's work in the middle of their

project, the middle of their working on it.

So that if there's notes from me about what I would think the character would or wouldn't

do, everybody hears it.

So they all think the same.

And, but it's also a chance to be inspired and you and you get a little competitive.

You're like, wow, look at what they did with the smarty pants in that shot.

I never knew you could do that with the handle and that you could make it look like he's,

you know, flipping them off or something.

And that would inspire them to like go.

And so it's just a win-win.

And so there's this sort of, it's almost like summer stock.

Everybody's got to learn all the roles.

And, but it's actors.

You talk to them just like actors.

This is your mark.

This is where you're coming from.

This is where you're going to.

And you're not trying to get into it too much, you know, because you don't want to get

too much into their head.

This is something that I feel like is the defining aspect of your films in particular is, and

maybe it goes back to that kicking yourself in the ass.

You're at Hardford.

But by design, giving yourself characters who are going to be incredibly difficult to animate,

I feel like there's a lot of self-imposed challenges of like, you go to the double-a-gang

and Toy Story 5 is three characters that do not lend themselves to animation.

They're characters that don't have traditional limbs, you know, two of them don't, one of

them doesn't have a traditional face, Wally and Eve certainly.

You talked a lot about with Nemo not wanting to cheat.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to put the personal eyes them more.

And then I feel like sometimes in the opposite direction you have a character like Hank, where

the challenge is.

A whole different one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, of extremity.

But that's not a thing you consciously sort of throw at yourself.

Not in the, I mean, I'm sure there's an element of challenge that I just want for

anything.

I think I'm a little bit more, it's more that I'm just not afraid of it.

I just go with what logically makes sense to, look at, I was charmed like everybody else,

at least that was around at the time that they first saw that Luxo lamp.

I was like, there's so much personality in this simple lamp with this mic right now.

And I felt seen because I felt like I had been anthropomorphizing everything as since

I was a little kid.

Like my bike was cold in the rain as far as I was concerned.

My, that leaf falling was afraid of heights when it fell.

Like that just was how I thought I didn't like learn that.

And so I realized I had a tribe and these are these are my people.

And I also was lucked out that I was the first generation Sesame Street kids that came out

in 69.

I was four years old.

And to me, the Muppets just always existed.

Yeah.

I learned everything entertainment and timing wise.

And, and, and, and if you go back and watch on YouTube any of the original first season,

like they were little adults.

There was nothing kidified.

Like I always have this theory that Elmo fucked it up for everything.

Yeah.

I'm your kiddy voice and everything had to be young.

And everybody started thinking about the kids.

And I'm like, nobody thought about the kids.

At least, and it's so good.

And it was clever.

Like green and so like that guy were open to your New Yorkers.

Yeah.

Yes, they tied her and they're opening up their jackets.

They like you want to buy a cute.

You know, it's, I mean, we're tired of 50.

It's a great, really.

Yeah.

But anyway, what I was quickly going to connect to was how much personality came of just

doing an open mouth with your hand, just a hand puppet.

Like just taking a napkin and like, and like so I just was raised going, I'm seeing a million

bit of subtleties of acting and reactions from just a hand puppet.

So I've never thought you couldn't do it with under extreme logic.

You logically just run.

I just like, it's always existed.

So I've never really thought about it.

But I do have arguments with, not arguments, but I have to like convince animators sometimes

that I realize, oh, they don't all think like that.

They have to logic it out.

And I'm clearly, I'm clearly more right brain than left brain because people want to go down

rabbit holes about like, well, if they did this, why did they do that?

And I just go, well, I'm already starting with a story that fish are talking.

So I'm not going to, I'm not going to left brain this.

It's an illness though about Pixar.

The people are like, well, I want to impose reality on it.

It's like, but we're outside of reality.

It makes you realize maybe they're right and I'm wrong.

I never think like that.

So I'm not going to start thinking like that.

I just want to have fun and I want to just not be distracted while I'm watching it.

And I feel really bad for somebody that is.

That's a curse because I just want to go along for the ride or any movie I'm watching.

So I'm just going like, all right, they're looking at one of the arguments that goes.

That's right.

You can't even be like, I'm always spastic.

Because like, there's an A-SOPs fable that starts out there once was a sausage in a burden

of mouse and lives in a house.

And you go, and it was amazing.

If you start that way, everybody goes, okay.

And you're like, and so it just shows you that if you made, if you made people have questions

about it, then you're just telling the story badly.

This is what I think.

It's not the story is bad.

Well, you're just telling it badly.

I think what Pixar movies sometimes do, and again, I am using Pixar monolithically here,

so feel free to yell at me.

But right, but it doesn't pose some logic, which is part of the fun, right?

It's like, let's just enough that we stand up the world.

Exactly.

We live in a, we're inside of a child's brain.

What could that look like?

We're inside of the axiomer, or whatever.

Like, there'll be some logic, but you need to embrace the fantasy as well.

You guys can speak better this, but I can only surmise that because the gaming world is

so immersive and thorough that you will want that same truth to be on any movie you want.

I've been thinking about this a lot.

I mean, cars is the one I think that broke everyone's breath.

But no, but I've been thinking about this a lot that I do think there is, as games became

more cinematic and less their own art form entirely, they start working more of the language

of films into them and people have control and autonomy within us.

Yes.

Yes.

Nolan did this interview recently.

I just saw the Chinese interview.

The Chinese interview.

It's fucking incredible.

Right.

Where he said, like, I think there is this problem of people feel like if they're able to recognize

a trope of storytelling that invalidates it.

That's such a weird, I mean, I sad.

Yeah.

But it's so true.

And it's such a sickness and sort of modern media of now that we can slow everything down

and look everything in million ways.

And, you know, like, you know, I can look at YouTube, but any clip I want to, yes, I can

show you patterns.

And then you'll be smart.

You'll see the patterns, like I see the patterns.

And it's like, there's nothing interesting about you seeing the patterns.

Of course, there's patterns to storytelling.

And when you're playing the patterns, you compliment them.

If they work properly because you go, that's fun.

That this pattern challenge, then I eat it.

I said this on Blue Sky, like an idiot.

You know, I'm, I made a social media post like, I don't really do that anymore.

Where I was just like, if you're a critic, the least interesting thing that any, the last

thing anyone wants to hear from you is I'm smarter than the movie.

Like that's not criticism.

That's just you talking about yourself.

Who cares?

Like, I don't care if you're smarter than the movie.

I want you to tell me what this movie means, either to you or to the culture or to what

you maybe perceive in the filmmaker, you know, like that's fine.

I don't care that you, you're like, well, this is, these are tropes I know.

So I'm smart.

You know, like that's not, you're not telling anyone an interesting story.

That's all I agree with that.

Yeah.

Sure.

Great.

I guess I'll get out of here.

I guess you can stay.

Okay.

If I can put my, my flick lover 98 hat back on, because we had, we had, you know, there

was the argument of whether or not to include a bug's life.

And a lot of it for me was just, I wanted to cover bug's life, right?

I mean, you could, you could almost get away with it because we, John was very gracious

and we were a team on that, you know, more so.

But at the end of the day, you know, I, it's, it was, it's his movie.

It was not to discredit that, but it was more that I thought it was an important step

in your arc in sort of the journey of screenwriter.

Yeah.

It was a second step.

Yeah.

Because we thought you sort of fall into it.

I mean, bug's life was a chore for you or for everybody.

For all of us, only in comparison to how, it was fascinating is we, I mean, all I

remember during a bug's life is complaining like, I wish I was as dumb and as eager as I

was making toy story because we knew nothing.

And so we kept saying we were like the young engineers that put a man on the moon and

NASA.

We just didn't know you couldn't do it.

Yeah.

And that got us through.

That was our fuel.

So even though I bet you on paper, it was harder to make toy story than a bug's life.

It felt funner because we were just young and like we're making a movie.

Like we didn't think we'd do anything more than that.

And it was came from such a natural inspiration like the, the well of like what, like I remember

us and the story changed five different ways after this, but this didn't.

It was what if it was your favorite toy on a top of bed and suddenly a new toy got

brought in for a birthday and it got thrown off?

Like just that sense, like you suddenly realized the, it evoked such feelings of empathy

about jealousy and, and how that felt when you're, you're an ex sibling came in when a new

kid came on the playground, like it just was so organic and natural.

It was like literally striking oil.

And so we never had that on a bug's life.

It was a intellectual exercise.

Like what if we turned the ant and the grass up around its head?

It could go a little seven samurai, it could go a lot of these things, but like just that

was an intellectual left brain didn't evoke the emotion and I learned.

And so it was, we got there, but it was always like trying to draw water out of a stone.

So I learned like, oh, it's too hard benefit, especially if we're going to work on it for

three to four years and you're going to get out of bed with it not working most days.

You got to be ideally on top of a well of something that is more natural of a geyser of

emotion and or not to do it, not do it yet.

So that's why a lot of our movies sometimes take forever before we really start committing

to them because we haven't found that well.

I'm not going to want to spend five years on this.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And then to start to you guys made in like five minutes, right?

That was a little bit more.

That's more.

Back at that, I realized that the perfect storm of that was they had tried so many other

versions that there was about 30% of the movie that was worth keeping, not in linear,

but like these little bits.

And then the other was we literally got, I had two versions, two other versions of Toy Story

we'd thrown at like two other, not like a whole whole tale, but there was so much in

the costume box left from the first.

And then the biggest factor was we got literally the band back together.

We got everybody back from stem to stern that had made the first one.

So we were psychic.

So you just put us in.

We had a costume box of leftover material.

We had building blocks that made a lot of sense.

But I looked, I was cleaning out my email last year.

Like it goes all the way back to 92, but like it's less and less because we weren't using

it so much then.

And I was freaked myself out of like I'm talking about, it's November of 98.

I'm doing post at Skywalker on Bugs Life, but I'm being asked to help do the outline for

this monster movie that he's doing.

So I'm doing that on the side.

By December, there's rumblings in the email that something's amiss across the street

with the other production.

By the holidays, John's calling me into like we got a talk.

By the January, we're like, we are going to have to take it all over.

By the end of February, I've written the whole thing.

By March, I'm off.

And I'm starting to help this thing that's now called Monsters Incorporated.

And I have this idea for a fish.

Like that, and I had two kids, I had two little kids.

And I looked under like, and I just go, I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't.

I like, I always put all those things in that era, but not so tightly together.

And just clear if I heard the listener, Toy Story 2 comes out in November of that same

year you're describing like of 99.

Yeah, right.

It's made like we I was writing pages on a Monday.

It was delivered to story by the end of Monday, like top of the day Monday, Tuesday morning

at the latest by Wednesday, Thursday, it's cut in by Friday, it's being refined.

I like it.

So it was just is insane.

I don't know how we did.

It is my default incredible.

Like the movie is so good.

But it just doesn't really make sense that the movie is over again.

It's like if you said you all have a band went on tour and played so hard and then left

and do something else and they said, come back and do exactly what you did before and just

keep it going.

That's why.

I mean, it's not only my favorite Toy Story movie.

It's maybe my favorite movie.

I often default to that as my answer.

I answered this recently when the five drunk finance bros and Madrid asked me, you like

movies, what movie you like and then proceeded to drop three beers while I answered.

But I think I've always pinpointed is that there is a feeling of mania to that movie.

Well, that's also a reflection of us because we were left.

Disney said basically go with God.

Let you and nobody was there to stop us.

Left alone.

That was the core original group and all we cared about was cracking each other up.

We cared about the film.

We cared about emotion, but not ever at the expense of cracking each other up.

It's like entertainment mattered greatly to us.

Everything went through an entertainment filter.

So even if we're doing the sad moment and by the way, the Jesse being sad is to emulate

what it's like to be empty nester.

Fast-sounding.

So that's why you don't get with it right now.

It's because you haven't had to be an empty nester.

Who's that drawing from?

Well, there was a range of people of ages.

We had people that were already grandparents, people that were single, that was all over

the map.

But we were just going with the truth of the arc of life of giving up your kid and having

to see them go away.

My kid's not going anywhere.

She's going to.

You just keep telling yourself that.

She's going to go to the art joke in the family.

She's like, she'll go to mega-reversers, just like the community college industry basically.

Like, yeah, now she can move there.

She's going to go to Sims University.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, yeah, no, she can go to college.

You can go to college like one neighborhood over massive hilarious.

The twins, I'll just still live in the basement, right?

They'll just, I don't know.

We've got to bring up the twin connection.

Oh, what's that?

Because I brought up to you, David, having twins.

I have twins.

I have twins.

Yeah.

I have three kids or three kids.

I have an older daughter and younger sons.

And how old are the sons?

They just turned two.

Okay.

So my younger brothers are identical twins.

Oh, so and you're, so what happened to me happened to your family?

And what's going to happen to your daughter?

I'm telling you now, because we're going to look back at photos when they're a little

and toddler's to your twins.

And you're going to be able to say, who is who?

Right.

And she will.

Yeah, that's like, you always knew you're.

I can still look at photos with just the back of their heads.

And I go, that's my brother.

That's my brother, Nathan.

Wait, so what's the age difference between you?

Five years.

My daughter was like three and a half.

Like the other thing that's, I don't know what the minutes apart, but my brothers were

born 10 minutes apart.

And that might have well been 10 years apart.

So whenever there was a lineup of us, the pecking order was who was came out first, who

came out last.

It's create my kids were born one minute apart.

Wow.

And yet it is, there's a C section, you know, just one and the other.

And it is nonetheless crazy that the, the, the, the younger one is the baby.

You were firm as the baby.

Of course he's the baby.

But maybe in every way he's littler, he's like, you know, what

out you do, they, they, my brother, one brother has all the signs of the baby brother,

one has all the signs of middle child.

I don't understand it.

It's very strange so far, but yes, the old, the old, the pecking one is the alpha.

Yeah.

Well, your parents survived them.

They barely survived.

Yes.

Yeah.

I get that.

I hear that.

And there was a story once where they figured out in their separate cribs had a one to

push their cribs across the room.

And then my mother came in and the dresser drawers have been used like steps.

And they got into the Vaseline and baby powder.

And it was, it was like, it's hard, fine.

We plow our feather all like the combined intelligence.

And that was when they, they would speak baby talking to each other.

And you could hear in the inflections that they were actually having a back and forth

conversation.

My kids do that.

Yeah.

It's weird.

It's right.

They, they, they, they, they, they babble stuff with each other and you're like, oh,

right.

This is like communication like that we will never understand.

It's very strange having twins.

Twin parents get at me always.

Is that in the family and any?

Not at all.

On either side?

No.

And we always joke, right?

Because it's like, I should wear a t-shirt like not in the family.

We didn't do IVF.

You know, because like those are the questions.

But it's the same thing as when someone says like, oh, I'm sick, right?

And you're like, oh, I'm so sorry.

So do you like smoke cigarette?

You know, like people immediately are like, is it going to happen to me?

What happened to you?

You know, like they just nicely start to ask questions.

And it's a genetically like, do you guys have that?

And it's the same with the twins.

People like, does it run your family?

Nope, just happened.

We are older parent.

Like, you know, it was an old, apparently it's more common the older you get because

your body basically just sort of starts, you know, getting rid of all the eggs, not to

be like biological about it.

But yeah, that's all.

I don't know.

There's a part of Africa where people eat a certain yam that makes twin pregnancies incredibly

common.

I learned that.

I can send it to you.

Wow.

Yeah.

What's the yam?

How do I get something?

I don't know.

It's working out really well for you.

Little bit.

It's working out.

Okay.

They're crazy.

Yes.

It's a, parts of Africa, particularly the Yeruba people in Nigeria have a diet rich in

native yams and those have hormones called phytogestrogens, which some people stimulate

multiple egg production.

Anyway, we have interesting.

We're talking twins.

We're talking twins.

Not the movie.

Not the movie.

Okay.

So we talked bugs life.

We talked about the crunch of right.

A bugs life you're consciously coming in as a screenwriter from the get.

I get like, yeah, I learned screenwriting by watching Josh Weedon do it for the year

and a half.

He worked with us.

Right.

And he was sort of at the top of his powers.

He was a boy.

He was sort of, he was sort of a boy.

He was rising.

Right.

He was still rising.

It's obvious because we had had script writers before that failed miserably.

And so we were getting a lesson on what good screenwriting was and what would be fascinating

is we'd sit in a room together the four or five of us, including Josh and we spitball

something and we'd play it out for ourselves.

He'd nod.

He'd go off into a room play soundtrack music really loud for a while and then come back

out and you'd read these two or three pages.

And the way they were written, you were just compelled to see it exactly the way we

had talked about it.

It wasn't and it sucked you in like it inspired me like, oh, there's a way to do.

I called it cinematic dictation.

Like, oh, I failed in English in high school.

So I thought that writing was for smart people, no offense.

But then I realized, oh, it's cinematic dictation.

Yeah.

It's like, I've always seen the movie.

There's just a way to do it that makes other people see it the way you want to see it.

And it can be done.

And if it's done poorly, you don't see it the way that they want, even though you had

it in your head.

So that's what I just became determined to be good at that.

And I was honest with somebody recently, I said, some of it was self preservation because

there was no guarantee this company was going to last and that we were going to be beyond

a, we were such a startup.

So we didn't know how the movie was going to do at the time.

And I was like, I need to learn a trade.

I can use somewhere else.

So I thought screen writing is applies to other places beyond just, uh, don't know how

to computer animate.

And so I just started doing it without anybody asking.

Nobody was asking me to be the writer, uh, after Josh left for the last year.

And by the time it was done, they weren't going to give me credit.

So I went to the current script of everything and I highlight everything that I, they had

kept.

And it was 75% of the script was what I did.

And so I convinced them.

And then, uh, then they said, okay.

So bugs life was like the first time the officially okay that I could play that role.

And from the beginning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then right, because you're credited on Toy Story, you're credited on Monster's Inc.

As a writer, right?

Uh, was that just you and Pete or no Daniel Gerson, right?

Okay.

Isn't the ledger on Monster's Inc.

Monster's just basically Daniel Gerson and, uh, let's see Jim, Jill Colton, Jeff Pigeon,

Ralph Eggelston.

I'm just looking at the story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I just was part of their helping.

I mean, I didn't, I wasn't the founder of any of that.

Was there a moment where you were supposed to direct that idea in a different form?

No.

Okay.

They had real trouble at the beginning outlining it and getting it to have an engine.

Yeah.

And the only thing I can really take credit for, uh, the engine is screams.

Well, David, that's what it, that's what it really is.

I came up with, I said, you need a motivation that creates greed and all the emotions that

happen in the real world.

And so scream is got to, what if you put scream in there so that it's treated like oil

is in this country?

What was the movie before that?

Because that does feel foundational to like, well, why the monsters do this?

You're right.

But you're smarter and right now than any of us.

No, but I'm excited.

We were all in our 20s just learning how to do it.

So it was a new story.

It wasn't a buddy film.

And we just had to learn how to, you know, I was, we were still reading every screenwriting

book going to McKee classes like we were just, we were, you're watching our learn as

you watch those first three movies.

It's, I mean, a lot of what?

I watch those movies incessantly.

And also why I think people sometimes will ask because I dropped out of Cal Arts, like

where did I learn story structure stuff when I ran away from academia, trying to teach

me that kind of thing?

And so much of it is from watching all of the DVDs that you guys put together, the talks

that you guys have done, the commentaries.

I think we were so excited to learn.

Yeah, you guys were real sure we wanted to pass it on.

Right.

Because that's for a long time, for like almost the first 20 years, but definitely the first

15, it just felt like we just got to continue film school.

And so we just promoted that atmosphere and anything we did.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but you're talking about the, the identification of the

oil spring that you had from the beginning with Toy Story that you felt like you couldn't

find with a bug's life for a while.

How do you know when you found it?

Is it just from the reaction from other people?

Is it within yourself?

You just go, I, the story now kind of explains itself.

You can definitely tell you just feel it.

It, it, it, it, it usually evokes an involuntary response from not only yourself, but when

you, you put the peanut butter with the chocolate and you pitch just the basics to somebody

else, even in its rarest golden book form, you see investment happening from the person

you're pitching to.

And that, that tends to be the, the proof is that there's, there's golden in the hills.

Because you talked about in this recent press tour that Toy Story is one of those things

where if you sit in a room for an hour, you start coming up with new ideas of what could

happen in that universe.

And it does feel like it's, it's an infinitely fertile playground for story.

I've, one of the reasons I think I get pulled in is because they've skipped the ABCs.

Like they've gone straight to like other letters in the alphabet and they've, and they've

just made understandably they're trying to be different or trying to be interesting or

trying to go, they think literally going to new territory will give us new ideas.

And I'm like, what was free in the beginning was just the fact that toys came to life.

Like just like that was like, wow.

And I get to win millions of things for them.

And you have to, and now we've kind of, from that movie on, messed up for generations.

Everybody thinks toys come to life.

Like there's, there's no wow factor for go watching the story.

It's a given now.

So the other thing that's behind that that I have to remind them on is that, that secret

sauce is in the mundane.

I said, if you take collectively the hours spent watching Toy Story movies, even if you

put five of with it now, it's about what six hours?

That's seven.

That's seven hours of a toy's life.

That's one day.

And they have spent, if there are toys in your life, like for five years or six years

or maybe even eight in your house, that's a lot of hours in the day, not accounted for.

I used to like, I remember thinking there'd be a lot of humor when we were trying to come

up with the first movie of like just the boredom of being in the room while the kids gone

and making it treating it like jury duty.

We had a joke of like, if I have to read Poki, the little puppy one more time, I'm going

to kill somebody and like, just put like that's where the humor starts to come from is

like the mundane and seeing it from that perspective.

100%.

And it's just respectful.

We're being right now.

Yeah.

Like you could do a whole sequence just about being trapped in that Ziploc.

It's why those movies make people dizzy sometimes, right?

Because these are intellectually developed conscious creatures that are basically little

grown-ups living in a child's room, kind of bored all day, right?

And one day they might be trash or they might be in a box or, you know, yeah.

The way people describe seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time and seeing the

runner go over and feeling like the world's exploded, like my mind explosion moment was

Woody starting the meeting in the first toy story.

Yeah.

There's something that just activated in me and oh, they're acting like grown-ups.

This isn't for me.

We did a sequence early on before we had all the way that we had that scene where we thought

we'd start with the birthday party because this had recently happened at Pixar.

There would have been two layoffs a couple years prior.

So everybody was kind of very savvy now to what layoffs felt like in company and it was

getting me next.

And so we treated, we did a scene of introducing Woody in the and his bedroom with everybody

going, is it me?

You know, who am I going to?

And we suddenly loved like that we were capturing something about adult life, but the metaphor

of what it's like for the toys and it made complete sense.

And we were told it was too juvenile by Disney at the time.

So we had to act it.

And everybody knows about the Black Friday and it not going well and everything like that.

And that's when that was year, you know, months of going down to what was supposed to be

like adult humor or a fight that knows that you're a hulio.

Yeah.

And when we had to like rescue the film and to save our asses and we had like two weeks

to like try to resurrect it, we went back to that layoff scene and we said there's something

muppety and just really, which is now we all know is toy story now.

Right.

But we said that we think our gut was right on that mojo and we're going back and it

became Woody's meeting classic fashion awareness.

Yeah.

I mean, all that stuff, which is just not, none of it is inappropriate.

And even as a small child, I recognize there was something funny in why are the cartoon

characters talking like my parents.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

That there, yeah, that there is a kind of clocking clock out by should we ask about finding

Nemo?

If you have some of the movies he's directed, I mean, geez.

Yeah.

We're asking a lot of general good.

But yes, finding Nemo is a perfect movie in my opinion.

Yeah, I was just downhill from after that.

Not true.

Yeah, you followed up with Wally.

Oh, you think of that.

You know, I'm piece of junk.

You would have thought you would have thought I had at the time.

Was that the feeling at the preview screening for Wally?

There was a lot of anxiety.

It got the lower marks and like Pixar generally, right, tended to, I mean, and you'd had,

and that's when I had to swap.

I was going to say it's before you do the final act change.

Yeah.

And, you know, again, learning curve.

Wait, wait, remind me.

I'm sorry.

I'm sure we're just going to say something.

I'll let you explain.

Oh, sure.

You directed the phone, Wally.

It pretty much scene wise played out similar, but it was missing two things.

We kept treating Wally in the third act like he had to be the hero.

And so he rescued Eve.

And we thought he wasn't going to be alive.

And then he put her together at the end.

Or no, no, no, he got still got smashed by the time he got to the Alito deck.

But we also didn't have him, like losing his personality, which is the true kind of,

like, oh my god, like, you're stomach.

So we knew it.

You could feel it.

And so, but I was at a, I was just, I was three and a half years or four years by now.

And I was just beat down.

I didn't know.

It just felt like I'd come up, tried everything.

And, but it was the same guys that I'd always had in the room to like, have her my ass

before.

And then he really just stayed in the room and thought and hammered it out until we

realized, oh, Wally's more like Chaplin.

Like he changes everybody else.

And then you have to have the payoff of that.

And then losing his identity at the end.

It all seems obvious now.

No, it does.

The losing is identity.

It feels so obvious that it's so it's making movies is crazy.

Because like you telling me that wasn't always part of the movie.

I'm like, I can't believe that.

But if you think about it, when you start writing a movie, nothing was in the movie.

Right.

And so, of course, that's why I always equate writing to an archaeological dig.

And it's very, the theory all where you just feel like you're saying that the story

already exists out there.

But I really do believe that it's very much like the angel in the marble and the Vinci

or when a Michelangelo chipping it away and letting it fly.

And he always saw it in the cube of marble.

And I've just seen that happen so many times.

At Pixar where you've uncovered these bones, you're just digging all the time trying to

build this dinosaur that you claim is in the ground or the story.

And then you don't have a say for what you find and when you find it, you can only give

yourself credit for digging in the right place and for how hard you're working at digging

things up.

You have to be sort of open-minded to like the answers don't come when you want them

to.

You're just got to be ready to do something about it when they do.

I saw Rashida Jones was doing press for the invite and she cited something that you

said to her, the mountain metaphor, but it was something to the extent of your job

in constructing a story or finding what the story is, is exploring every possible way.

When you're trying to figure out the path around the mountain, you're going to go up

it around it down at whatever, just move the mountain.

Like sometimes you just have to restructure and let's

sometimes you're like, why are we, why did we put this mountain here?

Right.

Like, let's just go somewhere else.

And it's like, right, you're a writer.

You can just be like, you know what?

The maximum in the mountain.

Right.

Yeah, you can easily trick yourself into thinking like that's cheating or that you're a failure

for not acquiescing to the story gods that like, oh, there was a different path that

I just wasn't thinking about.

Here's a question I have for you.

Your animated films have started with your idea, right?

One Carter, you write, but it's an adaptation, obviously.

And then the blink of an eye starts with a script from Colby Day.

And there are the other live action films that you've been attached to over the years,

which were almost always scripts that were out there in the ether.

Have you ever tried sitting down and starting a live action script on your own?

Is there a reason you feel like you're more attracted to or is that just the nature of

how things are so fucking hard?

Have shaken out.

All I've known, my career, mostly, is stuff that I either was a party too very from the

get go or was mine.

And everything that gets criticized, everything that gets changed, everything that, you know,

because you take it personally even when you think you're not, you debate whether you're

a failure, whether you're right.

It just takes so much out of you emotionally.

And once I found out you could actually, I said, wait a minute.

Some of my favorite directors never wrote what they worked on.

And I realized, oh, I don't have to die on this hill every time I make something.

And so I started looking at things.

Some of it was television, some of it was scripts.

And there were a lot of scripts I tried to get made that where other people that never

got picked up.

And just kind of did the more traditional route of like, I would love to see this film.

I couldn't totally see how this film should be made.

And it was still hard, but it was so much, it was so easy not to make it about me.

It was so easy to be objective.

Does TV feel particularly liberating in that sense?

It is in the just that I enjoy the doing.

Right.

Just the mind joy being on set.

I enjoy the making up.

The older you get, the less you're like, I'm not here to like talk about my career or

look it back.

I've got this much time left while I'm still standing.

I'm still healthy.

I love you.

I'm sorry, I'm making you look back at your plan.

I apologize.

But you know what I mean?

Like I love the doing and like, and I was like, it takes four years.

And then I finally, you know, in the same building with the same people, like it can get

a little maddening and you feel like time stands still.

And I just love the camaraderie and the summer camp put on a show that you get on.

And I love the brevity.

I mean, in two months, I've gone away to do TV, which is about two to three months max.

And I've come back to Pixar and nobody knew I left.

Like that's happened several times.

And I equate it to being a session player.

Like, oh, I get it.

I'm basically somebody else's album.

This is how they want or you know, this is how they want to play it.

And they're asking me to come in as a session player and play on this one song out of

their all their tracks.

And I thrive because I just feel so unshackled and unburdened by, is it about me?

What does it say about me?

What do I think?

Like I just, you're doing the opposite.

It's a, right, must be so easy.

It's not even easy, but it's enjoyable.

It's taking a lot of things that I thought were burdensome and making them enjoyable.

Because I realized telling the joke for me is half the fun, not just having to write

the joke.

So a lot of times it's freeing and I get to use my muscles and I get to get outside to

just work on a TV show.

Try different stuff.

Yeah.

Are you going to do any more of that?

Yeah, I'm going to be on one this fall that I can't talk about right now.

Fair enough.

But I wasn't looking for, but it's one of my favorite shows.

So I was like psyched.

So I don't know if I'll do more, but because it's also no life for two months, three months.

Because it's just, yeah, whereas animation to be fair, it's banker's hours, nine to six,

nine to five, you can be, gotta go to the doctor's that day.

You can be like, but it's four, three or four years.

Yeah.

And not only that, there just must be a frustration.

And like, oh, I want to fix this.

Okay.

Well, yeah, and you take a while versus like, hey, you give an actor direction and the next

take, they do a different or whatever.

And this is mean, but they're on a hard, on a day where I'm frustrated with another

show.

I'm going like, you kind of have no excuse not to fix this guy.

You have all the time in the world.

So let's put a time limit on like, if you haven't gotten somewhere by the end of the month

or the end of the week, like, but that's the other thing that I took back to toy, like

toy story five is the fastest we've ever made him over the outside of toy story two,

which was under duress.

Yeah.

Right.

How quick?

What are we talking about?

Three and a half months.

Three and a half years.

Three and a half months.

Yeah.

It was about three and a half years with me away for six months of that to finish up.

And blank.

Yeah.

And because I learned on TV to measure time differently, like in TV, any problem, any

issue they go, you talking to the terms of minutes, days, minutes hours days.

And if you're talking days, you know, you're in trouble.

So you're always talking like, can we fix it in minutes and hours?

In animation, you're talking days, weeks, months.

And so the, it's too easy to just push it down the road or take longer than you need

to.

So I applied the minutes, days, hours, a minutes hours days to coming back.

And it was a little aggro, a little aggressive, but it was still a better place to be.

We, people were excited that they were getting things solved and getting more times at bat

and figuring things out, you know, when you have to fix Wally, how long does that take?

You have fixed, but you know what I mean?

We did.

That was under duress because our, our, all our audience previews are usually set with

about six months left to tell release, which means only three months left in production.

And that's like your last week in, in regular terms.

That's like you, you've got Friday left.

So you hope you know that you're going to change something.

You have, you have it on the books.

It's almost like reissue it's built in.

You know, there's going to be something you're going to change.

It's actually about 10% of the movie max or less and it's strategic wear and what you

do.

And that was about a 30% change.

Yeah.

No, that was how it was, but every, it was a hard, it was worth it.

It was worth it.

It was a hard conversation to have with my crew who was ready to be done.

Yeah.

I feel like there's video on, on, on the video, everything I don't want to know about.

Of you apologizing before the demand.

Yeah.

I was probably put that on the DVD.

But those DVDs, yeah.

I would want like, especially obviously the two, you know, Brad, birds, two movies in the

2000s between, you're between Nemo and Walla, you've got Incredibles and Radatouille.

And those DVDs, he's pretty up front about like, I'm a pain in the ass.

Like I'm really, yeah, I'm really demanding and like, you know, and like, I as a kid or

as a teen, I was a teen and I was interested in movie making, I was it fascinated watching

them being like, this is very upfront about like, it's not just like, oh yeah, we're all

so happy to be doing this.

He came up with the adage, painless temporary film is forever.

Yeah.

Hold it all the time.

Yeah.

It is.

It's memorable.

It's memorable.

Yes.

But like obviously in Brad's movies, you see that in his movies, right?

Like it's like that, that character, like makes it across the line, you know, in terms

of the stories he tells or whatever emotions he's driven by or, you know, and I feel like

that's what makes the best picture movies the best.

And so it makes your Pixar movies good.

It's like they all have your kind of, you just have a very funny sensibility.

And like, I mean, that is the highest compliment.

Like it's because at the end of the day, that's what comes out of us naturally.

It's like I was talking on another podcast and I was saying like, I don't feel worthy

equating us to the Beatles, but you nobody, nobody questions that the Beatles were just

making.

They just made like if they never got out of their basement or the or Paul McCartney's

a family bathroom, they would make humbable tunes that everybody would remember immediately.

Like that's just what came out of them.

Yeah.

They didn't change for the audience.

They just tapped into something that they naturally did that worked great for the rest

of the world.

And so when you put us together, the infamous brain trust, everything we did got more

entertaining.

Like we're just naturally entertainers.

And people discredit that they treated it like costumes to put on after the fact, but

we're like, if you do it right, it's essential.

Like you, the joke is telling the story is being part of the machinery and part of the

entertainment and the core of it.

The sequence in Nemo of the story getting spread across the ocean, which leads into Nigel

telling the night, which this is the thing.

I feel like this is one of those legendary stories in your career of how does the word

get from one side of the ocean to the other?

And you end up voicing like three different characters in that sequence?

Well, just for the proof of concept, my co-writer was Bob Peterson, who's one of the funniest

men I've ever met.

And he makes me funny or brings out the funny in me that I can't seem to access fully

on my own.

And it's no different than being with a great improv partner.

Like you just throw me the challenge.

You know, so we like, we were like, how do we do this?

And we, it was like six o'clock or something, five o'clock in the afternoon.

And we had to have something up on the reels the next morning.

And so it was, you treated like an improv challenge.

Like, how would you make the news get across?

And then then you just were like, we can draw really fast.

We're, we're our own scratch voices.

So we just put mics up like this in the room and just crap that we crap out stuff all

the time that take only a few hours.

We just put this real high bar challenge to like, all right, you got to solve this exact

problem and you got to do it in an entertaining way.

We've done plenty of those where they didn't stick, but this one stuck.

I mean, but equating its improv, Ben and I both come from improv backgrounds among other

things, many things we've done.

But it makes sense in that sort of the game is how quickly can you identify the truth

and what has now been set up in front of you, right?

And that sequence is such a dynamic like speed rounding of, well, what would that type

of fish be?

And what would they do?

And what would they sound like?

And the escalation of that and the build of that and the series of correct identifications

that all feel right to the audience, which then leads into the most emotional moment in

the movie to me, which is more effective because it's coming off of me, my realizing

Marlon's coming for him.

Right.

Yeah.

It is verbal gags in a row that are all character and behavioral.

That was Steve Jobs who had part of the movie.

Well, because it should just be the most like shoe leathery kind of, this is, this is

just story weight, how to get from point A to point B. And instead, all of it is personal.

Well, I got to give most of the comedy props to Bob.

Bob's just so funny.

He could just see it's bidding out.

And I'm such a structuralist.

Bob Peterson, right?

Yeah.

I think again, when we're together, we're both able to like speak each other's language,

but we're able to like, I was just, you know, how does this build was my probably by

biggest driver, even though I'm still trying to be funny bouncing off of him.

And he's like, how to make it funnier.

And, but he cares just as much about building.

But we, because of the, the emphasis on the sentence, who is different for us, that's

just showed you how strong we were chemistry wise working together.

And then I'm such a, I'm such a film score nut that I'm always thinking about.

Is there a way the music can do this?

Is there a way the music can be involved?

Is there a way and it's one of Thomas Newman's best scores.

Yeah.

And I was, I wrote to two pieces of music, or two composers, all the time for Nimo.

And that was 90% of the time, or 80% of the time was anything Thomas Newman had scored,

because I just was like, and so you became a character in my mind.

Any particular though, any jam?

Shawshank.

But particularly, meet Joe Black.

Oh, that's a great score.

Score.

I mean, it goes over the top at the end.

And that's why I like that movie.

That movie is crazy.

And then, and then I would listen to Nine-inch nails LaFragile.

Yeah.

All right.

I kept saying, I make this is, is this, have you ever met Trent?

Yeah, I told him that.

I told him that on the red carpet at the Wally Perman, and that's so funny.

Yeah.

But I just was so afraid.

My biggest fear of making that movie was that it was going to be treakly and be an

after school special, because we had to go cute for a lot of it and innocent and sweet

and adorable.

And I just was worried about the tone and the balance being right, because my, I grew

up in the ocean.

I grew up being scared of the ocean, but fascinated by it at the same time.

I remember putting on a little diving mask and, you know, and needy, shallow water and

ducking my head under and then being freaked out because things started to disappear so quickly

in the void and you didn't know what was behind you.

And I, and I, that was the first thing I ever typed was, and it's the, I think it's

still in the first page of the script, but it just typed the void.

And I wanted that.

That was the big bold, the two big bold things at the time I remember really early on was

like, I want to like not do the circle of life.

Fuck that.

It doesn't exist.

Things are how to eat.

Circle of life is one of the most banana sequences ever.

It's gorgeous.

It's very impressive.

But I'm sure what the animals have a king.

The theory that some of them don't talk.

I just like things are out to get you.

It's a predatory world and there's a reason we're always scared about our kid crossing the

street.

And so the ocean is the perfect, you have to live in it, but you have to be afraid of

it all the time.

So I said, can I keep that alive throughout the movie?

And then the other thing was, can I make the parent the main character, not the kid?

And that seemed radical at the time.

It's a fair point.

Yeah.

It loses the parent either permanently or temporarily and has to figure something

exactly grow up.

So that's, and that happens in Nemo and this is why I listened to the fragile because it

would remind me how dark the, and I found out from him that he wrote that album listening

to Lamar.

And debut C was suicidal when he wrote Lamar by the ocean side.

And so the whole thing has this dark dark connection, but it would ground me like that,

that's that 10, 20% would just bring me back to going, don't be afraid to be scary.

Don't be afraid to be tense.

Don't be afraid to be unpredictable because that's part of the point of this movie is that

you're in the real world.

And the whole driving thing of this main character is fear and we have to be afraid to or else

it's just theory.

It's it's it, it prevents the movie, but not too much.

You know, like it doesn't overwhelm it, which obviously I know with a lot of the movies

you guys make, that can happen, right?

It's like, oh, what he's what he's coming off a little too agitated or villainous or

what you know, anxious and the same with the Marl, Marlens, Marlens too worked up.

Like he's too negative.

And like, every time I watch Nemo and he gets lost, I go, this is impossible.

Right.

Like he'll never fucking find the stakes couldn't feel.

I remember I'm more instrumental.

I was still trying to solve the movie and Bob Peterson came on about a year or two and

he was like the thing that blows me a mind about this movie is all you just spend the

whole time going, how?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is, I mean, which is the magic of a lot of this, you know, like Dory too, just like,

you know, I'm Wally, like these movies where it's like a great distance is going to be

traveled by a tiny thing.

And every time you're kind of like, I don't know how they're going to do this.

And characters with him toy story obviously pretty much always is like, hey, the toy got

taken across the street and you're like, across the street.

The, the, the machinations of the moving truck chase and toy story was mine.

It's so good.

And I boarded that out roughly and then everybody came in to clean it up because we had to

do it under a dress.

And I realized then and it's only proven all the way itself, toy story five, that that

comes more readily to me is the crazy engineering of how things will all fit.

Did you, did you have a monster sink too?

Did you have any, because a monster sink also has the like, we're somehow crossing

dimensions and all that.

And there's, I'm not the only person, but that's just if you had to get down to what,

what comes out of me the easiest, not easy, but easiest is how is this going to ultimately

pay off?

How can I hide it as a setup?

How can it like not be seen right away?

Is that the right brain thing?

Is that just, I don't know.

Like, that was a, yeah, was an engineer, chemical engineer who was basically work for a scunk's

top secret company that could solve, had to solve things for the government when they

had run out of time.

So I think I got that on my tail.

What did your mom do?

My mom was a frustrated actress.

So you're like Spielberg.

The artist and the science.

Yeah, we have.

Yeah, he and I actually had that comparison.

And, but I realized, I don't know science and math like my dad did.

So that part of the muscle goes towards abstract story building.

Yeah, story structure.

So I think that's why people would love me to stay in that lane because I'm good at

it.

But you live long enough and you're not interested in scratching the same itch all the

time.

Like, I'm also a hopeless romantic.

I'm also a sci-fi nut.

I'm also love drama, just good drama and in any new ways of finding tension and drama.

And so exploring stuff that wouldn't come readily to me, but I would love to see as

a, as an audience member is why I take chances whether they hit or miss on harder or

blank is it that's making me feel as adventurous some and satisfied as I was on the first two

animated movies I ever got to touch.

Is there an ultimate at least I shouldn't say ultimate?

Is there at this moment and itch your most eager to scratch that you haven't gotten

to within your phones?

Yeah, because you mostly worked in sci-fi when you've done live action.

Yeah.

You did three body and you did a, yeah, I also argue that toy story is low key sci-fi.

Yeah, a little bit.

Something.

I clearly lean that way.

I try not to think too hard about it.

I've been enjoying not having anything planned.

I didn't plan toy story five.

I didn't plan into the TV shows that got offered to me and I didn't plan the scripts

that suddenly I read and I was like, oh, I want to try and make that.

There's for a long time I was trying to get this movie made called Revolver that was written

by Kate Trefai.

Yeah, we've came up in our research.

Is that the Beatles still should be done in the last year or something?

Yeah, it's a great script.

And I got the Beatles, the state okay for four songs.

I got Ethan and Maya Hawks, which songs?

They were pre revolver because it's all about, because that Alaska moment happened and

they hadn't released Revolver yet.

Nobody knew that they were making that.

So it was like stuff from rubber soul and stuff like that.

But I got Ethan, it was kind of a paper moon relationship with father and daughter.

So I got Ethan, Hawke and Maya and Hawke to attach to it.

And nobody bit.

This was right before and then during the pandemic.

And so the whole world just rocked in no way.

Was it a rough, tidy bit?

Yeah.

It's still to me like such an obvious win-win movie.

You never see the Beatles in it.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is always the biggest fear.

Right.

Because this really happened.

There was a, I think there was a nine point something earthquake.

It's the largest earthquake ever on the North American continent or around Alaska, right?

Alaska.

If you go to Alaska, they never shut up about it.

There's signs everywhere.

But like, it's not an earthquake ever.

Yeah.

But there was, they were still in recovery a year later.

And there was one functioning hotel that you could stay at and the Beatles were flying

to Japan to do to do their last, nobody knew their last touring.

And they got rerouted by a typhoon.

I had the land in Alaska and they stayed for a night in the day in this hotel in Anchorage

in 1965.

And so the KTRIFI's from Anchorage and her mother was there when that happened.

And so she sort of elaborated because her mother had a crush on George Harrison.

So her main heroine character, he's just her goal is to get into that hotel and sleep

with George Harrison.

And it's this beautiful coming of age story, just beautiful.

And I still wish I could make it.

And was it Chairman Spaceman?

What was that?

Was something search light asked me to be involved in?

Okay.

And so I was heavy on the, and that was before I read blank.

So it was my shot at getting something else made.

And so it was from a based on an article from the New Yorker.

And we worked on many iterations of the script with the author of the piece.

And he's a great script writer.

And it just, it was clear what he wanted and what searchlight wanted weren't matching.

And to be fair, the world changed.

Like to do something about a billionaire going into space is was fascinating.

And then it just became off-putting and then it became reality.

And so it just was one of those ill-time things, those ill-time things.

Now, I'm seeing here in 1994, you worked on the episode Cookies, Cookies, Blookies and

the TV show Two Stupid Dogs.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

That was important.

That was while I was working on Toy Story early days.

So I had friends that now there were two stupid dogs in that show.

One big one long.

I've had the Griffin David release.

There was a friend of Pete Dofters that was working on that show and he needed some

boarding done.

And we just wanted to help out.

So it is always so funny with animators who are like, you look back in their career.

It's like all this great work.

And it's like, yeah.

And also just some random cartoon from the 90s.

That was a funny show.

I remember the show.

The secret squirrel segments on that.

Here it is.

Here it is.

So you were the prime audience.

I mean, we were like seven years old or whatever.

You worked on the back sheet Mighty Mask.

Oh, yeah.

What was that experience?

You were the best writer's role of people on the show.

You couldn't hire that.

That's pretty much your first credit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right out of college, my friend Jim Merton, who would go on to be a major director on

Simpsons, and Rich Moore, we're working on it.

Rich Moore, who did Ben, wreck it Ralph.

That's right.

We all went to school together.

So they were Ralph had this pattern of coming into Hollywood,

this all through the 70s and the 80s, where he would come into Hollywood off of just his

Fritz the cat, fame or Lord of the Rings fame, and get money enough to get something started

and then burn all those bridges and then leave town once it failed and then wait for

the regime change, which would happen about every five years until nobody knew who he

was again.

He's a separate credit and then he'd come back out to California and start over again.

And we were on this iteration because he had worked on the original Mighty Mass as a young

guy.

Okay.

I think it was Territunes was here in New York.

I think if I have it right, he worked on it in New York.

Wasn't it was it in Terry Town?

Maybe, maybe you guys are in front of the yeah, we got devices.

But anyway, he got the rights to it and wanted to be remade.

So John Chris Fallouchi was his guy Bruce Tim was on there.

Vicki Jensen worked there.

Oh, those are like all of us became somebody in animation, but we were all nobody's then.

It was crazy.

It was a crazy time.

We worked in an abandoned preschool in Van Eyes.

That's what that show feels like.

It feels like it came out escaped something.

And the intercom system was still working and he took Ralph took the principal's office

and he was this huge guy from the Bronx.

I think I don't want to if he's Bronx or Brooklyn.

Yeah, that's the vibe out of Burr.

And he had a bit of a a lisp and you would he he'd considered us 20 something.

He wanted a striker's cheap.

So this is like 86, 87.

So we would have legal pads and pencils and we'd sit in this wind a list teachers lounge

that clearly had still all the smoke from cigarettes from all the previous teachers that

had ever worked there.

And he would just hit the intercom go guys in my office right now and suddenly pick up

and you'd go into his office.

But he would he pulling out his old friends that he had made in the 70s.

So one day he was like, guys, this is Frank that I like to meet Frank.

This is that and we're like and it's guys chain smoking comes in.

We're like eating Frank for set up and then then they guess this is a this is a miss.

He sells cookies and it's like and famous aim is comes in dressed exactly dressed exactly

like he is on the package with the samples in a in a bag giving out cookies on and it

turns out he worked in wow in post and sound when he worked on and he was one of the sound

engineers are thinking for one of his movies in LA and then he was he was and he said and

Ralph was saying like, yeah, he's trying to tell me he's going to start the cookie business.

I'm like, get out of here.

Like you want to put money in the cookie business.

I'm not going to put my in the cookie business.

He was like a music manager and he made the cookies as like gifts to his clients.

Yeah.

So the cookies my guy any any made a killing.

Jim would say was every day was an interesting story working.

Yeah.

Is there anything I want to let you go because we already have a second chat with you

a little more in depth about John Carter obviously.

Screening tonight.

So obviously we can sort of dip into that more.

Yeah, but yeah, what would anything else you wanted to buy because you tell you two

stupid dogs questions.

Yeah, that was really important.

That was high on the list.

I don't remember it at all.

I really don't know.

You texted me after finding me mo and you said you guys got things mostly correct.

Oh, sure.

Yes.

I'm wondering if there is a thing because we were talking right before we started recording

about how when you do these press tours, you have to condense stories and then you create

a myth that then circulates for decades and you have to correct your own myth.

Is there a thing that you've heard us say as you terrifyingly have been listening to

the episodes on you?

Yeah, please don't do that.

You feel like we have helped to prepare.

I haven't listened to the Carter or the Blink because I can't mind too soon therapy.

Too soon for me.

Yes.

Yes.

But I can't remember what the Nemo things were.

There was nothing there was nothing egregious.

It was just more like, oh, that's a little off.

It can be is there a myth that you wish you could correct here?

We're trying to get you to say something so we could fire J.J.

Are you really trying to find me?

I see.

Yeah.

He spelled your name, Pandru, Satan.

Can we fire him for that?

Yeah, no, he is silent.

Pia silent.

I would have texted you with the correction if it was that egregious.

No, I always let J.J. know that he did a good job.

He's a good guy.

He's a good guy.

And you're very, very, very nice to bless us with your presence on this show.

You're really, really, really, really, really, really, really nice.

I'm showing my age.

I don't get half the references, half the time.

Oh, please.

Anytime you want to get one of the references, you just need to text me.

I'll explain the references.

But I'm impressed.

I'm impressed with your film knowledge.

Thanks.

I'm impressed with your film analysis.

That's all I need to say.

Thank you.

Press with your running gags.

As I said, I mean, truly, a lot of the analysis comes like backwards retrofit from hearing

you explain things over the years, like a wildly disproportionate amount of it comes

from the way you have kind of open sourced your sense of story specifically.

Well, again, keeps coming back to.

I have a sixth grade education.

And if I can get it, then I feel there's hope for anybody else to get it.

So I kind of heard it pass it on.

That's our podcast with like a second grade education.

Thank you for doing this.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

And looking forward to tonight, I'm excited.

I've never seen the film on the screen since.

And I was like, are you going to do it?

Are you going to tough it out?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

It's not hard for me to watch.

Okay.

Not hard for me to watch any of my movies.

I know why I made them.

And I know why I made the choices.

And I don't usually regret the choices.

I just some people are like, no, no, no, I'll never watch my stuff back.

I like that about the most.

Like I can't watch Toy Story 5 again.

Sure.

Because we just watched like 5 million times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of our editors assistants kept track.

And I'd seen it 95 times.

Oh my god.

So I mean, to be fair, I've seen some of your movies close to that many times.

Because I'm maybe a kid back to be fair.