Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 326: How to Make a Masterpiece | Pete Docter

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

We’re all creatives, whether we think of ourselves that way or not. In so many aspects of your life, from planning your future to planning a meal to curating your social media, you need to be able to both envision and then execute. And how you work with your mind in these moments is key. Today, we are going to hear from a master creator -- the mind behind brilliant Pixar movies such as Inside Out, Up, and the recently-released Soul -- about how to run a creative process at the highest possible level. (I have a six-year-old, and, in my opinion, one of the worst parts of the job of being a dad is sitting through insipid children's entertainment. But the aforementioned films have been both thrilling and moving to consume, for both me and my son.) My guest today is Pete Docter, who directed all three of those films. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Pixar. He is also a meditator and a practicing Christian whose films are each motivated by a big, pressing question he is posing to himself about his own life. In this conversation, he takes us inside the making of his films, most notably Soul, for which he and his team had to invent a coherent metaphysical scheme to explain both the afterlife -- and the before. We also talk about how his spiritual practices support his storytelling endeavors, and how to power through the pain, frustration, and embarrassment of trying to make something truly original. One more thing: We would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast. Our team here cares deeply about you, our listeners, and we are always looking for ways to improve. Please go to https://www.tenpercent.com/survey. And thank you. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/pete-docter-326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello gang, we are all creatives, whether we think of ourselves that way or not. Some of us may be traditional creatives and that we paint or write or something like that. But for everybody else, think about it in so many aspects of your life from planning your future to planning your next meal, to curating your social

media, you need to be able to both envision and then execute. And how you work with your mind in these moments is key. So today we're going to hear from a master creator, the mind behind brilliant Pixar movies such as Inside Out, Up, and the recently released Soul. He's going to talk about how to run a creative process at the highest possible level, all of which you can interpolate back to your life. I have a six year old, and in my opinion, one of the worst parts of the job of being a dad is sitting through insipid children's entertainment. But the films I mentioned just a few moments ago up inside out and so have been both thrilling

and moving to consume. They're also really funny. And they work on separate levels, one for me and one for my kid. My guest today is Pete Doctor, who directed all three of those films. He's also the chief creative officer of Pixar. He also, and this won't surprise you, happens to be a meditator and a practicing Christian whose films are each motivated by a big pressing question

he's posing to himself about his own life. In this conversation, he takes us inside the making of his films, most notably Soul, for which he and his team really had to invent an entire coherent metaphysical scheme to explain both the afterlife and the before. We also talk about how his spiritual practices support his storytelling endeavors and how to power through the pain, frustration, and embarrassment of trying to make something truly original. Two quick personal notes before we dive in here.

Personal note number one. Yes, Pete and I both happen to work for Disney, but that is not why I invited him on the show. As you may have noticed, we don't do a ton of Disney themed episodes here. Not that I have anything against Disney. I love Disney, but I'm not trying to provoke your skepticism on the regular. I invited Pete on because I was blown away by soul

and really wanted to hear how it was made to learn more about his creative process so I could take those lessons and apply it to my own often torturous creative work. Personal note number two, I gotta say it restores my faith and humanity to talk to a big time Oscar-winning movie director and have him be so available and engaged and down to earth.

This has not been my experience every time I talk to a big name Hollywood types. And I suspect you too will be impressed. Actually, I do wanna say one last thing before we dive into the episode. This is an ask of you. We would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this show. We take the show really seriously.

We care a lot about our listeners and we are always looking for ways to improve. So please go to 10% dot com forward slash survey to do us a solid. Thank you. All right, here we go now with Pete doctor Pete doctor, this is a big get for us. Thank you very much for doing this. Oh, it's good to be here. I Spector maybe a few Human beings who haven't yet seen soul for them could you just describe what the movie is oh boy Yeah, it's one of those were like jeez if I could have described it. I wouldn't have had to make the movie It's a basically an attempt to investigate What is it that life's all about? You know, why are we waking up in the morning? What are we doing with our lives?

What are we is there a goal? Is there are like are we born with a purpose? I'm just obviously this is sort of high level. In terms of the movie itself, it's about a soul who doesn't want to die, who meets a soul who doesn't want to go live. So that's like the simple elevator pitch, if you will. And just to get this out of the way, I'll probably have said this in the introduction. It's phenomenally good. Just to get this out of the way, I'll probably have said this in the introduction. It's phenomenally good. And I watched it the day it came out with my six-year-old son, and I watched it again the other day. We both loved it two times.

So I suspect you. I watched it many, many more times. And just to say a few more things about the basics of it, the star is Jamie Foxx, a jazz musician. Can you pick up from there in terms of describing, the star is JB Fox, a jazz musician. Can you pick up from there in terms of describing what the story is? Yeah, he's a guy who feels like I was born to play. I was born to be a musician and sort of as a stopgap, he took a job as a teacher.

He's not happy. But finally, one day, he finally gets to audition and succeeds with one of his idols, this jazz legend. He gets the gig only to then later on in the afternoon, fall into a manhole and die. And so now he's desperate to not go into the great beyond. He wants to get back to Earth, ends up in a place we call the great before, where we're all given our personalities or sense of who we are,

which is of course something we made up for the film. So far as I know, maybe it really exists, I don't know. But it did kind of come out, I have a couple of kids too, and looking back at photos of them when they were first born, you realize, and I could see who they were right off the bat. You know, the moment they were born, they had their own sense of personality. And this film kind of was sparked

by that idea of looking into where do we get that? How is it that I'm more curious than my sister who's more dignified or whatever, you know, those kind of things. What gives us that sense of individuality? Where does it come from? I have so many questions for you. Where to start. You obviously know Hollywood better than I do. I've had a few interactions as a East Coast journalist type. I've had a few interactions with Hollywood. They've all been interesting, but I can't imagine it would be easy for somebody to come up with an idea

as big as the one you've described. Sort of like what is life all about as the germ of a movie that would then be funded by a major studio. How do you pull that off? You say, hey, look, this is for quadrant, man. Everybody, no, I don't, when you say you know Hollywood, I don't know that I really do. I work at Pixar, which is up in the Bay Area of Northern California, where you know, miles, miles away from Hollywood.

We have obviously these ties with Disney, who distribute all our work, and we're partners with them. But we do enjoy a little bit of an autonomy being up here in this weird bubble. And I guess just to say it, our success has allowed us to be able to kind of say, hey, we're going to do this and take some risks. So obviously everything we do, we run past them, but yeah, I think they're willing to say, all right, well, we didn't think an old man

with a floating house was gonna work either, and then you guys pulled that off, so go for it, you know, which is pretty nice. You're referencing up. I am pretty open, I don't know if I've ever said it publicly. I'm certainly open with my child that I don't like children's films, but I loved up.

Oh, cool. I thought up was really extraordinary. Well, we try to make them not necessarily for kids. We think of them mainly as movies that I would want to watch that we ourselves as filmmakers. And that's kind of who we're targeting at the beginning is finding something that isn't intriguing to me as a person that I wanna wake up and think about every day

for the five years it's gonna take to make this movie. And then along the way, most of us do have kids and we're conscious of our audience and all of that, but at the heart of it, I mean, I think that's how we got to a film like this is me being a middle-aged guy now going, oh boy, I'm suddenly aware of my mortality more than I was when I was young. And what is it that I'm using my limited amount of time left on this planet to do? What's making me happy? What am I? What are my goals? All those things are really at the heart of what this film is about.

All those things are really at the heart of what this film is about. How do you go from that big pressing question to an unbelievably entertaining movie? I can't imagine that's easy. No, it's actually quite easy. First, surround yourself with incredibly talented people. And then, allow yourself to make a lot of mistakes. And actually, that's not easy at all. But our process is we try desperately hard to make the best movie we can. And then we fail. And then we get back up and do it again. And we fail. So by the time you see the movie, we've generally

made six or seven versions of the movie. Actually, we do that before we animate it. So the movie itself is being written to some degree, but largely storyboarded, which is kind of like, you know, a comic book version of the movie. And then we put that together with our own dialogue and sound effects and we can sit back and watch kind of a pretty close approximation of what the movie will feel like at very least.

Do you enjoy that process or do you find it torturous or both? Yeah, both. Yeah, exactly. It's fun. You have to be delusional every time you go into this, because if I'm conscious of all the pain and mental anguish that it's going to cause, I'm not going to do this again. You know, you go home a lot of days saying, why did I think that I could ever pull this up? Who gave me, this is going to be an awful disaster. So it's really kind of, at least for me, personally, often very demoralizing to watch the reality of, you know, when it's an idea, oh man, I had this great interaction, Joe Grant,

he was a head of story on Dumbo and worked with Walt Disney and stuff and we were sitting around for dinner in a group talking about the state of filmmaking and he was 96 at this point. Somebody was saying, oh, this film's dumb, this film is dumb, doesn't anybody have any good ideas and Joe kind of laughs and he goes, they're all a good idea until you have to tell someone else. Which is so true. Like in your own head, it's brilliant, but then when you put it out there,

it just, nine out of 10 times just doesn't work. I believe it was Isaac Asmov who said creation is embarrassing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so you wanna be surrounded by people you're comfortable being embarrassed in front of and who's opinion you trust. Yeah, it's be, you gotta have some experience to see through all the gunk to know that there's a core of something because it's so easy to say, that didn't work, that didn't work in your brain just starts to go, this is dumb and you just judge it and turn it off, you know.

So part of the trick, and even in the job I'm in now, which is trying to assist other people to make these movies, like try to see through the weeds of the things that are getting in my way and go, okay, here's the target. This is what we're aiming for. There is something really worthwhile here. So you're not only the primary driving force on certain movies, you're also helping other people make their movies.

Yes. Now, that's true of everybody because the way we work, as I say, once we do one of these story reels, we put it up in front of everyone. So all the other filmmakers are helping each other. But then in my particular case, as the CCO, I'm also kind of, that's my job is to kind of crawl all the creative work that goes forward and figure out how to set up these teams in the best possible way, how to set up the production schedule, anything that needs adjusting so that we can really maximize and make this a great thing.

I read Ed Catmills' book a few years ago, one of your colleagues from Pixar, who describes this process. I'm now remembering that I read that book. And it sounds actually as a creative, you know, I do a different kind of creation than you do, but that sounds incredible to be have so many great minds around the table helping you make something. Yeah, it really is. I mean, a lot of times you forget about it because you're so nervous about what you're putting for

that you fail to take into account the brilliant people we have and the amazing opportunity to work with other people. Because I think what happens a lot of times in the process, like show business is such a weird thing. I remember Joe, another Joe I knew Joe Ramp, who has our head of story on toy stories. He said, yeah, they call it show biz, part show part bizz. And there's a lot of times that the bizz part grows so big that you end up working with people who have never actually been in the show part of it. You come with your script or whatever and they're judging it based on what they think

it will make at the box office or how they think, what kind of age group it'll appeal to and things. And we're so lucky to be able to interact with and gain wisdom from other people who are entirely in the show part of the thing and they know what we're up against you know so as a director when something doesn't work and someone suggests something Brad Bird says you know you could do I know he as a filmmaker is seeing that suggestion in his head so it's a legitimate solution it's not says, you know, you could do, I know he as a filmmaker is seeing that

suggestion in his head. So it's a legitimate solution. It's not just a, you know, hot air or anything. It's pretty amazing. And the best people can leave you alone because your track record is so incredibly strong. Well, knock on wood, yes, so far. And again, I don't want to make it sound like they're the bad guys or anything. You know, I think they are an equal and essential part of the whole thing. These movies would never reach people if it weren't for the biz people. But I think it's essential that we both have a healthy respect for each other. You began this conversation by saying that you had this kind of nong question in your mind

as a middle-aged man about what's your life all about? What are you spending your time? Well, in the years it took you to make this film, did you arrive at something approximating an answer? Yeah, and I think it's there in the film. It is for me. I don't know if it speaks to you, but I'll say, for a lot of us,

and I know we're maybe a minority, but we're very lucky. People like me who have found something that they love, that they have a passion for pretty early in their lives. I mean, I, for me, it was like I was a, I think, making flip books in the corners of my math book. And that's just led on a path through my whole life of being amazed by movement, storytelling, animation. You know, that's what's got me here. And yet, I mean, really what happened was after Inside Out, which for me was such a, I can't imagine writing or making a film that would be more successful in some ways. And by

almost any definition of that, you know, we were financially successful. We got awards, we got nice, critical reviews, and man, people tell me that the film has been used by them and by psychologists to help gain deeper understanding specifically with their kids. So boy, I don't know how you could ask for more than that. And yet, when it was all done, I found myself saying, well, now what? For some reason, I guess in the back of my head, I was thinking, everything would be at peace and wonderful and whole and I would now be able to, I don't know, transcend to heaven or I don't know what I thought,

but it didn't really put everything together in a neat package. I was still the same person. I still had the same issues and problems. And I think there is this narrative that we often create in our heads that if I just accomplish X, it will fix everything. And so this film at its core is looking into that. And I think the answer I came to is, though I still suck at this, trying to be as present

and appreciative for moment to moment things, things that I might otherwise just walk past and often do. And that's like obviously a practice and a discipline and it's not something most people are born able to do, but I'm trying to get better at it. It does answer an earlier question from you. It does come through in the film. I don't want to say exactly how, because I don't want to spoil anything, but it really does come through in some very simple and beautiful ways.

Cool. Having said that, I'm curious to know from you, what do you do to work on your capacity to sort of be awake in your life rather than sleepwalking? Well, some of it is just habit. I back when things were normal, I would walk to work, which is extra time, and I know not everybody lives close enough to be able to do that, but that was a real luxury which allowed me to just like smell and feel and look, and I would try to not, you know, I'd get into habit once in a while of listening to podcasts and those are wonderful, but somehow just

unplugging and forcing yourself to be more cognizant and aware is huge. I do think there's something that a lot of artists who keep a sketchbook, there's a real connection there, because the act of drawing forces you to see more deeply. I can glance at something a hundred times, but if I have to draw it in prints in my brain in a way that I'm really focused on form and interaction and so, you know, so I think that's another good trick. And then, you know, I've gotten in and out of meditation and prayer and things like that that I think are probably even more essential than I have given them space for in my life. But that I think is another way.

In and out how so just struggling with habit formation? Yeah, exactly. It's not like I don't want to, but usually like I was on a kick where every morning I'd give myself a half an hour part part time just to meditate and I have to pray, and then I would get to a place where I'm like, well, if I'm late, I'm gonna have to skip that and go right to the work part. And that's, it's so easy to do. And I seem to be better at, like,

I actually have even in COVID, a fairly regular routine of workout doing aerobic X-S. I seem to be better at that than the mental thing. And I think it probably comes back to, I grew up in the Midwest and there's a little bit of like, well, I don't know how much of that stuff is really. Is that really real? The whole meditation thing. It might be kind of just made up or California or what. So it could be that there's a part of me anyway, and I'm probably fairly common with people to not give that 100% credit for being an actual thing.

You're in a friendly place for that kind of skepticism. I wonder, though, if one other thing that might help for you is kind of lowering the bar by saying, because 30 minutes is a big ask, especially early, maybe three minutes, five minutes. Yeah, and I've been pretty open to just whatever time I can get, at least having something is better than nothing, but even there I do kind of, you know, it only takes a day or two and you're out of the habit, at least for me.

But that's a good thought to maybe be a little less ambitious at the beginning. Yeah, and also to, you know, it's interesting what you just said about it takes a day or two and you're out of the habit. That's actually just a story you're telling yourself. We're talking about stories here. That is a story. And actually you could say, oh no, it's common for me to miss a few days, but that doesn't mean I've lost the habit. I could just start back up again. Nothing's been lost. Yeah, and then, and you're right. There's only, it only takes a day or two and you're back in the habit. So the habit is just always there, maybe, is what you're saying, huh? Exactly.

It's just whatever you do. Yeah. So you mentioned prayer. What tradition do you come out of when we're talking about prayer? I grew up Lutheran and then married into Presbyterian. And, you know, I think that whole tradition has been a constant deepening in learning for me, too, because my understanding of what I thought Christianity was 30 years ago is very different than it was even two years ago versus now. It's constantly shifting and growing. And I think that's probably what I'm speaking at ignorance here. But most of the holy scriptures and whatever religion, I think they have this incredible depth, at least within the Bible. You think, oh, I know this story. it's about Noah, and he's the flood, and the punchline is this. But then you read it, and it's way more complicated, and there's confusing, self-contradictory

stuff. And you're like, what? As a young guy, I thought, well, that kind of proves that it's faulty, that somebody screwed up along the way. And as I get older, I'm realizing, that's depth. That's richness. And it causes you to think. And I think that's a really good story isn't told to you. It's created in your own head. It's allowing you to be a part of the story. And you're essential to it, you know. I want to be careful in saying, I'm not suggesting that it's all made up and it's up to us to figure it out ourselves, but I do think we are essential to the formation of those ideas. I'm just coming up with this as we talk, so I don't know. I haven't really thought it through.

This may be hard to answer, but you said your conception of what Christianity is about has evolved. How would you describe your current understanding? Well, that's a long conversation. I don't know if we, but and probably more than I'm able to even answer. But I guess in short, I don't know that I ever really literally believed in an old guy with a big beard sitting on a throne,

but the more I start to unpack and learn about what I feel God is, the more I'm not able to talk about it almost, the concept of God gets bigger, it becomes more all-encompassing, and yet also more specific at the same time. I mean, it's a mystery, for sure, and I think I would be a fool to try to explain it. But I guess that's, you know, kind of why we tell stories like this to talk about things that are beyond our human ability to rationally discuss with logic language, you know, you got to use art language.

It would be safe, reasonably safe summary to say that maybe your understanding is a bit more molecular than intellectual sort of in your bones in some way. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. I mean, like I say, I feel like I've moved away from the idea of a person and now I almost like there's a lot of stuff in the film even where it's more geometric or energy. The more I learn about science, the more I kind of feel like, oh, God is in that as well. String theory. I mean, it's all going to, it could be easily disproven if you look at it from a scientific point of view, but it, yeah, it just feels more, I think you're right.

It's, I still feel as though there is an intelligence to it, to God, but it seems less centered in like a single being and more of like all purveying somehow. But this is just the way I understand it. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of many, many different ideas. In fact, working on the film, one of the great benefits was getting to talk to people from all these different traditions and understandings of that and the soul and life and so on. I think, again, as I get older, I feel the less need to say, that's right and that's wrong. When I was younger, I felt like, well, clearly, there is going to be one of these religions

that's correct. The other ones, then, by definition is going to be one of these religions that's correct. And the other one is then by definition our false. And this idea is either right or wrong. And now as I get older, I'm more open to the ideas that are in there and inspired by them and energized by them. You've brought me right where I was really most hoping to go in this interview, which is to talk about the metaphysics of the film, how you turn that into an engine for a story. I want to hear how you got there, but could you start by just describing the rules of the game. There's the great beyond and the great before and the mentors and the mystical zone.

Can you just sort of describe that for folks? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so our thought in the film, okay, people are born with a personality. Where did that come from? Well, there's this place called the great before, whereas a raw, unformed soul, which are more or less everybody's kind of identical at this point. Now we go through these different pavilions and we're given different personality attributes. Be that optimism, perfectionism, responsible, whatever those attributes are. And then when you're ready,

when you're deemed ready, the counselors who are kind of like just guiding everything, they're not telling you where to go, they're just making sure that there's not a big pile up over there in the corner, you know, they decide, all right, you're ready to go and off you go. And along the way, we thought there are some souls that just for whatever reason, the mix of who they are, have a little more trouble getting ready to go to Earth. They just, and so maybe, what if we brought up souls who had lived already on Earth to help them

understand what they're in store for? So we have in the film the idea of mentors, souls that have led successful lives, the universe says, hey, we're gonna ask you, could you do this? It's not required, you don't have to, but it'd be great if you could help us out and get some of these souls that are having trouble.

So, we have Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa and all the great people that are up there, which is of course a lot of fun from an entertainment standpoint to be able to access that stuff. And then hopefully, in the case of Mosul's, that does the trick and they're ready to go. In our film, we thought, well, what if there's one soul who doesn't want to go? How long has this soul been there? I don't know.

As we developed a story, we realized maybe he or she has been there so long that her number is number 22. She's like the 22nd soul that was ever formed. And now we're on to 108 billion, you know. So it's been a long time. And that seemed intriguing because then you get into kind of nihilism, you know, this idea of looking down. And this is easy to understand you. A lot of times you look around it

What's going on in the world and you're like this is like ultimate meaninglessness. It just is absurdity Why would anyone choose to come into this mess? So that's kind of where we started actually and then we thought well, all right Maybe this soul who has to talk her into it. It's more of like well for one an optimist But even philosophically an essentialist, a guy who believes I was born to play music, you know, I was born with this innate sense of purpose. And then the trick of the story was how to mislead the audience along with our main character to believe that and then flip it at the end.

Because we're kind of where we end up, I think, is more or less existentialism this idea that, yes, there is essence and purpose, but you have to figure that out yourself. You have to bring it, as opposed to being given it at the beginning. So we did quite a bit of what we call world building. It's just kind of playing around with those kind of ideas at the beginning. As I look back at our schedule I think like the first year we were just trying to figure out the mechanics of the rules and then all was interacting with Okay, what does that do for our character? You know if we change this or that How does it change the journey and the the storytelling and you just try it out and then you test it on each other talk it through

Pitch it and and see how people respond. Really, the reason we do so many versions of the story is, I feel like you're trying to discover the best way to put this feeling that you have into practice, the most strong way to do it. Because, you know, there's, like I say, in this film we had, pretty radically different, at least three or four radically different stories. But as I look back at them, I don't think the emotional takeaway was as strong as where we got to.

And that's ultimately what you're, why you're kind of testing all these products, so to speak, is to see how is it going to react? How are people going to react? How is it going to react? How are people going to react? How is it going to communicate? Right, because you got to make the world, but that in some ways, kind of the structure that is like unseen by most consumers, especially the six-year-old consumers, they're just latching on to the character. Do I care about this person or these people and what's going to happen next? Absolutely. Inside out was more exaggerated this way.

Anytime we changed the blocking of the characters, the whole world would change. We'd come up with different ideas for, well, I'm trying to think of a specific example, but even if you've seen that film, there's like the islands of personality. Yes. We took them away for a while.

We knew we wanted to design the world. The joy needed to get back to headquarters. So we had this big chasm and how do you get back the mechanics of all that changed. And so, you know, you can't just come at it from how does the mind really work? How am I going to design this metaphor for the mind? It was actually more built off of the needs of the mechanics of the story. Like, how do I get from point A to point B and how do I block that character from getting what she wants? That was a huge process that was very interactive with the design of the world.

Much more of my conversation with Pete Doctor coming up right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father,

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but I think to me was, I mean maybe because of my own personal proclivities and sort of semi-scapital, but very enthusiastic interest in mysticism is this area that allows terrestrial beings, people on earth to kind of connect to the great before. And I can't remember the name of this place, but can you describe it and how it's accessed? Oh, is that like the, are you talking about the name of this place, but can you describe it and how it's accessed? Oh, is that like the, are you talking about the Hall of Everyone? It's where people on Earth go when they're in the zone. Oh, oh, yeah.

Let's see, geez, what do we call that? We call that the Astral Plane. Yeah, so, okay, so just full disclosure. As you get into this stuff, you have no idea what you're doing and you just hunt around, you read a lot and you're like somebody read about, oh, when you meditate, you go into stuff, you have no idea what you're doing. And you just hunt around, you read a lot, and you're like, somebody you read about, oh, when you meditate, you go into this astral zone, like, okay, let's try that.

And then maybe we can in our story say that it's connected or closer to the great before, because it feels like that, right? As you're dreaming or thinking, you kind of, I know about you, for me, it feels like the rest of the world, even if I keep my eyes open, it kind of fogs out and goes away and I become somewhere else. And then you, our thought was, well, let's just set some scenes here and start playing around.

And then as you get into it, you recognize how it can all fit together to further our main character. Now, this is going to sound like you're insane, backwards engineering kind of thing, because I think most people's idea of story is like you nail your theme on the wall and you start hearing you structure it so that everything is built properly to end where you need to go. My process has been more that these stories are not made, they're discovered. And so you learn from all these attempts.

A lot of times they don't work out. You know, you do a sequence or a scene and you're like, well, that was interesting, but it doesn't further the story. So it gets dumped. But along the way, we found these other things that we can use over here. So yeah, it's a big discovery process. And I think I totally veered off from what you were asking that. But in a life of a way, the astral plane is super interesting, just from the world building standpoint, but you also use it as a way to further the plot

and some very key moments because there are people on earth who know how to get up there to the astral plane and then can impact the characters. You're the main characters who are stuck there or hiding out there. Yeah, yeah. And so yeah, when we started, we thought, okay, there are these people that we've all known that just got back from Burning Man. They're all as meditating and doing all this kind

of trippy stuff, maybe LSD or whatever. And so we thought, let's parody kind of a guy like that. But in an unexpected way, we gave him a British accent and we had a whole backstory. You know, almost every character he's seen in the film, we end up going into great detail on somewhere in a story meeting. And then what shows up on the film is like a small sliver of all that, but you know, we had a whole backstory for this character, Moonwind, that he used to be a stockbroker. He's actually financially very wealthy, but he took this sign-spinning job just because he loves going into the zone And that's the trigger for him in the same way some people might with cooking or playing basketball for him It's the sign-spinning that gets him there

Our thought was to kind of first just have fun with it Sierra Leeds and then use it as a story Exploration of the theme that we're talking about and I think one of the great discoveries for us were these characters, the Lost Souls, which the idea was, I don't know, but you see like people wandering sometimes the street or whatever, and then you just have the sense that they're lost, that they're just walking through life and they're not connected to anything or anyone, and I also feel really bad. So that was our thought of these characters at the beginning. But as we got into it, we realized, you know, there are other people who are so into something that they're equally lost, that they're so into, could be science, could be animation,

could be almost anything that ends up disconnecting you from life. It's the same thing potentially, right? Music could connect you intimately with other people in the world, but it could also separate you. So it's really how you use it. And so the Lossel's were a representation of kind of Joe as our main character who's so into this. Yes, this passion. If he goes too far, that's kind of where he could end up. On Moonwind, you mentioned this character, this kind of mystical guy who's able to go, he's a living earthling, but he's able to ascend to the astral plane and then impact our main characters. He is, you said he was a sign spinner. If you haven't seen the film or if you haven't been to New York City,

there are people who hold signs for stores nearby and they spend their time around. So you get, grab your attention. And just like a Sufi who's doing whirling, dervish dancing and getting into the zone that way, this guy while spinning the sign is accessing the astral plane. And it just got me wondering, you've made a brief reference to this, but like, did you, aside from all the reading you did, did you actually consult mystics on this aspect of the world? We did. We did. We had a couple of folks who came in who actually wanted to take a son, Journeys, you

know, and Shaman. So we had a guy who we met through the California UC Berkeley who kind of, he described himself, I think, as an accidental Shaman. He was studying culture in South America and somebody he was staying with and being a shaman taught him. And so he talked about like, what do you see when you go on these journeys, you know, what does it look like? Any clues we could get that we could use to help design the world, it was super useful. And then we of course talked to rabbis and experts in Hinduism, Buddhism, pretty much the main religions that we could find.

And then a number of offshoots, so. But it's impossible, I mean, there's hundreds of thousands, so impossible to cover at all. I'd be a multiple lifetime thing. But we got a lot of great things. Initially, we were there because we wanted to make sure not to offend anybody. We were looking for hot trigger buttons that, for example, in this world of souls, are they all new souls?

Are we saying there is reincarnation or no? Because that could, half your audience gets mad at you and turns the movie off. So we wanted to know what are the things that are potentially going to upset the audience and we'll try to either stay away from them or offend everyone equally. In the end, we of course, it was useful that way,

but I think the research was also really key in helping us develop the story. Where did you land on reincarnation? It seems like there isn't reincarnation in this world. What's funny is people who believe in reincarnation, who've seen the film feel as though it allows for it and people who do, so we were able to kind of fudge it. So I realized our time is short,

but I would be remiss if I didn't let you go deeper on inside out. You've made a few references to it. Can you just, again, for those, there may be a few people in the world who haven't seen this movie, can you just describe the basics of Inside Out? Inside Out is about this little kid, she's 11, who moves from Minnesota to San Francisco,

which to us was kind of a symbol for growing up. And so most of the movie takes place in her head with her emotions, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and our main character, joy. And it's really their journey to try to hold on to childhood joy only to discover, you know what, sadness is a key part of our existence. And sadness as an emotion plays a key role in helping us deal with the world. So, you know, it's all used through these characters. I were dramatizing it, hopefully, in more exciting ways than I have the way I'm describing her right now.

But it was again, it was a great opportunity. I always feel like, as audience member, is we love us. We want to see ourselves on the screen. We want to see something that we can relate to, that we go like, yeah, that's monsters or cars or whatever, but that's my life. I understand that, you know, emotionally. Both soul and insight out were great opportunities that way, because they were completely made up. They allowed us to play around and do all the great stuff that animation can do, but it was always based on things that are familiar to us as human beings. So the idea of playing around with emotions, the thing that appealed to me was just the animation fun of it, you know, getting to animate fear, for example, or anger, just seemed so entertaining. And then as we got into it, understanding on a much more heartfelt, deeper level, how

those emotions serve us in our lives and what they're there for, you know. A lot of times, I know Isles felt grown up like anger is kind of something that you want to conquer. You want to get over anger because it's a bad thing to, you know, road rage or whatever. And then getting to work on the film, you know, understanding, well, no, it's a defender of you. And it's,

it could be a great inciting for social justice and writing wrongs and things. So every one of these emotions has this wonderful purpose for us and a reason for being there. And so we got to put all that into the film. So that was a real fun one. The question that animated, and I guess that's a loaded term, but the question that animated soul for you was, you know, what, what am I doing with my life? What was the question that animated inside out for you? Well, that one, my daughter, I've, a son and a daughter, my daughter was kind of going through that phase of, as was represented in the film, of being a happy goofy, free, wheel-in-kid to being much more solid and quiet.

And I recognized that in myself as well. I remember being hitting, I was like midway through six grades. Suddenly the world changed and you become much more self-aware. And so that's really what started that whole thing was just again, what happens to childhood joy? really what started that whole thing was just again, what happens to childhood joy? You spent a lot of time as I understand it, consulting with experts in emotion and psychologists in order to construct an inner life that would be, I hesitate to use this word because it can be a nathema to entertainers, but it was educational. Or you created it. We tried to make it reflect as accurately as we could our understanding of the emotional world. By that, I don't mean obviously the physical anger is not a little squared off guy red

with fire coming out of his head. But in terms of his job, in terms of his motivation and their interaction with each other, yeah, we tried to make it as when we had a choice, we wanted to come down on what we know of is to be more accurate or truthful. Sometimes again, the story dictates such that you steer from that. An example being memories. The memories in the film are represented in these spheres that they're like looking at a book or something or a movie like they never change. And of course, what we know now about memory is that they're constantly evolving and shifting.

And so, you know, what I remember crystal clear from my 14th birthday is probably 90% false. But that wouldn't work for our story, so we fudged it. That to me, and I don't represent any professional expertise here, but that doesn't seem like malpractice and pales in comparison to the good you did by giving people a way, especially kids a way to understand their emotional life so that they're not scared and denial completely owned by these emotions. Good. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I feel like we do have a bit of a responsibility. I mean, I'll say, as we're making the film, you have to kind of put on blinders to this because it can be paralyzing to think about how is this going to come out into the world and what are people going to do with it? How are they going to read it? For a while, you have to put on blinders. And then after it gets enough legs that it's standing on its own, then you can start to really pay attention to that stuff. But if you come out of the gate worried about how people are going to misread something, it's just like I say, it becomes paralyzing. But I do think we have a responsibility

in the end to tell the truth as we see it, even though we're making all this up. What I mean by that is, I want to ultimately the emotional statement of the film should represent the world in some semi-accurate way, emotionally. That's maybe a hard thing to unpack, because I'm not saying the surface level stuff, obviously we're making all that up. But maybe as an example, if everyone lives forever and is wonderfully happy the rest of their lives, that would be nice, but it's not reality, and so I don't think it represents truth. Even the way we ended soul, which again, I won't give away for people who haven't seen it, but we tried a number of different things before we got to where we did, because if

you just make it all happy, it doesn't feel truthful. I wrote a book seven years ago about meditation. It's called 10% App Here, and I'm now writing a sequel. And I'm in the stage of vomiting up the terrible first draft. And really trying to tell myself, what I've heard you just tell yourself, which is stop thinking about what people are gonna dislike about what you're writing now.

Just write it as raw as you can, and you can worry about that junk later. Yeah. With the problem with what I deeply envy about your world is you're sitting around the table with a bunch of people and it's fun, whereas if you're a memoirist, it's almost by design, a lonely journey. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there are days for sure that Pixar is a blast, and then there's

a lot of days when it's work. It's just again, the discipline of showing up and banging on this and trying to make progress. And if you're not up for that, you're going to flame out. It's just, it's any creative endeavor. There's a certain amount of just sweaty work that's not necessarily fun. I hear you on that, my friend. Let me ask one final question before I let you go. What's on your mind now? Is there a question knocking around in your brain that might provoke a new film? There's I'm kind of in the gathering phase where I just am walking, you know, most of my thoughts

come from walk. If I sit at the computer, I get distracted, I answer email, and I don't have long enough stretches to really get my brain deep. So I tend to go on walks, and that's then I'll keep a little scrap of paper and a pen in my pocket and write stuff down. I'm kind of in that phase right now where it's just like random ideas that I bet in a couple of months we'll start to add up to something, but I'm not in a place yet where I'm clear on what that is. Do you enjoy this part? Yeah. I mean, it can be anxiety producing. I know at the beginning

of Inside Out, I was desperate to know what my next idea would be. You know, I just come off up and I was like, I got to figure out what's next, what's next, what's next. This time I'm more relaxed in that. Well, I have this other job now, so I'm getting a paycheck to help other people do that. So anything I come up with is just going to be gravy and I'll file away. And whether I direct again or what, I don't think we've really figured that out. Well, I hope you do. And as a dad, I thank you for providing incredible entertainment for children that I as a parent can actually be moved by great work.

That's very cool to hear. Thank you. Bravo. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this, Pete. Thanks again to Pete. that was a deeply enjoyable hour of my time. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. Before I close, as always, I want to give a hearty shout out to my ABC News Comrades, Ryan Kessler, and Josh Kohant. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a fresh episode. Hey, hey, prime members.

You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.