I looked long and hard at third films in series to see if there were any good ones that I could learn from. And there weren't any that hadn't just gone off the train tracks by their third film. Until, that is, I got to the third 'Lord of the Rings' film.
The only reason we made 'Toy Story 2' is that we happened to come up with a storyline that was really good. It wasn't driven by wanting to make a sequel.
Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'
If I went back to live-action, I'd have to do it the Pixar way. If I didn't, I'd feel like I was walking a tightrope without a net.
It's important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good.
I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.
Any of us directing at Pixar, whether it's our first time or not, feel a lot of pressure to not make a bad Pixar film.
I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I'm very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it's not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.
I ended up being exposed to cinema that a lot of other kids wouldn't have been exposed to.
For 'Toy Story 3' to be recognized by the Academy as not only one of the best animated films of the year, but also as one of the 10 best pictures of the year, is both humbling and overwhelming.
I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.
I love Giuseppe Tornatore, the guy that did 'Cinema Paradiso.'
The walls between live-action and animation are becoming really porous, and it's interesting.
Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.
How about a good comedy? 'Raising Arizona.' Remains the funniest movie I've ever seen in my life.
It wasn't the first film to show a kind of alternate vision of suburbia, but it left an indelible impression, I think, on everybody, and all films like that will forever be measured against 'Blue Velvet.'
My favorite film is 'The Shining,' mostly because it was the film that inspired me to become a filmmaker myself.
Going through the Chagrin Falls school system, I always thought I was going off to art school.
Do you ever achieve total forgiveness after screwing up?
I guess it's the fear of failure and not knowing how the films are going to do that just drives us to work really hard to make them the best they can possibly be.
