Pixar Talk

This amazing interview from Creative Screenwriting Magazine with Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt discusses the film in-depth, but also hints at an original movie that he and director Lee Unkrich were collaborating on before Toy Story 3 was greenlit. It sounds like Lee’s next project could already be deep in development (highlighted below in bold). I was able to transcribe the entire interview and there’s some juicy tidbits about making Toy Story 3 that I haven’t previously seen (Stantons 20-page treatment, the “grown up” sequence & more). It’s a great read, so please check it out and share your thoughts in the comments section.

In a strange twist of fate, Michael Arndt found himself in a position enviable to any writer. The New York-based screenwriter was in Los Angeles for the production of his first screenplay, the indie dramedy Little Miss Sunshine. Unsure of his next career move, Arndt received a call from his agent with the surprising news that Pixar principals wanted to meet him. “It was like being summoned to Mount Olympus,” he says.

It turns out that Pixar’s story department head, Mary Coleman, asked Sunshine producer Ron Yerxa if he knew any great up-and-coming writers. Yerxa gave Coleman Arndt’s script and she was blown away. The amazing thing about this story is that despite the fact that Little Miss Sunshine would eventually go on to become a big indie hit — and win Arndt an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — at the time Arndt was interviewing with Pixar, Sunshine didn’t even have a distributor.

As it turns out, Arndt is a huge animation fan and even made a few animated shorts at New York University, where he studies film, but never thought he could make a living from animation. “It never seemed like a career possibility,” he says. “I used to go to animation festivals and see every new Pixar film, but feature animation always seemed like Timbuktu. I knew it existed, but I would never go there.”

Arndt was hired at Pixar to work with Lee Unkrich, co-director of Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo, on an original idea of Unkrich’s. Arndt amidst that collaborating on Unkrich’s story at first concerned him. “Usually as a writer, you’re alternately stepping on the gas – creating stuff – and stepping on the brakes – editing and rewriting,’ Arndt explains. “But with Lee, I didn’t have the luxury of withholding scenes until I felt they were polished or perfect. I just had to crank out a scene and turn it in so he could react to it.”

Arndt admits he was worried that, when he got pages back from Unkrich, only the negative would be highlighted instead of the positive. “I had packed up and left New York and moved temporarily to San Francisco, all based on this good faith notion that this collaboration was going to work out,” Arndt remembers. “So I remember turning in my first bunch of pages and thinking, ‘Man, I hope this works,’ because you never know what kind of creative chemistry you’re going to have until you actually start working together.

When Unkrich returned the pages, Arndt was relieved. There were notes, but they were all improvements on what was already there. “That was a hugely liberating moment,” Arndt says. “I realized not only was I not going to have to be fighting this guy and arguing my point of view, but I could stop worrying about stepping on the brakes and being critical of my own work. I could start shot-gunning ideas as fast as possible and trust that Lee would sort out the wheat from the chaff. It ended up being a good relationship.”

While working on Unkrich’s film, Sunshine premiered at Sundance in January 2006, and while Arndt was there celebrating its success, he received more surprising news: Pixar had been bought by The Walt Disney Company and Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, John Lasseter, who directed the first two Toy Story films, would take on the same title at Walt Disney Animation Studios in addition to retaining his role at Pixar.

During the messy haggling between then-Disney head Michael Eisner and then-Pixar CEO Steve Jobs, it appeared the two sides could not reach an agreement, leaving Pixar to either sign with another studio or remain independent. One trump card Disney held, however, was rights to Pixar’s old films..and characters. When talks began to break down, Eisner put Toy Story 3 into preproduction without involving any of the first two films’ collaborators. It was a shot across the bow, to say the least.

When Eisner’s tenure at Disney ended in September 2005, he was replaced by Bob Iger, who reignited the talks with Pixar that led to the deal that merged the two companies. The then version of Toy Story 3 was shut down immediately and Pixar decided to make its own version in order to close the chapter of its signature series.

Given his new duties, Lasseter couldn’t take the reins himself, nor could Pixar luminaries Andrew Stanton and Peter Docter, who were busy with WALL-E and Up, respectively. Unkrich was asked by Pixar to put his work with Arndt aside and take on the role of director himself. Comfortable with their working relationship, he decided to bring Arndt along. “Again, this was before Little Miss Sunshine was even released, so I really felt like a kid from the sticks who is suddenly asked to be the lead-off batter for the Yankees,” Arndt jokes.

When Pixar decided to move forward with Toy Story 3, there were only rough ideas of what the content of the film could be. So Lasseter, Stanton, Docter and Unkrich – along with Up co-director Bob Peterson, story artist Jeff Pidgeon, and producer Darla K. Anderson – went on a weekend “story retreat” at the same Northern California cabin where the four of them and the late Joe Ranft broke the original Toy Story plot more than 10 years earlier. When they returned from the retreat, Stanton took a short break from WALL-E to draft a 20-page treatment that he then turned over to Arndt and Unkrich. But like most Pixar films, this early treatment doesn’t share a whole lot with the final product. “It had a rock-solid beginning and a rock-solid ending, which, as a writer, is all you really need to get going,” Arndt says. “But a lot changed between that first treatment and the final film.”

Over time, the changes that Arndt and the rest of the filmmaking team included a new inciting incident for the story, a new mid-point, new act breaks and a different third act – with the exception of the final scene. “That final scene was always the anchor of the whole movie,” Arndt explains. “We always knew it was solid gold. But we knew there was a good story in there somewhere. But going from the first treatment to the final film was not a matter of coloring between the lines. It was an agonizing, years-long struggle for everyone.”

Toy Story 3‘s plot centers around the threat that Andy — who is Woody, Buzz and the other toys’ owner — could decide to dispose of his beloved toys now that he is all grown up. For several days, Arndt struggled with an early sequence in the film that sets up this threat for the audience. He kept toying with scenes in which the concept of disposing of old toys is discussed by the film’s human characters but Arndt ultimately felt it was too expositional — until his train of thought was interrupted by a loud alarm that signaled a fire drill at Pixar.

As the studio employees filed onto the front lawn of the Emeryville location, Arndt found himself standing next to [Andrew] Stanton [one of Pixar's principals and writer-director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo, among other Pixar films]. “So, kind of as a way to make conversation,” Arndt recalls, I explained my problem and he immediately suggested that I set up the threat from the toys’ perspective.” Stanton thought if one disloyal toy was freaking out and said, “Screw it! Andy’s grown up and I’m getting out of here before I’m thrown away,” that the threat would have greater impact. That simple idea led to Sarge delivering those lines as he jumped out the window with his Army men. “That’s a visual way of setting up the idea and having it take the form of a dramatic argument between two characters — Sarge and Woody — rather than a limp line of exposition from one of the human characters, “Arndt says. “And that was a problem I had been struggling with on my own for about a week that got solved in 10 second because you’re all in this building and you just get those happy accidents once in a while — that and the fact that Andrew is a really irritatingly smart guy.”

Oddly, the early part of the film was where some of the hardest problems to solve resided. Arndt suffered mightily over a sequence the production team called “grown up,” which was a scene designed to catch the audience up on the 10 years that elapsed between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3. “There’s just a tone of stuff you have to deal with right away,” Arndt says. “Character exposition, relationships, expectations for the future and various disagreements. It was just a nightmare trying to figure out what all that stuff is in the first place and then how to communicate it as quickly as possible.”

When he has problems solving a scene, Arndt uses a process similar to outlining. “If a scene is very complicated,” he explains, “I’ll make a list of everything that needs to happen in that scene and then try to establish the proper chronology. That way, everything happens in the right order.” To hear Arndt describe it, even at the end of the project, the scribe feels his problems within this highly expository scene were never completely solved. “I actually went back and counted more than 60 drafts of it, and it still feels like the least-great scene in the movie to me,” he laments. “That was my Waterloo. It does what it needs to do, but it doesn’t sing the way other scenes in the movie do.”

Eleven films in, Pixar is very careful to not repeat itself and that adage certainly held true for the third installment of its landmark franchise. But if one is being held to the fact that these characters are only toys, their problems would seem to be limited. Arndt recognized this obstacle immediately, particularly when it came to Woody, the central character of all three films. Arndt explains Woody’s personal development by comparing his emotional progress in the films with that of a child. “In Toy Story, Woody is learning to share the spotlight with Buzz,” he explains. “He’s like a child who gets a new sibling and has to realize he doesn’t always have to be the favorite. That tracks emotionally with someone who is 5 or 6 years old.

“In Toy Story 2,” Arndt continues, “Woody has to deal with and accept his mortality. That tracks with a child who is 8 to 10 years old.” With the plot devised for Toy Story 3, Woody needed to progress to a more mature sentiment — that of a teenager — in order for the film to have the correct impact. “Woody learns about the impermanence of things and the necessity for letting go and moving on,” Arndt says. “So there’s an arc to his development across the trilogy. Even though there are common elements in all three films, I do think we’re telling a different story in each of them, as well as one big over-arching story that spans the trilogy.”

Another difficulty the script of Toy Story 3 presented was servicing the ever-growing cast of characters and balancing the moments between both the trilogy mainstays and the new toys we are introduced to in this film. “This is the danger of having a group protagonist”, Arndt laments. “A lot of times, we had to make sure that everyone had something to do in a scene. You never want a character to just be luggage that’s being dragged from scene to scene.”

Arndt points out that the familiar characters are so well defined by this point that coming up with their natural reactions to each new situation was fun. But at the end of the day, some characters were just going to get more screen time than others. “When you have so many characters, you’re invariably making a trade between variety and depth,” he continues. “While I couldn’t give everyone their own arc or subplot – although we did cram a lot of B-lines into 90 minutes – you want to make sure that each character, at the every least, is true to himself.”

Arndt’s fondest memories of his Toy Story 3 stint involve his immersion into the so-called “Pixar process,” a collaborative effort between great filmmakers who make sure each of the studio’s release is up to part with its predecessors. Chief among these individuals is the Pixar “Brain Trust” — a group that includes [John] Lasseter, Stanton, [Pete] Docter, The Incredibles’ Brad Bird, Up’s Bob Peterson, animation director Brenda Chapman (whose Pixar debut The Bear and the Bow will be released in 2011) and Pixar sound designer-turned-director Gary Rydstrom, among others.

Every convening of the Brain Trust saw [Lee] Unkrich and Arndt presenting their film at various stages of completion; sometimes as an early draft of the script or later on as rough versions of animation with added dialogue called “reels.” Then notes were given, usually with amazing results. Arndt doesn’t mince words when describing his Brain Trust experiences, ” As a screenwriter, that’s just f***ing heaven on earth!”

“You have to remember,” he continues, “I spent 10 years sitting alone in Brooklyn working on my own scripts and getting dribs and drabs of feedback every couple of weeks. And suddenly, it’s like you’re crawling through the desert and one day you drill down and hit a geyser. Sitting in on those Brain Trust meetings have been some of the most exhilarating moments of my creative life.”

“I remember the first time I sat in on a Brain Trust meeting,” Arndt continues. “As soon as people started talking, it was like the Harlem Globetrotters in your living room.” The collective minds preset at such a meeting can certainly only improve an idea. The common protocol is for one member to throw out an idea while another follows up with a completion or addition to the original thought. Jokes are topped sometimes three times over. “The organic intelligence in that room is automatically higher than even the smartest person in the room,” Arndt says. “There are times when you feel like you’re in the presence of some super-intelligent story deity that has powers beyond that of any mere mortal.”

For an Oscar-winning screenwriter who could have pick of any project in town, Arndt’s outlook on screenwriting changed after seeing the unique collaboration offered by Pixar. “When you look at the final product, there’s just no way I could have written that screenplay on my own,” he says humbly. “It’s just too narratively complex and too dense with incident and humor. I worked really, really hard on Little Miss Sunshine – I went to the end of my abilities in writing that script. But purely formal terms, Toy Story 3 puts Little Miss Sunshine in the shade. And that comes from the fact that it’s a collaborative process.”

Arndt says that Pixar’s process harkens back to the old studio model, when companies had writers on staff. He also points out that even the great auteurs he admired in film school – Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, Akira Kuroswa – had writers whom they regularly collaborated with on their scripts. “Pixar was very, very generous in giving me sole screenplay credit,” Arndt continues. “But what’s up on the screen is the product of a huge team effort. I was, very happily, just another member of the team.”

Also included in this collaboration is the story team led by Jason Katz, whom Arndt gives credit to for improving the screenplay tremendously. “They were constantly adding ideas and details into shaping the story,” Arndt says. “Everyone was given complete creative freedom to do whatever we felt was best for the story. Once you make that shift – once you check your auteur/genius/visionary self-image at the door – the problem of ego goes out the window.”

“People say that writing is re-writing,” he continues, “but that leaves out a crucial part of the equation: the feedback you get prior to your re-write. Pixar stories work because of the robustness of the story feedback system.” Arndt points to statements made by several key Pixar staffers who admit that, at some point in the process, every single film Pixar made was once the worst thing one might ever see. “It’s only by making the movie as a ‘reel’ seven or eight times, and failing repeatedly, and by applying the smartest and most ruthless criticism you can to the story over and over again, that the stories are able to take shape and come out feeling coherent and complete,” he says.

Arndt’s observations on his time at Pixar only confirm what many film pundits and fans have long suspected: Pixar’s films are such rousing successes because of the attention each individual at the studio dedicates to the screenplays. “Andrew Stanton’s rule of thumb is that it takes 10 man-years of labor to make a good screenplay,” Arndt explains. “Either two writers working five years or 10 guys working one year. For Toy Story 3, it was even more than that — probably the equivalent of 10 people working two or three years.”

“To me, this is what separates Pixar from almost everyone else,” Arndt concludes. “They realize how hard it is to come up with a great screenplay.”

Courtesy of Creative Screenwriting Magazine – Danny Munso

Tags: Lee Unkrich, Michael Arndt, Toy Story 3, Untitled Lee Unkrich Project