Transcriber: Giorgia Zanfardin Reviewer: Riaki Poništ
When an old man dies, a library burns.
I learned this African proverb from a friend of mine
who told me that for the majority of my career I've been like a firefighter,
putting out the fires of stories that were meant to be told.
Have you ever wished
you could've interviewed somebody before they died,
like a grandparent or a parent?
Or think about interviewing somebody now,
but you just haven't quite gotten around to it?
We all have a story,
and whether we know it or not,
we're shaped by the stories around us.
For the last 15 years,
I've had the greatest opportunities to tell stories.
I've travelled all seven continents,
I've been given access into worlds I would never have expected
and interviewed people I would have never thought possible.
My films have been portrayals of visionaries and everyday heroes;
they've been stories of creativity and technology;
they've been investigations
into humanitarian and environmental themes.
But when I look back, now on my career of filmmaking,
I realize that my filmmaking career was largely inspired by my childhood.
My dad and grandfather, both Academy Award winners,
worked at the Walt Disney Studios,
and they designed and developed the cameras and projection systems
for the Disney films and theme parks.
Every now and then,
my dad had to go down at Disneyland to work,
and if I was lucky enough, he'd take me with him.
But we didn't go in the main entrance like everybody else;
we went in the back entrance.
And I can tell you,
going through that gate was like entering wonderland.
Pulling back that curtain and seeing that magic backstage
was more exciting to me than what was on stage.
The people that designed the park were called Imagineers
and I grew up learning of their legendary stories
of how Disneyland was built.
Such as how to get ghosts to sing and dance in the Haunted Mansion ride,
or how to get fireflies to glow in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride,
or how to get Abraham Lincoln's body and hands to move
in the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction.
In fact, this is Lincoln's hand,
and I grew up with this hand always lying around our house as a kid
because my dad's hands were the actual molds for Lincoln's hands.
Now, my mom, on the other hand,
did not appreciate finding this in the freezer,
(Laughter)
but I still blame my sister for that.
So, needless to say,
I had a great time growing up behind the scenes.
So by the time I graduated from USC Film School,
I got a job as a director's assistant
in Hollywood on some big-budget studio films.
And it was exciting
because I got a behind the scenes look at the sausage-making of moviemaking.
But as the film ended and production was over,
I remember my job started to get mundane.
And I remember driving across L.A. morning traffic everyday
just to do a laundry list of gofer jobs for the director,
you know, like walk the dog - I hate to admit it -
meet the housekeeper, get the coffee.
And I remember thinking,
Is this what I'm really supposed to be doing with my film school degree?
So one day on this long boring commute, an image popped into my mind,
a photo that my grandfather took,
back in 1924,
when he was driving across country to Hollywood.
This was always hanging in my grandparents' house
when I was a kid, this photograph.
See, my grandfather had met Walt Disney
four years earlier in Kansas City, Missouri.
They were teenagers and artists working in an advertising agency.
They were both passionate about animation.
And they decided to form their own business called Iwerks-Disney,
but it only lasted a month.
Then Walt decided to go on his own
and form his own company called Laugh-O-Grams,
doing a little cartoons for the local theatres.
My grandfather soon joined them
and they started innovating little cartoons,
jerry-rigging animation cameras,
and they came up with some great innovative cartoons
including one that starred a live-action girl
in an animated backdrop,
and this had never been done before.
But soon Walt's money run out, and he had to declare bankruptcy,
so he took off for Hollywood to go find work,
and my grandfather returned to the advertising agency
for steady employment.
It was two years later
when my grandfather received a letter from Walt
asking him to come out to Hollywood
to join him as Chief Animator on a new cartoon series.
And my grandfather had a choice at this moment:
he could put this letter in the drawer
and play it safe,
or he could, you know, uproot his entire life,
move across country,
and go work on some esoteric cartoon that could totally go bankrupt again.
But what does he do?
He trusts his gut, listens to his instincts,
and moves across country,
goes down a long dirt road into an unknown future.
This, in storytelling terms, is called the inciting incident
or the call to action.
Everything prior to this moment is the backstory.
Everything ahead of this moment
is the story.
It's the moment that sets the protagonist in motion.
And as this story goes,
two years after my grandfather arrived in Hollywood,
Walt Disney did go belly-up again,
on a new cartoon series called "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit".
When his animation staff jumped ship,
the one person, the one animator who stood by his side
was Ub Iwerks.
He would go on to design and animate
the new cartoon character who would change the world:
Mickey Mouse.
Or Topolino, as you all know him here in Italy.
So, I was one when my grandfather died,
and needless to say,
I was very bummed that I never got to know him.
So by the time I got to Junior High,
I was tasked with doing a book report on somebody famous
and I decided to do it on Ub.
So I start looking through these books
on animation history and biographies on Walt Disney.
What I started finding was that the stories I was reading
were different than what I was hearing in my own family system,
you know, Ub's contribution to animation and visual effects
and his contributions to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
What I realized is there's a story of collaboration that was missing,
and as a result, a piece of animation history was missing.
And this discrepancy had always bothered me.
So here I was,
driving across town in morning traffic en route to walk the director's dog.
And it dawned on me:
I could save this library.
What if I go and I interview
the people that knew my grandfather before they were gone?
And maybe I could write a book or make a film, a documentary
and share his story with the world.
I didn't know it at the time, but this was my call to action.
So, shortly thereafter,
I met with Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt,
and I pitched him my idea of a documentary.
And he told me that he had great respect for Ub
and he felt that Ub's story was not only meant to be told,
it needed to be told.
And so he convinced the studio to fund the documentary,
and before I knew it, I was on my way to telling my grandfather's story.
So I spent the next eight months retracing their footsteps
back in Kansas City and Hollywood.
I visited their old sites
like the Laugh-O-Gram's building where they got their start.
And I interviewed the people that knew him.
And I learned that Ub and Walt were like the yin and yang
of creativity and technology.
Walt, pictured left here,
whenever he had a story idea that needed to be told,
Ub would figure out a technical or artistic solution for it.
Whenever Ub came up with some technical invention,
Walt would find a way to put it to use.
They were always pushing the envelope.
So this was my first documentary and I was having a blast,
but I knew I needed to prove myself.
So when the time came for me to show my first cut to the studio executives,
I remember feeling this sense of anxiety.
I was about to show them
a potentially controversial retelling of the Mickey Mouse origin story.
I mean, this is from Ub's point of view.
What if they disagreed with it? What if they wanted me to change it?
How would I negotiate this?
After all, Walt's most famous quote, arguably, was,
"It all started with a mouse."
So fortunately,
because this was a balanced and fair and honest retelling,
the studio not only embraced it,
they premiered it in Hollywood and distributed around the world.
Now people everywhere could experience the same magic
that inspired his life and mine.
And I got to get to know the grandfather I never knew.
Not long after this,
I ran into John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios.
And he invited me
to come screen my film up at the studio for the employees.
And I remember, at a Q&A after the film, somebody asked me,
if I could have done anything differently in the making of my documentary
what would it had been?
And I remember thinking,
"You know, if I could've gone back in time
and been a fly on the wall in the creation of Mickey Mouse,
recorded those early films and the behind-the-scenes activity,
I would have loved that opportunity."
So, that answer seemed to spark something, I think, in John's mind,
because afterwards they shared with me their long risky journey
into the creation of computer animation.
And then, they invited me to actually be that fly on the wall,
and go behind the scenes and actually capture the goings-on
in the creative process of Pixar Animation Studios.
It was very exciting.
And I remember my interview with Steve Jobs.
He told me that Pixar had combined the creative culture of Hollywood
with the hi-tech culture of Silicone Valley.
Two cultures that previously did not understand each other.
A place where as John Lasseter says,
"Art challenges technology, and technology inspires art."
But with all the advancements in computer animation,
what didn't change was the need to create believable worlds
with living-breathing characters.
As the classic animators have taught us, you have to make your characters feel.
I remember thinking,
"If I had been a fly on the wall during the creation of Mickey Mouse,
would it have looked something like this?"
This is a scene that I filmed during the making of Finding Nemo.
An exchange between director Andrew Stanton and animator Doug Sweetland.
[Last day of Finding Nemo dailies]
(Video) Woman: Doug is next.
Father: Hey, guess what.
Nemo: What?
Father: Sea turtles?
I met one!
And it was 150 years old.
AS: Nemo should be looking at his dad at the beginning of the shot.
DS: All the time? AS: Yeah, he looks like he's dead.
He looks like he's given up.
(Laughter)
He looked at his dad and he looked at his fin,
and he should be looking at him for acknowledgment the whole time.
They can touch the fin; they stay looking at each other.
(Laughter)
(Music)
[Doug Sweetland, animator]
DS: I was focusing permanently on father and really not on Nemo.
So I just kind of had Nemo defaulted to this eyes-forward pose,
not even thinking about how it would read,
except that hopefully you're looking at father.
But Andrew read it,
and he was totally right that he looks completely indifferent.
(Laughter)
So now I have to give the same treatment that I gave father to Nemo.
But you know, it's not like starting over or anything,
but I have to imbue that character with something.
So now what I can do is just go back into the thumbnails,
and what I can do is use these same drawings.
It will be good. The shot will be a lot better.
I've done all this stuff too, where the fin is the symbol of the movie.
His accepting of his son
is also the letting go of the past, of the loss, the trauma
and what is it to take someone's hand.
Not only as in an opportunity
to physically touch and connect with his son,
it also marks the new relationship.
(Music)
Father: I'm so sorry, Nemo.
(Music ends)
(On stage) LI: So, this behind-the-scenes access
really gave me a deeper understanding
for the human journey through the creative process,
or that courage to create.
I learned through my own filmmaking
that risk-taking is all about trusting your gut
and having that confidence to go down an unpaved road.
Much like my grandfather did and much like the founders of Pixar did.
So when I started receiving letters from students,
telling me that this film, the Pixar story,
inspired them to pursue a career in animation,
that gave me more motivation to go and find more stories
that were meant to be told,
more stories of risk and survival and risk and adversity.
But how do you find these stories?
I can tell you
that you will often find them
in the most surprising and unexpected places.
I would never have guessed
that my next film would have landed me in the trash,
literally.
The Guatemala City garbage dump, the largest landfill in Central America,
where thousands of families who had fled Guatemala's 36-year civil war
had found refuge recycling the city's trash.
Outsiders saw these people as degenerates,
and I saw them as hard-working survivors.
Vultures and stray dogs and people were all vying
for the same half-eaten banana just dumped from a trash truck.
Yet, children were joyful here.
They played with broken toys and hula-hoops.
And even Mickey Mouse dolls.
We asked one woman,
"What was the best thing you ever found in the garbage dump?"
She said, "My husband."
This was a story of risk, courage, survival and dignity.
I grew up in the world of Disneyland, and this was their playground.
So I was finding commonality in a place far from home and how I grew up.
When people learned I was doing a documentary
about people living in a garbage dump,
they thought I was crazy for doing this film.
But when it was nominated for an Academy Award,
and benefits screenings raised three million dollars
to help build schools in the surrounding areas of the garbage dump,
our film "Recycled Life" is proof
that films that are meant to be told can make a difference.
I find that as we get older, we start to look back at the stories of our lives.
We start to want to fill in the blanks
and answer the questions that we never thought to ask,
because we were so busy living and doing.
But when we start being, our own history starts to matter more.
If we could just have one more day with our loved one,
or we could have been that fly on the wall to learn about their processes,
their perspectives and their lessons in life.
Stories are all around us.
And we have the tools and the technology today like never before,
to go out and capture them and share them with others.
I challenge you, I dare you: go out.
Find those magical stories in others, and then yourself.
Because when we listen to our own instincts,
and we answer our own calls to action,
our stories become a gift to everyone.
They become the tribal knowledge to pass down.
Remember that old African proverb:
when an old man dies, or a woman, a library burns.
Go save some burning libraries, I dare you.
Thank you.
(Applause)