I am Pete Docter and this is The
Breakdown.
I grew up loving animation, feeling
like this is really what I was born
to do, and I think
I started when I was like eight, I
started working professionally when
I was 15.
And then after inside
out, I was like, you know, this is
probably as good as it gets.
I can't imagine doing anything
that would supersede
that in terms of audience
appreciation and box office
and critical acclaim.
And then I was like, now
what do I
do? I just go back and do it, do it
again. Or is there something that
maybe I'm missing because I still
don't feel like it, like fixed
everything and made me all whole
or whatever.
So I started
just wondering, like, you know, I
think a lot of us grew up with that
idea. Like, you find what you love,
pursue that and you will never work
a day in your life. You'll be happy.
And, you know,
I don't know. That's always the
case.
So this film is really kind of an
unpacking or an investigation into
what is it to live,
you know, what's what's going on in
this place? Well, the first
challenge was not pissing off
half the world's
population because, you know, there
are obviously a lot of different
ideas about what happens after we
die. So we decided, well, actually,
what's good about this idea is that
it doesn't really need to get into
that. We did explore it a little
bit, but primarily the movie
takes place before life and
before we're born.
And there are very few traditions,
actually, that talk about that.
So then we got to make it up.
But then the challenge
with that, of course, is there's
very little to look at for
reference.
We did do a lot of research.
We talked to rabbis and
priests and Buddhists and
all sorts of folks just to learn
what we could.
But, you know, most people
said, oh, the souls
are ethereal, ethereal.
They're nonphysical, they're
invisible, not
very helpful in terms of hints for
how to design things.
So we we tried to nod to that
stuff by making them foggy and
vaporous and so on.
I think actually our character
designer, Albert Lozano, had said,
what? What if you made an icon
of someone, but without
using them their looks as
a guide?
And so it's like the distilled down,
simplified, absolute reductionist
details that I would need to create
the look of somebody in this
in this form. And in fact, before
you're born, the souls that haven't
lived yet, they're even simpler.
They don't even have arms and legs
unless they need them.
If they need to grab something, they
can, you know, appears.
But that was kind of part of the fun
of it is just, OK, this is
kind of impossible.
How are we going to do it?
And luckily, we have really talented
people
that figure that stuff out.
It's just heaven.
No, is it h
e double hockey sticks?
How, how, how,
how, how
deep?
It's easy to get turned around.
It's the universe itself dumbing
itself down for humans to
understand.
So we want to make sure they don't
look like humans.
They shouldn't look like souls.
They're their own thing.
And we did experiment quite a bit
with kind of actually,
I asked one of the people, could you
build me a four dimensional
character?
You know, like if you see a
tesseract, it's like this weird
unfolding, three dimensional thing.
That's and and they said, yeah,
technically we could.
But this ended up being
kind of enticing.
It's like a Picasso or a
or Alexander Calder, like a wire
sculpture.
We also we were really inspired by a
lot of modernist
Nordic sculpture.
I don't know why, but that that came
up a lot.
And so all those things kind of
folded into this.
Just it's kind of that brainteaser,
OK, it's 2D, but it's 3D.
It's like, you know, like if you
take a piece of wire and you bend it
around, it's it's got dimension.
But from the camera's point of
view, it's flat until it turns.
And then I just was really
intriguing and also
unlike anything we've ever done,
which is also intriguing,
it's not like inside out where
you're cutting inside different
locations, you know, every couple
seconds. But still, we wanted
it to be very clear.
This is the world.
This is the ethereal, nonphysical
space, the other dimension.
And I think to
you know, just as we chose jazz,
jazz comes with its own kind of
design language. You look at great
album covers from the 50s and the
60s. There's great kind of graphic
shaped things with strong rhythm
and and color.
And so we were inspired
a lot by that as well in terms of
trying to make New
York City very identifiable and
recognizable, but also kind of
turning the volume up a little, you
know, make it its own thing
stylized, that it also ended
up being like a lot of times you
make these choices and then you
can't really fully define them
unless you have something to oppose
it. So having
the world and this is tactile and
hard edged and angular,
and then we have the.
Ethereal world, not soft and fuzzy
and round shapes, and so those
two, I think, define themselves
in opposition to each other.
The lost souls are meant to
basically it's funny.
When we started, I was just
recognizing there are people that
you see sometimes, you
know, homeless folks or you meet
them in life, that you just feel
like they they're lost.
They're just kind of aimlessly
wandering through life.
And it felt like polar opposite
to Joe, who feels like I
have a goal, I have a drive, I have
a passion that I'm following.
But as we got into the storytelling,
I started to recognize, you know,
that there have been times in my
life when I am so single mindedly
passionate and focused that
I become a lost soul that I start
blocking out the rest of the world.
And there's something really
intriguing about that,
though. As we talked about that, I
think it was Steve who was
the production designer, came up
with these really kind of cool,
blobby haunted forms.
And they're wandering
through this ethereal astral
plane looking for what they
think is the answer to life, blind
to it all the time.
So that was
kind of where that all came from.
I recognize this as an artist,
as an animator.
There were many times like I mean, I
even worked on Toy Story that
I was so into it that you
just it's almost like and
there have been studies done on this
with musicians and
especially athletes,
that it's almost like your vision is
affected and the rest of the world
just goes and you you narrow
in and you're so focused on what it
is. It's a it's a high.
It's like a natural high.
And then three hours later, you
kind of wake up and it felt like
five minutes, you know, you're just
so into what you're doing.
I'm sorry I zoned
out a little back there.
That felt really intriguing because
I'd heard musicians talk about that
as well, it felt like something very
common among people who
really love what they do.
But similarly, it can
be kind of like the last soul
conversation could be kind of like a
trap or something that you get stuck
there. We first came up with the
idea. I came up with the concept of
an area that would be
defining of souls, you know, the
great before or as we kind of
call in the movie, the youth
seminar, the great before.
Oh, we call it the youth seminar.
Now, rebranding
and the first draft,
I think was all set there.
It was kind of a heist movie.
It was these two characters trying
to get another pass,
an earth pass so that the one could
get back. But we never really
went down to earth.
And then as we got into it, we
realized, oh, you know, what we're
really doing with this film is kind
of arguing what is the point of
life? And so it's very passive
to sit here and look at pictures.
You know, we had Joe bringing up
moments of his life and telling
22, hey, look at this.
This is why this was so cool.
But it's like watching movies in a
movie and the characters have no
effect on that.
And and so it was very passive.
So we decided, OK, we got to send
them down to earth.
And then we were looking really to
find something. I think it was
around that same time we were
looking to find Joe reflecting
kind of my own thing of
having a passion and a
singular focus.
Animation is not maybe
the most exciting thing to watch on
screen. It's fun to watch the final
product, but as it's being done,
it's a lot of clicking and mouse is
moving and stuff. So we thought
while musician
we explored a bunch of stuff.
Actually, we had one version where
Joe was an actor,
but he kind of came off
like he was trying to get rich and
famous.
So when we hit on musicians,
specifically jazz, I grew up loving
jazz. I really it speaks
to me for whatever reason.
And we found this
story that Herbie Hancock
told about playing with
Miles Davis.
I think this must have been in the
60s and they were doing a
tour of Europe.
So it was a great tour.
And then he said there was this one
concert. It was so great.
And then in the middle of all of it,
I played this chord.
And he says it was so wrong
that I worried that I ruined
the whole concert.
And he said, but instead of
judging him, Miles Davis just
looked over, played some notes and
made that chord right.
And he is like, how did I took me
years to figure out how he did that.
What he did was he didn't judge it.
He just took it as something new
that happened and did.
What any great jazz musician should
try to do is to take anything
that happens and turn it into
something of value.
And as soon as I heard that, I was
like, this is exactly what we're
trying to say with this movie.
It's such a great metaphor.
The idea of improvization is
what we're doing in our lives.
We're just walking through and in a
perfect world, we're making the best
out of what we have.
And so jazz became
not only kind of a surface level,
integral part of the film, but a
very deep thematic thing
as well. Once you picked jazz
and we were looking for like centers
of great jazz, of course, New
Orleans.
But there had already
been a film from the Disney
Legacy set there as Princess
and the Frog. So we thought, well,
New York is pretty classic
as well. And it's a it's a place,
you know, you play at places like
the we made this up the half now,
but it's clearly based on, you
know, a bunch of different clubs
that we we saw actually
in lower Manhattan and out
in the outer suburbs
as well. So we've made a visit
there. We took tons of pictures.
We tried to capture kind of the
essence of it in the same way, like
when you do a caricature of a
person, it's not a photograph.
It's not exactly.
But it has the flavor of
of of the neighborhoods.
And we tried to be as specific as we
could. Traditionally Pixar, we tend
to do very kind
of classic Hollywood type of scores
with big orchestra 110 piece, you
know, with Randy Newman or
Michael Jackson or any of our great
collaborators.
And typically what we do is we'll
wait till the very end.
We kind of almost lock it
to the frame and then we hand it to
them and they just score it.
In this case, I felt like I know
there's something about this movie
that wants a different
approach.
And so I was lucky to
have worked with Ren Kleiss,
this amazing sound designer on
InsideOut.
Ren is also a longtime
associates and friends with David
Fincher, and so of course
had worked with Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross.
And so I was having
lunch with him one day and said, Do
you think those guys would ever do
anything?
Like, I know it's a stretch because,
you know, Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo in a Pixar film,
I don't know how that would work,
but but I mean, I just love
the way they think.
Very smart people
creatively. And he went
and asked them and it turns out they
were really key.
They were a little scared, as were
we. But I think we both had
to kind of stretch and maybe meet.
Somewhere that was beyond
where we initially thought we were
going to go and that produced some
really cool stuff, and then we
decided, well, look, we're going to
need somebody to perform so that we
can really animate to their
performance. We were lucky enough to
meet John Batiste, who, of
course, as bandleader on Colbert's
program.
And he was just fantastic, not
only as a performer, but as
a knowledge base for
the life of the musician
helping us even.
I don't think he knows this, but he
helped us craft the script, you
know, things he would say about
watching musicians or what he
was fascinated by or even
situations in his own life when he
didn't say get a gig or whatever,
and understanding all that kind
of behind the scenes stuff, it was
really key to
for us in writing the film.
And so as much as Jamie Fox is the
voice of Joe Jean-Baptiste
is like the hands of Joe
working in editorial.
That's where we really designed,
where how much time we were going to
spend, where.
And of course, that's all driven by
storytelling.
But I will say,
you know, like I mentioned a minute
ago, typically we lock the picture,
give it to our composers.
In this case, Trent and Atticus
were giving us a score as
we were writing the pieces
so we would be in the middle of
reworking dialog, an entire
big beats, and they would be like,
here's seven different cues that
maybe one of them will work and
they'd upload them somewhere.
And we listen to him.
I go like, well, that one's great.
But this one actually, we could use
that over here in the movie.
And so it was much more
of an organic process that
they did a lot of demos
that then we would plug in.
We would maybe distort them or copy
paste them a couple of times to make
it fit to picture.
And then they would go back and re
form those to to make
it more to, you know, to really
work. So it was an iterative,
organic process that was unlike
anything we'd done before.
We were lucky on this film to
pretty much get everybody we asked,
you know, we were looking for
someone that
for Joe could play
comedy because we wanted him to be a
fun character who also
could do drama, who understood
music. Of course, Jamie could do all
he's like. I don't know.
Did you know he was a he was trained
as a classical pianist.
That's where he he majored in
school. And he's amazing.
You know, he he not only knows
music, he can do it like he knows
it, knows it.
So that was pretty cool.
And of course, he never stops.
He just has energy to burn.
And I think he brought that to the
character as well. Joe became much
cooler as a result
of Jamie Fox.
I think he was a little bit more of
a shlub nerd
in our first drafts for twenty
two. We wanted somebody you know,
the whole character is kind of like
a teenager who thinks
like, I already know all this,
just, you know, forget it.
I want no part of it.
So we kind of thought of the
character like that.
And Tina,
Tina Fey is so smart
and intelligent and
I think we read in her
bossy pants her biography that
early on in in
high school or junior high, she made
friends because she was really good
at mocking other people,
standing off to the side and making,
you know, remarks.
And so 22, we really think think
of her quite like that.
It is an honor having you prepared
22.
I'm going to make you wish you never
died. And most people wish that
twenty take
their time.
And then from there, we just we
wanted to make sure that we had a
very international cast, because
even though it takes place largely
in New York, the great before is
meant to be international.
We didn't want to accidentally say
everybody is secretly, you
know, English or whatever.
So the casting is really I think
it's one of our most international
casts that we've ever had in a Pixar
film. We would always encourage
them to improvise.
We come with a script, obviously,
and we know exactly what we want.
But then we oftentimes I would just
say, well, how would you say this?
What put in your own words
or to play around with it or
whatever. And so
we got a lot of great gifts from our
actors that way.
There's so many great stories in
jazz that
that kind of reference, that
same improvization
as metaphor.
There's a great story of Keith
Jarrett playing a concert in
Cologne, Germany.
I think it was flown there and he
gets there. It's set up by this kid
who loves jazz and the piano
barely plays.
It's out of tune.
Half the notes don't work.
The action is all weird.
And he's like, no, no, I can't.
But, you know, the kids like, oh,
please, Mr. Mr. Jarrett.
And so they tune the piano
he plays and he quickly realizes,
I can't use these notes.
And it turns out because of those
restrictions, it became
one of those pivotal defining
albums for him.
This concert, the way he had to
play, changed his approach.
And those limitations proved
to bring forward something really.
Different, beautiful, and even
though it's uncomfortable, I think
making this movie along the way, we
had a lot of situations like that
where like, OK, this is not not
only is this not the plan, this is
actually feels like it's hurting us,
but because of
just pushing you a little out of
your comfort zone, it led us
to some really great different ways
of thinking and approaching the
filmmaking we started
five years ago.
So it took about four years.
We were within seven
weeks of finishing picture
when covid had and for a while we
were like, well, I guess that's it.
That's the end of that one.
But systems are systems.
People had set up a really
pretty well, I think because of all
their forward planning, it was ready
to go. People were able to take
these little doggie boxes home
and we finished animation
effects, work, lighting
all from, you know,
200 homes around the Bay Area.
So it's pretty, pretty amazing.