A Conversation with Andrew Stanton

Surprise! In a first for Blank Check, we’re dropping a bonus main-feed episode featuring a conversation with the Academy Award-winning director of the films we just covered. The great Andrew Stanton joins us for a delightful conversation about Pixar, what happened to scatting, and how Elmo messed everything up for everyone. He answers many questions from Griffin (the Pixar nerd formerly known as FlikLover98), and goes in depth on the ending of WALL-E. Enjoy! Sign up for Check Book https://blankcheckpod.substack.com/welcome, the Blank Check newsletter featuring even more “real nerdy shit” to feed your pop culture obsession. Dossier excerpts, film biz AND burger reports, and even more exclusive content you won’t want to miss out on. Join our Patreon for franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. http://www.patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter https://x.com/blankcheckpod?lang=en, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/blankcheckpod/?hl=en, Threads https://www.threads.net/@blankcheckpod?xmt=AQGzctAh4mbWTwYzCV1pzNT6AMV9o99EOfymi8TLR5mTde0 and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/blankcheckpodcast/! Buy some real nerdy merch https://kinshipgoods.com/blankcheck Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/s/gpcOkQr8Sv or Discord https://discord.gg/Q6YGSR3JrA For anything else, check out BlankCheckPod.com https://www.blankcheckpod.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Griffin Newman?

  We have no idea how to start these. We don't, there's not a, there's not a format. No. No.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Not a little theme?

• 0:27Griffin Newman?

  There's, well, I guess we'll do the theme, but then usually I do a quote from the movie. I butcher that. That's how it starts, but we're not talking about a specific film here today.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  You could like pretend laugh like you just were telling jokes or something before you got started.

• 0:41Griffin Newman?

  Oh, you want to, you want to WTF it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, ask about the traffic on the way over here.

• 0:47David Sims?

  Yeah, it was the traffic. Did you take the subway?

• 0:49Speaker 03

  I took the R.

• 0:51Griffin Newman?

  Oh, there you go.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Got here in 25.

• 0:53David Sims?

  Workman like train, you know, the R, she's nobody's favorite.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  It was 30 seconds from my apartment and then about

• 1:02David Sims?

  It's very close.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  25 seconds from

• 1:04Griffin Newman?

  The dream.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. From the stop here to get in.

• 1:07David Sims?

  The R just trundles along though. Like you're never on the R like, great, we're about to pick up speed.

• 1:12Griffin Newman?

  The R does yeoman's work.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  It's a yeoman's work train by, by a long shot.

• 1:16David Sims?

  Free burrows, local all the way.

• 1:17Griffin Newman?

  You often say that the Q is kind of default, the best train.

• 1:21David Sims?

  Q's a great train.

• 1:22Griffin Newman?

  Not your personal favorite, but that it's

• 1:24David Sims?

  It's a great train.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Why is the Q?

• 1:25David Sims?

  It's always an express.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:27David Sims?

  And I think that the line that goes down in Brooklyn is very attractive. Like it's very, it's very nice, sort of

• 1:33Griffin Newman?

  The curves of that Q.

• 1:34David Sims?

  No, it's, it's outside. It's a

• 1:36Griffin Newman?

  The outside is really nice.

• 1:38David Sims?

  It's, um, it's a special, if you want me to get really nerdy, there's not a lot of, um, uh, parts of the subway that are like the Q because the Q was a very, very old steam railroad. So it's just open cut in the ground. So it's not elevated, which you know, is cute, but like you gotta go up and down these stairs, you know, and it's not underground. It's really nice. The Brighton line.

• 1:56Griffin Newman?

  Sims is a fan of the, um, New York transportation.

• 1:58David Sims?

  I'm a New York kid.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Did you know before they put the subway system in, there was a pneumatic tube system between postal stations?

• 2:04David Sims?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  And they inaugurated it with a live cat.

• 2:07Griffin Newman?

  A live cat?

• 2:08David Sims?

  To make sure the cat like didn't die.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:11David Sims?

  I didn't know. Yeah.

• 2:12Griffin Newman?

  The cat was like the, the lycra was like the animal.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  They put it in a little cage, like a box and shot it down the tube.

• 2:18Griffin Newman?

  And it made

• 2:18David Sims?

  And then the other guys were like, we got her.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  That's what they say.

• 2:21Griffin Newman?

  That's what they say. Okay.

• 2:24David Sims?

  I think we should go back to pneumatic tubes.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I do too.

• 2:26David Sims?

  They're fast.

• 2:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28David Sims?

  Okay. Griff doesn't have a take on it.

• 2:29Griffin Newman?

  No, I'm just thinking, does anyone still use them?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I think a lot of places still use them.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  We did, when we were building the studio for Pixar in the late nineties, uh, we did Wired magazine was kind of au courant at the time. And they did a whole thing about how pneumatic tubes actually still exist and Boeing uses them like a huge scale and advanced technology. Send engine parts like half a mile down their property. So we were like, let's put that in the building. And Steve was like, no, no, no, no. And then we got whittled down to like, can we just have one loop? And it just goes nowhere. And we just paid the receptionist to like, put a little envelope and into a tube and shoot the capsule and then just do it every 15 minutes.

• 3:05Griffin Newman?

  And does it go back down to her?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:07Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Can we just have that?

• 3:08Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I was in Chicago recently and I bought weed, the weed shop.

• 3:14Griffin Newman?

  Congratulations, Ben.

• 3:15David Sims?

  Yeah, really?

• 3:16Griffin Newman?

  That's cool. That, you know what? That actually makes a lot of sense. I, I do think that's how we bring the pneumatic tube back. It makes sense to go hand in hand with the legalization of weed.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25Griffin Newman?

  Those stores shouldn't be pulling a thing out of a drawer.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:28Griffin Newman?

  Or going in the back.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30Griffin Newman?

  Even if it's just a guy blowing a thing through a tube from the back, that's what it should be.

• 3:35David Sims?

  Pixar is in the Bay? Where's Pixar?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Pixar is in technically in Emeryville, which is an industrial piece of real estate that's about a mile, maybe a quarter of a mile high and maybe a mile wide. And it connects Oakland and Berkeley. So if you go across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, there's a, right below it is a big Ikea store and right behind that is us.

• 3:57David Sims?

  Is that good being far away from Hollywood? Like quote unquote, far away?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  That's, that's part of the secret sauce.

• 4:03Griffin Newman?

  Yes. That you guys were sort of insulated. Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  And, uh, and it's a lot of other factors, but, uh, it also kept, it still does, keeps most of the employees grounded because when you leave, the waiter's not trying to sell a script or run a roll. You know, you're not meeting other people in the business. I mean, it's become kind of tech bro-y everywhere, but, uh, but there's nobody trying to make movies. Uh, so it kind of keeps you appreciative of what you get to do every day.

• 4:33Griffin Newman?

  We're here with Andrew Stanton, who, and this is a fact, is the director that we have been covering for the last six weeks.

• 4:40David Sims?

  That's so true.

• 4:40Griffin Newman?

  Six films, correct?

• 4:42David Sims?

  Yeah, just six features.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I should have opened with this, but explain to me, can, or can I just?

• 4:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, please.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Can I just say, can, for the rest of this episode, can I call you Flick Lover 98?

• 4:53Griffin Newman?

  Absolutely.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Cause that

• 4:56David Sims?

  Wait, you listened to a Patreon episode? That's sick.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Me.

• 4:59David Sims?

  I'm sorry I was a big

• 5:00Griffin Newman?

  I was big into it. Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Sorry I was anti-pixie.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  You should have led with that when you met me, Griff.

• 5:05Griffin Newman?

  A gentleman's character. We should, we should establish the backstory here.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  At first I thought there were 97 lovers of Flick, but then I realized, oh, it's the year.

• 5:16David Sims?

  The year you made it. Right, right. It was the year the film came out, 1998.

• 5:21Griffin Newman?

  It was the year the film came out. Yeah. Yeah. I needed that. Flick Lover 98. You can indeed call me. You're the one person who's allowed to call me that.

• 5:27David Sims?

  Let's clear the air on this. You're the co-director of that film.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:30Griffin Newman?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 5:31David Sims?

  That does mean you are not the director. Cause like some people will sort of say like, well, why won't you cover this film? They're a co-director and I'm like, I think that title like signifies that you're not the director. Exactly.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  The way it's explained is we came up with it because, that's my beer.

• 5:49Griffin Newman?

  This is an intense question.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Because during Toy Story, the team that had been doing commercials together was John Lasseter, Pete Docter and myself. And John and I just really clicked. And like, I was a really good Jiminy Cricket, like a good conscience for him. I was, I always say I'm like the devil on his shoulder and Joe Ramp, who God bless him, was like angel on his shoulder. But I was able to kind of always help him keep thinking in the right direction or avoid the wrong direction. And so I kind of was invisibly that role, uh, without knowing it, cause we didn't, we were all learning what the roles were on Toy Story. So after it was over, we said, can we make this official? And so I said, well, let's, let's make sure it's not a Disney only new dual directors.

• 6:36Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  But we didn't, we didn't, we didn't want to make up a title that was new. So we just said, we just know what the role means. Co-director means deputy. And you're just there to be, help the director be in two places at once. Like if you do the role right, if somebody talks to me and say, what should we do? I'm not pushing my vision. I'm pushing the vision of the director and I'm helping keep the movie going along.

• 7:00David Sims?

  But it's sort of a little different from like an assistant director, which is a very defined

• 7:03Speaker 03

  No, assistant director is a very, very, very, very different role. And so, uh, so that's unique to Pixar.

• 7:09David Sims?

  It's just, it's something that people get hung up on to this day, but I think because of the uniqueness.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  It's all semantics, but we've always been consistent since the first movie that like sometimes we, there, and I'm the same way. Like I found out on Nemo, I worked better having Lee Unkridge, who I'd always had as an editor to confer with when John was busy, to have him, uh, at the ready. Uh, so he came on board like the last year and a half.

• 7:34David Sims?

  Does every Pixar project have a co-director?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  No, right. It's, it's

• 7:37Griffin Newman?

  It's director's choice.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Right. It's, it's lit, there is not a stamped way it's done. And, uh, it's more like, we are very individual visionary based, like filmmaker based, and we do whatever will make that filmmaker work better. So I, the one beef I have that you guys fall accidentally into, it's my only beef, and it's for the greater good. When you use the, the word they for Pixar, it's like, you don't do that with Nolan. You don't say they for the Universal Studios or they for a part like

• 8:12Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  There is no star chamber of people going, you've got to do this. And everybody wants there to be, even internally Pixar people want that to be with Disney, but there isn't. It's like, we are, we take the, the high risk we take is we invest in that visionary filmmaker.

• 8:29Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  And then we will support them or kind of sometimes cast them and put a group around them so that they will succeed. Cause we can't afford to fail. But we also can't afford not to follow a singular artist vision. We learned that from the first movie. So it's, Toy Story is a John Lasseter movie, you know? Uh, it's always Bugs life. Uh, Toy Story three is a, is a Lee Unkridge movie. Uh, Toy Story four is a Josh Cool movie. There's no they. It's not like Pixar had, nobody knew that they were going to make a two. Nobody knew we were going to make a three. There isn't a great map. There's one of the great wisdoms of growing up and getting older is realizing nobody's flying the fucking plane. And you go, oh, and so we're just trying to make the best smart decisions we can at the time.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And maybe hopefully not pay for it later, you know?

• 9:15David Sims?

  But it's you're victims of your own success. I mean, the reason people, including us, are like, well, Pixar is because Pixar's run was so unique.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  And the mythical brain trust. It's treated like a sports team.

• 9:25David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  I know, I get it.

• 9:26David Sims?

  It's a dynasty.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  And so I know I'm, I'm fighting a losing battle, but I just, the idea that like, there is a, it is a group sport to make a movie, but that's still, everybody believes in live action, that there is a one person that is running that movie. Barbie's a Greta Gerwig movie.

• 9:43David Sims?

  Yes.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  And so, so are the pick, I can't speak for any other animation studios, but I can speak for Pixar and going, that individual was the director and visionary of that film.

• 9:52Griffin Newman?

  But, but also that's why, you know, we covered you and we're not a podcast going like, let's do a 25 film series on Pixar.

• 9:59David Sims?

  Well, that's true. And we did, right. We did Ron Clements and John Musker.

• 10:02Griffin Newman?

  And we did Brad Bird.

• 10:03David Sims?

  And we did Brad Bird.

• 10:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 10:04David Sims?

  We've done like, and Clements and Musker.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  I know, I know you get it.

• 10:07David Sims?

  Right, no, no, but we're idiots.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Just using the trap of they.

• 10:10Griffin Newman?

  Absolutely.

• 10:11David Sims?

  Okay, but here's my big question. Why was Red's Dream never in front of a movie? Like, what the hell?

• 10:16Griffin Newman?

  David brings this up every day.

• 10:17David Sims?

  Why can't Red have his moment?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Everybody was probably, I can't speak, cause I, why?

• 10:23David Sims?

  You can speak for Red.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  No, I just, I wasn't there when it was made.

• 10:26David Sims?

  Okay, fair enough. All right. It's a really old one.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  I have a feeling it was because it was a downer ending.

• 10:32David Sims?

  It is a downer.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  That they were.

• 10:33David Sims?

  Still stuck in the bike shop.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  You still have to convince Disney, who has the money and the distribution that you, this is the great, the best choice to put as a short in front of a film.

• 10:43Griffin Newman?

  Cause I get people amped up.

• 10:43David Sims?

  They put all the classic shorts.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Nobody wants to depress the audience right before you start rolling.

• 10:48Griffin Newman?

  Fair point. Cause that's your favorite? Did we realize this?

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Look at, we loved it on its own, but as a lead in to tee up something.

• 10:56David Sims?

  Yeah. It was just something that I saw at a young age, for some reason, it must've been on some compilation. I don't know why.

• 11:02Griffin Newman?

  Tiny Toy Story.

• 11:03David Sims?

  That I was very taken with.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Well, that just shows you were, you were destined for art house movies.

• 11:07David Sims?

  Seriously, it's true. It's like the, the French sort of.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very much.

• 11:12David Sims?

  Existential movie that sparked for me. Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:16David Sims?

  I just, but you didn't, you didn't even work on Red's Dream.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  So I won't hound you about Red's Dream.

• 11:21Griffin Newman?

  But you were, you were the second employee, is that correct? Or the second animator?

• 11:24David Sims?

  The animation department, I was the second, the ninth employee, second animator.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  So what was the first thing you worked on?

• 11:29David Sims?

  I was hired with this thinking that we had no idea that there would be a future of film. We just thought this is this new thing that they were the inventors of, which is called CGI, which is like, what the heck does that mean? It means computer graphics. All I knew is it could look photorealistic. At the time, we thought it did. Now our eyes so trained, it looks like crap. But we were the first of maybe only two other houses that could do that medium for possible advertising. It was the only way to make an income. So they had, I got hired to animate and think up commercials. And so my first thing was a Trident commercial with a ice cube that played jazz while a mint leaf scat sang on the top.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  The nineties.

• 12:14David Sims?

  This was when we did, we did have it figured out, god damn it. What happened to saxophones? What happened to scatting?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  The nineties, everything was just like, there needs to be a saxophone in this commercial, in this like, you know, the WB is gonna launch all jazz.

• 12:30Griffin Newman?

  Why isn't there a blue Eminem? And why isn't he voiced by John Goodman? We had it figured out. I, I now pay, if I can just grind an ax for a second, I pay for every option I get to remove ads from any streaming service. If the ads were still the ads from the nineties, I'd pay extra to get them back.

• 12:48David Sims?

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah. If it was the, what's the commercial where they need the air conditioner? I'll call now. What's that one? Sears?

• 12:55Griffin Newman?

  You know, I don't remember this one.

• 12:57David Sims?

  I'll, I'll show you later.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  I'm always, I wanted to pitch this to Disney, like they own ABC. I don't know about the ads of it, but wouldn't it be great if you could just pick a year and just watch ABC with the commercial cuts? Like the actual content? Like, I would watch that all the time.

• 13:13Griffin Newman?

  A streaming service where it's just, this is June 21st, 1984.

• 13:17David Sims?

  TGIF, 1997. I want to, right, the block.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  I want the whole experience of just having it on.

• 13:24David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Toy commercials included.

• 13:26David Sims?

  Yeah, sure.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I would think that would be a very profitable thing to do.

• 13:30Griffin Newman?

  It would be incredible. Yeah. I used, yes. I mean, I used to tape movies off of TV and watch them over and over again. I rediscovered them when my parents moved those VHSs and I put it in and immediately knew every word of every commercial.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Isn't that crazy?

• 13:43Griffin Newman?

  It's incredible.

• 13:44David Sims?

  Now, okay, are you a baseball fan? This is all I care about these days.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Fair weather, but I was, you're gonna hate me, cause I'm a Sox fan.

• 13:50David Sims?

  That's fine, I'm a Mets fan, I don't care. I was just wondering, cause you're, you're up in Oakland, you know, if you feel for the A's, but no, you don't, you don't really care.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Many people I work with are still in mourning.

• 14:00David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  And don't want to talk about it.

• 14:02David Sims?

  Rip A's. Okay.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:04David Sims?

  All right. All right. Andrew Stanton's here in the studio with us. I'm David Sims. Do we say our names?

• 14:07Griffin Newman?

  I'm Griffin Newman.

• 14:08David Sims?

  Great, cool.

• 14:08Griffin Newman?

  Ben Hosley's here.

• 14:09David Sims?

  Hey there.

• 14:09Griffin Newman?

  Looking great, by the way.

• 14:11David Sims?

  Thanks.

• 14:11Griffin Newman?

  He's always looking good. I haven't seen you in a while, but he's looking particularly good.

• 14:13David Sims?

  Right. For the listener, this is our first time seeing Griffin in, since end of June.

• 14:19Griffin Newman?

  Since the Stanton series started.

• 14:20David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Griffin Newman?

  I mean, I saw you on. I went away, I come back, we're ending it. Yes.

• 14:24David Sims?

  Mm-hmm. And Andrew's joining us. Toy Story 5 has come out.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Come and went, now it's.

• 14:32David Sims?

  Done great.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  All about Spider-Man right now.

• 14:34David Sims?

  It is so funny that you just made a cash billion dollars and it's like, a month later, it's like Spider-Man and the Odyssey.

• 14:40Griffin Newman?

  Who cares? You did get to be the highest grossing film of the year.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  So far.

• 14:45Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's not gonna be that at the end of this thing.

• 14:49Griffin Newman?

  But you got to be, it was anointed.

• 14:51David Sims?

  Sure.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:52David Sims?

  You got that little badge.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Like, I have nothing to complain about.

• 14:55David Sims?

  It seems the movie did, did, beyond expectation.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Beyond, totally beyond expectation.

• 15:00David Sims?

  Did terrific.

• 15:01Griffin Newman?

  Highest grossing Toy Story film.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Before inflation. Yeah.

• 15:05David Sims?

  Made my daughter very sad.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Really?

• 15:07David Sims?

  Yeah, in a way that she couldn't articulate, cause she's only five.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I don't count five as movie going yet.

• 15:13David Sims?

  Well, fair enough. I guess she can go.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Just a dark theater is, can be traumatizing for a child.

• 15:20David Sims?

  In my child's defense, she's a very experienced theater goer. We like, we see lots of movies together and usually when we exit the theater, she's just kinda like, best movie, great, loved it. Every minute was great, obviously, cause we're seeing things like Super Mario or whatever some animated.

• 15:34Griffin Newman?

  Goat, you love goat.

• 15:35David Sims?

  The great sports drama, Goat. Toy Story 5, she was just upset. She was like, I want mom. Like, she was just like, clearly thrown by it, I think because of the friendship stuff. You know, just because it was about interpersonal.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Relationships.

• 15:49David Sims?

  Kid drama.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:50David Sims?

  And most of the things she sees are more about interpersonal, kind of like Star Fox or Mario drama, minion drama.

• 15:57Griffin Newman?

  She's very wrapped up in the Star Fox drama. Flippy Frog.

• 16:00David Sims?

  Uh, and like, the emotions in Toy Story 5 are subtler and like, are, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to like, tell you something you don't know here.

• 16:08Griffin Newman?

  He's not trying to like, bill you for therapy.

• 16:10David Sims?

  I'm more investigating, like my, it's like, my kid walks out of, you know, Star, Super Mario and it's like, I like that Luigi's scared. Like, she gets that. You know, it's just a very loud emotion. Like, I think Toy Story 5, she was like, trying to process it all, like what was going on with Bonnie.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Hopefully they'll watch the movie again when they're older and it'll be different for them.

• 16:27David Sims?

  No, it's just great. I'm saying, this is, this is a compliment. She liked it. It's just, it's just intense.

• 16:32Griffin Newman?

  I said Flippy Frog instead of Slippy Toad. Andrew, here's.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 16:36Griffin Newman?

  I know. I just need to correct myself before I'm fired from this podcast. Here's a Red's Dream related question. And then I, and then I wanna get more focused on things.

• 16:43David Sims?

  What's Red's Dream?

• 16:45Griffin Newman?

  Red's Dream? You cited the, the Pixar short.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  A Red's Dream, I'm sorry. I was hearing Red's Dream.

• 16:50Griffin Newman?

  Can we, can we get the shorts back in front of the movies?

• 16:53David Sims?

  Oh yeah, sure. The movies are a little longer, I feel like. The Pixar movies have inflated in length.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  There was a period of time where we had a lot more being made and, and just the theatrical experience was a little more for sure. And then I think between having to make things for less and being in a questionable still space of theatrical, although it's starting to feel like a good year.

• 17:20David Sims?

  Feeling good?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  It may come back, but that's, that's a lot, they're not cheap to make.

• 17:25David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  And they, they, they take a year and a half to make a short. And that's longer than some live action movies are to take. So it's, it's, it's, it's harder and harder to justify.

• 17:36David Sims?

  Wasn't the, wasn't it obvious, sorry, wasn't it often the idea that like, with the shorts, you're testing some sort of?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Sometimes, sometimes. But we're at a place now where it's, now you can, used to, I mean, the stuff we could do, like I was away for 10 years or eight years, but 10, if you count going in, like when last time I was like, in production at, and I thought we could do everything looks wise. Back then in 2014, 15, and now I just like as a kid in a candy store working on this one, I was just like, wow, we can, we can do anything.

• 18:11Griffin Newman?

  I, I think Wally still looks incredible, but it is wild. When we do this podcast, I often will go back and read the reviews from the time. And at the time, everyone went, well, they cracked it. It's never going to look better than this. Every single thing has technically been accomplished now on this film.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I'm of the belief that like about, yeah, maybe 10 years, maybe a little longer. It's all still costly, just manpower wise, but you can, if you can think of it, you can make it. It's just in the eye of the beholder now. It's, it's, if you don't like the look of something, you gotta blame the artist, not the paints.

• 18:47David Sims?

  Was it weird though? Like coming back 10 years later? Or was it freeing or fun or like cool to open up the old toy box? Like

• 18:56Speaker 03

  It was fun.

• 18:56David Sims?

  Toy box.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It was fun to be in the production of it. It was fun to work. I love, I mean, I love production. I love working with other artists. I've always been that kid that loved putting on a show in the backyard, kind of equivalent or making our movies with, in, with your super eight. And so that's the drug. What I knew I wouldn't love and was confirmed only about two years in was I don't like how long it takes. As you, you just mentioned before, I'm hoping I don't give anything away. You're 40.

• 19:25David Sims?

  I am. No, no.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Time gets faster at 40 and then it gets even faster at 50 and, or, and so four years at 60 is just too long because then suddenly half a decade's practically over and I can count on one hand how many more times I could do this. Like it's time that's made me kind of anti-animation at this point.

• 19:48David Sims?

  Here's a connection. And you don't think children should have, be fun or have fun or be happy too. So you're anti-animation for that.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  No, I think children should have a lot of fun, but I'm not worried about being the bearer of that.

• 19:58Griffin Newman?

  Yes. It's not your responsibility anymore.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  No, I'm making films for myself.

• 20:02Griffin Newman?

  The press you did, the, the press runs for the two movies you had this year. You, you talked about this a lot and how growing up, you never specifically were interested in animation in a singular way. That was never the exclusive goal of what you wanted to do and how you feel like this might be your last animated film because of the time issue. This is maybe a very stupidly broad question, but how did you realize you had the capacity to do animation? Because it is the kind of thing, unlike live action directing, where it starts with needing to have some facility at doing the technical.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  It's easy to look back to 2020 now and go, I was jack of all trades and master of none. Like I love, I was going to be an actor. I was going to be a musician. I was going to be an artist. I could do all three of those things and none of them at great to such mastery in my teens that I knew that this was calling me. And I didn't, but I liked doing all of them. And I definitely loved the arts and I, and I went to the movies like fricking church. Every, it was

• 21:04David Sims?

  And you're in Massachusetts?

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, so it's like what sports are for sometimes to bond, uh, parents and the kids and the family. Uh, movies were that. Our, our whole family would jump into the station wagon, go up, what we said, up the line to the movieplex. And they, we didn't even think about what was that playing? We would just go see it.

• 21:21Griffin Newman?

  And you worked at an art house theater as well, right?

• 21:24Speaker 03

  By the time I got old enough to be employed. Yeah. And, uh, and so all of that, I didn't want to give up. And so it's because I found out, and this is, you gotta remember, so far before the internet, before knowledge of anything, you know, they have handbooks was the only way you could find out about colleges or somebody went somewhere and told you about something. And so it was my junior year of, of high school and my guidance counselor had to meet me to say, what I'm going to do with my life? Where am I going to go? I didn't know. And he was late to the office. I sat there and I stared at this bookcase and there was this binder with a fluorescent, a hot fluorescent orange binder. And I pulled it out and it was for Cal Arts. And I learned, I learned, oh my God, they teach animation.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  I draw, which is sort of like acting. I like to act. Uh, it's all about timing and uh, I've got a good rhythm. I like music and it's ultimately on film and I love film. And I was like, suddenly I was like, I don't have to give up any of this.

• 22:19Griffin Newman?

  It was literally all in that one moment.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  It was, it was all in that one. And then I became like Devil's Tower. Like I had to go. And because I had fucked off most of my high school and I was really bad student, I didn't get in. And so I spent the next, I got into one school.

• 22:33David Sims?

  To Hartford.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Hartford Art School, which is basically a business school. And there's this one little oasis that took me and I learned and it kicked my ass foundations wise. I was probably their best student because I was trying to make a portfolio to just get the hell out. And so the next year I got into Cal. So I have the rejection letter from one year and stuff. But then the, the conclusion to that story is you jump to 2003, Nemo comes out. Cal Arts wants to give me an award at the Red Cat Theater. My suite mate for one year was Don Cheadle. Don Cheadle's doing well.

• 23:01Griffin Newman?

  What?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  And so Don starts to, uh, presents me with the award and I give this same speech about how I found out about Cal Arts. And then I say at the end of it, I said, so whoever in 1982 in the admissions department decided to make the binder fluorescent orange, uh, thank you. And this guy in the back went, that was me.

• 23:19Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  So it was very, nice closure.

• 23:21David Sims?

  Pop. Full circle.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Nice closure.

• 23:23David Sims?

  Cheadle, was he, what was he doing?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Cal Arts is like fame school. And I don't know if that means anything to anybody.

• 23:29Griffin Newman?

  No, no, means a lot.

• 23:30David Sims?

  Are you aware?

• 23:31Griffin Newman?

  I dropped out of Cal Arts.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  You dropped out of Cal Arts.

• 23:33Griffin Newman?

  How long did you go? I went for nine months, just enough.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  And what made you drop out?

• 23:38Griffin Newman?

  What made me drop out? I went for, for live action film directing, which I think was the wrong choice for me and school. And I also think I didn't want to be in school.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Who was running the program then?

• 23:49Griffin Newman?

  Uh, Steve Anker.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Sandy McKendrick was running it when I was there. Can you believe that?

• 23:56Griffin Newman?

  I mean, who was, um,

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Sweet smell of success.

• 23:58Griffin Newman?

  Monty, Monty Hellman was teaching at the time.

• 24:01David Sims?

  Lavender Hill Mob.

• 24:02Griffin Newman?

  Lavender Hill Mob. And, uh, James Benning. It was like an incredible faculty.

• 24:06David Sims?

  You also didn't drive. So getting around was quite challenging for you.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  That's a problem in California.

• 24:11Griffin Newman?

  Andrew, it was maybe 50% of the reason I dropped out.

• 24:15David Sims?

  Why didn't you go to school in the North East? Like, why didn't you go to like film school over here?

• 24:19Griffin Newman?

  Like the idea of going to a school where I could come back home and hang out with the same people on the weekend.

• 24:23David Sims?

  I know. I guess that.

• 24:25Griffin Newman?

  I grew up here and almost everyone I knew was doing that. And I, I was feeling very, um, uh, defiant about, I'm going to go somewhere different. I'm going to make a new life for myself. And I, I had, I got locked onto Cal Arts because I thought I wanted to be animating. And I had some facility for it, but I didn't have the, the discipline I found ultimately. Um, I think I could have done experimental, but I had locked into character. And then when I felt like I'm not good enough at this, then I shifted to live action. And then when I was there, I started going, I feel like I want to act. And so it was also at a weird transitional time in my life, but I'm very familiar with

• 25:08Griffin Newman?

  uh, uh, all of the, the places you're listing and also who the alumni are. Ed Harris, David also went to Cal Arts.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Pee Wee Herman.

• 25:17Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Paul Rubens. Yes.

• 25:19David Sims?

  Absolutely. And lots of it. I know Cal Arts.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Who roomed for a hot minute with David Hasselhoff.

• 25:24Griffin Newman?

  Really?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 25:26Griffin Newman?

  These pairings are incredible.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  And now somebody should write a book.

• 25:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 25:29David Sims?

  Really? Yeah. And I know, it's just like, what was it like? You know?

• 25:32Griffin Newman?

  My roommate was, uh, Joss Glenny Smith, who was, who's an actor. He's still a working actor.

• 25:37David Sims?

  Uh, great.

• 25:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 25:38David Sims?

  Should we just stick on this?

• 25:39Griffin Newman?

  No, absolutely not. Um, but, but I, you're calling out a thing that I think isn't discussed enough, which is how much of animation is acting?

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I always have to explain to the actors that I'm working with that, um, you're half the equation, you know, and that I'm going to have a conversation with what I'll call the shy actors, which are the animators, not in front of the camera. And, but they have to be cast as appropriately as anybody, you know, that old adage of if you can get the script and the casting rights, uh, for a movie, then you're halfway there. It's kind of true also for your animators. Uh, you know, they, they have the things that their strengths are and, and aren't. And, uh, and it's almost a little tougher because you have to, you usually have a team. So like, there's not one person animating

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Woody or one person animating Jesse. It's, it's a group of people. So, uh, we adopted at the very beginning of the whole studio was, uh, what Disney did, which, uh, you have dailies every morning where all the animators watch everybody's work in the middle of their project, the middle of their working on it. So that if there's notes from me, uh, about what I would think the character would or wouldn't do, everybody hears it. So they all think the same. And, but that's also a chance to be inspired and you, and you get a little competitive. You're like, wow, look at what they did with, uh, Smarty Pants in that shot. I never knew you could do that with the handle and that you could make it look like he's, you know, flipping him off or something. And that would inspire them

• 27:12Speaker 03

  to like go, and so it's just a win-win. And so there's this sort of, it's almost like summer stock. Like everybody's got to learn all the roles.

• 27:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And, uh, but it's actors. You talk to them just like actors. This is your mark. This is where you're coming from. This is where you're going to. And, uh, and you're not trying to get into it too much, you know, cause you don't want to get too much into their head.

• 27:33Griffin Newman?

  This is something that I feel like is the defining aspect of your films in particular is, and, and maybe it goes back to that kicking yourself in the ass, you're at Hartford. But by design, giving yourself characters who are going to be incredibly difficult to animate. I feel like there's a lot of self-imposed challenges of like, you go to the, the double A gang in Toy Story five is three characters that do not lend themselves

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:59Griffin Newman?

  to animation. They're characters that don't have traditional limbs, you know, two of them don't, one of them doesn't have a traditional face, uh, Wally and Eve, certainly. Um, you talked a lot about with Nemo, not wanting to cheat.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:12Griffin Newman?

  And, and

• 28:12Speaker 03

  I never put that together.

• 28:13Griffin Newman?

  them more. And then I feel like sometimes in the opposite direction, you have a character like, like Hank, where the challenge is

• 28:20Speaker 03

  A whole different one. Yeah.

• 28:21Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of extremity, but that's not a thing you consciously sort of throw at yourself.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  I, I, not, I'm, not in the, I mean, I, I'm sure there's an element of challenge that I just want for anything.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  I think I'm a little bit more, it's, it's more that I'm just not afraid of it. I, I just go with what logically makes sense to, I, I, I, look, and I was charmed like everybody else, at least that was around at the time that they first saw that Luxo lamp. I was like, there's so much personality in this simple lamp. Do it with this mic right now. And I felt seen because I felt like I had been anthropomorphizing everything as since I was a little kid, like my bike was cold in the rain as far as I was concerned. And my, that leaf falling was afraid of heights when it fell, like, like that just was how I thought. I didn't like learn that. And so I realized I had a tribe and that these are, these are my people. And I also was lucked out that I was the, uh, first generation Sesame Street kids.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  That came out in 69. I was four years old. And to me, the Muppets just always existed.

• 29:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  I learned everything entertainment and timing wise. And, and, and, and if you go back and watch on YouTube, any of the original first season, like they were little adults. There was nothing kidified. Like I always have this theory that Elmo fucked it up for everything because it started doing a kitty voice and everything had to be young and everybody started thinking about the kids. And I'm like, nobody thought about the kids, at least entertainment wise.

• 29:44Griffin Newman?

  And it's still good without them.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  It was clever. Like, and so like

• 29:47Griffin Newman?

  They were tired New Yorkers.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yes, they're tired and they're opening up their jackets saying like, you want to buy a Q, you know?

• 29:53Griffin Newman?

  I mean, we're talking 50, it's a great character.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  But anyway, what I was quickly going to connect to was how much personality came of just doing an open mouth with your hand.

• 30:02Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Just a hand puppet, like just taking a napkin and like, and like, so I just was raised going, I'm seeing a million bit subtleties of acting and reactions from just a hand puppet. So I, I've never thought you couldn't do it with, under extreme limitations.

• 30:19Griffin Newman?

  Logically just run there.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  I just like, it's always existed. And that, so I've never really thought about it, but I do have arguments with, or not arguments, but I have to like convince animators sometimes that I realize, oh, they don't all think like that. They, they have to logic it out. And I'm, I'm clearly, I'm clearly more right brained than left brain because people want to go down rabbit holes about like, well, if they did this, why did they do that? And I just go, well, I'm already starting with a story that fish are talking. So can we, I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna left brain this.

• 30:51David Sims?

  It's an illness though about Pixar that people are like, well, I want to impose reality on it. And it's like, but we're outside of reality.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  And it makes you realize maybe they're right and I'm wrong, but like, I never think like that. So I'm not going to start thinking like that. I just want to have fun and I want to just not be distracted while I'm watching it. And I feel really bad for somebody that is, that's a curse. Cause I, I just want to go along for the ride or any movie I'm watching. So I'm just going like, all right, there, there, look at one of the arguments like

• 31:17Griffin Newman?

  Sickos. That's just what it is.

• 31:18David Sims?

  Are you kidding me?

• 31:18Griffin Newman?

  People on the internet?

• 31:19Speaker 03

  I'm always fascinated because like, there's an Aesop's fable of, that starts out, there once was a sausage and a bird and a mouse and it lives in a house. And you go, and it was amazing. If you start that way, everybody goes, okay.

• 31:29Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  And, and, and you're like, and, and so like, so it just shows you that if you made, if you made people have questions about it, then you're just telling the story badly.

• 31:39Griffin Newman?

  This is what I always

• 31:40Speaker 03

  It's not the story is bad. You're just telling it badly.

• 31:43David Sims?

  I think what Pixar movies sometimes do, and again, I am using Pixar monolithically here. So feel free to yell at me, but right, but it does impose some logic, which is part of the fun, right? It's like, let's,

• 31:53Speaker 03

  But just enough that we can get going.

• 31:55David Sims?

  Exactly. Like we live in a, we're inside of a child's, you know, brain, like let's, what would, what could that look like? We're, you know, we're inside of, uh, the axiom or, you know, like whatever, like let's, there'll be some logic, but you need to, you know, embrace the fantasy as well.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  I, I, you guys can speak better than this, but I, I can only surmise that because the gaming world is so immersive and, and thorough, that you will want that same truth to be on any movie you watch.

• 32:23Griffin Newman?

  I've been thinking about this a lot.

• 32:25David Sims?

  Look, I mean, Cars is the one I think that broke everyone's brain.

• 32:27Griffin Newman?

  But no, but I, I've been thinking about this a lot, that I do think there is, as games became more cinematic and less their own art form entirely, they start working more of the language of films into them. And people have control and autonomy within that.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes.

• 32:41Griffin Newman?

  Nolan did this interview recently. I just saw that.

• 32:44David Sims?

  The Chinese interview? It's fucking incredible.

• 32:46Griffin Newman?

  Where he said like, I think there is this problem of people feel like if they're able to recognize a trope of storytelling, that invalidates it. Uh, yes.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Such a weird, I mean, I, that's sad.

• 32:58David Sims?

  Yeah, but it's so true. And it's such a sickness and sort of modern media of now that we can slow everything down and look everything a million ways. And, you know, like, you know, I, I can look at YouTube, but any clip I want, yes, I can show you patterns and then you'll be smart. You'll see the patterns like I see the patterns. And it's like, there's nothing interesting about you seeing the patterns. Of course there's patterns to storytelling.

• 33:20Griffin Newman?

  And when you're, when you're playing the patterns, you complement them if they work properly. Cause you go, that's fun that this pattern challenged me and I beat it.

• 33:27David Sims?

  I said this on Blue Sky, like an idiot, you know, I'm, I made a social media post, like even though I don't really do that anymore, where I was just like, if you're a critic, the least interesting thing that any, the last thing anyone wants to hear from you is I'm smarter than the movie. Like, that's not criticism. That's just you talking about yourself. Who cares? Like, I don't care if you're smarter than the movie. I want you to tell me what this movie means either to you or to the culture or to what you maybe perceive in the filmmaker, whatever, you know, like, that's fine. I don't care that you, you're like, well, this is, these are tropes I know. So I'm smart. You know, like that's not, you're not telling anyone an interesting story. That's all.

• 34:02Griffin Newman?

  I agree with that.

• 34:03David Sims?

  Yeah, sure. Great. Uh, I guess I'll get out of here.

• 34:06Griffin Newman?

  This is, okay. If I, if I can put my, my flick lover 98 hat back on, cause we had, we had, you know, there was the argument of whether or not to include a Bugs Life. And a lot of it for me was just, I wanted to cover Bugs Life, right?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  I mean, you could, you could almost get away with it because we, John was very gracious and we were a team on that even more so. But at the end of the day, you know, I, I, it's, it was, it's his movie.

• 34:29Griffin Newman?

  My, I, it was not to discredit that, but it was more that I thought it was an important step in your arc in sort of the, the journey of screenwriter.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a second step.

• 34:44Griffin Newman?

  Cause Toy Story, you sort of fall into it.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I mean, Bugs Life was a chore for you or for everybody, for all of us, only in comparison to how, it, what's fascinating is we, all I remember during a Bugs Life is complaining like, I wish I was as dumb and as eager as I was making Toy Story because we knew nothing. And so we, we kept saying, we were like the young engineers that put a man on the moon at NASA. We just didn't know you couldn't do it.

• 35:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  And that got us through. That was our fuel. So even though I bet you on paper, it was harder to make Toy Story than a Bugs Life. It felt funner because we were just young and like, we're making a movie. Like, we didn't think we'd do anything more than that. And it was, came from such a natural inspiration, like the, the well of like, what, like I remember us, and the story changed five different ways after this, but this didn't. It was, what if it was your favorite toy on a top of bed and suddenly a new toy got brought in for a birthday and it got thrown off? Like just that sense, like you suddenly realized

• 35:52Speaker 03

  the, it evoked such feelings of, of empathy about jealousy and, and how that felt when your, your, your next sibling came in, when a new kid came on the playground, like it just was so organic and natural. It'd be, it was like literally striking oil. And so we never had that on a Bugs Life. It was a intellectual exercise. Like what if we turned the ant in the grass up around its head? It could go a little Seven Samurai, it could go a lot of, a lot of these things, but like, just that was an intellectual left brain, didn't evoke

• 36:22David Sims?

  Yeah, you didn't have the emotion.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  The emotions. And I learned, and so it was, we, we got there, but it was always like trying to draw water out of a stone. So I learned that like, oh, it's to our benefit, especially if we're going to work on it for three to four years and you're going to get out of bed with it not working most days. You gotta be ideally on top of a well of something that is more natural of a geyser of emotion and, or not do it, not do it yet.

• 36:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  And so that's why a lot of our movies sometimes take forever before we really start committing to them. It's because we haven't found that well.

• 36:55David Sims?

  I'm not going to want to spend five years on this until I like the idea.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  And then Toy Story two, you guys made in like five minutes, right?

• 37:01Griffin Newman?

  That was a notoriously easy one.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  You know, the more, the more I look back at that, I realize that the perfect storm of that was they had tried so many other versions that there was about 30% of the movie that was worth keeping, not in, not in linear, but like pieces.

• 37:16David Sims?

  Little bits.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  And then the other was, we literally got, had two version, two other versions of Toy Story we'd thrown out, like two other, not, not like whole wholesale, but there was so much in the costume box left from the first. And then the biggest factor was we got literally the band back together. We got everybody back from stem to stern that had made the first one. So we were psychic. So you just put us in, we had a costume box of leftover material. We had building blocks that made a lot of sense. But I looked, I was cleaning out my email last year, like it goes all the way back to 92, but like it's less and

• 37:58Speaker 03

  less because we weren't using it so much then. Um, and I was freaked myself out of like, I'm talking about

• 38:07Speaker 03

  It's November of 98. I'm doing post at Skywalker on Bugs Life, but I'm being asked to help do the outline for this monster movie that Pete's doing. So I'm doing that on the side. By December, there's rumblings in the email that something's amiss across the street with the other production. By the holidays, John's calling me into like, we gotta talk. By the January, we're like, we are gonna have to take it all over. By the end of February, I've written the whole thing. By March, I'm off and I'm starting to help this thing that's now called Monsters Incorporated. And I have this idea for a fish like that.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  And I had two kids, I had two little kids and I look under like, and I just go, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't, I'd like, I always put all those things in that era, but not so tightly together.

• 39:00Griffin Newman?

  And just to clarify for the listener, Toy Story two comes out in November of that same year you're describing like.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Of 99, yeah. It's made like we, I was writing pages on a Monday. It was delivered the story by the end of Monday, like top of the day, Monday, Tuesday morning at the latest, by Wednesday, Thursday, it's cut in. By Friday, it's being refined. I like, so it was just, it was insane. I don't know how we did.

• 39:22Griffin Newman?

  It is my default.

• 39:23David Sims?

  It's incredible that the movie is so good. Like, it just doesn't really make sense that the movie.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Again, it's like if you said.

• 39:29David Sims?

  You, you all have the shorthand.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  A band went on tour and played so hard and then left and do something else. And they said, come back and do exactly what you did before and just keep it going. That's why.

• 39:40Griffin Newman?

  I mean, it's not only my favorite Toy Story movie, it's maybe my favorite movie. I often default to that as my answer. I, I answered this recently when the five drunk finance bros in Madrid asked me, you like movies, what movie you like?

• 39:54Griffin Newman?

  And then proceeded to drop three beers while I answered. But I, a thing I've always pinpointed is that there is a feeling of mania to that movie.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Well, that's also a reflection of us because we were left, Disney said basically, go with God and let you, and nobody was there to stop us. That's us left alone. Like that was the core original group and all we cared about was cracking each other up. We cared about the film, we cared about emotion, but not ever at the expense of cracking each other up. It's like entertainment mattered greatly to us. So everything went through an entertainment filter. So even if we're doing this sad moment, and by the way, the Jesse being sad is to emulate what it's like to be empty nester.

• 40:37David Sims?

  Fascinating.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  So that's why you don't get with it right now.

• 40:40David Sims?

  Is John the empty nester?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  At that point, like who's, who's that drawing from? Well, there was a range of people of ages. We had, we had people that were already grandparents, people that were not single, that was all over the map. But we were just going with the truth of the arc of life of giving up your kid and having to see them go away.

• 41:01David Sims?

  My, my kid's not going anywhere. She's gonna.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  You just keep telling yourself that.

• 41:05David Sims?

  Yeah, she's gonna go to. Our joke in the family is like, she'll go to mega rivers, which is like the community college down the street. Basically it's like, yeah, no, she can move there.

• 41:13Griffin Newman?

  She's gonna go to Sims University.

• 41:14David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, no, she can go to college, you can go to college, like one neighborhood over, massive.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Hilarious.

• 41:21David Sims?

  The twins, I'll just, they'll live in the basement, right? They'll just, I don't know.

• 41:24Griffin Newman?

  Oh, we gotta bring up this twin connection.

• 41:25David Sims?

  Oh, what's that?

• 41:27Griffin Newman?

  Cause I, I brought up to you, David, having twins.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I have twins.

• 41:31David Sims?

  I have twins, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Do you have three kids?

• 41:33David Sims?

  I have three kids. I have an older daughter and younger sons.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  And how old are the sons?

• 41:37David Sims?

  They just turned two.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Okay, so my younger brothers are identical twins.

• 41:42David Sims?

  Oh, so, and you're, you're, so what happened to me happened to your family.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  And what's gonna happen to your daughter, I'm telling you now, is that we're gonna look back at photos.

• 41:50David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  When they're little and toddlers, your twins, and you're not gonna be able to say who is who.

• 41:54David Sims?

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  And she will.

• 41:55David Sims?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. Like you always knew your, your siblings.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  I can still look at photos with just the back of their heads and I go, that's my brother, that's my brother Nathan.

• 42:03David Sims?

  Wait, so what's the age difference between you and yours? Okay, yeah, so you were, my daughter was like three and a half, like.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  The other thing that's, I don't know with the minutes apart, but my brothers were born 10 minutes apart and that might as well been 10 years apart. So whenever there was a lineup of us, the pecking order was who was, came out first, who came out last.

• 42:20David Sims?

  It's cra- my kids were born one minute apart.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 42:24David Sims?

  And yet it is, there's a C-section, you know, just one, then the other. And it is nonetheless crazy that the, the, the, the younger one is the baby.

• 42:34Griffin Newman?

  You refer to him as the baby always.

• 42:35David Sims?

  Of course he's the baby. But my baby in every way, he's littler, he's like, you know, whatever.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  And they do, they, they, my brothers, one brother has all the signs of the baby brother, one has all the signs of a middle child.

• 42:44David Sims?

  I don't understand it. It's very strange so far, but yes, no, the older one is the alpha. Yeah, well, your parents survived though?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  They barely survived.

• 42:54David Sims?

  Yes, yeah. I get that, I hear that.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  And there was a story once where they figured out in their separate cribs how to one to push their cribs across the room. And then my mother came in and the dresser drawers had been used like steps and they got into the Vaseline and baby powder and it was, it was like.

• 43:11David Sims?

  This is horrifyingly plausible.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Tar and feather all, like the combined intelligence. And that was when they, they would speak baby talk to each other and you could hear in the inflections that they were actually having a back and forth conversation.

• 43:22David Sims?

  My kids do that. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's weird, it's right. They, they, they, right, they babble stuff at each other and you're like, oh, right, this is like communication, like that we will never understand. It's, it's very strange having twins, twin parents, get at me always.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Is that in the family in any way?

• 43:37David Sims?

  Not at all.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  On either side?

• 43:38David Sims?

  No, we always joke, right? Cause it's like, I should wear a T-shirt, like not in the family. We didn't do IBF, you know what I mean? Because like, those are the question, it's the same thing as when someone says like, oh, I'm, I'm sick, right? And you're like, oh, I'm so sorry. So do you like smoke cigarettes? You know, like people immediately are like, is it gonna happen to me? What happened to you? You know, like they just nicely start to ask questions like, and is it genetically? Like, do you guys have that? And it's the same with the twins and people like, does it run in your family? Nope, just happened. We're older parent, like, you know, it was an old, apparently it's more common, the older you get, uh, because your body basically just sort of starts, you know, getting rid of all the eggs, not to be like biological about it, but uh, yeah, that's all. I don't know.

• 44:18David Sims?

  There's a part of Africa where people eat a certain yam that makes twin pregnancies incredibly common. I learned that. You're just making shit up now. I'm not, I can send it to you. Wow.

• 44:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, what's the yam? How do I, how do I get something? What, you want twins? I don't know, it's working out really well for you.

• 44:34David Sims?

  Little.

• 44:35Griffin Newman?

  It's working out okay. They're crazy.

• 44:37David Sims?

  Yes, it's a, yeah, parts of Africa, particularly the, the Yoruba people in Nigeria have a diet rich in native yams and those have hormones called phytoestrogens, uh, which some people stimulate multiple egg production. Anyway, uh, we have interest in here.

• 44:55Griffin Newman?

  We have.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  And we're talking twins.

• 44:57Griffin Newman?

  We're talking twins.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Not the movie, not the movie.

• 45:00David Sims?

  Okay, so we talked Bugs Life, we talked.

• 45:02Griffin Newman?

  We were saying the.

• 45:04David Sims?

  Oh, the, the crunch of.

• 45:05Griffin Newman?

  Right, right. Yeah. A Bugs Life, you're consciously coming in as a screenwriter from the get go.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  I get like, uh, yeah, I learned, uh, screenwriting by watching Josh Whedon do it for the year and a half he worked with us.

• 45:18David Sims?

  Right. And he was sort of at the top of his powers.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  He was, well, he was, he was sort of a boy genius. He was rising fast. He was still rising, but it was obvious, uh, because we had had script writers before that failed miserably. And so we were getting a lesson on what good screenwriting was. And what would be fascinating is we'd sit in a room together, the four or five of us, including Josh, we'd spitball something and we'd play it out for ourselves. He'd nod, he'd go off into a room, play soundtrack music really loud for a while and then come back out and you'd read these two or three pages. And the way they were written, you were just compelled to see it exactly the way we had talked about it. It wasn't, and it was, and it sucked you in like, it inspired me like, oh, there is

• 46:03Speaker 03

  a way to do, I called it cinematic dictation, like, oh, I failed in English in high school. So I thought that writing was for smart people, no offense. But, uh, uh, then I realized, oh, it's cinematic dictation.

• 46:15David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  It's like, I've always seen the movie. There's just a way to do it that makes other people see it the way you wanna see it. And it can be done. And if it's done poorly, you don't see it the way that they want, even though you had it in your head. So that's what I, I just became determined to be good at that. And I, and I was honest with somebody recently, I said, some of it was self-preservation because there was no guarantee this company was gonna last and that we were gonna be beyond, we were such a startup. So we didn't know how the movie was gonna do at the time. And I was like, I need to learn a trade I can use somewhere else. So I thought, screenwriting is applies to other places beyond just, uh, learning how to computer animate.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  And so I just started doing it without anybody asking. Nobody was asking me to be the writer, uh, after Josh left for the last year. And by the time it was done, they weren't gonna give me credit. So I went to the current script of everything and I highlight everything that I, they had kept and it was 75% of the script was what I didn't. And so I convinced them and then, uh, that, then they said, okay. So Bugs Life was like the first time they officially okayed that I could play that role.

• 47:26Griffin Newman?

  And from the beginning.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 47:28David Sims?

  Yeah. And then, right, cause you're credited on Toy Story, you're credited on Monsters Inc. as a writer, right? That was that just you and Pete or no, Daniel Gerson, right? Okay.

• 47:36Griffin Newman?

  Isn't the legend?

• 47:37David Sims?

  Oh, Monsters.

• 47:38Griffin Newman?

  On Monsters Inc.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Monsters was basically Dane, Daniel Gerson and, uh.

• 47:42David Sims?

  Let's see, Jim, Jill Colton, Jeff Pigeon, Ralph Eggleston. I'm just looking at the credits here.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  There's a lot of story by, cause there's a lot of rebuilding by, and I just was part of their helping. I mean, I didn't, I wasn't the founder of any of that movie.

• 47:54Griffin Newman?

  Was there a moment where you were supposed to direct that idea in a different form? No, okay.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  They had real trouble at the beginning outlining it and getting it to have an engine. And the only thing I can really take credit for.

• 48:06David Sims?

  The engine is screams.

• 48:07Griffin Newman?

  Well, David.

• 48:08David Sims?

  That's what I.

• 48:09Griffin Newman?

  That's what, really?

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I came up with, I said, you need a motivation that creates greed and all the emotions that happen in the real world. And so scream is gotta, what if you put scream in there so that it's treated like oil is in this country?

• 48:24David Sims?

  What was the movie before that? Cause that does feel foundational to like, here's why the monsters do this.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  You're, right, but you're smarter than right now than any of us were then.

• 48:33David Sims?

  I have hindsight.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  We were all in our twenties, just learning how to do it. So it was a new story. It wasn't a buddy film and we just had to learn how to, you know, I was, we were still reading every screenwriting book, going to McKee classes, like we were just, we were, you're watching us learn as you watch those first three movies.

• 48:51Griffin Newman?

  I mean, a lot of what, why I watch those movies incessantly and also why I think people sometimes will ask. Because I dropped out of Cal Arts. Like, where did I learn story structure stuff? When I ran away from academia, trying to teach me that kind of thing. And so much of it is from watching all of the DVDs that you guys put together, the talks that you guys have done, the commentary.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  I think we were so excited to learn.

• 49:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, you guys were real sharers.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  We wanted to pass it on.

• 49:21Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Cause that's for a long time, uh, for like almost the first 20 years, but definitely the first 15. It just felt like we just got to continue film school. And so we just promoted that atmosphere in anything we did.

• 49:36Griffin Newman?

  Maybe this is a dumb question, but you talking about the, the identification of the oil spring that you had from the beginning with Toy Story that you felt like you couldn't find with a bug's life for a while. How do you know when you found it? Is it just from the reaction from other people? Is it within yourself? You just go, I, the story now kind of explains itself.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  You can definitely tell, you just feel it. It, it, it usually evokes an involuntary response from not only yourself, but when you, when you put the peanut butter with the chocolate and you pitch just the basics to somebody else, even in its rarest golden book form, you see investment happening from the person you're pitching to. And that, that tends to be the proof is that there's, there's golden in the hills.

• 50:22Griffin Newman?

  Cause you talked about in this recent press tour, that Toy Story is one of those things where if you sit in a room for an hour, you start coming up with new ideas of what could happen in that universe. And it does feel like it's, it's an infinitely fertile playground for story.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  I've, one of the reasons I think I get pulled in is because they've skipped the ABCs. Like they've gone straight to like other letters in the alphabet and they've, and they've just made, understandably, they're trying to be different or trying to be interesting or trying to go, they think literally going to new territory will give us new ideas. And I'm like, what was free in the beginning was just the fact that toys came to life. Like, just like that was like, wow. And I get to witness that. And you have to, and now we've kind of, from that movie on messed up for generations. Everybody thinks toys come to life, like there's, there is no wow factor for go watching a Toy Story movie. It's a given now.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  So the other thing that's behind that, that I have to remind them on is that, that secret sauce is in the mundane. I said, if you take collectively the hours spent watching Toy Story movies, even if you put five with it now, it's about what, six hours, maybe seven? That's seven hours of a toy's life. That's one day. And they have spent, if there are toys in your life, like for five years or six years, or maybe even eight in your house, that's a lot of hours in the day not accounted for. I used to like, I remember thinking would there be a lot of humor when we were trying to come up with the first movie of like, just the boredom of being in the room while the kid's gone and making it, treating it like jury duty.

• 52:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  We had a joke of like, if I have to read Poki, the little puppy one more time, I'm going to kill somebody. And like, just, but like, that's where the humor starts to come from is like the, the mundane. And seeing it from that perspective.

• 52:15Griffin Newman?

  A hundred percent.

• 52:16David Sims?

  Look how disrespectful we're being right now, right?

• 52:18Griffin Newman?

  They'll put them all in the bag.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Like you could do a whole sequence just about being trapped in that Ziploc bag.

• 52:22David Sims?

  It's why those movies make people dizzy sometimes, right? Because these are intellectually developed, conscious creatures that are basically little grownups living in a child's room, kind of bored all day. Right. And then one day they might be trash or they might be in a box or, you know, yeah.

• 52:40Griffin Newman?

  The, the way people described seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time and, and seeing the runner go over and feeling like the world has exploded, like my mind explosion moment was Woody starting the meeting in the first Toy Story.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:52Griffin Newman?

  There, there's something that just activated in me and, oh, they're acting like grownups. This isn't for me.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  We did a sequence early on before we had all, we had that scene where we thought we'd start with the birthday party, but, because this had recently happened at Pixar. There had been two layoffs, uh, a couple of years prior. So everybody was kind of very savvy now to what layoffs felt like in the company and who was getting the axe. And so we treated, we did a scene of introducing Woody in the, Andy's bedroom with everybody going, is it me? You know, who am I gonna, you know, and, and we suddenly loved like that we were capturing something about adult life. But the metaphor of what it's like for the toys and it made complete sense. And we were told it was too juvenile by Disney at the time, so we had to ax it.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  And everybody knows about the Black Friday and it not going well and everything like that. And that's whenever, that was year, uh, you know, months of going down to what was supposed to be like adult humor or savvy humor.

• 53:55Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  And when we had to like rescue the film and save our asses. And we had like two weeks to like, try to resurrect it. We went back to that layoff scene and we said, there's something muppetty and just really, which is now we all know is Toy Story now.

• 54:11Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  But we said, the, we, we think our gut was right on that mojo and we're going back. And it became Woody's meeting.

• 54:18Griffin Newman?

  Plastic corrosion awareness. I mean, all that stuff, which is just not, none of it is inappropriate. And even as a small child, I recognized there was something funny in why are the cartoon characters talking like my parents?

• 54:28David Sims?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. Uh, that there, yeah, that there, there is a kind of clock in, clock out vibe. Should we ask about Finding Nemo? Should we ask about the movies he's directed? I mean, geez.

• 54:40Griffin Newman?

  We're, we're asking a lot of general questions, but yes, Finding Nemo is a perfect movie in my opinion.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just downhill from after that.

• 54:47Griffin Newman?

  Not true.

• 54:48David Sims?

  Yeah, you followed up with Wally. What were you thinking? That, that, you know, piece of junk.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  You would have thought, you would have thought I had at the time.

• 54:55Griffin Newman?

  Was that the feeling?

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Uh, at the preview screening.

• 54:58Griffin Newman?

  For Wally?

• 54:59Speaker 03

  There was a lot of anxiety. It got the lower marks.

• 55:03David Sims?

  And like Pixar generally, right, tended to, I mean, and you'd had, and that's when I had to swap.

• 55:09Griffin Newman?

  I was going to say, it's before you do the final act change.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, you know, again, learning curve.

• 55:15David Sims?

  Wait, wait, remind me, I'm sorry.

• 55:16Griffin Newman?

  That the final act was, well, I'll let you explain. You directed the phone wallet.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  It's, it pretty much scene wise played out similar, uh, but it was missing two things. We kept treating Wally in the third act like he had to be the hero. And so he rescued Eve and we thought Eve wasn't going to be alive. And then, uh, he put her together at the end. Or no, no, no, he, he got, still got smashed, uh, by the time he got to the, the Lido deck. But we also didn't have him.

• 55:52David Sims?

  Like losing his personality. Which is the, the true kind of like, oh my God, like hitting your stomach moment of the movie.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  We knew it, you could feel it. And so, but I was at a, I was just, you know, it was three and a half years or four years by now. And I was just beat down. I didn't know, it just felt like I'd come, tried everything. And, uh, but it was the same guys that I'd always had in the room to like cover my ass before. And so we really just stayed in the room and thought, and hammered it out until we realized, oh, uh, Wally's more like Chaplin, like he changes everybody else. And then you have to have the payoff of that. And then losing his identity at the end, it all seems obvious now.

• 56:32David Sims?

  No, it does. The, the losing his identity thing, it feels so obvious that it's so, it's making movies is crazy. Cause like you telling me that wasn't always part of the movie. I'm like, I can't believe that.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  Well, but, but at the, if you think about it, when you start writing a movie, nothing was in the movie.

• 56:46Griffin Newman?

  Right, of course.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  It's just, that's why I always equate writing to an archaeological dig. And it's very ethereal where you just feel like you're, you're saying that the story already exists out there. But I really do believe that it's, it's very much like the angel in the marble and Da Vinci, or when Michelangelo chipping it away and letting it fly. And, uh, you always saw it in the cube of marble. And, uh, and I've just seen that happen so many times, uh, at Pixar where you've uncovered these bones, you're just digging all the time, trying to build this dinosaur that you claim is in the ground or the story. And then you don't have a say for what you find and when you find it.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  You can only give yourself credit for digging in the right place and for how hard you're working at digging things up. But you have to be sort of open minded to like, the answers don't come when you want them to. You just got to be ready to do something about it when they do.

• 57:44Griffin Newman?

  I saw, uh, Rashida Jones was doing press for the invite and she cited something that you said to her, uh, the, the mountain metaphor, but it was something to the extent of your, your job in constructing a story or finding what the story is, is exploring every possible way.

• 58:00David Sims?

  When you're trying to figure out the path around the mountain, you're going to go up it or round it down it, whatever, just move the mountain. Like sometimes you just have to restructure and let something go essentially.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Sometimes you're like, why are we?

• 58:10David Sims?

  I can't figure this.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Why did we put this mountain here?

• 58:12David Sims?

  Right.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Let's just go somewhere else.

• 58:14David Sims?

  And it's like, right, you're a writer. You can just be like, you know what?

• 58:16Griffin Newman?

  The mountain could be in a different place.

• 58:18David Sims?

  Right.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. You can easily trick yourself into thinking like, that's cheating or that you're a failure for not, uh, acquiescing to the story gods. That like, oh, there was a different path that I just wasn't thinking about.

• 58:29Griffin Newman?

  Here's a question I have for you. Your animated films have started with your idea, right? John Carter, you write, but it's an adaptation, obviously. And in the blink of an eye, starts with a script from Colby Day. And there are the other live action films that you've been attached to over the years, which were almost always scripts that were out there in the ether. Have you ever tried sitting down and starting a live action script on your own? Is there a reason you feel like you're more attracted to, or is that just the nature of how things?

• 58:57Speaker 03

  It's so fucking hard.

• 58:58Griffin Newman?

  I've shaken out, yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  I, I, all I've known my career mostly is stuff that I either was a party to very, from the get go, or was mine.

• 59:11Speaker 03

  And everything that gets criticized, everything that gets changed, everything that, you know, it's, you take it personally, even when you think you're not, you, you debate whether you're a failure, whether you're right. It just takes so much out of you emotionally. And once I found out you could actually, I said, wait a minute, some of my favorite directors never wrote what they worked on. And, and, and I, and I realized, um, oh, I don't have to like die on this hill every time I make something. And so I started looking at things. Some of it was television, some of it was scripts. And there were a lot of scripts I tried to get made that were other people that never got picked up. And just

• 59:54Speaker 03

  kind of did the more traditional route of like, I would love to see this film. I could totally see how this film should be made. And it was still hard, but it was so much, it was so easy not to make it about me. It was so easy to be objective.

• 1:00:08Griffin Newman?

  Does TV feel particularly liberating in that sense?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  It is in the just that I enjoy the doing. I enjoy being on set. I enjoy the, the making of, the older you get, the less you're like, I'm not here to like, talk about my career or, or look at back like, I've got this much time left while I'm still standing. I'm still healthy and I, I love.

• 1:00:28Griffin Newman?

  Sorry for making you look back at your career. I apologize.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  No, but, but you know what I mean? Like, I love the doing and like, and I, and I was like, it takes four years. And then I finally, you know, uh, in the, in the same building with the same people, like it can, it can get a little maddening and you feel like time stands still. And I just love the camaraderie and the, uh, summer camp put on a show that you get on. And I love the brevity. I mean, in two months, I've gone away to do TV, which is about two to three months max. And I've come back to Pixar and nobody knew I left. Like that's happened several times. And I equate it to being a session player. Like, oh, I get it. I'm basically somebody else's album. This is how they want, or, you know,

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  this is how they want to play it. And they, they're asking me to come in as a session player and play on this one song out of their, all their tracks. And I thrive because I just feel so unshackled and unburdened by, is it about me? What does it say about me? What do I think? Like I just.

• 1:01:30David Sims?

  You're doing the opposite. It's right. It must be so easy.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  It's not even easy, but it's, it's enjoyable. It's taking a lot of things that I thought were burdensome and making them enjoyable. Because I realized telling the joke for me is half the fun, not just having to write the joke. So a lot of times it's freeing and, and, and I get to use my muscles and I get to get outside to just work on a TV show.

• 1:01:55Griffin Newman?

  Try different stuff.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56David Sims?

  Yeah. Are you going to do any more of that? Or are you trying to make a movie now?

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  I'm going to be on one this, uh, fall that I can't talk about right now.

• 1:02:01David Sims?

  Fair enough.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  But I wasn't looking for, but it's one of my favorite shows. So I was like psyched. And, uh, and, um, so I don't know if I'll do them more, but because it's, it's also no life for two months, three months.

• 1:02:14David Sims?

  Because it's just.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Whereas animation, to be fair, it's banker's hours, nine to six, nine to five. You can be, gotta go to the doctors that day. You can be, you know, like, but it's for three or four years.

• 1:02:26David Sims?

  Yeah. And it, and not only that, there just must be a frustration and like, oh, I want to fix this. Okay. Well, that's going to take a while. Versus like, hey, you give an actor direction and the next take they do it different or whatever.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  And this is mean, but they're on a hard, on a day where I'm frustrated with another show. I'm going like, you kind of have no excuse not to fix this, guys. You have all the time in the world. So let's put a time limit on like, if you haven't gotten somewhere by the end of the month or the end of the week, like, but that's the other thing that I took back to Toy, like Toy Story five is the fastest we've ever made a movie outside of Toy Story two, which was under duress.

• 1:03:01David Sims?

  Yeah. Right. Uh, how, how quick? What are we talking about?

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  Three and a half months, uh, three and a half years.

• 1:03:05David Sims?

  Three and a half months would be pretty impressive.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  I'd be doing it all the time. It was about three and a half years with me away for half, uh, for six months of that to finish up.

• 1:03:14Griffin Newman?

  Finish blank. Yeah.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  And, uh, because I learned on TV to measure time differently. Like in, in TV, any problem, any issue, they go, you talk in the terms of minutes, days, minutes, hours, days. And if you're talking days, you know, you're in trouble. So you're always talking like, can we fix it in minutes and hours? In animation, you're talking days, weeks, months. And so the, it's too easy to just push it down the road or take longer than you need to. So I applied the minutes, days, hours, I mean, it's hours, days to coming back. And it was a little aggro, little aggressive, but it was still a better place to be. We, people were excited that they were getting things solved and getting more times at bat and figuring

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  things out, you know?

• 1:04:01David Sims?

  When you have to fix Wally, how long does that take? You know, fix, but you know what I mean?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  That was under duress because our, our, all our, uh, audience previews are usually set with about six months left to, to release, which means only three months left in production. And that's like your last week in, in, in regular terms. Or that's like you, you've got Friday left. So you hope, you know that you're going to change something. You have it, you have it on the books. It's almost like reshoots built in. You, you know, there's going to be something you're going to change. Hopefully about 10% of the movie max, uh, or less. And it's strategic wear and what you do. Uh, and that was about a 30% change?

• 1:04:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, that was how I was, but every, it was a hard.

• 1:04:47David Sims?

  But it was worth it.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  It was worth it. It was a hard conversation to have with my crew who was ready to be done.

• 1:04:52David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Griffin Newman?

  I feel like there's video on, on one of the releases.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Probably video of everything. I don't want to know about.

• 1:04:57Griffin Newman?

  Of you apologizing before the demand.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, they probably put that on the DVD.

• 1:05:01David Sims?

  But those DVDs, I would want, like especially, obviously the two, uh, you know, Brad Bird's two movies in the 2000s between your, between Nemo and Wally, you've got incredible Zan Ratatouille. And those DVDs, he's pretty upfront about like, I'm a pain in the ass. Like, I'm really, yeah, I'm really demanding and like, you know, and like, I, as a kid or as a teen, I was a teen and I was interested in movie making. I was fascinated watching them being like, this is very upfront about like, it's not just like, oh yeah, we're all so happy to be doing this.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  He came up with the adage, pain is temporary, film is forever.

• 1:05:31Griffin Newman?

  I quote it all the time.

• 1:05:32David Sims?

  Yeah, it is. It's memorable. It's, but like, obviously in Brad's movies, you see that in his movies, right? Like, it's like that, that character like makes it across the line, you know, in terms of the stories he tells or whatever emotions he's driven by or, you know? And I feel like that's what makes the best Pixar movies, the best. And that's what makes your Pixar movies good. It's like, they all have, you're kind of, you just have a very funny sensibility. And like, I mean, that is the, the highest compliment. Like.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  It's, it's because at the end of the day, that's what comes out of us naturally. It's, it's like, um, I was talking on another podcast and I was saying like, I, I don't feel worthy equating us to the Beatles, but you, nobody, nobody questions that the Beatles were just making, they just made, like, if they never got out of their basement or the, or Paul McCartney's family bathroom, they would make hummable tunes that everybody would remember immediately. Like, that's just what came out of them.

• 1:06:29David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  They didn't change for the audience. They just tapped into something that they naturally did that worked great for the rest of the world. And, and so when you put us together, the infamous brain trust, everything we did got more entertaining. Like we're just naturally entertainers and people discredit that they, they treated it like costumes to put on after the fact. But we're like, if you do it right, it's essential. Like you, you, the joke is telling the story is being part of the machinery and part of the entertainment in the core of it.

• 1:07:00Griffin Newman?

  The sequence in Nemo of the story getting spread across the ocean, which leads into Nigel telling.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  The night.

• 1:07:08Griffin Newman?

  Which that, this is the thing. I feel like this is one of those legendary stories in your career of how does the word get from one side of the ocean to the other? And you end up voicing like three different characters in that sequence?

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Well, just for the, just for the, the, uh, proof of concept, my co-writer was Bob Peterson, who's one of the funniest men I've ever met. And he makes me funny or brings out the funny in me that I can't seem to access fully on my own. And it's no different than being with a great improv partner. Like you just throw me the challenge, you know? So we like, we were like, how do we do this? And we, it was like six o'clock or something, five o'clock in the afternoon and we had to have something up on the reels the next morning. And so it was, you treated it like an improv challenge. Like, how would you make the news get across? And then, then you just were like, we can draw really fast. We're, we're our own scratch voices. So we just put mics up like this in the room and just crafted,

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  we craft out stuff all the time that take only a few hours. We just put this real high bar challenge to like, all right, you got to solve this exact problem and you got to do it in an entertaining way. And we've done plenty of those where they didn't stick, but this one stuck.

• 1:08:19Griffin Newman?

  I mean, but equating it to improv, Ben and I both come from improv backgrounds, among other things, many things we've done. But, but it makes sense in that sort of, the game is how quickly can you identify the truth in what has now been set up in front of you? Right? And that sequence is such a dynamic, like speed rounding of, well, what would that type of fish be? And what would they do? And how would they do it? And what would they sound like? And the escalation of that and the build of that and the series of correct identifications that all feel right to the audience, which then leads into the most emotional moment in the movie to me, which is more effective because it's coming off of.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Nemo realizing Marlin's coming for him. Right?

• 1:09:00Griffin Newman?

  It's like 10 perfect verbal gags in a row that are all character and behavioral.

• 1:09:06David Sims?

  That was Steve Jobs' favorite part of the movie.

• 1:09:07Griffin Newman?

  Well, cause it's, it should just be the most like shoe leathery kind of, this is, this is just story weight, how to get from point A to point B. And instead, all of it is, is personal.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Well, I gotta give most of the comedy props to Bob. Bob's just so funny. He could just spit it out. And I'm such a structuralist.

• 1:09:28David Sims?

  Bob Peterson, right?

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. That I think, again, when we're together, we're both able to like speak each other's language, but we're able to like, I was just, you know, how does this build was my, probably my biggest driver, even though I'm still trying to be funny bouncing off of him. And he's like, how to make it funnier? And, but he cares just as much about building, but we, because of the emphasis on the sentence was different for us. That just showed you how strong we were chemistry wise, working together. And then I'm such a, I'm such a film score nut that I'm always thinking about, is there a way the music can do this? Is there a way the music can be involved? Is there a way?

• 1:10:07David Sims?

  And it's one of Thomas Newman's best scores.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was, and I, I wrote to two pieces of music or two composers all the time for Nemo. And that was 90% of the time or 80% of the time was anything Thomas Newman had scored. Cause I just was like, and so he became a character in my mind.

• 1:10:28David Sims?

  Any in particular though? Any jams?

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Shawshank and, but particularly Meet Joe Black.

• 1:10:33David Sims?

  Oh, that's a great score.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  I mean, it goes over the top at the end and that's why I loved it.

• 1:10:38David Sims?

  I mean, that movie's crazy.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  And then, and then I would listen to Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile.

• 1:10:44David Sims?

  All right.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  I kept saying, I'm, this is, is this-

• 1:10:48David Sims?

  Have you ever met Trent?

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. I told him that. I told him that on the red carpet at Wally.

• 1:10:53David Sims?

  That's so funny.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Year. But I just was so afraid. My biggest fear for making that movie was that it was going to be treacly and be an after school special because we had to go cute for a lot of it and innocent and sweet and adorable. And I just was worried about the tone and the balance being right because my, I grew up in the ocean. I grew up being scared of the ocean, but fascinated by it at the same time. I remember putting on a little diving mask and, you know, in needy shallow water and ducking my head under and then being freaked out because things started to disappear so quickly in the void and you didn't know what was behind you. And I, and I, that was the first thing I ever typed was, and it's the, I think it's still on the first page of the script. I just typed the

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  void. And I wanted that. That was the big, bold, the two big, bold things at the time I remember really early on was like, I want to like, not do the circle of life. Fuck that. It doesn't exist. Things are out to eat you.

• 1:11:52David Sims?

  Life is one of the most banana sequences ever. It's gorgeous. It's very impressive, but you're like, I'm sorry, what? The animals have a king?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  The theory that-

• 1:11:59Griffin Newman?

  Some of them don't talk?

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  I just like, things are out to get you. It's a predatory world and there's a reason we're always scared about our kid crossing the street. And so the ocean is the perfect, you have to live in it, but you have to be afraid of it all the time. So I said, can I keep that alive throughout the movie? And then the other thing was, can I make the parent the main character, not the kid? And that seemed radical at the time.

• 1:12:24David Sims?

  It's a fair point. Yeah. Usually it's like the kid loses the parent either permanently or temporarily and has to figure something out, has to grow up.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  So that's-

• 1:12:33David Sims?

  And that happens in Nemo and this part of the movie.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  That's why I listened to The Fragile because it would remind me how dark the, and I found out from him that he wrote that album, listening to La Mer. And debut scene was suicidal when he wrote La Mer by the ocean side. And so the whole thing has this dark, dark, deep connection, but it would ground me like that. That's that 10, 20% would just bring me back to going, don't be afraid to be scary. Don't be afraid to be tense. Don't be afraid to be unpredictable because that's part of the point of this movie is that you're in the real world. And the whole driving thing of this main character is fear and we have to be afraid too, or else it's just theory.

• 1:13:10David Sims?

  It's, it's, it pervades the movie, but not too much, you know, like it doesn't overwhelm it, which obviously I know with a lot of the movies you guys make, that can happen, right? Where it's like, oh, Woody's, Woody's coming off a little too agitated or villainous or what, you know, anxious. And same with the Marlin, right? Marlin's too worked up. Like he's too negative.

• 1:13:32Griffin Newman?

  I think I said this in the episode, but every time I watch Nemo and he gets lost, I go, this is impossible.

• 1:13:40David Sims?

  He'll never fucking find him.

• 1:13:41Griffin Newman?

  The stakes couldn't feel more insurmountable.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  I was still trying to solve the movie and Bob Peterson came on about a year or two and, and he was like, the thing that blows me in mind about this movie is all you just spend the whole time going, how?

• 1:13:53David Sims?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I mean, which is the magic of a lot of this, you know, like Dory too, just like, you know, in Wally, like these movies where it's like a great distance is going to be traveled by a tiny thing. And every time you're kind of like, I don't know how they're going to do this.

• 1:14:08Griffin Newman?

  And characters with impediments.

• 1:14:09David Sims?

  Toy Story, obviously pretty much always is like, hey, the toy got taken across the street. And you're like, across the street?

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  The, the machinations of the moving truck chase in Toy Story was mine.

• 1:14:23David Sims?

  It's so good.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  And I boarded that out roughly and then everybody came in to clean it up because we had to do it under duress. And I realized then, and it's only proven all the way till Toy Story five, that that comes more readily to me is the crazy engineering of how things will all fit.

• 1:14:42David Sims?

  Did you, and Monsters Inc. too? Did you have any, because Monsters Inc. also has the like, we're somehow crossing dimensions and, you know, all that and-

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  There's, I'm not the only person, but that's just, if you had to get down to where, what comes out of me the easiest, not easy, but easiest is how is this going to ultimately pay off? How can I hide it as a setup? How can it like not be seen right away?

• 1:15:04Griffin Newman?

  Is that the right brain thing? Is that just-

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  I don't know. My dad was a, was an engineer, chemical engineer who was basically worked for a skunk's work, top secret company that could solve, had to solve things for the government when they had run out of time. So I think I got that from my dad.

• 1:15:20David Sims?

  What did your mom do?

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  My mom was a frustrated actress.

• 1:15:24David Sims?

  So you're like Spielberg, the artist and the scientist. Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  He and I've actually had that comparison. And, but I realized I don't know science and math like my dad did. So that part of the muscle goes towards abstract story building.

• 1:15:37David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Story structure. So I think that's why people would love me to stay in that lane because I'm good at it. But you live long enough and you're not interested in scratching the same itch all the time. Like I'm also a hopeless romantic. I'm also a sci-fi nut. I'm also love drama, just good drama and in any, in new ways of finding tension and drama. And so exploring stuff that wouldn't come readily to me, but I would love to see as a, as a, as an audience member is why I take chances, whether they hit or miss on Carter or Blink is, that's making me feel as adventuresome and

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  satisfied as I was on the first two animated movies I ever got to watch.

• 1:16:24Griffin Newman?

  Is there an ultimate, at least I shouldn't say ultimate. Is there at this moment, an itch you're most eager to scratch that you haven't gotten to within your films yet?

• 1:16:32David Sims?

  Right. Cause you've mostly worked in sci-fi when you've done live action, even in, even in TV, you've done some, like you did Three Body and you did-

• 1:16:38Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. I also argue that Toy Story is low key sci-fi.

• 1:16:41David Sims?

  Yeah, a little bit. Something.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  I clearly lean that way. I, I, I try not to think too hard about it. I'm, I've been enjoying not having anything planned. I didn't plan Toy Story five. I didn't plan any of the TV shows that got offered to me. And I didn't plan the scripts that suddenly I read and I was like, oh, I want to try and make that, you know? There's for a long time I was trying to get this movie made called Revolver that was written by Kate Treefight.

• 1:17:08David Sims?

  Yeah. We, that came up in our research. That's the Beatles, like stopping in Alaska or something?

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a great script. And, and I got, I got Paul, I got the Beatles estate okay for four songs. I got Ethan and Maya Hawke.

• 1:17:23David Sims?

  Yeah. Which songs?

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  They were pre revolver because it's all about, because that Alaska moment happened and they hadn't released Revolver yet. Nobody knew that they were making that. And so it was like stuff from Rubber Soul and, and stuff like that. And, but I got Ethan, it was a kind of a paper moon relationship of father and daughter. So I got Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke to attach to it. And nobody bit. This was, this was right before and then during the pandemic. And so just the whole world just rocked and nobody bit.

• 1:17:57Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  And it's still to me like such an obvious win of a movie. You never see the Beatles in it.

• 1:18:01Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02David Sims?

  Right. Which is always the biggest fear.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Cause this really happened. There was a, in 64, I think there was a nine point something earthquake. It's the largest earthquake ever on the North American continent or around-

• 1:18:14David Sims?

  In Alaska, right?

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Alaska.

• 1:18:16David Sims?

  If you go to Alaska, they-

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Never showed up about it. There's signs everywhere about like, it's a freaking earthquake happened.

• 1:18:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  But there was, they were still in recovery a year later. And there was one functioning hotel that you could stay at. And the Beatles were flying to Japan to do, to do their last, nobody knew their last touring. And they got rerouted by a typhoon and had to land in Alaska. And they stayed for a night and a day in this hotel in Anchorage in 1965. And so Kate Treffis from Anchorage and her mother was there when that happened. And so she sort of elaborated because her mother had a crush on George Harrison. So her main heroine character is just, her goal is to get into that hotel and sleep with George Harrison. And it's this beautiful coming of age story, just beautiful. And I still wish I could make it.

• 1:19:06Griffin Newman?

  And was it Chairman Spaceman? What was?

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  That was something Searchlight asked me to be involved in.

• 1:19:13Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:19:13Speaker 03

  And so I was heavy on the, and that was before I read Blank. So it was my, my shot at getting something else made. And so it was from a, based on an article from the New Yorker. And, and we worked on many iterations of the script with the author of the, of the piece. And, and he's a great script writer. And it just, it was clear what he wanted and, and what Searchlight wanted weren't matching. And to be fair, the world changed, like to, to do something about a billionaire going into space is, was fascinating. And then it just became off putting and then it became reality. And so it just was one of those ill timed things, those, those ill timed things.

• 1:19:58David Sims?

  Now I'm seeing here in 1994, you worked on the episode Cookies, Okeys, Blokeys.

• 1:20:03Griffin Newman?

  What?

• 1:20:03David Sims?

  The TV show Two Stupid Dogs.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, wow.

• 1:20:07David Sims?

  Okay.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  And do you care to comment?

• 1:20:08Griffin Newman?

  This is important.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  That was while I was working on Toy Story, early days. And so I had friends that-

• 1:20:14David Sims?

  Now there were two stupid dogs in that show. One big, one long.

• 1:20:17Griffin Newman?

  I'm kind of the Griffin David relationship.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  It was a friend of Pete Docter's that was working on that show and he needed some boarding done. And we just wanted to help out. So I-

• 1:20:26David Sims?

  It's always so funny with animators where like you look back in their career. It's like all this great work and it's like, yeah, and then also just some random cartoon from the 90s.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  That was a funny show.

• 1:20:34Griffin Newman?

  That was a good show. The, the secret squirrel segments on that?

• 1:20:38David Sims?

  Rings a bell.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  So you were the prime audience.

• 1:20:42David Sims?

  I mean, we were like seven years old or whatever.

• 1:20:44Griffin Newman?

  You worked on the Back She Mighty Mouse as well, right?

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:47Griffin Newman?

  What was that experience?

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  That was a murderer's row of people on that show. If you could, you couldn't hire-

• 1:20:51David Sims?

  Yeah, that's pretty much your first credit.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I, right out of college, my friend Jim Merden, who would go on to be a major director on Simpsons. And Rich Moore were working on it and-

• 1:21:05Griffin Newman?

  Rich Moore, who did Ben, Wreck it Ralph.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08David Sims?

  That's right.

• 1:21:08Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08David Sims?

  I love-

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  We all went to school together and so they were, Ralph had this pattern of coming into Hollywood. This all through the seventies into the eighties where he would come into Hollywood off of just his Fritz the Cat fame or Lord of the Rings fame and get money enough to get something started and then burn all its bridges and then leave town once it failed and then wait for the regime change, which would happen about every five years, until nobody knew who he was again, except for his credits. And then he'd come back out to California and start over again. And we were on this iteration because he had worked on the original Mighty Mouse as a young guy.

• 1:21:49Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  And I think it was Terry Toons was here in New York, I think. If I have it right, he worked on it in New York.

• 1:21:53Griffin Newman?

  Wasn't it, was it in Terrytown?

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 1:21:56Griffin Newman?

  Maybe.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  You guys are in front of the-

• 1:21:58Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, we got, we got devices.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  But anyway, he got the rights to it and wanted it to be remade. So John Christopher Luci was his, was his guy. Bruce Tim was on there. Vicky Jensen worked there.

• 1:22:11David Sims?

  Oh, those are, yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Like all of us became somebody in animation, but no, but we were all nobodies then. It was crazy. It was a crazy time. We worked in an abandoned preschool in Van Nuys.

• 1:22:26Griffin Newman?

  That's what that show feels like.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Griffin Newman?

  It feels like it, it came out of-

• 1:22:29David Sims?

  It's like escaped something.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  And the intercom system was still working and he took, Ralph took the principal's office and he was this huge guy from the Bronx. I think I don't want to, if he's Bronx or Brooklyn.

• 1:22:39David Sims?

  Yeah, that's, that's the vibe we had.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Out of borough. And he had a bit of a, a lisp and you would, he, he considered us 20 something. He wanted writers cheap. So this is like 86, 87. So we would have legal pads and pencils and we'd sit in this windowless teacher's lounge that clearly had still all the smoke from cigarettes from all the previous teachers that had ever worked there in it. And he, he would just hit the intercom and go, guy, it's in my office right now. And, and suddenly pick up and you'd go into his office. But he would keep pulling out his old friends that he had made in the seventies. So one day he was like, guys, this is Frank Frazetta, like you're gonna meet Frank Frazetta. And we're like, and it's guys, chain smoking comes in. We're like eating Frank Frazetta. And then, then they got, this is, this is Amos, he sells cookies.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  And it's like, and famous Amos comes in dressed exactly, dressed exactly like he is on the package.

• 1:23:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  With the samples in a, in a bag giving out.

• 1:23:33Griffin Newman?

  Cookies on.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  And it turns out he worked in, in post and sound when he worked on, and he was one of the sound engineers, or I think for one of his movies in LA. And then he's, he was, and he said, and Ralph was saying like, yeah, he's trying to tell me that he's gonna start the cookie business. I'm like, get out of here. And like, you want to put money in the cookie business? I'm not gonna put money in the cookie business.

• 1:23:52Griffin Newman?

  He was like a music manager and he made the cookies as like gifts to his clients.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Griffin Newman?

  And everyone's like, sell the cookies, my guy.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  And he, and he made a killing. Jim would say, it was, every day was an interesting story working.

• 1:24:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Is there anything, I, I want to let you go because we already have a second-

• 1:24:09David Sims?

  We're gonna chat with you a little more in depth about John Carter. Obviously the screening tonight. So obviously we can sort of dip into that more there. But yeah, would, would any, anything else you wanted to bug him?

• 1:24:19Griffin Newman?

  Because you terrifyingly-

• 1:24:20David Sims?

  Two stupid dogs question.

• 1:24:21Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, that was really important.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  That was high on the list.

• 1:24:24Griffin Newman?

  It's been sitting on that.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  I don't remember it at all.

• 1:24:26Griffin Newman?

  Really?

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:24:27Griffin Newman?

  You, you texted me after finding Nemo and you said, you guys got things mostly correct.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Yes.

• 1:24:34Griffin Newman?

  I'm wondering if there is a thing, because we were talking right before we started recording, about how when you do these press tours, you have to condense stories and then you create a myth that then circulates for decades and you have to correct your own myth. Is there a thing that you have heard us say as you terrifyingly have been listening to the episodes on you?

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, please don't do that.

• 1:24:52Griffin Newman?

  That you feel like we have helped perpetuate?

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  To be fair, I haven't listened to the Carter or the Blink because I can't, mine's too soon.

• 1:24:58Griffin Newman?

  Therapy.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  It's too soon for me to hear.

• 1:25:00Griffin Newman?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  But I can't remember what the Nemo things were. There was nothing, there was nothing egregious.

• 1:25:08David Sims?

  It was just more like, oh, that's a little off.

• 1:25:10Griffin Newman?

  It can be, is there a myth that you wish you could correct here?

• 1:25:14David Sims?

  We're trying to get you to say something so we can fire JJ.

• 1:25:16Griffin Newman?

  We're really trying to fire him.

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  I see.

• 1:25:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yes. He spelled your name Pandrew Stanton? Can we fire him for that?

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, nope. He is silent.

• 1:25:26Griffin Newman?

  P is silent.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Um, I would have texted you with the correction if it was that egregious.

• 1:25:31Griffin Newman?

  No, I always let JJ know that he did a good job.

• 1:25:35David Sims?

  He's a good, he's a good guy.

• 1:25:36Griffin Newman?

  He's a good guy.

• 1:25:37David Sims?

  Yeah. And you're, you're, you're very, very, very nice to bless us with your presence on this show.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  They're real men. It's a hilarious show. I, I'm showing my age. I don't get half the references half the time.

• 1:25:46David Sims?

  Oh, please. Anytime you want to get one of the references.

• 1:25:49Griffin Newman?

  But that's just text me and I'll explain the references.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  But I'm impressed. I'm impressed with your film knowledge.

• 1:25:54Griffin Newman?

  Thanks.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  I'm impressed with your film analysis.

• 1:25:56Griffin Newman?

  That means a lot.

• 1:25:58David Sims?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Impressed with your running gags.

• 1:26:00Griffin Newman?

  As I said, I mean, I truly, a lot of the analysis comes like backwards retrofit from hearing you explain things over the years. Like a wildly disproportionate amount of it comes from the way you have kind of open sourced your sense of story specifically.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  Well, again, it keeps coming back to, I have a sixth grade education. And if I can get it, then I feel there's hope for anybody else to get it. So I kind of tried to pass it on.

• 1:26:27Griffin Newman?

  That's, that's our podcast, but with like a second grade education. Uh, thank you for doing this.

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:26:34David Sims?

  Thank you and looking forward to tonight.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  I'm excited. I've never seen the film on the screen since and-

• 1:26:41David Sims?

  So are you gonna do it? Are you gonna tough it out?

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:44David Sims?

  All right.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  I, it's, it's not hard for me to watch.

• 1:26:47Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Not hard for me to watch any of my movies. I know why I made them and I know why I made the choices and I don't usually regret the choices.

• 1:26:53David Sims?

  I just, some people are like, no, no, no, I'll never, I never watch my stuff back, like-

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  I'm like that about the most, like I can't watch Toy Story five again.

• 1:27:01David Sims?

  Sure. Cause you just watched it like five billion times.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I literally, one of our editors assistants kept track and I'd seen it 95 times.

• 1:27:08Griffin Newman?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  So-

• 1:27:09David Sims?

  I mean, to be fair, I've seen some of your movies close to that many times because I have a kid.

• 1:27:13Griffin Newman?

  To be fair, I've seen it 91 times.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Like, like Nemo took me seven years before I was like, oh, what? And some of it's just because you just want to see it like, do I have even fighting chance of seeing it as a movie?

• 1:27:23David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Because it's, it's, it's, all of them are a yearbook. They're just a yearbook. Like I remember where I was when I shot that. I remember the-

• 1:27:30Griffin Newman?

  Every choice.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  And when it's long enough of a time passing, you, it becomes fond memories. It's like opening up an old photo album and you're just like, oh yeah. And it triggers memories that you had forgotten about it. So it's very-

• 1:27:42David Sims?

  Which is great. That's just great. Yeah, that's lovely.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  But like just collecting all the photos that I'll, I don't know.

• 1:27:48Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  Is, uh, it was like, I, I found stuff I forgot I had, which was exciting.

• 1:27:53David Sims?

  Are you in touch with anyone left on that?

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Samantha Morton and I, I just-

• 1:27:57David Sims?

  And she's having such a year.

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  I gave her such kudos for Cersei.

• 1:28:02Griffin Newman?

  Pretty incredible.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Probably the highlight, highlight of the movie.

• 1:28:05David Sims?

  And it's a great movie.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  And I'm so happy for her. It's like, it's like a whole nother generation is learning how great she is.

• 1:28:10David Sims?

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  And Friends Defoe, I haven't talked to him in a while, but he's a good New Yorker pal. And we all loved working on that movie. And it was hard, but it was, we enjoyed it till the day it came out. And then, and we all had plans, which I'll talk about tonight, about what we were, I found the outlines for the other two.

• 1:28:34Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  And I'm like, oh, we really knew what we were, where we were going and what we were gonna do. And so there's any, there's a lot of, not a lot, but the critique, some of the critiques about the first one are actually because we just knew where we were going with the second one and we weren't gonna give away all the marvels or, or do what you would normally do in a standalone film. So, which, you know, is a naive mistake of ours to have done, but-

• 1:28:57Griffin Newman?

  I'm excited to see it.

• 1:28:57David Sims?

  I'm excited to see it too, yeah.

• 1:28:58Griffin Newman?

  I'm excited to see all the stuff you dug up.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  Especially with an appreciative crowd. I, I realize this may never happen again.

• 1:29:04Griffin Newman?

  I mean, sold out.

• 1:29:06David Sims?

  Sold out right away.

• 1:29:07Griffin Newman?

  Right away, added second showing.

• 1:29:08David Sims?

  People excited. We had, right, we were doing a second showing, yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Sweet. Thanks, guys.

• 1:29:12Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:13David Sims?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:13Griffin Newman?

  So much, sir.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hostly. Our creative producer is Marie Bardi Salinas and our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by JJ Birch. Our theme song is by Lain Montgomery and the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick. Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit. Join our Patreon Blank Check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Follow us on social at Blank Check Pod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.