Pixar director Docter loves his job

    The Daily recently sat down with Pete Docter, the charming co-director of Pixar's upcoming film "Up." The film is to be released in digital Disney 3-D on May 29. In addition to the film, Docter spoke about his trip to South America to do research, his childhood obsessions and his experience working for Pixar.

Question: "Up," like a lot of Pixar movies, seems very character-driven. How do you know when you've created a compelling character?

Pete Docter: Well, I guess we know that it's compelling when we show it to the other guys at work and people are like, "Hey, that's a compelling character!"

Q: I guess that's a good sign.

PD: Yeah, more often than not, that's kind of the first comments we get. You might know this, but the way we work at Pixar is that we have our team that's making the film and we get together about every four months and show it to the other directors. I grab John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, and they all come in and watch the movie in whatever state it's in. And usually the first comments we get are about the characters ... Carl, [the main character], was fun because he could be a jerk and likeable at the same time. He could slam the door in the kid's face and you're like, "Well, you know, he's earned that."

Q: I think "Up" also differs from other Pixar films because of its small cast. Was that ever a concern for the group of you [that] make the creative decisions at Pixar?

PD: Well, that was an intentional thing on my standpoint, just because on a lot of films, and some that I've worked on, when you get a big cast, it really complicates the plot. I wanted to create enough room to just enjoy moments and have characters relate to each other and talk to each other, as opposed to always having to go to the next plot point. So we intentionally kept the cast small and I think it paid off in that way. I simplified my job by keeping the film to a small cast.

Q: I know that for all of the Pixar movies, the creative team actually goes to the place, like for "Ratatouille" [2007], you went to Paris. Did you actually go to South America?

PD: Yes, we did.  [For] "Toy Story" [1995], we got to go to the toy store. [For "Monsters, Inc." (2001)], we got to talk to kids and look at animals and stuff, but this one, we got to go to South America. Right where Venezuela meets Brazil and Guyana, there's this place called Triple Point. Right on that point there's this amazing, weird, table-top mountain. It's a mile high from the base up to the top, and it has these weird rock shapes; [it's] windswept; it's like as close as I'll ever get to going to Mars ... It just felt really alien. There's plants up there that are found nowhere else in the world ... We camped up on top, took a lot of pictures and sketches and drawings and paintings and things, and really kind of felt what it was like up there, and we captured a certain amount of that in the film. I don't think we would have had quite as much authenticity had we not done that. That was really crucial.

Q: Why do you feel 3-D is needed or necessary in a film like this? Do you worry that the technique will be distracting or remove some of the emotional impact of the movie?

PD: I definitely worry about that ... the best movies are those when you sit down and you're swept up and then in two hours you wake up and go, "Wow, I just went on this amazing trip." We didn't want 3-D to break that spell at all. We made some rules early on ... We're not going to have things coming out at you .... We were also going to use depth as a storytelling device.

Q: I'm sure you hear about how Pixar's films consistently garner rave reviews among critics. How do you deal with the pressure from all of these compliments? How do you do it?

PD: I sort of half-take the compliment and half-don't trust it and just be self-critical. The truth is that every one of our films has been a disaster at one point and we just leave ourselves enough time to fix it ... Films take about five years or so, and probably three and a half to four of that is just story and then production is about a year and a half to two years, somewhere in that ... at the beginning [we] just focus on the story. We don't think about, "Geez, how are we going to do 10,000 balloons?" We'll deal with that later.

Q: How fun is your job?

PD: In a way, we have all these videos and things of us riding scooters and throwing pies and whatever, and you kind of go, "Well, that is fun," but it's a lot of work. There's a lot of days when I'm coming in at 7 a.m. and not going home until 10 or 11 at night, and everyone at work is like that ... We often have to chase people out — "Go home! Have a life!" — because otherwise, they'll just stay there and try and make everything they touch [be the] best they can, which is a good problem to have. But it is a lot of work. They've done a great job of setting up the studios as just a good, collaborative place, even down to the architecture. There's a big, kind of common space in the middle where all the food and the bathrooms are, so at some time during the day, you're going to have to come out of your office and mingle with people instead of e-mailing them all day. So, it all works out ... We're spoiled rotten, that's for sure. It's a fun place.