Pixar’s Formula For Storytelling Success & Emotional Persuasion w/ Founder Ed Catmull EP 1474

0:01Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection. I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jospree Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

0:44So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends and I'll see you there. At Pixar, well, we also say that failure is part of the process. It does happen. We don't actually use the terminology very much. Now, there are times when you have something which actually does fail, so we don't avoid it. You have to, like, if something really fails, you say it. But the terminology of making a film is, since we know they all have problems, is we're trying to solve the problem.

1:24Hmm, hmm, that solution didn't work. Let's try this. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

1:52Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest today. We have the inspiring Ed Catmull in the house, the co-founder of Pixar Animation and the New York Times bestselling author of Creativity Inc. Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really happy to be here. We were just chatting for the last 30 minutes before this conversation. And I'm fascinated by your story, by your life and the things that you've seen, witnessed, overcome and building a business, but also just building a beautiful life of your own.

2:29You were surrounded by some of the most brilliant creatives, leaders of industry since you were in college and you essentially grew up with these individuals in chasing after envisioning, manifesting, creating a dream of yours to make animated films, which took you a long time. And then you've now done over 32 films since your time of starting at Pixar, I believe, and Disney, 31, 32 films. Is that correct? Yeah. And it's incredible to know the influence you've had on the lives of, I'm assuming billions of people who have consumed your stories. So I just want to acknowledge you for the incredible amount of work that you've created, the incredible amount of things that you've had to overcome in building the first animation film to, you know, building a massive company and all of the unseen forces of thousands of creative individuals coming together.

3:33The incredible magic that happens with that, but also the challenges you've had to overcome as well. So I'm so excited you're here. And we were talking about one of my favorite moments from Pixar, which was Toy Story 3 at the end, where that made me so emotionally captivated, so moved to tears at the end of this movie that I remember watching it the first time thinking, how am I crying watching a cartoon? How is this making me feel so deeply about my own life and imagining my own life. And it's just amazing what you and the entire team has been able to create. So I'm excited you're here. I'm excited for the book that has the expanded edition to it, which talks about what you've learned in the last 10 years of leading Pixar and Disney animation as well.

4:25And yeah, welcome again to the show. Very excited. Well, I'm very happy to be here. um although i i also want to be careful that i don't take credit for what those other people did of course so uh but being the leader you know being being co-founder leading the charge and and casting a vision and overseeing the vision is uh a big responsibility well that's that was the fun part yeah was okay how do you have these rather amazing people work well together over a period of time and it never changes like it's today's problem is not like yesterday's problem and it you know it keeps changing right right what was the biggest challenge you had in starting that first movie because i remember you saying it took about 14 years of time of like saying when we'll be able to actually create this animation i think it was 14 years from your prediction what was the biggest challenge in waiting that long and actually putting out the first movie with Toy Story?

5:29Well in when I when I first started it was like this was the the goal was to make a film and I naively thought that it would probably take 10 years and I very quickly with uh within a two or three years was disabused of that like that was just wrong but I didn't replace it with another estimate it's like i really didn't know so it was uh more of okay how do i think about the people how we work together and but also what are the economics of it and what are the technical problems that need to be solved because initially i thought of myself as a researcher i was thinking in terms of what are the problems that we need to solve to get there.

6:21And then while doing that, at least when I was in New York Tech, it was after I left Utah, I also found that because I was now over this group and I was kind of avoiding actually being the manager of the group, so I was trying to have it both ways. Yeah. I wanted to be the person that was solving the technical problems and I kind of like being a leader, to be honest. So I have these theories about how to manage but I also found that I liked figuring out these kinds of problems too. That is, the relationships between people and what made them work was really interesting. So I didn't have to give up one over the other.

7:13It's more like a time allocation. but i would say there was a phasing over time but i stayed pretty deeply involved in technical issues probably for the next 10 or 15 years the technical side on the technical side before launching the first film before launching well yeah before launching the first film yes and uh because we have this uh rather amazing group there uh and i I had a I worked on having a culture like it was open and we published everything we did now at this point because we're new in the industry there were some people who thought we're pretty close and I just felt like well we're not close at all so some people were secretive about their breakthroughs and I just thought well breakthroughs shmikthroughs we're years away yeah So the best thing to do was to publish everything we did and completely participate in this community.

8:23And I'll have to say that a lot of my deepest friends come out of academia. Because we go to the same conferences. We've known each other for 50 years. But by publishing everything, we also became the place to come to. So we were bringing in the best people. And then finally Star Wars happened. And when Star Wars happened, then George Lucas was the first person in the film industry with credibility who thought that technology was going to affect the industry. Like the number one. And believe me, we had tried. And to anybody else, we were utterly and completely irrelevant. it. It wasn't like they didn't think we could do it.

9:14It was, they didn't even think about it at all. So George thought it was going to be possible. So he hired me in because we had this rather amazing group. This is late seventies now? Uh, this would have been, uh, yes, late seventies. Um, because I joined Lucasfilm in 1979. Okay. And when I left New York tech, and trying to create this environment, I realized at that point that half of what I thought was, actually worked really well. It became the foundation of what we built on. And half of what I thought was a complete crock. It didn't work at all. But the most important thing for me was that when I went to Lucasfilm, I came away with the insight that about half of what I did was right and half was wrong.

10:09I was going to hang on to the things that were right, but I was going to try something new. But I believed that my ratio of right to wrong would probably remain 50-50 and would probably continue to be true for the rest of my life, which I have found to be true. And it isn't as if I have a way of keeping track. I mean, you don't really know how to put numbers to this, but it felt like the value to me was understanding that I was right, excuse me, I was wrong more than I thought I was. You were wrong what you thought, yeah. Yeah. So at Lucasfilm now, it's a new educational opportunity. And George wanted to bring technology into film editing, to digital audio, and into computer graphics.

11:07and now it's another educational opportunity because now you've got three customer groups one of whom hated what we were doing they didn't like the idea so these are the video editors now george knew video editing he's the one that wanted it but the person they put in charge of doing it thought it was a terrible idea so okay so that did not end well even though we did something which was way advanced or anything else in the industry. We didn't have a customer who wanted to use it. The digital audio, we had a guy who loved the idea and, and basically worked with this really well. But the third group was ILM and ILM was neutral.

11:57Their view was, um, well, your resolution is too low, but if you ever get to be good enough to be used in films, we'll use it. So now we're the driving force. Our goal is to meet their needs, to be good enough for what they were doing because they were the best in the industry. And if we could make them happy, then we would have succeeded. So we became the driving force, nobody else that was our motivation and so those were the kinds of lessons and the other lesson was that as a representative of the Lucasfilm I got to visit all these different companies supercomputer companies Cray, CDC companies that most people don't either haven't heard of or don't remember and also the emerging workstation companies and they wanted to sell the Lucasfilm so I could go in and talk with the leaders of the companies because they wanted to sell the Lucasfilm because Star Wars was sexy.

13:06And for lunch or for dinner, I'd meet with the engineers because they knew that I was actually a real technical person. And what I found was at every one of these visits, I got two different views of a company in the same day. and I became aware that in a lot of companies there was like a class structure not a term they would use people would never say well we're first class here there are people say we're treated second class okay but you can see this going on in companies and I remember thinking this can't be good. So as we continue to grow, and at some point we began to bring in artists, especially when we became Pixar, then the one thing that was clear to me is we needed to make sure that we didn't have a notion of first class and second class, that we really had to make sure right from the beginning that we gave the message of valuing everybody and that isn't the same thing as saying that everybody is the same yeah they're not they have different skills different capabilities and so forth but the notion that some people are better than others are different class not a good thing.

14:37So the basic principle was that you actually make the assumption that everybody can be better. Not the same, but everybody can be better. And that that is not a high-risk proposition. It is worth doing. So basically we were learning as we were going through this. And then we got to the point where George, because he got divorced and his cash position was now completely different than he needed to sell us. So this is a year-long stressful period for us. It's a very stressful period. But part of that was by this time we had reached a level of quality because we had built some hardware in order to do high quality images that that ilm was starting to use what we had and so part of the deal as we spun out was they had the rights to use the software that we had and they used it in the film i think the first major one was the abyss although we had done something earlier for them like for star trek there was that thing where you flew over the planet and it turned lifelike.

16:05So we'd done a couple of things for them, but I found somebody to help run the graphics group. We were never part of IELTS, but they needed somebody in IELTS. They started that transition to digital technology. So we were acquired by Steve Jobs. What year was this now? This would be 1986. 1986, Steve Jobs acquires you. And you'd known Steve before then. Well, I met him once, and then he just disappeared at the time we were now starting to get sold. Now, I didn't know why he disappeared. Later, of course, I learned the reason was he was in this internal struggle, which resulted in him being removed at Apple.

16:57so this was basically a public humiliation for steve and it largely had to do with the way he related with people so uh that's kind of the mythology around steve and i knew steve when he was like this that is his behavior around people was not empathetic and uh that kind of behaviors is frankly kind of it's interesting and people like to tell stories about it and write about it it's sort of like the bad boy behavior and it's unfortunate because it doesn't capture the arc of Steve's life which is far more interesting and impactful instead the focus on the outside, whether it was movies or writing about him or articles, was about a period in his life.

17:53And that was a period in which he was kicked out of Apple. He started Next Computer. And Next, he did some brilliant things, like his software choices, it turns out, were fundamentally, ultimately changed, not only Next, but later Apple. his hardware choices were questionable and he made some poor business choices sure and and choices in which he thought these were really big wins but i'm i was looking at them and thinking oh this cannot be a good idea right right right but he bought you guys he bought pixar so then Then he bought Pixar after he got them. So we knew Steve when he was like that, but we didn't have any choice.

18:43We'd been spending a year. This was an utter disaster. I mean, it's a long story itself, the things he went through. But the end result was that Steve acquired us. When he acquired you guys, were you excited or were you more nervous based on his personality from the past? Well, we were excited to keep alive and keep going. So that was the excitement part. The dream. Yes. And Steve is like, he is, I mean, for us, and very, I had a great relationship with Steve. So I think I worked for Steve longer than anybody else. Wow. And I never had an argument with Steve. Never. Never. Wow. We disagreed at times, but we never had an argument.

19:28and and what and my style with Steve was that if I didn't agree with him first of all I I knew I was self-aware enough to know that I absolutely could not think as fast as he could right he's really smart you're not gonna debate him we're not gonna jump in yeah yeah so So, I mean, there are people who actually can push back with him and argue with him successfully. So there's something that's not known about Steve, but he actually values people that push back on him. But I can't think that fast. So instead, he'd shoot down what I say, and then I would say, well, let me get back to that. And I'd wait a week.

20:13So I'd think about my next sentence. Right, for a week. For a week. And then I would give it to him and he'd shoot it down. Let me get back to you. So, this might go on for weeks, and a couple of cases went on for months. And there'd be one of three outcomes. I'd say each one was about equally likely. One of them was we reach a point when I would say, oh, I see what you're saying, you're right. And that ends it. About a third of the time, he would say, okay, got it, you're right. End of discussion. it's like you just bought what i said and that was it it just i didn't explain it very well the first time sure um and and one of the reasons i would do this is uh i never confuse the personal power that somebody might have or their position with what was right so it didn't matter if somebody was a better debater or could think faster than i could or they were in a in a senior position as I didn't mean they were right.

21:23So it just meant that I couldn't argue at the same rate. So I just didn't give up as long as I knew that I was right. And if I wasn't right, then I would change. So the other third of the time is we didn't reach a conclusion. So in that third, I just did what I wanted to do. And Steve was okay with it because we had discussed it. and that's how it worked. Oh, interesting. For all those years. How many years did you work with him?

21:59Well, he acquired us at that time. We were then a public company, so we were a public company until we were acquired by Disney, and then at Disney, the terms of it was that we had the equivalent of a board of directors. We're just now a group within Disney, and I had a dual report to Bob Iger and to the head of the studio. Wow. But we had this steering committee. So the steering committee was John, Steve, and me and then Bob Iger, the chairman of the studio and the CFO of the company. Wow. So like every month to begin with and it slowly got there. of it. But now this group would come in and they were like our board of directors.

22:50So that continued up until the end of his life. How many years total time that range is that? When you first... From 86, and I forget what year he got. Wow. Then Tanner, I think her. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Okay. So 30 something years. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. What were the three biggest lessons you learned from observing Steve jobs from communicating with him and from the way he left the world well um in the in the case of it's like one of the lessons one of them which he understood intuitively uh which was that when you're wrong you change now i mean there's different ways of phrasing and it's like that there's no upside in being wrong and some people think they need to win the argument and steve actually understood that was never the point it was you want to get to the truth quickly and but he also understood that um at an intuitive level that because of the power of his personality it actually could be the process.

24:06And that was part of his learning as he went through this was the recognizing, was him recognizing that his abilities, his like superpowers, could actually get in the way of him finding out things. So I'll give a couple examples. One of them which would surprise people was that we had a board of directors because in 1995, at the end, we went public. And this is like a big public offering. We were the second largest IPO of 1995, only after Netscape. And when did Toy Story come out? In 95. 95. So we went public one week afterwards. Wow. So when we were doing the road trip, and part of the road trip...

25:00showing the movie was well actually it wasn't showing the movie it was telling people that we had a new technology that's going to change filming so now it's a complete conference this film is going to be a big success wow but he could stay to them nobody else can do this there isn't anything like it it's going to change the industry and we've got the people that that that changed the technology and they're doing the content that's what this company is but we don't we're not going to go public until after the movie comes out because we think that we should show you how big this is wow before we go public smart so that was what we did for the few months leading up to going public you were telling a story about the story yes wow and that we were going to prove it and you guys did and we did you proved it big so what was that first week like toy story launches box office and then you go public the next week later what was that week like uh it was surreal what were the numbers of the box office and then going public is well interestingly enough what i remember at the time because our whole group at the time would go to our computer graphics conference which is SIGGRAPH.

26:20And for the most part, it's showing the newest technology. And we believe firmly, because we made short films and they were actually, you know, Academy Award winning short films and they're quite impactful, but they're short. And people would always pay attention on the outside to the technology. so when the film came out the biggest question that we had and everybody was looking for it and all the technology people were looking for it was what are the reviewers going to pay attention to and what we found was that almost every review there was at most one or two sentences about the new technology, and the rest of the review was about the movie.

27:17Wow. And that, for all of us, was like, that's the win. It wasn't about the technology. It was about being a great movie. Yes. And if we had done that, and we got people to buy into this world and watch it and feel it, then that was the win. And everybody understood it at every level in the company. Wow. So that's what I remember with reading those things to find out whether or not we had really accomplished what we wanted to do. It's incredible. I mean, what I'm curious about is how were you able to tap into the human mind and create emotional connections with audiences through these animations?

28:02How was this studied and executed for the last 30 years at such a high level? And how did you do that for that first movie? Well, I will say that for the first movie, there was, it's one of those things where there is some luck in that group that first came in. We had always, in the history of both at New York Tech and then at Lucasfilm and then at Pixar, was to say we really want to hire the very best. And so I would say, well, we want to hire people who are smarter than I am. and I know other people say that because what does that even mean? But it means that you don't want to be threatened by the people that you hire and they just have to have these extraordinary skills.

28:57And so when we were building out our technical group, they were just really good. They had passed me in terms of their understanding of all the technology. And John understood that too. So when he did his first hires, the first person he hired was Andrew Stanton. And then the second was Pete Docter. And then Joe Ranf came in and then was brought in really to be an editor, except he turns out to have been, like one of the best storytellers ever is Lee Unkrich. so uh this is this amazing group of people that came together and uh now part of it was we really had established a culture where that this was the right thing to do is you aren't bringing in you weren't even thinking about them as okay who's going to be second to me it's like okay who was really good.

30:01And it turns out that Andrew had this extraordinarily structural sense. We didn't know that. It emerged because of the challenge. And Pete Docter had this incredible emotional core. And still does. So he went on to do Up, Inside, Out. It's like getting the emotion right it's like who he is and uh lee has this uh actually phenomenal filmmaking sense of okay we're doing this but you really have to get all these pieces right and then the the the person that was sharon callahan initially who was uh thinking about the lighting and people aren't often aware of this but the lighting uh is really important for conveying the emotions and then the artist that we had ralph eggestin had a color palette for the movie because it turns out the basic color changed throughout the movie and it's this subtle thing that's affecting your perceptions.

31:19Wow. So, like, this is this amazing group of people. And the interesting thing about it was that none of these people had ever made a feature film before in their life. Oh, my goodness. So, we hadn't used computer graphics, but they also hadn't done a 2D film. They hadn't done any film. It's unbelievable. Everybody is a beginner. They all had to figure it out. and you're leading them. Yeah. I mean, how do you know? I mean, yeah, the emotional, the emotions you're able to pull out of people, you know, in these films, through, you're a technology guy, but through the tech, through the art, through the color, through the lighting, through the sound design and the music, through the tonality of the voice actors, and bringing it all together to create a cohesive emotional story is unbelievable how you guys do this and i'll continue to do it but how did you know how to put it all together well i i mean the way i thought at the time was is how do you have a group that works together because i'm not a filmmaker and i i would you know over time we developed a way of of helping people was which ended up being called the brain trust but my view was when I went to these meetings was how do we make sure this group works together like what are the things that make it work together what takes them off the rails so as to work out some some principles for that and it's fun to give notes to movie but the truth was there's only one movie in all those movies that I gave a note that I felt so strongly about that i had to push really hard to get it in there what was that it was in monsters incorporated what was the note well the note was at one point near the end the monster sully has to scare this dummy which is being video that's like a training video and uh you may recall that when he does this he then looks up and he sees that the girl's right there and he scares the bejesus out of this little girl the one he loves and he didn't mean to do it but the original thing what she saw was that she saw him on the monitor so i looked at this and i said you can't do this because anybody that has a child remembers there are times when they may have done something that where their child was was in danger, either because of themselves or it happened to them.

34:12And when that happens, it sears into your soul and you never forget it for as long as you live. And for Sully, he needs to see that he was the cause of the thing that scared her, that it was not good enough to have her see it by the monitor. And so there's some pushback on it. And, you know, I tried to talk with Andrew, and for Anderson to know this is actually critical to the film. I just felt, oh, good. But that's it. Right. And so I could look and say, well, I did one at least. One note in 30 movies, yeah, yeah. But that wasn't my job. Yeah. They're the filmmakers. It wasn't my job. It was to say, okay, is this working well together?

35:04Why is it derailing? when does it go well when doesn't it go well and so that was the whole time and then when jim morris came in initially over uh he came as producer and then he was our head of production then he was our general manager and then he became the president uh it was like we're both like you know we're in there just looking at the process and what works what doesn't work right you just evolving right so for time i mean it's you got pretty animated during this uh retelling a story with Monsters, Inc., what movie left you with the deepest amount of emotion when you watched it after it came out or in the process of making it?

35:46What was the movie that captivated you the most? I'm sure it's hard to say which one you liked the most, but was there a moment in a movie that really touched you in a way based on your own life experience different than the other emotional moments in movies well it was um uh it's a little hard to say because the any emotion in a movie connects to watching the people go through this so i don't i can't even watch a movie in the same way that others do because i'm actually seeing what took place the creators the producers the Everything leading up to me, yeah. I mean, they're just, you know, these fellows all at the beginning have problems.

36:33It's just one thing after another. And we go through multiple steps with different ways of trying to fix the problems. And, in fact, it was one of the things I wanted to clarify with the expanded edition of the book was that uh you know i i talked a fair amount about um you know failure and how it is part of the process but i realized that we it doesn't actually capture what takes place because we all know that we learn from failures and it's in fact failure is kind of popular talking about nowadays about a way of learning the reality is is that we have two meanings to failure which are deeply built into us so there's one meaning which is that we know that we've had failures and we learn from them and it's part of the process of learning the other meaning is the one that we got in school and that is if you fail a class it's because you screwed up you didn't work hard enough uh or you're dumb right none of those are good meanings right all right now you you go out into business bridges fail relationships fail companies fail and in politics and business failures are used as bludgeons with which to beat opponents.

38:09There is real and palpable fear behind failure. All right, so if we talk about failure, then it is almost possible for most people to emotionally disconnect those two concepts. And so I realized that that's what I observed, that at Pixar, while we also say that failure is part of the process, it does happen. Yes. We don't actually use the terminology very much. Now, there are times when you have something which actually does fail, so we don't avoid it. You have to, like, if something really fails, you say it. But the terminology of making a film is, since we know they all have problems, is we're trying to solve the problem.

39:02Hmm. hmm, that solution didn't work, let's try this. So the iterative process is, we're trying it, let's try this. And as long as the team is working well together, even if they haven't solved the problem, if they're working well together, we say, okay, keep going, it's a tough problem. And they know that. They know we have their back. and uh and the only thing that the only real clue we have that we have to do a major change is if the crew begins to lose the confidence that a leader can actually get them there they may like the leader this is not uh you know i like i you know i don't like them it's it's more like I just don't have the confidence we're going to get there.