Lee Unkrich
Do you ever achieve total forgiveness after screwing up?Collection: Forgiveness
We all, to some degree, wish we could have some element of our childhood back again while, for kids, moving on is something they're worried about. They know it's going to happen at some point.Collection: Moving
I love Giuseppe Tornatore, the guy that did 'Cinema Paradiso.'
When people think of Mexican music, they most often think of mariachi, and that, of course, is one part.
Live action movies are someone else's story. With animation, audiences can't think that. Their guards are down.
It's an incredible honor to be nominated by the Academy.
We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.
If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.
I'm lucky to be surrounded by incredibly talented people at Pixar, of course, and I learn a lot from them each and every day.
How about a good comedy? 'Raising Arizona.' Remains the funniest movie I've ever seen in my life.
It wasn't the first film to show a kind of alternate vision of suburbia, but it left an indelible impression, I think, on everybody, and all films like that will forever be measured against 'Blue Velvet.'
My favorite film is 'The Shining,' mostly because it was the film that inspired me to become a filmmaker myself.
Every one of us at Pixar is worried that we're going to be the one to make the dud.
After we finished 'Toy Story 2,' we talked about going right into making 'Toy Story 3,' because we had an idea that we thought had some promise. But there were a bunch of boring contractual problems going on between Disney and Pixar at the time that kept us from making the movie.
Going through the Chagrin Falls school system, I always thought I was going off to art school.
I guess it's the fear of failure and not knowing how the films are going to do that just drives us to work really hard to make them the best they can possibly be.
For anyone who's had a transition in their life - heading off to college, parents sending their kids off to college, people getting out of college and heading off into the workforce. Those are major transitions.
I looked long and hard at third films in series to see if there were any good ones that I could learn from. And there weren't any that hadn't just gone off the train tracks by their third film. Until, that is, I got to the third 'Lord of the Rings' film.
It is shocking how much a day-care center is like a prison. They both have security cameras with walled exercise yards. Prisons are permanent day cares for people permanently in time-out - convicts.
Finding a good kid actor is like finding a needle in a massive haystack.
For 'Toy Story 3' to be recognized by the Academy as not only one of the best animated films of the year, but also as one of the 10 best pictures of the year, is both humbling and overwhelming.
The best way to bring people in and have them empathize with others is through storytelling.
The walls between live-action and animation are becoming really porous, and it's interesting.
I really personalized the pressure to make a good 'Toy Story' film. It made me physically sick at the beginning. Literally, I wanted to throw up in the morning because I was just so racked with stress.
One of the tricky things with animation is, because we spend four years on the movie and everything is done so methodically day by day by day, it can be a struggle to have the finished film feel spontaneous and loose and naturally occurring.
I love movies that are funny and scary and truly emotional all in one film, and I don't feel like I see movies like that a lot.
'Coco' is shaping up to be one of the most beautiful films we've made.
I saw a lot of movies that I probably shouldn't have seen. I saw 'Dog Day Afternoon' when I was in first grade - that kind of thing.
I ended up being exposed to cinema that a lot of other kids wouldn't have been exposed to.
When I was around 12 or so, I saw 'The Shining.' I just remember that being a turning point for me, where I started to think about the fact that there was a hand behind the film. That it wasn't just this magical story being told - there were actual people crafting these films, and they were works of art.
Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.
When you think about it, the most important thing to a toy is to be played with by a child, and anything that keeps them from being played with gives them stress - things like getting lost, getting broken.
We know that families and kids are going to be an important part of our audience, so we've always made sure that we've picked subject matter that was appropriate for kids. But I think if you try to target a movie to kids, you're going to fail.
Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.
We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.
We try our best every time to make engaging films that we're interested in, and we just hope the rest of the world likes them.
I never wanted 'Toy Story 3' to feel like another sequel just grafted on. We all know that if you put 3 after your title, it typically means garbage, and we knew that going in.
The only reason we made 'Toy Story 2' is that we happened to come up with a storyline that was really good. It wasn't driven by wanting to make a sequel.
Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'
In the earliest days of Pixar, when we were making 'Toy Story' and 'A Bug's Life,' we all came together as a group.
I didn't want to be the guy who screwed up 'Toy Story.'
I grew up loving watching movies, and at a certain point, I started to become fascinated with making movies. Then I went to film school, and I got to dabble with different aspects of moviemaking, and I ended up settling heavily into editing - editing was what I was really adept at, had a passion for.
I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.
I'd really love to watch David Lynch work, to be a fly on the wall.
Any of us directing at Pixar, whether it's our first time or not, feel a lot of pressure to not make a bad Pixar film.
People loved the first two 'Toy Story' films so much, and the last thing I wanted to do was make a disappointing third film.
With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.
If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.
It's a strange business, and unfortunately, what we do in animation is a mystery, especially the directors.
The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.