I recently had the pleasure of taking part in a round table interview with Director Pete Doctor and Producer Jonas Rivera on their latest Disney/Pixar film “Inside Out”. These were my questions for the dynamic duo.
How was the concept of the film born?
Pete: It sort of was born by thinking about emotions as characters and I knew that there had been movies that took place inside of the human body. I was just doing a mind exercise like what would be fun to play with and emotions seemed like right what animation does best which is strong opinionated caricature personalities. It was about that time that my daughter was eleven and she was going through a big kind of change as most kids do, from playing on the ground with dolls to being more quiet. That change made me wonder like what is going on in her head and made me want to explore that a little bit.
Jonas: It was an easy thing for me to hook into as a parent and when he pitched it to me I thought this is a really great opportunity and a great arena to try and develop a movie into. It felt like something familiar but foreign at the same time. It felt like a great opportunity visually and narratively.
In the “Special thanks” section you had mentioned a couple of doctors, how did they help guide you through the making of the film?
Jonas: Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Dacher Keltner who are both well respected scientists and phycologists and so we started there and they were really helpful.
Pete: When I first pitched the idea the basic pitch was like this eleven year old girl she’s the setting and in her head are these emotions. I had optimism, anger, fear and some other ones. I didn’t really even know what emotions were and how many and what their jobs were and of course optimism isn’t even a human emotion as I found out later but I had a basic concept of her and it was really talking to those guys that the emotions were defined more fully. Now the interesting thing is that there is no scientific consensus, there is no kind of agreement that there are six emotions. Some people say there are twenty seven, others I think like the University of Glasgow has reduced it to three. It really depends on what your looking for and how you define it.
Jonas: Which we joke like…okay that means we’re right. (Laughs)
Pete: We arrived at five largely because I mean I think from an entertainment stand point you want a large enough group to have some diverging opinions on things but not so big that your like wait who’s that again? You couldn’t quite track it when it got much more than the five. We tried a bunch of different stuff and other characters and plots that we would test out and abandon. Those guys really helped a lot even down to the writing like what do these emotions do? What is their sort of uber goal? And you always try to have that for any character weather their emotions or not. What are they craving, what do they need?
I noticed that you used the “Grimm Grinning Ghosts” tune for the nightmare scene and I was wondering if there are any other hidden “Easter eggs” in the film that you could share with us?
Jonas: I don’t know if your a fan of Disney World but there’s a shot in which Bing Bong which is the sort of imaginary is in “Imagination Land” and we had a a pile of things that Riley had outgrown and if you look close there’s a beautiful framed picture of Figment from Epcot’s “Jorney Into Imagination”. Of course the Pizza Planet truck shows up in three different places and is very well disguised. A113 which is the classroom at California Arts institute. We also have the tribute to the upcoming film which is a dinosaur. It was so funny, we were somewhere and they were showing us all the clips of all the scenes with the Pizza Planet trucks were and there was this shot in “Nemo” where the characters were in the bags and they were rolling across the street and a Pizza Planet truck went by and they freeze framed it for us and nobody had called this out but I knew it because I was working on Cars at the time and behind the Pizza Planet truck it was Louigi! Nobody even knew about that one. It was just so cool!
Inside Out in theaters June 19th!
