Interview (Written): Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera (“Inside Out”)
An Empire Online interview with Inside Out’s Pete Docter (co-writer / co-director) and Jonas Rivera (producer). First, excerpts from Docter:
How did you pitch the story?
Kind of the way we’ve been asked to work is to pitch three ideas, and that way we can kind of play around and cross-pollinate and see if something sparks over here. We’d done that, and then this one came to me after that, and I knew it was it. Scrape everything else off. I was able to convince John of that as well, so it’s a little unorthodox, but there are no rules.
There’s a trend at the moment towards female protagonists who aren’t defined by their relationship to men. Is that the case here?
Absolutely. That’s not part of my daughter’s story, it wasn’t really part of my story growing up, so this story is about growing up and getting old and what it is to leave childhood, and other things that are different from that. And as we did our research, psychologists told us that there is no one on Earth that is more emotionally attuned to other people than a 12–16-year-old girl. So we knew we were in the right territory.
— —
What was the thought process behind the genders of the emotions?
Again, it was intuitive. It felt to me like Anger’s very masculine, I don’t know why. And then some of it came to casting… Sadness felt a little more feminine and Mindy Kahling as Disgust felt right. And someone balanced too. Plus the female roles lead because it’s inside a girl. With mom and dad, we skewed them all male and all female for a quick read, because you have to understand where we are, which is a little phony but hopefully people don’t mind!
How do you juggle the story inside and outside the mind?
The difficult thing on this one was not only did we have to chart the story, but there are two stories going on at the same time — the outside story with Riley and then the inside story with Joy. What she does affects the human, and what Riley does affects Joy. But the human doesn’t know about Joy; she’s just going through her life. I’m not sure we’ve 100 percent solved it yet, but that’s been the challenge, having two stories that affect each other.
Next, excerpts from Rivera:
When did you agree on this idea?
Towards the end of Up we started kicking around ideas, and Pete has a few that he’s been playing with for years and years. We threw our hat in the ring with John Lasseter to go around again, because I think we’re a good team. We pitched a few and this was last, and John said, ‘That’s the one’. It’s a very simple concept and John went right for it. We went away and spent a couple of months putting together a more detailed pitch and presented it to a bigger group including Andrew and Brad (Bird). Brad said, “It’s a great idea… Good luck!” in a way that made it sound like the movie would be a huge challenge. And he was right, because it took a while to go from a good idea to an actual movie. Pete had an idea about his daughter and what’s in her head and what if we talked about her ideas. John liked the idea of that world, to go somewhere everybody has thought about, and things such as losing your train of thought — what if we showed how you forget something?
— —
So Pete’s daughter was the inspiration?
Pete, like a lot of artists, takes inspiration from his life. John always tells us to make films that you would want to take your family to see, so Pete has gone further and takes inspiration from them. And it is this truth for every parent. My kids are small and my daughter just graduated from kindergarten. I almost freaked out that she’ll never do that again, that’s it. So when you watch the kids grow up, you feel this helplessness that you can’t stop time and you wouldn’t want to, but that’s where joy is. We started off making a movie about our kids and as Pete said, we made it about us, our selfish wish to freeze time, which we can’t do. We have a lot of reference on how our kids behave!
For the rest of the interview, go here.