Jim Morris is a very important man in the world of entertainment. As the President of Pixar Animation Studios, he oversees the production of the studio's features, shorts, DVD content - and even their theme park activities.
Over in Ireland for the VFX and Animation Summit, he took some time out to talk to TEN about Pixar's latest release, The Good Dinosaur, and the hotly-anticipated Toy Story 4.
John Byrne: There was a major false start with The Good Dinosaur as – for the first time in Pixar's history – you shut down a production and started again from scratch. Can you tell us about that?
Jim Morris: It took us a while! It didn't always work. These are fairly collaborative efforts. The original idea, we all thought, was a great one. We knew that there were some story issues, and we figured that we'd be able to figure out solutions to them.
But in the original incarnation we just had a couple of things that we just weren't able to fix. Usually we find a way, but this was one time we needed to go back to the drawing board, because we liked some of the stuff and the characters - but the story-line is totally different to what the film is now.
The film's got a great opening proposition: what if the meteor that caused the extinction of dinosaurs missed the Earth entirely and they remained the dominant species?
It's a little fable-like, I guess, at some level, with the dinosaurs surviving. It felt right. We did a research trip to where the dinosaurs were, in Wyoming and Montana, in the States, and that's the landscapes. The landscapes you see are the landscapes where those dinosaurs lived.
That's where the dinosaur bones and deposits are. And so the inspiration and flavour of the film, the western feeling to it, is drawn from that, because that's kind of the reality of where they were.
It's quite a scary and dark film. Isn't that a little unusual for Pixar?
I think on some level it's our edgiest film, and maybe our scariest film. It's a survival film, really. And if you look at the two main characters, they're young characters and you might think, maybe it's a younger film. But it's probably our most intense film on some level, because it's about these two characters trying to survive a very beautiful but 'sort of fierce' nature. I see it as a kind of prehistoric/buddy/ road survival movie.
This is a big year for Pixar with two cinema releases [Inside Out was a big summer hit]. Was that intentional?
No. We've had the intention for some time of releasing two movies every other year but, in all honesty, we had two this year because The Good Dinosaur was supposed to come out last year. But we did a re-start on it, and we didn't have a release last calendar year, so we ended up with two this year.
But going forward, we are planning to have two per year and it looks like we're in pretty good shape to do that. Hopefully we don't run into story issues that are unsolvable - it happens.
I was in Aardman Studios – the home of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and more - a few years ago, and the dedication and love people there have for their work really shines through. I'd imagine it's a similar story at Pixar?
Everybody feels very proprietary about the work and when we have screenings for the films and so forth, we invite all of the studio in to see it and we have them send in their notes and so on, to see if there are threads about what people are thinking.
They take a high degree of ownership, even the baristas in the café! We never have security leaks out of Pixar because everybody's so passionate about keeping the stories and so forth, and information about the company.
After endless rumours, Toy Story 4 is on the way. Can you tell us a bit about that?
We were so happy with Toy Story 1, 2 and 3 as a trilogy, we thought: don't touch it. Walk away. And John Lassiter, Andrew Stanton and the creative leaders of the company agreed - we made a pinky swear (he refers to an American kiddies' secrecy pact done with the 'pinky,' or little finger) - that they wouldn't touch it unless they had an idea that they all just loved and believed in it so much that they wanted to do it.
Andrew primarily came up with the story and then flushed it out with John. It's in the same world, with the same characters, but it's not really an extension . . . I just call it a new chapter. That was the Andy story. Andy's gone. And this new chapter is a love story, and it's a love story between Woody and Bo Peep. It's kind of their next chapter now that Andy's gone. You know, what do the toys do when their original owner's gone away? How do they continue on? And it's very sweet and emotional, and it's a little bit different . . .
I think people would trust Pixar not to go back there unless there was a very good creative reason.
John got very excited about this idea, and Toy Story was originally his idea - John Lassiter's idea. And he's so excited he's directing this one, which is a huge difficulty for us because he oversees Pixar, he oversees Walt Disney Studios, Disney Toon Studios. And he has this fantastic ability to do that and really help elevate all these films in these studios.
But he likes to direct too, and I think there's something about keeping his toes in the water that actually makes him better overseeing those other films too. So, we're working it out. We had to do the same for Cars 2 - that was a film he wanted to make.
John Byrne
The Good Dinosaur is on general release. Read our review here.
