Interview One

1 Pretty much as soon as you took over at Disney, you changed the
2 name of the studio.
3 Yes, from ‘Disney Feature Animation’ back to ‘Walt Disney
4 Animation Studios’, as it was when Walt made his films. Even the
5 Mickey Mouse on the letterhead is from the original studio’s
6 letterhead.

7 Is that to remind everyone of the heritage of the studio?

8 It’s the heritage but also it’s saying we’ve gotta make movies that
9 are at this level. You know Walt Disney’s name is not only on the
10 studio, but on every film up there and I take great responsibility in
11 that.

12 Have you made a lot of changes at the studio already?

13 I just wanted to make this place a filmmaker-led studio. It was an
14 executive-led studio, with movie ideas based upon marketing and,
15 you know, toys, and all sorts of stuff.
16 Directors were worrying about how to address the notes from
17 executives rather than thinking about the audience. We’ve got rid
18 of all that now.

19 Arguably the first signs of change came with Bolt, which

20 seemed to indicate some smarter decisions with character and
21 plot.
22 Well, that is the beauty of our methodology. We do the storyboards
23 and then the story reels1 and we can work and rework, and rework
24 the movie.
25 I’ll never let anything go into production that isn’t already working
26 well in the story reel. Because no amount of great animation will
27 save a bad story.
28 How did Toy Story come about?
29 Steve Jobs was talking to Disney – saying that we were interested
30 in doing an animated feature for them. In the beginning, though,
31 they said no.
32 It was Tim Burton who opened that door for us, really. He was
33 trying to get The Nightmare before Christmas back from Disney.
34 But then they said, ‘Why don’t you just do it for us?’ and that kind
35 of gave them the idea that, okay, they could have the Disney
36 animated films - which were kind of the crown jewels of all
37 animated films - being done by other people.
38 So they finally came back to us, came to Steve, and said, 'We’re
30 interested in talking to you.'

31 Did you already have the idea for Toy Story fairly fleshed out?
32 We actually made a list of what we wanted our movie not to be. We
33 didn’t want it to be a musical; we didn’t want it to have like a good
34 guy and a bad guy, and you know, sidekicks and all that stuff.
35 Because that was all Disney's thing.
36 So we started to look at different kinds of film genres and we
37 landed upon the buddy picture. We loved The Odd Couple and The
38 Defiant Ones, and Midnight Run.
39 And we thought that could be really big because we were
40 developing the toy idea, so we hit upon this buddy picture concept
41 of an old toy that’s a child’s favourite, and a child’s birthday gift –
42 a new, real flashy, modern toy that becomes the new favourite, and
43 how the old toy deals with that. So that became the essence of Toy
44 Story.

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Interview Two

1 Can we move on to the question of “endings”? Perhaps novels are

2 never really finished – just abandoned, to misquote Valéry. Why the
3 predilection for open endings? And do you contemplate the
4 possibility of a reversion towards closure in any future novel?
5 Well, endings are clearly very important because in so far as a novel is
6 saying something in general about life through a story, then how it ends
7 is going to determine the ultimate impact it's going to make. When I'm
8 writing a novel I more and more think of the process being not just
9 verbal – a matter of merely finding the right words – because in a way
10 the process is much more than that...one is practising a rather God-like
11 activity, creating people who weren't there before, putting them in
12 motion, deciding how their various interweaving fortunes are going to
13 turn out. Every decision one makes carries some kind of philosophical
14 or moral implication…

15 “One does not kill off characters lightly, I assure you...”

16 Exactly. And how one ends the reader's experience of those fictional
17 fortunes is obviously important. I almost never know how a novel is
18 going to end because that is part of what I'm trying to discover, really.
19 If I had a novel completely mapped out in my head I think I'd lose
20 interest: writing it would just become hard labour. I like the experience
21 of reaching unpredictable conclusions. But there comes a point when
22 one has to make up one's mind what's going to happen. And I suppose
23 it goes with modern scepticism about solutions to questions; modern
24 literature, on the whole, doesn't present us with resolved endings...I
25 suppose you could say that I'm doing the same thing as I do in relation
26 to realism and breaking my realism: my novels tend to raise the
27 possibility of a neat, closed ending, but then maybe disperse it.
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