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" After Pixar's 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization. "

Ed Catmull

Creative

Success

Thinking

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" Believe me, sequels are just as hard to make as original films. "

" We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film. "

" The desire to avoid meltdowns actually is one of the things that screws up live-action films. "

" Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it. "

" If something works, you shouldn't do it again. We want to do something that is new, original - something where there's a good chance of failure. "

" Communication needs to be between anybody at any time, which means it needs to happen out of the structure and out of order. "

" The need to challenge the status quo is just more obvious when you're failing than when you're succeeding. But it's no less urgent. "

Ed Catmull

Challenge

Need

" The problem is some of our riskier films just don't make as much money. But if you only make films that will just be commercially successful, then you can also sink yourself as a studio. "

" If you put out 20 films, you hope that a number are successful. It's like human reproduction versus frog reproduction. Frogs produce thousands and hope a few succeed. Humans don't produce many babies but put a lot of energy into them, which is kind of where we are. They still don't always succeed, but you try a lot harder. "

" It doesn't even matter how successful a movie like 'Up' is: you'll never sell a lot of toy walkers. But that's the way we spread out the risk. "

Ed Catmull

You

Way

" I did like 'Despicable Me.' I thought it was quite good. "

Ed Catmull

Despicable

Did

" The trick is, in everything we do, there are things we love. And sometimes the things we love get us stuck. And it's only if we let go of some of those things that we free the movie up to become greater. "

Ed Catmull

Love

Everything

" Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world. "

" Lucasfilm has always had an openness to technology. "

" I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do. "

" We have a whole industry which is gigantic: games. Games is very successful. It's its own art form, though, and it's not the same as a linear narrative. "

" I liked the first 'Kung Fu Panda.' "

" When I was young, it was television that was taking off, and so you had people worried that people were spending too much time watching television. "

" If you're a director presenting a new idea, and the person who can judge whether or not it goes ahead is in the room, that makes you somewhat defensive. "

" One term that's used in this industry a lot is this notion of 'feeding the beast.' You've got all of these people whose livelihoods are dependent on it. There are enormous pressures to keep material going into it, and the pressures to feed it are not irrational. They're the basis of your business. "

" When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough. "

" What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies. "

" The skill of a good creative leader is being comfortable with blowing up an idea and knowing it will get better. "

" We need to remember we're always a lot more wrong than we think. "

" Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. "

" A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They're in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. "

" When I see a film, I'll remember that there was a time when it wasn't working, and there was some pain and angst in order to get it to work. "

" I started off life at Pixar with interesting technical problems. But as time has moved on, I found that the social and management problem was far more complex and interesting. "

" Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck... our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck. That's the hard part. "

" At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire. "