John Lasseter Quotes

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

'Alice' took over two years to make and took a great deal of planning, obviously much more than usual. We spent so much more time prepping the film, and that was unique for us.

Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.

Mr. Disney and his staff were constantly scouting for great stories to bring to life on film.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.

'Ice Age' felt like stage acting. You'd write a sequence, and sometimes you'd submit pages, but other times, I would actually perform it for the directors and producer in my office.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

I actually think storyboards are great. I don't draw well enough to do them myself. I've only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in 'Margaret': one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.

The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.

The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.

I haven't thought about getting into production. I'm interested in the creative aspect of storytelling.

You can't, no matter what anyone says, build a movie around someone.

With me, I probably work a lot more than people assume I do, but people don't realize how much work goes into writing and producing and making a movie.

Actually, no, but I am close to the people who are working on Chicken Little, and I'm very close to the people over at Pixar. I mean, as far as stories are concerned, almost everything we have could be told that way.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

I love all kinds of movies. I'd especially like to make some, you know, violent crime drama.

I like pre-production and post the best. I don't like shooting at all. I find it grueling and tough, but I love post and the whole process of seeing the film finally come together. You start ironing out all the rough spots, and the really bad bits you just throw away. So from day one of post to the last day, you see nothing but improvements.

'Shadow Hero' was a dream to work on.

More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.

I worked in the story department for years on 'Cars' and 'Toy Story 3.'

Making a movie is a lot of problem solving.

There are so many decisions in making a movie.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.