Pete Docter Quotes

The picture's over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!

I like working intensely, then going away and thinking about it, working out why it didn't work and then coming back to it. It makes the work richer, I think.

The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.

I carry a disposable camera. It takes me back to my childhood, when you had to develop your film and wait to see what pictures you got.

I mean, making simulations of what you're going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you've gone wrong and what you can do about it.

Well, there are three different processes of making a film, of course. They're sort of re-written three times. You write it to start with, and then you shoot it and you re-write it while shooting and you sort of re-write it as you edit.

I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.

There's something magical still about it when I get in a darkroom, and you've shot a roll of film and you develop it and you look at your negatives, and there's, like, imagery there. That always stuns me.

All my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.

A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don't. We ask what is working and what isn't. So it's not as if I'm shutting out input.

After I finish any film, I move to the next one. It takes about a year to write and another six months are for pre-production and other things. You need a minimum of two-and-a-half months for the shooting of a new film. Then, I also edit my own film.

Young photographers must experiment all the time and not be frightened of using light - freely-shooting straight into the light if need be - making an effort to get new angles on much photographed subjects, and also discovering chemical properties of film itself.

One of our big tools is screening. We screen usually 12 times, which is much more than most filmmakers do, and we recut in between each one, because we really need to feel how the audience is reacting to the movie.

The writer is just so much more intimately involved in the television process than the feature film process.

My two bits here are that writing is a solitary job but there are times when one needs to discuss the work, and see what's working and what's not.

I'm not accustomed to doing films without seeing the script. There are certain people that are auteurs, and you accept them regardless of whether you see a script or not. But Spielberg is not an auteur.

There's a certain time in the core of making a movie from pre-production to halfway through post-production I don't read any project, my agent will tell people that "he's not reading." And then when I know how the movie's probably gonna work halfway into post-production, I'll come along.

Sometimes I go to a test screening and look at the audience in line, and I start to go, "Okay, I bet this is going to work, and this isn't going to work." It's weird, but just going and facing the music and putting it out before a crowd, even before it starts playing, that exercise of putting it up on a screen for people makes you realize things even before it starts rolling. It's really weird. I've heard other people say that, too.

Often with film, I find that you're just really getting to know a person. They're just starting to sink in, and then you wrap the film.

If I'm able to catch the screening, there's a point in the film where, like clockwork, a portion of the audience gets really emotional and begins to cry. And that's very difficult to make happen.

There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script and then you cut that and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

I was not, and am not, officially a producer of that film [I am love] but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage and to a certain extent I've been a producer ever since.

The cinema is death at work.

When I started in film, I was living and working in Asia, and when we did films there, it was so fast. It was much like TV.