Pete Docter Quotes

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.

It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.

If you would ask me what my ideal process is, I would say, long pre-production, long production and long post-production.

I was totally involved in Bobby's World from the time we started the idea to sitting with the artists on how he would look, to the script meetings, the music, the lyrics, the songs.

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

'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 a process in the movie industry in both live action and animation called development hell!

A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.

'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.

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

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

A live action movie is work, and an animated movie is you showing up in your pajamas once every three months, or in my case, just a splash of baby powder. It's not any kind of heavy lifting.

For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time.

I don't do storyboarding, ever; I'm not interested in that.

I had always loved cartoons, especially 'Bugs Bunny,' and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.

I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

Pre-production and post-production is something that I've never been exposed to. I was pleasantly surprised that you could accomplish a lot during pre-production.

When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.

I have a notebook, and I know what decisions will be made in pre-production. Everything is pre-determined in the pre-production period. I visually design the whole thing, and I know when things will happen.

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

I've grown up around cinema. Michael Kamen was a very, very close friend of mine, sort of my godfather. So I know how much work goes into it. You have to know what you're doing.

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

Inherently, making a movie is tough because there's so much anticipation when it happens - even if everything goes well.

The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.