Edwin Catmull Quotes

It's hard to write new stuff when the songs you have written before are still changing and evolving. It would be like building something when the foundations there are not really solid.

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

I talk to all the creative directors today, and they take me aside, and they say, 'You know, it must have been great back in those days when you could do anything you wanted.' I say, 'Huh? Excuse me?' I mean, we fought. In the '60s and '70s, you fought wars with clients, and you have to continue fighting wars to do great work.

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

One must always attempt to make good films, even if you fail it is ok. It is a journey, you have both good and bad days.

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

It's not fair to use movies that weren't creatively successful as a reason why something won't work.

This amateurism however, can sometimes be helpful in forging a style; you have to work around your weaknesses.

Oftentimes the shows that don't work help you get it right.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I always think that you finish one movie, you start a new one, and you think, 'OK. I did that last one. Now I've learned. I know how this works.' Then by the end of the movie, you think, 'No, I don't, really.'

Going into my second film as a director, it's night and day of what it was like going into my first film. It doesn't matter what you know in your head and what you've been taught until you're there and doing it; it's a whole new ball game.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

You're only as good as your body of work, and everybody has issues, whether it's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. I'm not comparing myself to those guys, but you learn more from the misses than the hits.

I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.

Also, I plan to screw something up on every movie I do so that I can learn from my mistakes and become a better director with each project.

Most people don't really understand what it takes to get a film made, and the struggles .I think anyone who makes a film goes through their own set of struggles.

'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.

Everyone starts out desperately trying to make a hit, but some people are just more mistake-prone than others. I happened to be fairly mistake-prone. Of the 40 shows I made, I'd say ten were hits, which is a pretty good average.

I think everything that you do, you're learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that's one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking.

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.

Every movie goes through that U-shape where you start with 'Oh that's a great idea. I love it.' Everything's possible and then you face 'Oh, we can't do that, and that's impossible, and that's a bad choice.' You go the practicality of it. And then you come up to 'Great.' But that middle part is when you don't have results yet.

I know as a director I hit it out of the park sometimes, and sometimes we haven't, and that's kind of the way art goes. You just have to be willing to take the 'failures' and learn from them, make the best of them.

I learn from every movie I do because on every movie I have a different experience.

I enjoyed making this album a lot because of the knowledge we acquired over the last 3 years.