One of the joys of print is that it's easier to stumble upon the gems you were meant to read instead of the articles that initially drew you. So it was that I skimmed into "Second Act Twist" (New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2011), a profile of Pixar director Andrew Stanton's latest directing endeavor, John Carter of Mars. It went from being a creator profile into becoming a primer on creating. The director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E is hardcore on expunging "lazy thinking," revising (scenes in previous films are discussed as why they worked & didn't), failing early (just dive in & "be wrong fast." You can fix it on the second draft, but you've got to have a first draft before you can fix it.) and a striving of artistic perfection ("Any scene that's an eight he'll tear up to try to make it a ten.", "What makes me care?")
More importantly, little throwaways were keepers. He keeps storytelling index-card
Inevitable but not predictable. reminders on bookshelves stating:
- Inevitable but not predictable.
- Conflict + contradiction.
- How they choose is who they are.
Every one of those is vital if you're telling a story with believable characters.
Finally (and there's more worth gleaning), he re-reread Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing, which emphasizes distilling stories to "one
crisp sentence before making them. For Finding Nemo it was "Fear denies a good father from being one," and, for Wall-E "Love conquers all programming."
All keepers as I continue to create. And yet another reason to check a pile of print culture from your library and skim anything that looks interesting. Soon enough something you didn't expect will hook you into better storytelling.
I'm not a huge fan of animated films, but I do like Stanton's! The stories transcend the genre. I didn't think Monsters, Ink would hold any appeal, yet within moments of the beginning, I was hooked and utterly captivated! Interesting trivia: my cousin and Andrew Stanton played together as children!
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