The Importance of Play to Creativity

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”
Andrew Stanton

“Every time I’d have to show Up! to John Lasseter or Andrew Stanton, I would hate it because I just want to be left alone and make the movie. And yet when once I do show it to them, it made it so much better, especially hearing their comments. They’re great filmmakers themselves, and we have this great system at Pixar where we show each other our work about every four or five months and get feedback from all those guys. They’re such amazing filmmakers. To get comments from them is fantastic.” Peter Docter
” It’s very supportive, although it’s not always easy, because we’re all very honest with each other with constructive criticism. It’s like we’re all on the same team, and if the whole team wins, then a place like Pixar will not have to go away. We all get together every 4-6 months to look at each other’s films. It’s not some sort of tribunal or anything. It’s almost like a writers’ room kind of feel, where you get a chance for objectivity from others. If you work on something alone too long, it’s like staring at yourself in the mirror—you stare too long, and you start seeing a million things wrong, and you start changing things just because you can. So you need your peers—somebody you can trust creatively—who can say, “I think this is great, don’t change it,” or, “This is not working as much as you think so change it.” Andrew Stanton
“I also like a comment I’ve heard Andrew Stanton say, which is “talent isn’t fair.” I’m lucky enough to work at a company where I don’t have a chance of being the smartest person in the room, and I like it that way. I won’t lie; it’s hard to work with so many talented people, you have to have a certain diamond hard sense of self or you can come home bummed out after a hard day at work. But it does cause you to bring your A game. Luckily, we tend to do a very good job of hiring people that are actually nice, and really want to work with other people.” Michael B. Johnson
“We’re not supervised. We’re sort of allowed, like an independent filmmaker, to do what we want. You don’t get that freedom anywhere else. And this is the only studio outside of Disney, when Walt Disney ran it, where an artist runs the whole place. Here, it’s John Lasseter, and that trickles down.” Andrew Stanton
“My motto has always been, ‘Be wrong as fast as you can’. Which basically tells you that we know that the process involves messiness and risk-taking, but that’s what art is. Art is not doing the same thing twice, art is not playing it safe; art is taking risks….”
Andrew Stanton
“The one thing that I’m very proud of about Pixar, that I think does make a difference, is that it’s not some “Nirvana”, Willy Wonka chocolate-river-place where everybody walks around with great ideas and we just make them. It’s a bunch of hard-working guys that really know that, like, it’s all about getting on your bike and falling over as often as you can. What Pixar does really well is… make it a supportive atmosphere to make mistakes… In a weird way, the process is dependent on you making mistakes… That’s how we find a lot of freshness to things.” Andrew Stanton