Pixar's Girl Story
(5 of 6)
At dinner that night, she talks about singing in the choir at the Armenian Orthodox Church where her dad serves as priest. Andrews says he's an atheist. "Who's God? Dad? There is no God," he says. Then he rethinks. "What about Odin? There might have been an Odin." After Andrews finishes his chicken entre, leaving the vegetables untouched, he orders the same entre again and eats that too. It's his signature restaurant move.
His final version of Brave is brawnier than Chapman's original pitch: more bows, more arrows, more bear fighting. Andrews loves action films. He left his job as second-unit director of Disney's upcoming sci-fi movie John Carter to direct Brave. Brave has a lot of action. A major character's leg is amputated and a woman sustains an ass pinch before the opening credits. Chapman, who still works at Pixar and watches occasional reels of Brave, seems leery of some of the changes. "Even when I was on it, there was sometimes so much action that I said, 'Pull it back.' The last version I saw had a lot of action, but I know it's all shifting," she says.
"Where we're going to land is a hybrid," Sarafian says. "Heart and original story from Brenda, with the energy and entertainment and adventure that Mark brings. That's the goal." Chapman and Andrews will be credited as co-directors.
Catmull (he's Papa Bedouin) acknowledges that director firings and last-minute script changes are traumatic. He also thinks Pixar's willingness to make things difficult for itself accounts for its financial and creative success. Pixar averages a worldwide gross of $603 million per film and has 29 Academy Awards. Yet of all those movies, only Toy Story 3 went smoothly, as Lasseter acknowledges. Brave has been rough, but no more so than most of them, including the first Toy Story. "Woody was a jerk for a while," Lasseter says. "He was king of the toys, and he was too into being the favorite toy." After test screenings for a completely finished WALLE, director Andrew Stanton decided that instead of having WALLE save Eve, he'd reverse it; the entire third act was redone with an injured WALLE.
"What's the success rate of live-action films? It's 10% to 20%," says Catmull in his office as he plays with a Slinky. "In live action you shoot more than you can use and hope to God you have enough to make it good. In animation you can keep working on it."
It helps that Pixar works like an old-time studio. The directors, writers and animators are office employees, not free agents. The company is now working on three other movies (one is a prequel to Monsters, Inc., one is about the inside of a girl's mind, and one is about dinosaurs), and everyone helps on every film, whether it's to attend a Brain Trust meeting or do last-minute animation--or step in for a fired director. Live-action films suffer from a lack of this kind of community, Catmull says. "If you're a star who's got an agent, you don't want a community."