Episode 022 Ed Catmull

Summary

• Ed Catmull is the cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, and has received five Academy Awards.
• He was interviewed by Tim Ferriss on the Tim Ferriss Show.
• They discussed the birth of Pixar, his background, the creative process, storytelling, mistakes they’ve made, and lessons he’s learned.
• Ed Catmull discussed the pivotal year of 1995 when Pixar went public, the success of their first movie, and the realization that most successful companies fail quickly.
• He also discussed his personal goal of wanting to be the best in the world at something, and how he realized that this was not a useful question.
• Ed Catmull believes that the desire for complete clarity leads one away from addressing the mess in the middle.
• He believes that art is not just about learning to draw or self expression, but rather learning to observe.
• Storytelling is a way of communicating and understanding, and it is even stronger than most people think.
• To make a movie, the story of the making of it is too complicated to tell, so it is simplified and edited down to convey certain ideas.
• Mythologies are a way of teaching basic principles to each other, but they don't capture everything.
• Crises that arise out of the making of a movie should be organic and not artificially generated.
• Ed Catmull discussed the importance of having a broad understanding of history, mythology, and culture in order to develop storytelling skills.
• He recommends listening to lectures on the history of human civilization, reading wisdom books from various traditions, and observing the chaos and creation of Silicon Valley.
• George Lucas was a successful filmmaker who invested in bringing technology into filmmaking, which was not done anywhere else in the industry.
• He was motivated by the precision control of optical printing and blue screen matting used in Star Wars, and the need to have objects blurred in the direction of motion.
• Summary:
• Steve Jobs changed his behavior over the course of his life, becoming more empathetic and caring.
• Steve Jobs wanted to go public with Pixar to get a war chest to negotiate a 50/50 partnership with Disney.
• Steve Jobs valued equitable partnerships and worked to maintain a good relationship with Disney.
• The hardest film for Ed Catmull to make was Toy Story, as it was the first film Pixar made.
• Ed Catmull does not believe it is necessary for someone to make a sacrifice of that magnitude for a film to be a landmark film.
• Ed Catmull was not present for the first Star Wars movie and does not know if the story is true or false.
• Making a sequel is not necessarily easier than making something original.
• All directors get emotionally invested in their films and can get lost in them, so a "brain trust" of colleagues is necessary to help navigate the process.
• All films start off as "sucky" and it is a discovery process to find the elements that will make it a good movie.
• Pixar has only abandoned one film, and the rest have either evolved or been restarted.
• The value of the world is that contributions come from many people over a long period of time.
• The book Ed Catmull has given most often is Creativity, Inc.
• Ed Catmull has given many books as gifts, with One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer being one of the most frequent.
• He enjoys documentaries, but cannot recall a favorite one.
• He was particularly impacted by a series of lectures from the Teaching Company on world history, specifically the Tudors and the Stuarts.
• He recommends the podcast Hardcore History and its series Wrath of the Khans about Jangis Khan.
• When asked who he thinks of when he thinks of the word successful, he thinks of people who have achieved equanimity in life.
• He meditates for between a half hour and an hour a day, and practices Vipassana.
• He views himself as constantly needing to change and take on different perspectives.
• His advice to his 20yearold self would be to face the problem and not try to sidestep it.