Pixar filmmaking a process of alchemy, says ‘Brave’ director Mark Andrews

SALT LAKE CITY — It’s almost hard to believe that
director Mark Andrews wasn’t always attached to Pixar’s
latest film “Brave” in an official capacity.

A self-described “nerd” for everything Pict or Celt, the
CalArts-trained animator is known as Pixar’s resident Scottish
expert. He’s also a skilled archer and swordfighter (like Merida) who
(like King Fergus) has one daughter and three sons.

To top it all off, long before “Brave” was even “a
twinkle in anybody’s eye,” as he put it during an interview
last week, Andrews has been wearing kilts to all of Pixar’s big
events.

But in reality, the first-time feature filmmaker only came on board in the
last 18 months of production after the original writer and director, Brenda
Chapman (“The Prince of Egypt”), was asked to step down.

During the interview, Andrews was kind enough to shed some light on what
it’s like to be a director at Pixar and the demanding process that
makes its films so consistently great.

Although this was his first time in the director’s chair for a feature-
length film, Andrews is no stranger to the responsibilities of the job, having
worked on a number of Pixar classics like “The Incredibles”
(2004) and “Ratatouille” (2007), as well as writing and
directing a 2005 short titled “One Man Band.”

More recently, he co-wrote and directed the second unit on Disney’s
“John Carter” alongside fellow Pixar filmmaker Andrew
Stanton (“WALL-E”).

A huge part of the success of Pixar’s animated films has to do with
its intensely collaborative approach. As Andrews described, before actually
animating the movie — an extremely labor-intensive and costly
process — the filmmakers first assemble what is known as a story
reel, which is basically the entire film done using storyboards that can be
screened like a normal movie for peer evaluation. The kicker, though, is
that at Pixar, your peers are guys like John Lasseter (“Toy
Story”), Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”), Pete Docter
(“Up”) and Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3”).

“If I just had to get it done,” Andrews said, “big deal,
but Pixar sets the bar so high.”

In the 18 months Andrews worked on “Brave,” he created the
movie in story reel form four times, tore it down and started over whenever
something wasn’t coming together.

“We can talk about things we think are wrong with the story, but
that’s only intellectual. We have to see it and feel what’s
going on to know what’s not working, but also to know what is
working.”

An example he gave of this process in action involved two scenes at the
beginning where Merida and her mother, Queen Elinor, lay out their
differing points of view for the audience — without ever speaking to
each other. In the original storyboards, the scenes were separate and each
had a distinct beginning, middle and end, but every time Andrews and his
team watched them in the context of the story reel, they couldn’t
help feeling that they dragged down the narrative’s overall pace.

“The information was right,” Andrews said, “but how
we were delivering it to the audience wasn’t working.”

Joking, one of his storyboard artists asked, “Why wouldn’t they just
talk to each other? Then the whole movie would be over in 10
minutes.” This comment gave Andrews the idea for the final version
of the scene, which intercuts the two conversations to make it sound like
Merida and Elinor actually are talking to each other. This scene, in
particular, stands out as an example of the kind of economic and
entertaining storytelling Pixar is renowned for.

“Those are the kinds of discoveries you have to find,”
Andrews said, “where you know the information is right, but
it’s just not working.”

At Pixar, this process is repeated for every movie, every scene and every
moment until each film works together as a cohesive narrative unit.

Until that point, though, nothing is safe.

This applies to characters as well. “There were a lot of these loose
ends where we had characters,” Andrews said, “but they
weren’t integral to the story, and if they’re not integral, why
are we wasting time with them?” The bear Mordu and even
Merida’s three mischievous brothers — Hamish, Harris and
Hubert, who are responsible for some of the film’s funniest
moments — had to be justified in terms of story before they were
safe from the chopping block. This meant a lot of head scratching and
rewriting as they tried to figure out ways to build every single character
into the narrative structure but in non-superfluous roles.

This kind of rigorous peer evaluation is the key to Pixar’s
filmmaking approach, but there is no formula for success, Andrews said.
“Story is alchemy. We’re changing lead into gold, and once
we find gold, we have no idea exactly how we got there, so we have to start
from scratch all over again.”

A native of Utah
Valley and a devoted cinephile, Jeff Peterson is studying humanities and
history at Brigham Young University.