Amy Poehler And Pete Docter On Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’: “It Was The Most Difficult Thing I’ve Ever Done”
We spoke to Poehler and Docter at the Australian premiere of Pixar's new film last night. They were DELIGHTFUL.
If you were lucky enough to visit Disney World in Florida at any time during the ’90s, you may have chanced upon Cranium Command: an attraction at the Wonders of Life pavilion which featured a young Audio-Animatronic soldier named Buzzy, charged with piloting a 12-year-old boy. Buzzy had to work with various parts of the body and brain, a supporting crew played by various film stars and comedians including Charles Grodin as the Left Brain (a logical being), Jon Lovitz as the Right Brain (the creative, zany side), George Wendt as the Stomach (always hungry), and, as the Right and Left Ventricles, Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon reprising Hanz and Franz from Saturday Night Live.
The similarities between that set-up and Disney Pixar’s new film Inside Out are remarkably striking. This time set in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley, the command centre of Inside Out is manned by five emotions: Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), and the dominant feeling of most happy children, Joy (Amy Poehler). But after Riley’s parents move the family from Minnesota to San Francisco, her memory units — small glowing orbs which form the core of her personality, and are stored in the recesses of her brain — begin to turn from joyous to sad.
In an attempt to fix the impending crisis, Joy and Sadness end up locked out from the mind’s headquarters, as Fear, Anger and Disgust are left alone to unwittingly wreak havoc on Riley, in a manner familiar to anyone who has suffered the chaos of pre-teenagehood. The film follows Sadness and Joy’s journey back to HQ.
Similarly to Pixar’s Toy Story and Monster’s Inc, the movie is about a mis-matched team who need to work together in order to protect childhood, and learn from it. Look a little deeper, though, and Inside Out is a moving and ambitious treatise on the complexities of growing up, and the importance of learning to listen to other people’s problems and feelings, and talk about your own.
Or, as Amy Poehler put it in an interview with Annabel Crabb on last night’s 7.30, “It’s a beautiful, simple story about how it’s okay to be sad, and how change is the only thing you can depend on.”
Director Pete Docter — a key player in Pixar’s most seminal films, who directed both my favourites, Up and Monster’s Inc — was inspired by his own experience as a father. When he started working on Inside Out, his daughter Elie was eleven, the same age Riley is when Joy stops being her dominant emotion, and darker feelings take over. When the film was finished, Elie was 16. “I would definitely observe what was happening [with her],” he told me last night, at the film’s Australian premiere in Sydney. “We spoke to a lot of other people on the crew too — especially other women on the film. We’d ask them, ‘What were your difficult childhood traumas?’, just to make sure we were being truthful in what we were dealing with.”
I ask if his kids ever tire of their dad mining their lives for plot-lines and nuances. “Well, they’re not aware of it!” he laughs. “It’s funny, I don’t often talk to them about, like, ‘What do you think should be in the film?’ It’s more that I’m at home watching what’s happening. Being a father has fundamentally changed me, so that shows up in my work.”
As with every film in Pixar’s ouvre, the set-pieces of Inside Out offer a masterclass in world-building. The techni-coloured, multi-faceted universe encompasses the headquarters themselves, and the pathways that lead the memory orbs to the islands that make up Riley’s personality — in her case ‘Family’, ‘Honesty’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Goofball’, and ‘Hockey’. To get back to HQ, Joy and Sadness must traverse through the other, more complicated sections of the mind — like the Willy Wonka-esque Imagination Land theme-park, the mind- and dimension-bending world of Abstract Thought, the Long Term Memory holding facility, and, in one particularly hilarious scene, the Dream Studios.
“It was almost more difficult than anything I’ve ever done, I think,” Docter says, before a qualification: “Scratch the ‘almost’. It was the most difficult thing. Largely because the mind is something we’re all familiar with, but that we’ve never seen before. So there was a sense that if we got of wrong, people would sort of recognise that on some intuitive level. So it just took a lot of iteration. We did a lot of research; we re-did and re-did and re-did and re-did our world a lot, and really in layers, you know?”
Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), in the aisles of Long Term Memory.
Six years in the making, the end result is perhaps the most ambitious and adventurous world that Pixar has built; tactile, inventive, and completely unrestrained by the limits of reality. When I use the word “delicious” to describe it, Docter laughs. “That may be due to my fondness for candy; a lot of the guys would tap into that, hoping that I’d approve stuff, I guess. But yeah, it does have a kind of flavour to it.”
The character building was just as complicated. In an earlier iteration of the film, Joy embarks on her journey with Fear in place of Sadness as her antagonist, and in an interview with Collider, Docter revealed that the way Joy’s character was written — all happy, all chipper, all the time –– was actually just irritating everyone. That all changed with the casting of Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler, who brings necessary lashings of barely-masked bitterness and sarcasm to the role. The way Poehler describes it? “The emotions have emotions!”
“Joy changes, you know?” she tells me. “She goes on her own journey. She bursts out of the gate in this very intense way, and very soon she learns that she can’t do it alone, so Joy gets sad.
“What’s great about the film is that, from a very base perspective, you watch it as a slapstick comedy and you enjoy it — and then you unpack it as you go home. It’s really deep, and it makes you think about your memories, and your life, and your choices,” she says. “And so it stays with you, like every good Pixar film.”
I ask Poehler if there’s any movie she remembers seeing when she was Riley’s age, that stayed with her after all these years. “Uhhh… Purple Rain?” she says, before the trademark cackle. She gestures to all the tweens and teens lining up for her autograph at the multi-coloured carpet, who one can assume have zero affinity for a 1984 rock drama starring Prince which featured a song called ‘Sex Shooter’. “Buuuut that maybe doesn’t apply here.”
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Inside Out is released around Australia on Thursday June 18.
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Feature photo of Amy Poehler and Pete Docter from the Sydney premiere of Inside Out, by Brendon Thorne for Getty Images.