Catmull On Curiosity
Ed Catmull, speaking on David Senra's podcast:
Ed Catmull: As we started to become successful, nobody from Disney ever came and said, "What are you guys doing?"Now, they're starting to go downhill. I think their last really big hit was Lion King. They started to go down from there. We're going up, and we show them the films. We take them down and get notes from them and so forth.
But nobody ever asks what we're doing or what's different. Why is it that Pixar is so different? It's very curious. So now, for me, it's just observations like, "Okay, why aren't they curious? Why aren't they asking?"
Then we signed the contract—the five-picture contract—to continue it, which continues that right to see everything that we're doing.
Now we're very successful, and they're very unsuccessful. And still nobody ever asks, "What are you doing?" And there are no secrets. We're not hiding anything, ever.
David Senra: What's going on there?
Ed Catmull: I have a theory. Part of it, I think, has to do with: you go to your first conclusion, and you stop thinking.
In this case, they would have thought that the reason Pixar is successful is because they've got some combination of—it's like, it's John Lasseter's got it, or John and Ed, or John and Ed or Steve, some combination of three. We don't have them. And that's the secret to their success, so we can't copy that.
Now, that's just a shallow way of thinking. The real question is, "What is it that's being done that's different?" Everybody's different, but what are they doing?
And there was a logic behind the way we built Pixar and the culture of Pixar, which is unlike anything else in the entertainment industry. There was nothing secretive about it. Nobody cared to know.
"They've got the right people" is a wonderfully convenient explanation. It's the great man theory, stupid. Nothing to see here.
Mitch Resnick describes the work that explanation lets you skip in Lifelong Kindergarten:
Creativity grows out of a certain type of hard work, combining curious exploration with playful experimentation and systematic investigation.
Were Disney still doing this "certain type of hard work"?
The turning point for Catmull, and Disney, was when Bob Iger became CEO and got curious about Pixar:
So Bob decided to come up as soon as he was made the CEO. He came up to Pixar, and the idea was to spend a day with us, seeing what we were doing, how we thought about things, and what we had in the works.And when he came, he walked up our walkway to the building alone. No assistant, no entourage. You know, a driver dropped him off. He came up alone, spent the whole day going around.
And the first thing is, like, from the people at Pixar, the fact that he came alone was very impressive. Right? No group of people coming around. So, very personal.
Bob loved what he saw. And then he went back and said, "Okay, we have to do this." And that was his first major battle with the board, which he did write in the book. This was too big of a risk and too much money.
Disney already had permission to see everything. Iger went and had a look.