The Good Dinosaur had an interesting journey to the big screen. It’s been a six year trek from initial idea at Pixar to the box office hit that debuted in theaters over Thanksgiving weekend. We caught up with The Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn and producer Denise Ream and right off the bat, had to know how the process changed them as filmmakers.
“That’s a great question. That’s going to make me emotional. It was tough,” Sohn said.
“Yeah, it was really hard,” added Ream.
Sohn said it was hard to have to restart the process after essentially making the movie once and then having to make it from scratch. “You know the people at Pixar, and I’ve been there for fifteen years, you learn to put your heart into the work. What’s tough is when that work gets slammed. That’s just how it is, that’s the process,” he admitted.
“But you believe in something and then slam, slam, slam, slam! [And then you say], ‘I’m not putting my heart out there again. That just hurt a lot.’ But then you think about, ‘Okay, what am I trying to do here?’ And we are trying to make the best film we can. And the best film that we can demands that you continue to put your heart into it. And everyone would do that. Even during the darkest days.”
Ream reported that she was incredibly impressed with how the Pixar team as a whole pulled together and produced a heartwarming film that stands up to the high standards of the studio, unfazed by the setback. “Honestly the way that the team rallied behind Pete and the film, it was inspirational,” she said.
“My job is to obviously give people what they need and, also, at many moments, getting out of the way — letting people do their work, not micromanaging.”
As can be seen in The Good Dinosaur trailer, the film follows a world where that asteroid that wiped out the Jurassic inhabitants, actually didn’t. Fast forward a million years and they’ve evolved into farmers and cattle rustlers. So yes, the film is kind of Pixar’s first western.
Sohn was asked where that inspiration came from. “It was early on, just the idea of a dinosaur farmer plowing the earth. Then, taking the herbivores into farming land and making carnivores into ranchers. There was this real survival quality to this that was really interesting. What I loved about Westerns was that fact – that these are homesteaders and everything like that.”
To achieve the standard Pixar realism that permeates every frame of film they’ve ever produced, the team went on research trips. One particular journey helped the film truly take its shape.
“Denise [Ream] sent us out on research trips and we met this one ranching family, the McKay’s, and they were this beautiful family. And they were living this beautiful life up in Oregon herding cattle. When we went up there, it was pretty much like [the movie] City Slickers. I’m from New York so I’d never done anything like that before,” Sohn said and laughed.
“This family was so pure and it made me think of my family. I grew up in New York in a grocery store and we would all work together to survive in the city and make a life for our family. This was the same thing. [They] were surviving but out in this incredible country. So there was this connection for me — there was this universal idea here.”
The presence of family is everywhere in The Good Dinosaur. Whether it is Arlo and his farming clan, Spot and his searching for his human family, or the T-Rexes he meets who are cattle rustlers (played by Sam Elliott, Anna Paquin and AJ Buckley. Sure it’s an element that is in most Pixar movies, but in The Good Dinosaur, it truly drives the narrative.
“It was a big deal. It was something that we balanced and talked about. And once we go the T-Rexes into that family world, it all kind of began to click in a different way, in terms of the evolution of the story and what Arlo would need from family — and the idea that every member is an integral part of their family and Arlo feels like he’s not,” Sohn said.
Another facet of The Good Dinosaur is the animation. Pixar has been ever raising the bar since it first landed on the animation landscape two decades ago. But, there is something all-too realistic about what we see in their second film of 2015 (after Inside Out) that is truly picturesque.
“I love that. It’s not like we were trying to create a whole new place. We were trying to capture the emotion of a place. Where it’s just like, ‘Boy, look how soul-enriching these landscapes are?’ It’s dwarfing me and making me feel things that I didn’t feel.’ Then there are moments that are so small, like looking at a leaf and seeing how raindrops slide down the leaf,” Sohn said.
Ream reported that the first priority was the story and that she always felt that the Pixar wizards would match the emotional power with visual splendor.
“We actually changed the production process for animation. We ended up giving chunks of work so that they could work continuously. Often, when you’re under the gun, you’re just doling out shots to get them done; to hit quota, so to speak,” Ream said.
“We basically thought, ‘If we wanna do this movie without a lot of dialogue, this performance needs to be really good. So we prioritized the work flow for animation.”
Sohn could not be prouder of the entire Pixar family and how they pulled this one together. “It was a completely collaborative effort. All I did was want to learn animation so I went to school for it and I worked at Pixar,” he said.
“Working with animators to this capacity was some of the most amazing things that I’ve ever seen.”