The long road to ‘Inside Out 2’: ‘You don’t want to make a sequel for the sake of making a sequel’
“Inside Out 2” producer Mark Nielsen has worked for Pixar for years, all the way back to the 2006 short film “Mater and the Ghostlight,” set within the “Cars” universe. He was an associate producer on the original “Inside Out” and even won an Oscar as one of three credited producers for “Toy Story 4.” But in the nine years since “Inside Out” introduced audiences to Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith), and a little girl named Riley (voiced originally by Kaitlyn Dias), Nielsen says he often heard one question more than anything else: “Can you give us more of this?”
“I knew right away that this was a movie people wanted to see – especially if we could do it well and if we could have something to say,” Nielsen tells Gold Derby. “Because you don’t want to make a sequel for the sake of making a sequel. You’ve got to have it has to be surprising. It has to be interesting. You can’t just repeat the same thing over again.” Watch our video interview above.
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Directed by Kelsey Mann and set two years after the events of “Inside Out,” the sequel follows Riley again (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) as she navigates early adolescence and a crush of new feelings and emotions. The biggest is Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), who comes in like a wrecking ball and shakes up Riley’s core beliefs while trying to get her to grow up.
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In casting Hawke to voice Anxiety, Mann says he was intentionally looking for a younger actor to play opposite Poehler to create a generational divide that might feel familiar to many parents.
“I wanted it to kind of feel a little bit like a parent, where you feel like you know what you’re doing, then all of a sudden you hit this new world, and suddenly you feel like out of touch and older, and you’re like, what’s happening?” Mann says. He met Hawke over Zoom while on vacation with his family – perhaps fittingly – at Disney. Mann says Hawke immediately understood Anxiety as a character, particularly that she wasn’t the film’s villain.
“The part that I really, really loved about Maya, is that she was playing the character from a place where it’s not evil or mean. Anxiety is doing it out of love and protection. So you could really feel the love and humanity behind Maya’s performance. You could just feel that she loves Riley, and she kind of has that side to it,” Mann says. “I remember hanging up with Maya and I called Mark, and I was like, ‘That was pretty awesome.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, she is perfect.’”
But that Hawke even had the opportunity to voice Anxiety, is part of Pixar’s rigorous storytelling process. As Nielsen explains, the version of “Inside Out 2” that arrived in theaters this summer to massive crowds and repeat viewings is much different than where the film started.
“We’re hard on ourselves,” Nielsen says. “So it’s about iteration. We built like nine full versions of this movie over a four-year period where we would build it up, watch it, and then tear it down and make changes.”
One early idea for “Inside Out 2” was that Riley would abandon her love for hockey altogether. But it was dropped, Nielsen says, when it became apparent that what made Riley standout in “Inside Out” was now taken away.
The emotions changed too. Shame was a big character in an early version but later dropped altogether. “It was really heavy and not that fun to watch,” Nielsen says of the character. Some versions of “Inside Out 2” had nine new emotions, but keeping track of the characters and their motivations became overwhelming. They settled on the four new ones – Anxiety, Envy (voiced by Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (voiced by Adele Exarchopolous) – because those emotions “very specifically supported the story.”
“It’s a really unique place,” Mann says of Pixar and the process. “Everyone who works at Pixar is there for the same reason: To make a great movie. It’s not always true elsewhere. We just make the movie over and over and over and over again, each time changing it to hopefully make it better.”
And the result, Nielsen says, is something the Pixar filmmakers would want to watch even if they didn’t work at Pixar. “‘We’re making movies that we’re interested in, and that makes us sit forward in our chairs,” he says. “The things we think are funny, we put in there. If we laugh at them, they stay. If we don’t, we cut. We’re always pursuing universal themes. We’re also trying to make a movie about something relatable to the experience of being human. So no matter what age you are, you’re going to be able to relate to it.”
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