Pixar's Pete Docter Doesn't Know Where Cinema is Going Either

_{A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler.}

Greetings from my house, to which I have finally returned after a wonderful, exhausting week at TIFF, where I saw 25 movies and, like my compadre Richard Rushfield, really pushed the limits of how many times you can make hors d’oeuvres qualify as a proper meal.

One time I actually did sit down for a real meal was in the company of Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, who was in town for an onstage conversation at the TIFF Industry conference. While I ate my avocado toast, he gamely answered many of my questions, from the future of movie theaters — he’s more nervous than you’d think, particularly given the blockbuster success of Inside Out 2 — to AI’s role in animation.

I’ll share more of that conversation below, after a look back at the bold, boundary-breaking TIFF premieres that could make this one of the more forward-looking Oscar races in years.

One more programming note: Next Monday will bring both a newsletter and a special edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, in which my colleague Elaine Low and I will discuss Sunday night’s Emmys. You’ve subscribed to the podcast already, right?

How the Oscar Race is Shaping Up

Halina Reijn was fresh off the most acclaimed premiere of her career, but when she arrived in Toronto from Venice on Tuesday night for the North American premiere of her film Babygirl, she swore to the audience she was still shaking with nerves.

As the 48-year-old Dutch director explained, she made Babygirl as a way to talk about things that scared her — female desire and power, to be specific. The film won the best actress award for star Nicole Kidman at Venice, which put expectations sky high once the film arrived in Toronto and played for a crowd eager to celebrate it.

Dark, erotic and morally ambiguous — with Kidman playing a powerful female CEO who starts an affair with a self-assured intern (Harris Dickinson) — Babygirl played like a crowd-pleaser in Toronto. It’s intriguing evidence that A24 might be able to reach outside of an arthouse crowd when the film opens in December, much as its The Iron Claw made it to $45 million worldwide last year.

But that doesn’t make Babygirl any less of a big swing in a season that’s turning out to be full of them, and might just test the limits of how bold the Oscars are willing to be.

Without new films from perennial heavyweights like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan, it’s younger, never-nominated directors like Reijn, Anora’s Sean Baker, Nickel Boys’ RaMell Ross and The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet now leading the pack. Movies about affairs, sex workers, the Civil Rights era and the Holocaust have had plenty of time in the Oscar spotlight, but none have ever looked like any of these in either style or substance.

You don’t have to be a newcomer to be pushing boundaries, either. Jacques Audiard, the 72-year-old French director, has a huge audience favorite with Emilia Pérez, a melodramatic musical whose stars Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Salda?a and Selena Gomez are well on their way through the Oscar buzz gauntlet. Recent Oscar nominees like Luca Guadagnino and Denis Villeneuve are backing their own big swings as well, with Guadagnino in the mix for both this spring’s Challengers and the upcoming Queer and Villeneuve once again primed for recognition for his ambitious, wildly successful Dune franchise.

Related: Emmy's Surprise Nom and the Case for Multi-Cam

Of course there are some more broadly accessible titles out there too, including TIFF hits from previous best director nominees Edward Berger (Conclave) and Jason Reitman (Saturday Night), both of which could be contenders for TIFF’s audience award. The bolder stuff that relies more on critical acclaim often premieres earlier at festivals, so we can probably expect a more straightforward tone from the likes of Gladiator 2, Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Ideally every best picture lineup has a nice mix of something for everyone — a Top Gun: Maverick for every Tár, you might say — and this year’s lineup will likely be no different.

But after a week in Toronto, arguing with my fellow journalists about the ambiguities in The Brutalist and marveling at the pugnacious female leads of both Hard Truths and Anora, I’m thrilled by the forward-looking, daring bunch of contenders we have right now. Is there such a thing as being too weird for best picture? This year may put that notion to the test.

Breakfast with Pete Docter

Sure, he’s currently backing the eighth-highest grossing movie of all time, and is the head of a studio that’s released six sequels in the past decade. But credit where it’s due: Pete Docter knows a thing or two about big swings, too. And he’s as aware as anyone that risk in Hollywood doesn’t get any less scary when you’re on a bigger scale.

“This film did great — more than great,” he tells me, about as modestly as you can when the film he’s referring to, Inside Out 2, has made $1.6 billion and counting. “But there’s no sense of where things are going in the future in terms of cinema.”

Docter was Pixar employee no. 10, starting three days after his college graduation in 1990, and he’s directed bedrock Pixar classics Monsters Inc. and Up in addition to having a creative role on all the others. But when he took over as the company’s chief creative officer in 2018, he became synonymous with the company in a way he never had before — and just in time for a pandemic and a streaming revolution that changed everything.

Like everyone else, Pixar is still picking up the pieces. Weeks before Inside Out 2’s phenomenal debut, Pixar laid off 175 employees, which Docter describes as the company’s biggest layoffs ever. “That was another thing that made this year really weird,” he says, clarifying that the layoffs were a result of moving away from streaming-only Pixar projects like Win or Lose. “Unfortunately now Disney has come to the point where they realized, you know what? The amount we have to spend to do the quality we do doesn't make sense.”

Pixar’s commitment to high quality has remained consistent even as other animation houses have begun to challenge them for inventiveness; I ran out of time before I got to ask him about DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, which premiered at TIFF and got the kind of emotional responses from grown-ups that used to be Pixar’s exclusive domain.

Some of that quality is coming courtesy of AI, which Pixar has used for nearly a decade in highly technical ways that are a far cry from the viral AI animation you might see online. “I mean, you see these demos and it looks like, oh my gosh, AI can do anything. It's a magic box,” Docter tells me. “But when you dig a little deeper, it’s pretty problematic just getting consistency. My experience with it is, if I have any vision at all of what I want in my head, it’s a disaster.”

Docter does see an “interesting philosophical question” in the human fears around AI, and the ways people fear robots might start to take ownership of what we feel belongs to us. Pixar is a company built on computers and pixels, of course, but also its people — there’s a reason people like Docter or Elemental director Peter Sohn spend their entire careers there.

As the leader of Pixar’s vaunted creative braintrust, Docter places a premium on “weird hallway interactions,” so he’s fighting the good fight to get more of his employees back in the office post-pandemic. “You bump into somebody and go like, ‘Oh, now that you’re here, let me ask you this.’ And then they say something that changes the course of the movie,” he tells me. “That’s happened on almost every film I’ve worked on.”

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