Producer Tips

Incredibles 2 producers Nicole Paradis Grindle and John Walker reveal their strategies for getting the film made on time and on budget.

Finding scenes to go into production first: “We’ll often make considerations about the sets that are available to us,” says Grindle. “In looking at the movie, we thought, ‘Well, we know we’re going to have scenes with the family, and we know we’re going to have scenes of the family in their house, so let’s build that house first. Because whatever they do in there we’re going to need them in there, and then we could look at the scenes that happened in the house and see which of those were starting to gel.”

Bringing people together: “For reviews, we try to bring lots of people into the room rather than filing them off, like, ‘Well, here’s the effects review, and here’s the layout review, and here’s the story review,’” states Walker. “We try to open those things up. And something that Nicole and I do that’s maybe a little different than some of the producers at Pixar and in animation in general is to have those big rooms of people with large reviews across multiple departments. We’re trying to reproduce an artificial set where everybody’s on the set together, and I think that that’s helpful. I think that the solo-ing that happens in animation is something that producers have to actively work against.”

Streaming reviews: “Another thing we did on Incredibles 2,” says Grindle, “which I think was started on a movie before ours, was that we streamed our reviews. Folks who are working at their desks can actually look at the work that’s being shown in the review, and listen to what Brad and others are saying about it in the room. So, even when you are in a relatively small room and not everyone can be there, you can still listen in. We have to remember that everyone who’s working on the film is a filmmaker, and they want to feel like a filmmaker, and if you’re working isolated in a room on this one little piece of the movie, you don’t feel like a filmmaker. It’s hard to stay motivated. So, being in on the ground floor of everything that’s going into the storytelling is very motivating.”

Dealing with film length: “Nicole and I look through the film and we pick sequences that we feel could be cut if we had to, and we lift them out of the film and we refuse to put them into production. We tell Brad he’s got to get the rest of the movie done first before we’re going to make these ‘hostage’ scenes. That makes him angry, but it motivates him to fix the film in time for us, and then we release the scenes at the end of process, and then we make the whole film. It’s an insurance policy – these are complicated films and sometimes it’s not clear at the beginning of the process that we can actually make a film as long and as complex in the time that we have allotted.”