Edwin Catmull

“I started off life at Pixar with interesting technical problems. But as time has moved on, I found that the social and management problem was far more complex and interesting.”

“Sometimes a leap of faith doesn't pan out.”

“A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They're in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing.”

“One of the effects Pixar University has on the culture is that it makes people less self-conscious about their work and gets them comfortable with being publicly reviewed.”

“We have to evolve, we have to change, and in order to do that, we have to initiate the change.”

“For me, one of the great tragedies is the conclusion studios have drawn about traditional animation. I believe that 2D animation could be just as vital as it ever was. I think the problem has been with the stories.”

“In life,you're going to have risk, so you have to say, 'My attitude going forward is how to I fix the problem.' And it's not trying to cling onto the past. When I look around, most problems happen because people are trying to cling onto the past.”

“With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.”

“We'll fund a project even if I'm skeptical because I'd rather be proven wrong by somebody on the inside than by somebody on the outside.”

“One of Pixar's key mechanisms is the Braintrust, which we rely on to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk.”

“If you want people to be let loose, you can't over-control them.”

“I've certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don't have a clear goal.”

“I have received a great deal of benefit from the simple yet difficult practice of learning to stop the internal voice in my head. I learned that the voice isn't me, and I don't need to keep rethinking events of the past nor overthink plans for the future. This skill has helped me both to focus and to pause before responding to unexpected events.”

“Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it.”

“Outsourcing, in and of itself, isn't responsible for the erosion of America's high tech infrastructure. The short-term thinking that led to a lot of bad outsourcing decisions is the root cause. And short-term thinking isn't a problem confined to the executive suite. It's a problem in Washington and in our society as a whole.”

“The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of 'Toy Story' - John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft.”

“In the early 1970s, I headed to graduate school at the University of Utah and joined the pioneering program in computer graphics because I realized that's where I could combine my interests in art and computer science.”

“We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.”

“Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out.”

“I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.”