Drew Turney
A little boy watching superheroes on TV while his father wants him to honour the family tradition of worship. Bored, he escapes into his imagination, where the figures from his cultural and religious heritage become superheroes, giving him common ground with his father.
It sounds every inch a Pixar movie, and the animation powerhouse made the short after the juggernaut of Inside Out while it was prepping The Good Dinosaur (which it was shown ahead of in theatres).
But even though director Sanjay Patel has worked at the studio for 20 years, he had no plans to be a Pixar filmmaker. As he and Sanjay’s Super Team producer Nicole Paradis Grindle tell Moviehole in Los Angeles, it was all the idea of a quite well known Pixar name.
How did Sanjay’s Super Team come about?
Nicole:
After 10 years at Pixar Sanjay got an itch to look at different things and explore Asian art. He ended up producing a book called The Book of Hindu Deities that led to some other things including a couple of shows at the Asian art museum in San Francisco.
Based on that success, and outside his regular work at Pixar, he was invited to put up a show in our employee art gallery and it was there John Lasseter saw the work and invited him to make a film.
It was jumping the queue considerably since most folks at Pixar apply for the great opportunity to direct a short film. Sanjay wasn’t necessarily looking for this opportunity and was taken aback.
Sanjay:
It was definitely something I wasn’t driven to do but once the opportunity presented itself I saw it as the chance to do something I wanted to do with my books, which was to give voice to stories and a culture I didn’t really see much of.
My nieces and nephews knew everything about the Pixar films I worked on but they didn’t know as much about the cultural stories of their own background, so I felt really driven to tell those stories. To do it with my friends at Pixar just felt like an incredible opportunity.
As for the beginning title [‘the following is a true story – mostly’], that was something we came up with in development. We had concerns about the religious subject matter and we really wanted to make it clear to people this was rooted in me and my Dad’s experience. It wasn’t talking about religion or Hinduism at large, it was just about one family’s experience with traditional and faith.
Actually John Lasseter took it even further, he was the one who suggested to make it really crystal clear it was a personal story and should end with a photo of my father and I, which was awesome. He even suggested naming the short after me, so people really understood this is personal.
Did you take into account the differences between the faith and family outlook of the East and the more secular view we take in the West?
Nicole:
We definitely looked at an East versus West motif but we liked to think that the family dynamic was fairly universal. Generational tension goes beyond immigrants or Eastern culture.
Sanjay:
The story’s definitely set in America. My parents were more checked out than my American friends’ parents were. My parents were basically just trying to survive and keep working so they weren’t really very present. The only time my father would show up and demand family time were these rituals, which would occur twice daily.
I can’t speak about east and west, I just know the specifics of my family, and that’s exactly how it happened in my family.
There were some nerd details about how we placed things in the room, it was a very conscious choice to put little Sanjay and his TV on the left of the screen, which was the West part of the screen, and the father and his shrine on the right of the screen, which was the East part of the screen.
What’s the job of a producer on an animated movie?
Nicole:
As a producer I’ve always worked in animation and I’m particularly fortunate to work at a studio like Pixar. From the outside people think all I do is sit by the pool all day but in fact Pixar has a lot of different projects going on and our crew is always busy doing different things.
The job of a producer in this instance was to partner with Sanjay to figure out what his vision was and help him put together a team of people to realise that. They had to be the right people and they had to be available because our folks are in great demand, so I spend a lot of time negotiating with other projects to bring those people on.
Also I have to corral the vision a little bit to fit into the schedules we had. We made our short between Inside Out and the Good Dinosaur, so we were limited. I’m sure people will see Sanjay’s vision was quite ambitious, so figuring out what we could possibly get done in that amount of time and what we could live without was a big part of the job.
What’s more important as a director in modern animation, being a storyteller or being technical?
Sanjay:
I definitely worried about that initially, but one of our previous short directors – a guy called Doug Sweetland – gave a talk about that and had such great advice. He was an animator just like me, from a traditional 2D background, he didn’t really know anything about the technical departments and he was worried about how he’d be able to direct those people.
What he came to realise, which I found is true for me as well, the director is trying to give people the marching orders, but the story is often giving the marching orders. Everybody is essentially looking at the story to guide them and in many ways the director is the one that’s just interpreting the story and everyone else is using that interpretation.
But if I have a clear idea about what the emotion is or whatever’s supposed to be communicated in the moment, our technical artists can really take that and run with it and do the rest.
Does making a short equip you with the skills necessary to direct an entire feature?
I wouldn’t know. It was a good experience, I’ll say that. I’ve had the good fortune of working on so many good features over the years, but even then, seeing every department is a true revelation even when you’re working on a short. Even though I felt like I knew the medium and process it was a huge education, so I imagine working on a feature would be learning from scratch again.
