DAN SCANLON

I tend to like dry humor.

There are certainly moments in the story room where you watch the movie die on the table. You put A next to B, and suddenly none of it lines up anymore. We feel that all the time. It's a terrible feeling.

The idea of us telling a story where a character doesn't get everything he wants at the end is one of the relatable things - dealing with failures and missteps in life - and it's something that's so rarely dealt with in movies, especially kids' movies.

I think the biggest difference is in live action, you show up, and there's a set there and a ground to stand on, at least, and in animation, there's kinda nothing. You are making decisions on everything.

I started at Pixar the month 'Monsters Inc.' came out.

There are characters that become more popular as we fall in love with them.

No one ever tells a story to help you figure out where to go when a door closes on you.

I worked in the story department for years on 'Cars' and 'Toy Story 3.'

I think we make the movies, initially, with the one movie in mind. But we do love the characters, and so we kind of miss the characters when the movie is over. But I think what happens is, every now and then you realize there's more to tell, or an idea comes up.

People will turn their noses up at a sequel or that type of thing, but Pixar really works hard - if they're making a sequel - to make a sequel an original movie, to make it an original story.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

I actually worked for a small company in Ohio that sort of farmed out work from Disney and Dreamworks, so I really only ever worked in two studios.

I trust every lead in every department. All of the teams are phenomenal artists. All I need to tell them is why to do something, not how to do something.

The first 'Monsters, Inc.' represents starting at Pixar for me, I have a special place in my heart for it. So to be able to tell a story with those ideas is an honor.

Once you get into a feature, whether it's a sequel or an original one, you have to start all over again, and you're creating a world, creating new characters. You're also tracking emotions. You're trying to create emotion and create a character that you can fall in love with for two hours.

I was an animator for a while early on, but a 2D animator.

I don't think at Pixar we'd ever make something that was too scary for general audiences.

I'm not really a horror movie fan.

There's some real dark days where you just feel like the story is falling apart in every one. Just keep moving forward, even when you are bluffing, even when you don't quite know what is going to happen next.

I don't even know how computer animation works, honestly, and I don't need to.

I don't need to try to push everyone out of the way and say, "This is how you do it. I actually like not knowing. I trust every lead.

A lot of times, people say that if you work hard and never give up, it will always work out, which is a great message. However, that's not always the case.

A director can come from anywhere, but having a story background, if you have nothing else, is probably a good thing to have because it's really the one tool you need.

I like sharing stuff with people. I feel like it's kind of at their own discretion, you can see too much if you want to see too much.

The scary thing is that sometimes you are wrapping up animation on a sequence and you don't know how the movie ends or begins. You just have to bluff and move forward.