I admire directors so much, I find them incredible: they manage such a huge number of people of different characters, think of the money involved.
[Muppets] all have their own teams. And I had to get it over to [Miss] Piggy's team and approvals, but she was with it.
You can't actually hire and fire people inside of an open source community. Which means that getting people to work together is much more along the lines of making sure that people have the tools they need both to get their work done but also to know what is being done by other people and how to take that to their employer and tell that story to their employer and to show this is why the community is good and this is why we're working on these sort of things because it helps us over here.
The day you step on the floor the meter is ticking and time is of the essence. You can't really afford to not know what you're doing. So I think the screenplay is a great tool to get everybody on the same page.
Well, we try to - we definitely try to have a balance. And I think things have gotten a lot better at Pixar. When we did "Toy Story," that was an all hands on deck situation that really was time intensive.
I always try and bring screenplay, shooting and editing into a sort of symbiotic - as close into alignment as you possibly can get them, consistent, obviously, with the resources that you've got and the time you've got available.
When there's a clear vision, and you've got the creative teams working toward that goal, each on their own, it can then come together quite elegantly at the endpoint.
Some infrastructure projects clearly require massive, coordinated investment - interstate highways or a new trans-Hudson tunnel, for instance. Others don't have to. We should be unafraid of pilot projects and learning.
I often compare putting a hotel together to old-time movie production. You come up with a story line, you hire the writer, the director, the stars, the set designer.
I believe in paying special attention to every project that you do and supporting the projects you do.
The hardest part about directing is getting everyone on the same page.
I just put people together. I just identified jobs that have to be filled. And then I have to go out and find the right people and make sure they talk to each other. So I'm the beneficiary of good things that other people do. I get credit for that. If they don't do a good job, I get the blame for it.
We're all outriders out there, and what we have is all these large number of tasks - that's the herd; that's all the cattle - a whole bunch of individual, hundreds if not thousands of projects at any given time ongoing that we're trying to complete. So we're trying to keep the cattle herd, keep it all just going in the right direction.
Society needs people who can manage projects in addition to handling individual tasks.
Directing is a huge amount of work with very little payoff, and a quarter of the money, and nine times more time spent.
I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare.
There are two big benefits from moving conversations from a mode where you're addressing individuals, or groups of individuals, to addressing a channel which is a topic, a project, a functional discipline, or whatever.
We worked with the engineers in the design and construction and testing phases in those various areas, then we would get back together at the end of the week and brief each other as to what had gone on.
I paid my way through school doing set construction for film and television. I'm a member of Local 44. I was a construction coordinator on 'Beverly Hills 90210' for 4 1/2 years and ran their whole construction program. I did two other pilots as a coordinator for Aaron Spelling.
Then you realize that the preparation and the planning of this small army of people trying to head to the single aim of creating a work that's going to excite people is very risky. Of course, the odds are that it's not going to work out because there are too many possibilities of it going wrong.
The architect is very interesting because the architect is the commander, meaning the one who commands all the workers. The architect is also the music director and composer. He cannot play each instrument, but he needs to understand and embody the sense of each part.
