Full Transcript for Pixar Founder: Steve Jobs, Disney and the Fight to Stay Alive | Alvy Ray Smith

it's just a series of good luck. It's just one piece of good luck after another. What good luck I mean, breaking your leg doesn't sound like good luck, but it turned out to be because it made me stop and reassess the world and be sure I was doing something right and I wasn't. And a second piece of good luck was my best friend was Dick Schelp who built the first color graphics. machine in the world and built the and and and he also wrote the software, the the the Superpaint program. and the th ther next piece of luck was they hired me at Xerox Park. Now I look back at Xerox Park was this amazing place. As I'm as I think you understand, it's where desktop computing as we now all practice it began. The the mouse, the The laser printer, the Ethernet, the desk the Windows based operating system, I mean the the whole thing. the desktop computer and I did the color pixel part. It was all happening around me. I was just surrounded by these amazing geniuses. And I was there by accident, you know, as far as I concerned, I was there because my friend was there. Konstantin Saifoulline: I'm interested how the culture of a place like this influences the people. What in this place actually made people do great things? Why did these things get developed in Xerox Park? Alvy: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a good question. Why did they what did they do right and what did they do wrong? They they basically said, you know, this was a corporate Xero Xerox corporate decision to set up this research center. by the way, the corporate center of Xerox was at in Rochester, New York, on the other side of the country. They set up this research center in Palo Alto, California. basically it was y you know, it was all hippies and beanbag chairs and writing on the walls and and there there were you could do anything you wanted. I mean the there was kind of a general theme that you were designing the office of the future. But the s the scientists there, the engineers there just took that to mean build whatever you think needs to be built. So, you know. Somebody wrote a w a word type program and somebody wrote a built a laser printer and somebody did color graphics and somebody did the mouse and somebody built the alto desktop computer, so forth. People just did what they had to do. 'cause they were free free to. Dick Chop, my buddy, just decided to build an art machine. by the way that I d didn't actually get hired there. They they purchased me with a purchase order. They didn't have any slots to hire hire people, so they they purchased me they purchased my service as an artist showing off Dick's machine with a purchase order. Konstantin Saifoulline: That's crazy. Alvy: And that counts several years later, you know, a year or so later when they fired me. They didn't really fire me, they canceled my purchase order. Konstantin Saifoulline: haha Alvy: And I and I said I said, Well well why? You know, you you've got the f colors the future and you own it completely. I didn't know about the engineers at NASA. I thought this was the the color all the color in the world and they owned it. And essentially that was true. And the th the manager looked at me and he says, Alvy, you may be right. But it's a corporate decision to go black and white. Okay, bye. I don't think so. Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah, yeah. Alvy: So the next in a sense, this is a lucky break, too. It's hard, it's hard to I didn't seem like at the time, but I had paled paled with an artist friend named David D. Francisco by this time. He was an artist in San Francisco, a video artist. And He would come down and jam with me on the paint program at night. He wasn't hired at all, and so he needed an income. And he suggested that we propose to the National Endowment for the Arts a project for exploiting this new artistic medium, the color pixel. And we did that. We we submitted a proposal to NEA. Now the proposal required that we have the machine that Dick Shop had built. We called it a frame buffer or a picture memory. It's a it's a memory made of pixels. He built the first one in the world. We we needed one for this grant if we were to get it. So getting fired from Xerox Park forced me, forced us to go look for the next frame buffer. Where's the next frame buffer in the world? And we heard that they were building one in Salt Lake City. At a place called Evans and Sutherland. By the way, Salt Lake City, the compute the University of Utah there was already getting a reputation as an early center of computer graphics research. So we jumped in my car, drove over to Salt Lake City, and tried not to say the word art, but I had hair down to my ass, and David's hair was out to here. And they they knew we were artists i even though we never said the word and they said, Guys, and by the way, you know, our president we just wanted access to that next frame buffer that they were building. Just access. And they said, Guys, we we can't do that. We're we are funded by the Defense Department and we can't have artists. But there was this crazy man who just came through here the other day. A rich man from Long Island, New York, who bought one of everything in sight. And I said, did he buy the frame buffer? Yes, he did. He had purchased the very first commercial frame buffer. The second frame buffer in existence, in other words. Now when I say frame buffer you gotta that it's it's full of color pixels, right? That's what a frame buffer is. It's a memory full of color pixels that you can see. You can see pictures. All right, very important. And one of the people at the University University of Utah said, by the way, I'm going out there tomorrow to advise this rich man. I'll call you when I get back and tell you what I see there. He called and he said, If I were you, I'd get on the next plane. See, this is luck happening here. So Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: so David and I did exactly that. We got on the next plane, flew out to Long Island. I flew out to New Jersey actually

where David lived and it was there was a terrible blizzard going on in New York City. I think it dropped eighteen inches of snow. And we fought our way from New Jersey over to Long Island through that sno through that blizzard to the New York Institute of Technology, which was you know, a fancy name for basically what was at the time a diploma mill. It was it It's now a a a reputable university, but at the time it was just a diploma mill for kids who lived on Long Island and wanted a college degree. They could drive to this campus and learn video engineering and things like that and get a degree. The rich man who owned this university was named Alexander Schure. He was one of the he was one of the people that who made it made Pixar possible, actually. Nobody knows about him, unless they've read my book. And he's he he's probably the the the most one of the most courageous financial people along the way because he put a lot of money into us but he lost everything. His kids even took the university away from him, finally. but that's later. What w I've got to describe to you the North Shore of Long Island. It's fabulous. It's Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: states and mansions, one after the other. Extremely wealthy people just lined up along this the North Shore of Long Island. It's worth Yes, same today. It's it's just mansion Konstantin Saifoulline: So today, if I would go there? Alvy: after mansion after mansion. Huge estates. Gorgeous grounds. Movies are made there. And this man, Alexander Schur, had somehow cobbled together four of these giant estates to be the campus of his New York Institute of Technology, New York Tech. And the the mansions on those four estates were the buildings on the campus. So we we did computer graphics in one mansion, we did video in another mansion. I l David and I and another guy lived in a third mansion nearby and my girlfriend lived in a fourth mansion. I mean it I I come from a small town in New Mexico. I couldn't believe it. I would get up every day and pinch myself. Is this it felt like a movie. Is this really happening? Yes it was. This this guy had had an entire studio of old fashioned animators on the campus. And he was making a movie called Tubby the Tuba. Now, that's the old fashioned way where you you draw a pencil on paper and then you trace that on ink on the celluloid and then you opaque between the s ink lines with colored inks and then you photograph you stack up the cells and you photograph That's the old fashioned way of making that's the way Snow White was made. He was trying to be the next Walt Disney. That's he that was his fantasy, I think. He wanted to be the next Walt Disney. And we wanted access to that frame buffer he had bought. And and and he he was a very, very strange man. but basically I talked my way in. I showed him some of the st what I'd done with Dick Chelps machine at Xerox. I'd made a video and he gave me access. And then I met the person whom he had just hired to run the Evans and Sutherland equipment that he had just bought. It was a kid named Ed Catmall. Well, Ed Catmall would be the co-founder with me of Pixar later. So this is where we met. working for this crazy man on the north shore of Long Island. So I can I can give you one story just to kind of sh show you how amazing this was. First of all, he was buying he was he he bought us the the best computer graphics laboratory in existence. not really understanding how you make a movie with computers. Nobody had ever done that. And he was he just th thought somehow you plug computers in, you you get dollars out the other you know. He didn't know. Konstantin Saifoulline: What was the setup? What machines did you put into the room? Alvy: Well, w we had that the frame buffer. One frame buffer. We had one P D P f eleven of some sort, computer. We had the we you know, it was nowhere close to being able to make movies. We we no all And I I guess I should also add that the animators at the s at the animation studio were scared to death of us. It's like like movie industry is scared to death of AI today. These guys are scared to death. It didn't matter. We would say we would insist is look, we we aren't the computer can't create. We're we can take away the grunt job grunt work, but it's not gonna take your job away. You're the animated we don't know how to b animate. By the way, we still don't know how to animate. So But they didn't believe us. They assumed that, you know, basically we were these computers, whatever they were, were gonna take their jobs away. But we learned, we got a master's class from these old animators on how to make a feature-length animated film. Another piece of luck. one day, Alex Uncle Uncle Alex, we called him. Uncle Alex came to me like four in the morning. would w we would work all night. It was so exciting. Everything we touched was new. And you didn't want to go to sleep 'cause you might miss you might miss something. So he said, Do we have the best computer graphics facility in the world? And I said, Yes, we do. He said, Well, how do we stay there? Which is the right thing to ask, right? I said, Well, if you buy me two more of these frame buffers, which were eight bits deep I can cobble them together, three of them together, to have twenty four bit pixels, and instead of two hundred and fifty six colors, we'll have sixteen million colors, and then we can do anything. Now did he get that? I wasn't sure. And by the way, that first frame buffer cost him eighty thousand dollars. That's for five twelve by five twelve by eight bits. Eighty thousand dollars. Nineteen seventy-five dollars. Which is probably something like, I don't know, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars now. For what we would now think of as a trivial piece of memory. Trivial. And I just said Buy me two more of those. Well, a few weeks later he came in, he says, You know what? I bought you five more of those eight-bit thingies, Konstantin Saifoulline: Ha! Alvy: so you'd

have two of those twenty-four-bit thingies. And in today's dollars, he had spent, just on my say-so in that one conversation, he had spent over two million dollars in today's money to make sure we were had the best. And that put us in the world of RGB full color pictures, the first in the world. And we were out in the advance of everybody else and we never looked back. That you know, that was the beginning of the charge toward Pixar. You know, I I I I still kind of look I'm astonished at what happened and how you know I call Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: him Uncle Alex there once? That was a total coincidence. My roommate, my housemate in California when I was working for Park had tried to tell me that his uncle was doing what I was doing. And I went, Well, my housemate was an economist at Stanford. What did he know about computer graphics? He didn't I said, He doesn't know what he's talking about. I know everybody in the world who's doing computer graphics. No, his uncle's not one of them. So I came back after having met this crazy man on Long Island to tell my housemates that I was moving out, going to Cal going to New York. And my housemate says, Alvie, I've been trying to tell you. That's my uncle. Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: How how can these things happen, right? It's just like, okay. Konstantin Saifoulline: How did it then came to like you actually creating Pixar like what was the thought behind there like doing the step and How many people were actually like involved in and like actually creating this company? Alvy: Well we we we had to create it was the was the thing. It w it wasn't You know, basic what I just described to you was we were working for the man. His name was Alexander Shure. Or a research lab. We had been a I had been a research lab at Xerox Park, research lab for Alexander Shur at New York Tech. And then we realized by the way, Tubby the Tuba was a failure as a movie. anything that you can do wrong with a cell animated movie he had done wrong. And we had nothing to do with it, thank goodness. And we we decided by the way I sh very important while we were there, while the group was there at New York Tech, we said, why don't we be the first group in the world to make a complete movie with a computer? Let's be first. What we didn't know is it would take us 20 years to get there. And Toy Story was that movie, but it took us 20 years to get there. So, but we but we quickly ascertained that this guy, this rich man, was not was not the person to take us there. So about that time, this guy, George Lucas, came on the scene with Star Wars. And we all went in and were astonished by it and little did we know that one day he was gonna knock on our door and say, Why don't you guys come out and join me? And we went, Okay, we thought it'd be Disney, but Disney hasn't knocked on our door and you have. So we went to we we went to Marin County, California, near San Francisco and worked for George Lucas. And that was our next huge lucky break. He he didn't really understand who we were, but he was so George Lucas had this vision that it was time to digitize Hollywood. It was time to make audio digital, video digital, certainly bookkeeping digital. Everything should be digital. he he didn't understand that the movie making process itself could be digital, but The editing could be right. So he and we knew we could help him with that vision. But we assumed what he really wanted for us, he wanted us to be in the movies. You know, he wanted we had I already had a piece in the in the Museum of Modern Art in New York by then. And we you know, we we we were fa getting famous amongst computer graphics people for our animations. So we soon that's what he wanted, but he never came to me and asked me to use my group to be in the movies. And I finally dawned on me that he didn't get it. He didn't get it. He thought we were just technical nerds that could do hardware and software, but we we couldn't do the creative part. Well, of course the creative part was what we wanted. And the way we Got past that was the next lucky break was Star Trek people came in and asked for us to be in Star Trek 2 The Wrath of Khan. Just a short piece called the Genesis Demo. And we did that. I was I directed it. It was just a short piece. And after it was of the night after the premiere, George Lucas stepped one foot in my office and said, Great camera move. It was a camera move I had put in the piece just for his benefit. And he got it. And then he started telling his friends about us, one of his friends being Steven Spielberg, and so forth. Then the word started to spread. But he didn't ru so what what I was gonna g say was we we were still working for the man, right? This the the man happened to be George Lucas in this case. We were still Konstantin Saifoulline: Hmm, yep. Alvy: a research facility. The next thing that happened, again, doesn't sound like a lucky break, but it was, George Lucas and his wife got divorced. Well, in California, half the fortune goes with each spouse. That's the way the law works. So overnight he lost half his fortune. And I went to my partner Ed and I said, Ed, you know, George just lost half his fortune and he never really understood who we are. He didn't like we wanted to make animated movies. We were into character animation and he didn't understand that. he's gonna fire us. He can't afford us. Let's and here's where I said, let's start a company. It would be awful for this this group of creators that we've assembled to disperse. I need to say one more thing. Moore's Law still still hadn't got to the place where a computer was fast enough to compute a movie. And we knew that. We had a cold hard fact, I could prove it to you. there were still five years to go before computers got fast enough to compute a movie cost effectively. How are we gonna hold this croup group of expert technical geniuses and artistic geniuses together for five years. We said, well, w let's start

a company for them. And we we know we can't make a movie with this company, because Morse Law's not there yet. But we could but we had built a prototype computer for George Lucas. Why don't we turn that prototype computer into a product, just like they do in Silicon Valley, and sell computers? And that'll support us for five years, probably, at which point We can make the movie. Somehow magically that would just happen. And that is what happened. Konstantin Saifoulline: From where came the conviction? Like, I'm interested, like, was it just that, like, all of you were such experts into the topic that you were, like, all agreeing on, yeah, we're just, like, totally just five years away from this? So that's just going to happen. Alvy: Well we knew w we were we were we were right on that. What we didn't what we were lousy at was business. You Konstantin Saifoulline: Hmm. Alvy: know, for a business you have to have marketing and sales and Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: finance and you know, all that. HR We had to we didn't know any of that. Ed and I just we didn't know any of that. We had we were sort of middle manager type people. We weren't we had to learn to be C class. And we had to raise money for this corporation. So we we quickly put a business plan together. with sell computers. That's that's that we showed how you know spreadsheets do do what all startup companies do. You sh prove with spreadsheets it's gonna make sense. But then we had to raise money. But and you asked how many people it was about 40 people by this point that we were trying to keep alive. That included all this my technical geniuses, of which I an awesome group of guys. And artistic geniuses like I I'd already hired John Lassiter, who was our head animator and he was a creative genius of the first order. Pixar wouldn't have made sense without him. And then and remember this is two this is two computer nerds, Ed Capmill and myself, went out to the venture capital world and tried to raise the money to capitalize this company. Thirty five venture capital firms turned us down. I i this is hard to do, but c can you imagine being turned down once and then thirty five thirty five times? Thirty five times. So basically Konstantin Saifoulline: can imagine being turned out a few hundreds of times. I experienced that. Alvy: every we were kind of sexy because we were Lucasfilm. We were we were spun out of Lucasfilm. So we would get through the front door of every venture venture capital firm in s in Silicon Valley. But They would all say they always said no. We didn't make sense. We you know, we Ed and I were not practiced in in business. And we already had a prototype. It wasn't like they were financing a prototype. It wasn't we already had 40 people. This is it just didn't fit Silicon Valley. It didn't fit it didn't fit the formula, right? They all said no. So then we had this idea, Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah, the classical Schema. Alvy: why don't we go? Let's partner with some very large corporation and we'll do something that they need and they'll they'll pay for the company. So we approached ten large corporations. Eight of them said, No way. No. Two of them Said, okay, let's do it. One of them was General Motors, which is the largest corporation in the world at the time. And they went into partnership with Phillips of the Netherlands. which was into medical imagery, and we had done some good medical imaging, they decided to go together and fund Pixar. And we got all the way to the final day of the negotiations in Manhattan. We were in Manhattan up on the fortieth Konstantin Saifoulline: how many people will be part of the negotiations. Alvy: Well, there was giant boardroom table. You might have seen one. It had four parties around it. It had General Motors, Phillips, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, because Lucasfilm had a piece of anything. An attorney you know, a set of attorneys for each party, and and Ed and me, basically. So they're probably, I don't know, twenty people around this table, fifteen or twenty people around this table. It was one of the most painful days of my life. got had a stress headache. It was just like a nail being pounded right but right into my forehead. Because my future was being decided right there by, you know, what was happening in these negotiations. And at the end of that day, everybody was smiling and shaking hands. And in the business world, that means you have a done deal. All that remains is the next day the attorneys write up what's been agreed to, and everybody signs and shakes hands and it's done. But not in our case. In our case, overnight, so it turns out that the part of General Motors we were dealing with. was run by H. Ross Perot. Does that mean anything to you? H. Ross Perot Konstantin Saifoulline: No. What falsehood are you? Alvy: ran for president of the United States once. He was a quiet character and basically he about the same day we were negotiating in downtown Manhattan, he was tearing the board of directors of General Motors apart for being fools for buying Hughes tools. And that news broke in the Wall Street Journal the day of our negotiations. Everybody knew immediately that anything that had to do with General Motors and H. Rossboro was dead. And our deal was right there in that juncture. So we got thrown out overnight. Our deal got thrown out overnight. Ed and I are frantic, right? We've now gone through forty-five funding possibilities, been told no. It Lucasfilm's at the end of their tether. there you know, we were facing the possibility this is just not gonna happen. We were in the limousine. Going back out to the airport to fly back to California. And it Ed and I were and we were just tossing around ideas and we came up with Do you know what a Hail Mary pass is? A Hail Mary pass is in football if you just you just throw a crazy pass hoping that just by sheer Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: luck you'll you'll get out of the tight situ. We we came up with a

Hail Mary move. Let's call Steve Jobs. Now, we had already met him as part of the financing schemes. He had he had been one of the people who He had he had invited Ed and me over to his mansion along the way and offered to buy us from Lucasville and run us as his next movie. He had been kicked out of Apple by then. So We said, no no, you know, we want to run our own company, but we'll take your money. And he agreed. He agreed to that. But he ran his number, his capital you know, his valuation number by Lucasfilm, who had to agree to everything. And his number was about half of what General Motors and Phillips were offering. So they just laughed him out of the office basically. All right, so that's the background. We're in the limo now. General Motor Phillips has failed. Let's call Steve. So we decided to call Steve and say, make exactly the same offer again. Half the valuation. We're pretty sure that Lucasfilm is gonna take it because they're nothing else. You're end of the road. And that's what happened and that's how we got Steve Jobs to be our investor. Now everybody says he bought us. No, he didn't. He inv he he capitalized this start up company. He owned the majority of this stock, but the employees owned the rest of it. and basically You know so even though I don't like Steve Jobs at all, I thank him highly for funding us. Basically we kept him out of the building the rest of the time 'cause he always upset everything. And five years passed, Morris Law did what it's supposed to do, and right right on schedule Disney knocked on our door and said, Okay guys, let's make that movie you always wanted to make. And we did, that was Toy Story. Konstantin Saifoulline: This must be a really interesting time. mean, from what I've read about Steve, he was never a person who was just a bit involved into things. He wanted to be like, he wanted to say things. How did how went like the the board meetings when? When you were there like did you try to hide things or did you? Try to make them as short as possible like how did you basically kept him out of running the company? Alvy: well, he was he he had started up his own company called Next by this time. And Next was an hour and a half away from Pixar. It was below San Francisco. Pixar was north of San Francisco. And we after s after the experience of him visiting Pixar and upsetting everything, we realized we have to keep him out of the building. So we made sure that every meeting was at next. Every time it was a board. Konstantin Saifoulline: You Alvy: So Ed and I and Steve were the board of directors. So we made sure all the board meetings were next. And I think within so f one of one of the people at Pixar told me that for for until Toy Story from the funding to the Toy Story coming out, they think Steve had been in the building nine times. So this is like a lot of years. You don't you'd been there very rarely. No. Of course he his he would he would read he would tell the story so that he had been there

all along and ran the whole place himself. Not true. You didn't know anything about movies. Konstantin Saifoulline: What happened in this time before the first movie came? Like you now had funding, how did you structure things? Like how did you came up with like running a company? Because a company obviously is not only great people and not only capital, like you need to move the things in the right way. you basically would need to have this coach, right, who has the knowledge about how to bring the company in the place that it can actually produce in the movies and not go bankrupt. Alvy: Yeah, well, we had to keep alive, right? We had to keep the whole idea was to sell hardware to keep the company alive until we got to the place where somebody would capitalize a movie. That someplace turned out to be Disney, who came in and basically saved everybody financially by capitalizing Toy Story. By the way, by that point Pixar had failed about three times and was completely out of money. Despite Steve Jobs, the great Steve Jobs being the Chairman being the on the board. Reason is is we really weren't a hardware company, right? We were we wanted to be in the movies and that's really what we were good at. we built a wonderful machine, but every but it w it not enough people bought it to support the company. And by definition, that's failure. And we ran out of money three times. And usually when you run out of money in Silicon Valley, you're dead. But Steve jobs so did not want to be seen as a failure that he would just tear Ed and me apart with his voice, but he would write a check and and put more money into the company and take more of our equity away, I should also add. but he kept us alive. For whatever reasons he kept us alive. I think it was so he wouldn't be embarrassed. And we got we it worked. We we we got we got we made the movie. Konstantin Saifoulline: Tell me a bit more about why did this relationship between Pixar and Steve Jobs not worked out? It's fascinating to me that there can be a relationship where someone puts their money in really huge stakes and at the same time the company does not like the person who invests the money. Alvy: It's you know, I it nobody wants to believe me, I guess, but b Steve Jobs was was the money and that was it. And I thank him highly for it, but he did it he had nothing to do with building the machine or or s or making the the deal with Disney and you know later after Story Toy Story came out, he made sure that he was in the you know, the when the cameras rolled he was there and he went on to become a big player at Disney but that was just riding on Pixar's glory. He did he got us there with the money. But he had nothing to do with the hiring and the creativity. Konstantin Saifoulline: What was for your company the processes that you developed for hiring and for how to run the company? Alvy: You that's one of those things that I've never quite understood. Why did I have such a wonderful team? How did that happen? you know, I I and I think it happened like this, but I'm not really sure. Everybody knew we were a center of computer graphics research excellence. And we would let you publish. Because we We came from academia. Both Ed and I came from academia. Where publishing the fame you get from publishing is your pay. Salary is just sort of a secondary thing. We weren't in it for the money, in other words. we were in it for the the academic glory. And p so without even trying, the best minds in computer graphics would just come and ask to be with us. And I would say, Of course. So Konstantin Saifoulline: But what do you think has been like, you know, there must be attractive things that go out into the world is that just people think Yeah, this is highly secret place where I want to come in and I want to be part of like Alvy: Well we weren't secret. I think that's it. We were not secret. in fact I remember Japanese businessmen were just puzzled wh why we would let our people publish. We said, Well that's how we attract the best people in the world. If they know there there are certain ideas that we say, no, we'll we'll keep those quiet. Because we're you know the company income depends on them. But anything else you can publish. And they did. So every year there's this big conference called Sigraph and we dominated the papers presented at Sigraph. So you I remember when the even w here's an example of of how people came. one of the first of my geniuses as I called them was Lauren Carpenter. We weren't even at Lucasfilm yet. I was between New York Tech and Lucasville, working at JPL in Pasadena, California, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. But the word had gone out that I was gonna be head of the graphics team at Lucasfilm. just rumor. But I started receiving resumes. And one of them was just an eight by ten manila envelope with a single eight by ten color photograph inside. And an address. It was a picture of a fractal mountain, a mountain made from fractals. Now fractals had just been Just become famous because of this guy Benoit Mendelbroth had written a book about them. But nobody quite knew what to do with them. So Lauren Carpenter was so smart that he sent me a picture and he knew that if I that I would know who he was just from that one picture. And I did. I knew that he had mastered fractals in the service of making pictures. And so I called him and said, Well, I want you. And he said, No, no, no, you can't hire me now. I want you to see the the movie I'm making and I'm going to show it at the next cigar. And after that, we'll talk. I said, Well, okay. I'm ready to hire you right then. Konstantin Saifoulline: you Alvy: And so sure enough, at the next cigar, Lauren Carpenter showed this movie called Volibre was the first it was a a short animation of fractal mountains as seen from a hang glider. and it blew everybody's socks off. It was so good. Nobody see nobody's seen things like this yet. Now now you wouldn't even notice it's so commonplace,

but nobody sees like and Sigraph is always a very appreciative audience. They they just people erupt in standing ovations when they see something they know is the future. That's what happened. I was sitting on the front row. after it was over and I rushed the stage and I said, Now and Lauren said, Now I hired him on the spot. So that that was one example. You know, just it these people just got I say, Well I have to have you and they would say, Okay Bec you know, because being in the movies was really sexy. So Konstantin Saifoulline: How have been the years with working with Disney at the beginning and like how did the relationship there involved? I read about it from multiple sources. I'm really interested how it's been from the inside, like from Pixar, how did this relationship involved? Alvy: Well, what what Disney had and we did not have was ex you know, production experience, marketing experience in the in the film world. Well, of course that, yeah. Konstantin Saifoulline: And money, probably also. Alvy: And that. I mean back in the back at New York Tech we always thought Disney would be the company who funded us. In fact, we believed that so heartily that Ed and I would visit Disney once or twice every year. We would make a pilgrimage out to Disney and just sh show them what we were doing and alert them to, you know, say, you know, are you guys don't you n don't you Konstantin Saifoulline: Hey guys Alvy: need to have don't you need to go digital? And we knew they were they were th that Disney was in trouble. And you know, the Japanese were tr trying to take away their business. And the problem was that Disney was being run by a football player whose qualification was that he had married Walt Disney's daughter. But he was basically just driving the company into the ground. He was reissuing Cinderella every few years in Snow White, you know, doing reruns. But the company wasn't doing anything really innovative. And They but the technical level of people at Disney knew exactly who Ed and I were. They knew we were the solution to Disney's problems. But they said, guys, the the the management's not gonna they're not gonna get it. But the point is we made good friends with the technical level that paid off in the long run. And it and it and Roy Disney became a close friend. Not close a friend, let's just say. Roy would be the nephew of Walt Disney. He was pretty much a playboy, rich. He sailed in sailing races around the world and, you know, had a good time with his wealth. But he was interested in his family name being kept alive and prosperous. So He he helped engineer the removal of that football player. and the repl and having him replaced by Frank Wells and Michael Eisner. Eisner and Wells. And s one month after that, they came and knocked on my door at Lucasfilm now and said, You know, you always told us that you could digitize our cell animation process. Let's do that. Okay. And we did that. We we negotiated I remember it was a sixteen month negotiation because they were they were hard dealers. we negotiated a what's called the caps project computer animation production system with disney this is between Lucasfilm and Disney and it was so successful that basically both companies liked each other you know the admired each other both both companies did what they said they would do by contract but they did more and better. Most deals don't go that well in the business world, but this was a really good deal. It worked for both of us. They bought more image Pixar image computers than anybody else. Konstantin Saifoulline: haha Alvy: not enough, unfortunately. So that that bound the two companies together, but for some reason which I've never understood, they didn't buy us. They could have it any time. And I still don't understand. I think they they thought they could basically take our technology from us. And they had to try it a few times before they realized they didn't have it and we did. Konstantin Saifoulline: in terms of technology like when you say they were not able to to buy you does it mean to buy the people to buy the things that the people develop to buy the culture? Alvy: The deal we made with Disney preserved the culture and independence of Pixar. We knew it was really important that that be the case. We di w did not go down to Burbank, California. We stayed here and here being California. Not Washington. the so the culture could be n unchanged. Nothing changed when the deal went through except ownership. And it's it's I guess my fear has has been that as the original employees age out of Pixar that the company will finally disnify. And I don't think I mean I I think I mean that it will be folded into Disney and become a song and dance place like most of their movies are. that hasn't happened yet though. And here it's been a lot of years. A lot of movies have come out. And the separation of the two cultures has been maintained. Konstantin Saifoulline: Do you think this is important for the success of Pixar? Like that it had this culture independently or do you think it would have worked the same well if it would have been part of Disney? Alvy: Think I think it's the culture we have I c let me just make a strong statement, then I think we probably should close down. I I was both an artist and a technique technical person. I'm good at both. And I think I can claim responsibility for that being the case at Pixar, that it that it celebrates both kinds of creativity. It celebrates technical creativity equal in stature to cr artistic creativity. Did I say that right? Artistic technical and artistic technical and creative art artistic creativity are equal. Now that's easy to say, but seldom practiced. I worked at Microsoft for a while and Microsoft Programmers are king. If you're in if you're not a programmer, if you're in the way they would put it, if you're not smart enough to be a programmer, you can do that, you know, that you can make pictures and marketing and art and that that lesser stuff. They look down their noses, in other words, it artistic creativity. In graphic arts houses that I've encountered, the opposite is true. The creatives are the noble people, and those technoids, the guy that do the you know, do the technical stuff, or lesser. That just doesn't work. We disallowed that kind of classification at Pixar. Both sides were equally celebrated in all possible ways. Salaries, vacations, dignity, respect, everything. Mutual admiration. That's the culture I'm very, very proud of having fostered at Pixar and what I think makes Pixar unique. And I that's that's the culture I do not want to see go away in future, despite all of us original. There's still maybe one or two of the original team still at Pixar. But, you know, not for much longer. So We'll see what happens. all I Konstantin Saifoulline: us. Alvy: what I could say is, boy, am I proud of my baby. And we Konstantin Saifoulline: Yeah. Alvy: it you you if you listen carefully, you we didn't know we were gonna be Pixar, right? We were just a group of people. Wanted to make the first movie. We didn't even know what that would be or what the style would be. We didn't know it would be three D style, character animation, a la Pixar. We would any Anything so long as it's completely computer generated, we would have been happy. So we didn't know it would be Pixar. I and Konstantin Saifoulline: Nice. Alvy: you know, one one of my thrills in life is I'm I'm just about eighty three. Next week I turn eighty three. I I if I give a talk, people kinda come up to me Awestruck afterwards and I realize this no, no, no, it's not me. They they don't know me. I represent their childhood to them. They've grown up on Pixar movies, right? And I I'm a living representative somehow of Pixar, even though all I did was start the company, right? I didn't Don't get me wrong, I don't mind playing that role. I d you know, it's a fine role to have. It's sort of like be the people's grandfather. It it's a it's a it's a curious it's something I've had to come to term terms with as I've gotten older is that is people don't really know me. They know my company and I represent the