As Pixar’s big Christmas release Soul gears up to drop on Disney+ Hotstar Premium, I spoke to the main minds behind the film - Pete Docter (director, story, screenplay), Kemp Powers (co-director, story, screenplay) and Dana Murray (producer) about their ambitious animated feature.
Featuring the voices of Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey among others, Soul revolves around Joe, a middle-school band teacher, whose true passion is jazz. But, when he travels to another realm to help another being find her passion, he soon discovers what it means to have soul.
How has Soul pushed the boundaries at Pixar in terms of thought and ambition - when you place it next to films like let’s say, Coco or Inside Out?
Pete Docter: From the get go it was a challenge and everybody was a bit nervous because we were talking about potentially deeply held belief systems that are different around the world, whether you are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish - you have different ideas about where we come from, where we are going, afterlife and so the idea of tip-toeing into that made a lot of people nervous. Now, all of that was also amplified when we decided Joe needed to be African-American, there are a lot of cultural issues and especially for those of us who are not African-American, we do not understand or have experience in the culture and so that was fraught with a lot of tension and anxiety initially. So, there were big things that we bid off on this film and it’s thanks to all the collaborators that we have that helped us to pull it off.
Kemp, tell us about the casting of Jamie Foxx for Joe Gardner, how did the team zero in on Foxx and how much did he bring to the table.
Kemp Powers: Jamie Foxx brought a lot to the table as an actor and we’ve always said that we could not have picked a better actor to play Joe Gardner than Jamie Foxx. He has the pedigree of both - the dramatic chops, he’s an academy award winning actor, he’s also a comedian, so we’ve got the humour covered and he’s also actually a musician. He started off as a musician, a classically trained pianist. So, it’s kind of hard for us to imagine any other actor who could have really embodied all the elements of Joe as well as Jamie Foxx did. That being said, once we brought Jamie in, after our first couple of sessions, and at the end of the day when I watched the film I don’t even hear Jamie Foxx’s voice, to me now Jamie Foxx sounds like Joe Gardner not the other way around.
Dana, jazz plays such an important part of the film, now suppose you couldn’t use jazz or music as Joe’s passion or choice of art, what else would you have gone with, were there other options?
Dana Murray: We were really playing around with what his purpose or what his passion would be. I think we tried actor, we tried scientist, I think we joked about him being an animator, but none of them seemed as fun or as exciting to watch on screen as a musician, so when we decided on musician, we were thinking of rockstar, we wanted it to be a very noble passion and jazz is like - you don’t go into jazz to get famous and rich, you go to Jazz because you love it and you’re passionate about it, so when we landed there, it seemed like the right fit.
Pete, could you tell us about the thought that went into designing Overseers in the Great Before in Soul - they are just basic line drawings, but they convey such grace and power at the same time.
Pete Docter: We wanted to be clear they are not gods, or creators or anything like that. There’s somehow the powers of the universe distilled down into power of some form. We also wanted to make sure they don’t look like people or souls because they are different than that, so you know we struggled and played around with a bunch of stuff and then one of our story artists, she had a challenge of boarding a scene with one of them and she just started drawing them as these lines or these squiggles and then our design team actually took wires, they just started bending coat-hangers and we thought - wow! if we could somehow do something like that - like it’s a 3-dimensional line and maybe that would do exactly the things that we are after. It turned out to be really fun but really hard.
Kemp, in Soul, while we are in the Great Before, we see new souls going through a phase where they discover their ‘spark’, and are then bundled off to earth. How was it with you - did you always know what your spark was, or did you have any trouble finding what your spark is, like 22 (a soul who doesn’t know what its spark is) does in the film?
Kemp Powers: I would have definitely fallen more into the 22 realm than in the Joe realm. I definitely didn’t know what my spark was, I wasn’t really sure what I was good at when I was young. Even what I am doing now is a second career, I was a journalist for 17 years before I moved into creative writing as a profession. For me, I was just searching more and more around, one of the great things about this film is that it allows for and shows that we see both those people who do have that drive from the very beginning. People like Pete (Docter), who always knew that he wanted to be an animator, as well as for people like me, who kind of like have to find themselves, and at the end of the day, neither one is better than the other, you could still come to this place of true satisfaction regardless of whether you were meant to do something from the beginning or not. Ultimately, we want to say that everyone has a place, everyone’s life has merit in this world.
Dana, we have seen Pixar emphasise on diversity and inclusion - films like Coco and Soul are I believe examples of that. But, could you tell us behind-the-scenes how seriously are ideals of diversity and inclusion taken so that it reflects not just in the work but in the workplace as well at Pixar.
Dana Murray: It’s a major priority at the studio right now, I think it starts with the storytellers, there are a lot of new voices coming up in the ranks, a lot more women a lot more people of colour and there’s just a lot of open and honest conversation happening in the workplace about what is going on and where is the bias and how can we change our hiring process or interviewing process and just kind of looking at how we do things and taking a step back and seeing how we can get more diversity within the company.
Pete, Kemp, Dana - thank you so much for your time and all the very best for your film Soul.
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