Lee Unkrich

I love Giuseppe Tornatore, the guy that did 'Cinema Paradiso.'

I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.

I don't like 3D movies that have things popping out of the screen. Firstly, I find it straining on my eyes, and more importantly, it distracts me from the movie.

The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.

It's a strange business, and unfortunately, what we do in animation is a mystery, especially the directors.

If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

People loved the first two 'Toy Story' films so much, and the last thing I wanted to do was make a disappointing third film.

Any of us directing at Pixar, whether it's our first time or not, feel a lot of pressure to not make a bad Pixar film.

If you ask any of us which movie we were making when one of our kids was born, we'll be able to tell you instantly. It's like our family lives are permanently woven into the movies.

I'd really love to watch David Lynch work, to be a fly on the wall.

I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.

I grew up loving watching movies, and at a certain point, I started to become fascinated with making movies. Then I went to film school, and I got to dabble with different aspects of moviemaking, and I ended up settling heavily into editing - editing was what I was really adept at, had a passion for.

I didn't want to be the guy who screwed up 'Toy Story.'

Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'

The only reason we made 'Toy Story 2' is that we happened to come up with a storyline that was really good. It wasn't driven by wanting to make a sequel.

I never wanted 'Toy Story 3' to feel like another sequel just grafted on. We all know that if you put 3 after your title, it typically means garbage, and we knew that going in.

We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.

When we made 'Toy Story,' journalists were more interested in talking about the technique because it was so new and unknown, and we just wanted to talk about the story.

People talk a lot about Pixar going off the rails. A lot of people are saying they aren't happy that we are making sequels. But for every one of those people, there is one that is happy because they fell in love with the worlds we created. We hope we've proved that a sequel can be every bit as enjoyable as the original.

We got together as a group to come up with the idea for 'Toy Story 3' in the same cabin where we dreamed up 'Toy Story.'

We hope 'Toy Story 3' looks amazing but still retains the character design of the first film. I like to think it looks like 'Toy Story' would have looked back then had we had the skills and the technology.

When we made 'Toy Story,' we knew, even back then, that this was going to be the ugliest film we would ever produce.

Pixar is filled with people who don't get rid of their toys.

I know I'm going to send my three kids off to college someday. I know my parents will pass away someday. It's one thing to say, 'I'll be able to deal with that day when it comes,' and it's another thing to find yourself at that day, dealing with it.

If I went back to live-action, I'd have to do it the Pixar way. If I didn't, I'd feel like I was walking a tightrope without a net.

It's important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good.

We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.

I think the moment you try to make something for kids, you are making something really cruddy that even kids don't want to watch most of the time.

When we were making 'Toy Story,' my grandmother was very ill, and she knew she was not going to make it. I went back to visit her, and there was a moment during that visit that I had to say goodbye, and I knew I'd never be seeing her again. I looked at her and knew that I was looking at her for the last time.

The world does not want to see a Pixar film that's not great.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by incredibly talented people at Pixar, of course, and I learn a lot from them each and every day.

I did direct quite a bit when I was in school, and I directed some television afterwards.

I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I'm very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it's not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.

You can be stuck for two weeks on a problem, and then you get the right couple of people in a room, and in five minutes, you get a great answer.

Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.

We know that families and kids are going to be an important part of our audience, so we've always made sure that we've picked subject matter that was appropriate for kids. But I think if you try to target a movie to kids, you're going to fail.

Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.

I love that people are still obsessively trying to understand and decode 'The Shining.' People want to find meaning in things that seemingly don't have meaning on the surface.

We try our best every time to make engaging films that we're interested in, and we just hope the rest of the world likes them.

In the earliest days of Pixar, when we were making 'Toy Story' and 'A Bug's Life,' we all came together as a group.

I guess it's the fear of failure and not knowing how the films are going to do that just drives us to work really hard to make them the best they can possibly be.

I was disappointed that 'Tangled' didn't get nominated for Best Animated Film.

When you think about it, the most important thing to a toy is to be played with by a child, and anything that keeps them from being played with gives them stress - things like getting lost, getting broken.

How about a good comedy? 'Raising Arizona.' Remains the funniest movie I've ever seen in my life.

It wasn't the first film to show a kind of alternate vision of suburbia, but it left an indelible impression, I think, on everybody, and all films like that will forever be measured against 'Blue Velvet.'

My favorite film is 'The Shining,' mostly because it was the film that inspired me to become a filmmaker myself.

Every one of us at Pixar is worried that we're going to be the one to make the dud.

After we finished 'Toy Story 2,' we talked about going right into making 'Toy Story 3,' because we had an idea that we thought had some promise. But there were a bunch of boring contractual problems going on between Disney and Pixar at the time that kept us from making the movie.

Going through the Chagrin Falls school system, I always thought I was going off to art school.