Interview (Written): Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina and Darla K. Anderson

The co-director, co-writer, and producer of the Pixar movie Coco.

From Collider:

Are you looking to other Pixar films as a template for what works and what doesn’t work?

UNKRICH: No — it’s more that sometimes we think that we have this really great idea and we run with that idea until someone goes, ‘Wait a minute — this is exactly what we did in Ratatouille.’ And then everyone just groans in the room because we have to start over and come up with a new solution.

Then are you cognizant of finding different emotional beats for each Pixar film?

UNKRICH: It’s never about saying, ‘Oh we’ve done this in Up, so let’s try [something else] in this movie.’ It’s never that. We go where the story takes us and we hope we have a story that allows for a broad range of tones and emotions. We really just try to go where the story takes us, so it’s never about ‘we’ve never done this so let’s do that.’

UNKRICH: It’s great to be at a company, especially with the original films, they’re given whatever gestation periods they need. Sometimes it’s a long time before something finds it’s footing. It’s happened again and again. When we made Up, it started out being a very different film then what it finally became and that’s happened on a few of our films. Even Coco — this was a very different story at the beginning, but luckily [Pixar] give us the room to try things and fail. We know that’s going to be a part of the process until we get to a place where we have a movie that’s worthy of being in this world.

What was that initial spark for Coco?

UNKRICH: The original spark was just the idea of doing a story up against The Day of the Dead [Dia de los Muertos]. We didn’t quite know what that could be. It could be really anything. Just the notion of doing [a film centered around The Day of the Dead] is what I pitched to John [Lasseter]. John sparked to the idea of setting a story up against the celebration. Then we went on out trying to develop a story and we went through a couple different ideas before we settled on what ultimately became Coco.

Here is a trailer for the movie Coco:

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