Elemental Writers on Pixar Creative Process, Sequel Talk, & More

Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies, Pixar | Tagged: disney, elemental, interview, John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, leah lewis, Mamoudou Athie, peter sohn, pixar

Writers Kat Likkel & John Hoberg talk to Bleeding Cool about their creative process in Pixar’s Elemental, potential future & more.

For many artists, Pixar represents the gold standard for cinematic animation, and that’s a dream writers Kat Likkel, and John Hoberg achieved when they signed on to collaborate with director Peters Sohn in Elemental, which follows Ember (Leah Lewis) and Wade (Mamoudou Athie), physical opposites as fire and water entities, in a city where fire, water, land, and air residents live together. The duo spoke with Bleeding Cool about their journey to Pixar, how the Disney company nurtured their creativity, if there was any talk of expanding beyond the first film either as a sequel or Disney+ series, and their takeaway from their experience.

How Pixar Embraced Kat Likkel & John Hoberg in Writing ‘Elemental’

A lot of prestige goes into working on a Pixar project, given the nuance. Did you guys feel any pressure to go above and beyond, or is that something that you treated like your previous work?
Likkel: You got to do both of those things, honestly. When you get the call from Pixar, it’s like being tapped by the spy organization. They’ve been checking you out beforehand. They’ve already talked to people about you and read some of your stuff. They think there’s something there that they see. When you show up there, it’s intimidating because it’s like, these are the classic movies they do with such wonderful in-depth work. You’ve got to have both. It’s like walking in the door. You both have this confidence of saying, “I can do this!” You also must be humble enough to know they can probably do this better than me.

Hoberg: I remember this feeling because we’ve worked on a lot of episodic television. We’ve done a lot of feature writing, but stuff that didn’t go through. There’s always a timeline, especially television, where it’s like, “It’s good enough for Friday; it’s Thursday night.” You got it is the best you can do for Friday, right? A lot of times, you knock it out of the park, and a lot of times, it sorts of. Time always runs out, and Pixar has time constraints, but they’re willing to let it stretch because they don’t want it to be good enough. They want it to be the best they can make it. I would say it’s pressure, but it’s not negative pressure. I want to live up to this moment for them and try to do our best work. When we first started, sometimes we’d see a direction blink, but that works. Then we also would realize, “Yeah, it works, but we want it to work and be at best it can.”

Likkel: We were huge fans of Pixar, too, before this happened to us. We wanted to make sure that we came in upping our game, like if we were the people who were going to be sitting in the movie theater, what would we want to see? What would be special about it that adds that extra thing? We wanted to try to up our game to try to find that and match that Pixar magic.

Hoberg, You do a lot of writing and rewriting there. We looked at our files of the sequences; we probably did eight versions of this movie, but we rewrote probably 750 files of scenes. We started doing this thing; Pete was great about this, where we would be like, “Here’s what we all talked about. Here’s a version, and if we’d had it, here’s a crazy idea that goes somewhere completely different.” Having that freedom to try something and know if they don’t like it, it doesn’t work. If they liked it, it could be special; it was incredible. The story artists have that freedom, too, to be like, “Here’s a sketched-out version of the scene as it was discussed, but here’s another idea.” The movie was filled with that, where you would try these things and see what excited people.

Some isolated IPs with Pixar expanded with the streaming area for Disney+. Given what you’ve been over with Peter Sohn, was there any talk about a wait-and-see approach to how it does in the box office for a potential sequel, perhaps repurposed from unused material? Perhaps, a TV series on Disney+? Is there anything you guys could talk about?
Hoberg We never heard any talk like that. I know that everybody involved would love to continue exploring the world’s characters. There’s a lot to learn about Ember and Wade. Kat and I’ve always been like, “We’d love to see their little steam baby and how they raised their steam baby [laughs].” There was no direct talk about that, but frankly, that’s kind of out of our grade of conversation. Those would be conversations taking place behind closed doors that we wouldn’t have been welcome to that. I know everybody involved in it loved the world and the characters.
Likkel, If they ever came back to us, we would do it in a heartbeat. There are a lot of possibilities if they want to go other routes with that. That could be amazing. That’s going to be their internal discussions.

I had a feeling that there were probably some other arcs that, like, let’s save this for if you want to explore this next time or something. Am I wrong to think there were many things that could have gone?
Hoberg Yeah, once you do, because there was a total of ten versions of this movie. You make a new version of the film every three months. It’s all hand-drawn to start with, and the voice actors are mostly Pixar employees who come in and do the voices. With each of those versions, there are directions you go are completely different than what ended up in the movie. There were some fun directions. There were some directions that it’s like, “Wow, that didn’t work at all, but what it makes you realize is when you have characters, and we fell in love with Wade, Ember, Dad, and Wade’s family. It’s the characters that you watch these things for. It’s why in television, ‘Fraser’ could do the same storyline that might be in ‘Friends,’ but it doesn’t matter because ‘Frasier’ going through it is a different thing to watch than Monica going through it. You realize that once you find characters you love, you want to keep putting them in situations to see how they react.

What is the one major takeaway that you guys have learned working on Elemental?
Likkel It’s made us better writers. It’s made us more willing to explore and take chances. Coming up on television, you have a short amount of time to write your scripts to do all the work. Working with Pixar they have an iterative process. It’s like you make the same movie repeatedly, changing things every time until you finally get to like it,” From beginning to end, it works. This is great. This is now what we’re going to animate.” It gave us a lot of courage to work on our other projects more in that way because it’s like we would tell Pete Sohn, the director, he would have an idea and say, “Let’s write that. Let’s just write that real quick.” John and I can draw sketches, write a scene quickly, and we learned to write scenes repeatedly and take big shots at them, throwing in other ideas. That’s the kind of freedom you have at Pixar with their process that you can do.

Hoberg, It was the best thing, and Kat was alluding to it that we learned when these artists would tell the story because when you’re breaking the story out, it’s not just Kat, Pete, and I. There’s also the head of story, who’s an artist, but a storyteller, then the story team, and they’re all storytellers also. Everybody’s part of coming up with the story. You’ll have these big meetings, and one of the artists will draw and then show you, and it’ll be a rough sketch, but you’ll get the idea, and you be like, “Oh, I see what you mean.” We had this breakthrough that was like, “Wait a minute! Our version of that is we can write a scene where we won’t go home and spend three days making every word exactly right. We’re going to show them 70 percent. It’s fast, and we will say, “Guys, trust us. We can make this good, but here’s what we’re thinking, and we can write that in 25 minutes.” Then they can just look at it, and then, in the same way, we do with sketches like, “Oh, I got it, or I hate it, one way or the other.” It did, like Kat’s saying, rewriting used to be something that we would be like, “Ugh,” and now it’s a chance to find something you wouldn’t have found otherwise. It’s the greatest gift we could have gotten from this experience.

Elemental, which was co-written by Brenda Hsueh, also stars Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O’Hara, Mason Wertheimer, Joe Pera, and Matt Yang King. The film is currently in theaters.

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