How Creativity Can Help Us Unlock Our Potential | Writer of Pixar's Inside Out, Meg LeFauve

Michael Gervais (0:00)

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Meg, this is a real treat. I, I'll tell you how this started, is that I think I was just like, love slobbing all over, you know, like Inside Out 1 and Inside Out 2, and I just, I loved your movies. And as I was talking about Ad Nauseam, our head of creative here, Kevin Lay, goes, oh, I know Meg.

Meg LeFauve (3:29)

Yes.

Michael Gervais (3:29)

You know, I know who did that movie. And so I was like, please. So we've we've really been looking forward to having you here. So thank you for coming in.

Meg LeFauve (3:38)

Oh, thanks for having me. I was really looking forward to being here. Talking with you.

Michael Gervais (3:42)

Oh, my God. OK. So one of the reasons I loved it so much is as a trained psychologist with a specialization in performance, you nailed it. You got it. And I'm friends with one of your what's it called consultants, one of the psychologists that was was helping you. So good job to Dachner.

Meg LeFauve (4:05)

Dachner.

Michael Gervais (4:06)

Yeah. I mean, he's so good. So, OK, how how did you get so good at writing stories, at telling stories, at at pulling out the genius of an arc where the viewer or listener is just compelled to want to get to the next arc or to the next note? How did you do that?

Meg LeFauve (4:26)

It's so funny to start the question with how did you, you know, get so good because I think every writer I know has fraud syndrome. So, immediately my brain is like, am I? Is that good? It's just so funny. The way your brain immediately tries to buffer that. I think partly that's just because we're sensitive, creative beings and we're always kind of finding our place. I also think that I keep wanting to evolve as a writer and try new things and push myself.

So, I think that in for these specific movies, I am so honored to say that it's my movie but it's not just my movie. It's Pete Docter is the originator, a genius of Inside Out as the first director and I wrote with him on Inside Out. And then of course we have the second movie of Kelsey Mann, the director. And Pixar is a place of collaboration. So, you're definitely writing. You're writing a script and you're writing a script when both movies, each script had three different story lines going at the same time. And they have to play with each other like music. If something happens in one story line, like let's say with Joy Down in the Mind, it has to also affect Riley, it has to also affect what's happening in headquarters. So, it's very much three-dimensional chess that we were playing with both movies. So, but in terms of your question, how do you get to that level of storytelling? One is you work at a place like Pixar, where their only motto is fail fast. They really want you out pushing to the edge of your ideas, the edge of what you think you can do or what the movie or the story could possibly do, and a place that really taught me to iterate. I realized after about three months in the first movie of when I got there, that this is a building full of artists and they have been drawing in sketchbooks, probably since they could hold a pencil. So, they are very used to iteration, iterate, iterate, iterate, do it again, go again, go again. As a writer, we can get a bit protective of our work and fearful that, but this is a great scene. What if I can't write another great scene?