Heres how it went…

I was going through your past credits, and one of them was for effects work onEraser!

Youre the only person whos asked me about that!

When they had the big fight?

It was Steve Williams.

He was an animator, and yeah, we did the crocs.

[laughs] That was really fun, actually!

A lot of your early credits seem to have that sense of fun to them.

I had a lot of fun.

[Laughs] That was hard to do there!

It was just like, no one else!

And I have to say, I was pretty gutted.

The lastStar Warswas, for large parts, effectively an animated film, too?

Yeah, thank you.

Id probably buy that.

So, that was a dark day, when we werent one of the three nominees.

I worked on this movie calledDaylight, where we did pyrotechnics.

And the interesting one wasDeep Impact, which was one of the first big water effects.

And that the water comes through the World Trade Center.

That was a film where they developed a lot of the water particle technology thatThe Perfect Stormleveraged.

Are water and kisses still about the hardest things to do in animation?

Water is still hard.

Aardman is using water on its upcomingPiratesfilm, and I think theyre bringing CG in to do it.

But still working with models for most of the rest of the film.

Water is incredibly hard.

Its very difficult to do practically.

Thats part of the joys of stop motion!

Its a fascinating art.

That is one of my dreams.

Id love to produce a stop motion film.

Thats one of the great things about stop motion.

That was really great, because we were able to get fast turnarounds.

So, youre able to do lots of different types of work in a pretty short amount of time.

One of my projects, at the Superbowl, they used to have a thing called Bud Bowl.

I absolutely loved working on it.

It was my first big producing job.

And he was just this curmudgeonly, quirky, interesting, strange guy who I absolutely loved.

That was one of my first projects.

I ended up leaving that company to go to ILM, where I started the week thatJurassicParkcame out.

Thats a good week to start.

It was literally that week.

June of 1993, and the whole industry did change after that.

And the puppetry and stop motion sort of, sadly, continued to fall by the wayside.

Its clearly still labour intensive.

Which, by Pixar standards, is very, very fast.

And it was hard.

On average, theyre five years to make.

Thats more accurate, to be honest, from beginning to conceptualising the story to completion.

And we were supposed to come out in 2012.

I got the job in 2008 when I was still onUp.

Two weeks after I got the job, they said theyre moving it up a year.

And the thing that was a challenge was we knew it was going to be a big scope movie.

But more scary was trying to iterate on the story as many times as we typically do.

I would say the screenings that Pixar typically do range from twelve to sixteen weeks.

If wed done sixteen weeks, wed have probably had one, if not two less iterations.

So, we throw the movie up and see what works and doesnt work.

That was what Andrew Stanton would say, Fail quickly, and fail often.

But you cant do those films inCars 2.

How much of the screening programme was about refining that tone?

That was really tricky.

The locations were sort of set.

Fortunately, locations were chosen pretty quickly.

We tried to pick countries that had strong automotive histories.

They had strong racing traditions and beautiful car design.

So, that was how we determined that.

Fortunately, picking the locations did help keep everyone working.

We had to build this world, and that was helpful.

The locations you homed in on have very different lighting demands.

From a technical point of you, that goes far behind designing the cars for the film.

That was hard, and that made it very difficult.

Fortunately, our DP is an amazing lighting DP, and she was just remarkable.

The Japan race was extremely difficult.

There were two things.

I wanted to do that opening scene, because of my effects experience.

I wanted to get it done first.

Fortunately, that was in a really good story place.

That, fortunately, was one we could get in production very quickly.

Because youre building these cities.

And its like, how hard are these races going to be?

The Japan race was inspired by the Singapore race.

Not only do they have to be designed, they have to be legally cleared and executed.

But we had a huge team, also, to execute this work.

With Pixar, though, its almost as though thingsshouldbe hard.

Thats what people expect.

Theres the perception of the technological arms race thats going on in CG animation.

But also, with Pixar, its the stories that tend to be tougher.

I keep saying that right now we have a workforce at the studio that could probably execute anything.

So, I think that, truly, they are really great at execution and production.

We have a robust pipeline, really talented R&D.

An unrivalled animation department.

Ive worked with some great animators, and I think that department is amazing.

So, I think, in terms of production, execution isnt the issue.

It is, instead, about what story do you want to tell.

It doesnt matter how great it looks if the story isnt entertaining.

The storytelling, too, has improved amongst your rivals, which I think is the biggest shift.

I think thats fantastic.

Pixar producers seem to have a more creative than technical role.

But the hands-on filmmakers have to be alien to the pressures of what everyone else is doing.

But you, as producer, dont have the same luxury.

How conscious are you of the outside pressures?

At a certain point, I literally had to put that stuff aside.

I couldnt think about.

I did feel like it would have been easy to get bogged down, fret and be intimidated.

But that wouldnt have helped my team.

My job was really to say, Alright, this is the movie were doing now.

I want to make it as great as possible.

And what does our team need to do that?

I had to trust my colleagues at Disney to take care of our movie.

And I felt supported by Ed Catmull and Jim Morris, my bosses.

That took relief off of me, knowing that I had that support.

Did you enjoy it?

Actually, I felt very melancholy when it ended.

I was happy, because it was exciting to see how fans would embrace the movie.

But I loved the team we put together.

It was really fun working with John [Lasseter].

And part of me didnt want it to end.

I would say I absolutely loved it, but it was really hard.

There were days when, honestly, I would go home and cry.

Denise Ream, thank you very much!

Cars 2 is out now.