Tim O’Shea: You’ve been a fan of Pixar since the late 1980s, but how long had you been considering an examination of the Pixar company?

David A. Price: I became a Pixar fan after I saw an unfinished version of Tin Toy at a conference in ’88. But I didn’t start thinking about writing their history for another 15 years. In 2003, I had finished my book on the Jamestown colony and everyone was telling me to tackle another story out of the colonial period. That’s the standard advice — to build on what you’ve already done.

There were a couple of things that pushed me in a different direction. The kind of nonfiction I like to write has very strong characters at its center. As I pondered ideas for another book on early American history, I came away with the feeling that most of the really important and interesting figures had already been covered ad infinitum. I wasn’t confident I had anything to say that was worth saying.

At the same time, I was feeling drawn to the idea of a company book that would be heavy on reporting and that would have some literary ambitions. Pixar bubbled to the top of the list very quickly. I liked that it would give me the chance to write about art and technology in addition to business.

O’Shea: Who do you think is the target audience for this book–fans of computer animation; business students with an interest in working in Hollywood; or both?

Price: Certainly animation fans seem to be a big part of it. But I’ve also found the book has connected with a lot of business people. This doesn’t surprise me, because what the founders of Pixar went through in the early years was pretty much the standard small-business drill with lots of fits and starts, good and bad decisions, lucky and unlucky breaks.

There are also people working in technology who are drawn to the story. The biggest audience I’ve had for a book talk was at Microsoft Research.

O’Shea: How many interviews did you conduct for the book, and were there some interviews that were much more challenging to gain than others?

Price: I think I interviewed 30 or 35 people for the book. There were some I interviewed once or twice, and others I was in touch with many times by phone and e-mail.

Some people were harder to find than others. Pixar’s former CEO was hard for me to find. Other than that, I don’t consider any interview “challenging” to get. I’m not of the school that says you pester people or charm people into talking with you. Basically, my m.o. is that I write somebody one time to explain who I am, what I’m doing, and why I want an interview. If they say yes, great. If they have questions, I try to answer them. If they say no, I wish them well and move on.

Fortunately, most people I approached said yes. Love and Hate in Jamestown gave me credibility with some people. Some just liked the idea of an independent history of the company.

O’Shea: How did you go about getting access to personnel files (such as employment agreements) or was that information you gained from the SEC?

Price: Ed Catmull’s and John Lasseter’s employment agreements from the Toy Story era were part of the file I got from the SEC.

O’Shea: In terms of pacing of the book, did you trim out a great deal of the pre-Toy Story/formation of Pixar history, in order to get to Pixar’s mainstream success days, or did you think people would be as interested in the early history as much as the popular days, so pacing was not a concern?

Price: I enjoyed writing about the years leading up to Toy Story as much as I enjoyed writing the stories behind the feature films.

Probably more so, in fact, because there was this great sense of constant temporizing. They couldn’t make a go of it as part of Lucasfilm–George Lucas sold them off. Then they couldn’t make it as a computer company. When that didn’t work, they tried software and couldn’t make it as a software company. They tried making commercials. They were doing great work at all of these things, but there was never enough cash coming in. Steve Jobs was in a constant state of angst over the red ink. Ed Catmull stepped down as CEO for a while because the stress of dealing with Steve was starting to affect his health. At the same time, Pixar’s employees had the feeling of being on an artistic and technological frontier, which they loved.

O’Shea: As you examined the history of Pixar, I’m sure you encountered many of the same names that have always been associated with its success–but is there a person (or people) who you think was/were pivotal to the success who may not receive as much credit as they deserve?

Price: John Lasseter and Ed Catmull and some of the other early people at Pixar really do deserve tremendous credit for pursuing their vision with the persistence that they did. They could have walked away any day of the week and gotten more money and security–or at least the feeling of more security.

As for under-recognized people, I’d say one of them is Joss Whedon. Most people don’t know he was one of the writers of Toy Story. The point when that film really started to come together was when Joss started working on it. Obviously, there were other very talented people on the story team at different times, also.

The other person, and I’m going to get in huge trouble for saying this, is Jeffrey Katzenberg. When he was running the Disney studio, he pursued the Toy Story deal with Pixar at a time when every major studio in Hollywood was shutting its doors in Pixar’s face. Pixar approached Paramount, Columbia, one studio after another, and got turned down. He saw what computer animation could be, and what John could do with it, at a time when other people in the industry couldn’t.

O’Shea: Do you expect to hear from Jobs about your take–I would imagine if he read it, some of it (for example, the struggle over his Woodside residence) might be awkward for him to read.

Price: I am absolutely certain I will never hear from Steve about the book. You’re right, parts it are awkward from his point of view.

O’Shea: In researching the book, it seemed you did not leave many stones unturned. How intimidating or stressful was it to conduct the interview with Mike Hoover the only survivor of the 1994 helicopter crash in which his wife and Frank Wells, among others, died. Why was it important for you to interview him rather than use the archival information that is readily available?

Price: There isn’t much out there on the helicopter crash other than the NTSB accident report. I sent a letter to Mike asking for an interview and I didn’t hear back. Then a year later, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from him saying, “Sorry, I’m sure you’re finished with the book, but if there’s any info that you think I may have, call me anytime.” Naturally I called him that day.

I did feel apprehensive because he’d lost his wife in the accident. Until then, I actually didn’t have any experience at all interviewing somebody who’d lost a loved one. Mike was gracious and made it easy.

The crash turned out to be important to the book in a different way than I expected. I started out wanting to include it because the death of Frank Wells set in motion Jeffrey Katzenberg’s departure from Disney and the founding of DreamWorks Animation. But talking with Mike, I learned how Frank had put other people first–there was another helicopter that got out ahead of the storm.

At that point, I was unhappy with the pattern that seemed to be emerging in my story–that if you want to be successful in business, you have to be self-centered and difficult like Steve Jobs or Michael Eisner. Frank Wells was a good guy on a personal level, which came across in his actions that day. So I was glad to have him as a counterpoint.

O’Shea: Was it hard for you to enjoy Pixar films as much when you began writing about and doing research on the company on a 24/7 basis?

Price: The films I liked, I liked more as I was writing the book because I could better appreciate the artistry and technical genius behind them.

Before jumping into the interview, here’s the official bio on the storyteller:

“Enrico Casarosa has been in the animation industry for more than ten years, drawing storyboards that fit into large animated feature films. Currently a story artist at Pixar Animation Studios Enrico continues his quest to create more hours in the day by drawing alternate realities. Sooner or later his experiments will break through and we’ll all have to buy new watches. Meantime he just published an art book “3 trees make a forest” with partners in crime Ronnie del Carmen and Tadahiro Uesugi. Other times he pursues his muse by traveling with his watercolors and sketchbooks. Enrico is the founder of ‘SketchCrawl’, a worldwide drawing marathon event that gathers artists from all around the globe.”

Once you finish reading the interview, be sure to go here to buy the book directly from Casarosa.

Tim O’Shea: In addition to this new book, the Venice Chronicles, you work at Pixar. I was struck by something you recently wrote in your blog: “It’s become tradition for us selfpublishing friends here at Pixar to take photos of the opening of the first box of books.” How many selfpublishing friends are at Pixar and can you name some of them (and their projects)?

Enrico Casarosa: Oh yes there’s quite a few of us. I’ve had the luck of sharing tables at more than a couple of conventions (and co-publish a book) with uber talented friend Ronnie del Carmen. Another long time friend here at Pixar is Bill Presing, artist of “Rex Steele Nazismasher”. We met a long time ago back in NewYork and both did stories for the anthology Monkeysuit. And the list of talented pixarian friends/co-workers goes on: Scott Morse (Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!, Magic Pickle), Ted Mathot (Rose and Isabel, Cora), Derek Thompson , Dice Tsutsumi (Out of Picture) and many more. There’s also been a couple of anthologies called Afterworks that gather comics for some of the folks here and they even a new volume in the making.

O’Shea: Will you be involved in the next Afterworks anthology?

Casarosa: I’d love to, they are doing some great stuff for it, but I unfortunately it’ll be hard for me to find the time in the next few months.

O’Shea: While you published the book yourself, you’re using Chris Pitzer’s AdHouse as a distributor, what about Adhouse made you want to have them distribute the book for you?

Casarosa: I’ve known Chris and his AdHouse books since he put out the excellent Project Superior. He asked me to be part of his Project Romantic but timing didn’t quite line up for that, so when I finally finished The Venice Chronicles I thought it might be a good fit. Also I’ve been self-publishing comics for a few years now and I really felt I could use his help and expertise in getting these books out there. It’s not an easy business and I love Chris’ approach to it, it’s labor of love for him.

O’Shea: What made you decide to develop the Venice Chronicles in the first place, and how is it similar and/or different from your past self-publishing efforts?

Casarosa: I’ve done a few autobiographical comics in the last few years (I’ve self-published a couple of small books called “Sketchcrawling”) and I’ve been more and more interested in what autobio can offer. First I enjoy self-deprecating silly humor and I think it’s interesting to unabashedly make fun of yourself. The embarrassing stuff makes for some good material … quite often. Couple that with a love I have for drawing from life and recording what’s around me (especially on trips) and you have the ingredients for these Chronicles.

More specifically, regarding the journaling aspect, there is something really interesting to me in telling a story at the same time as you are living it; as you embark on a travel, without knowing what right or left turns might come your way. I find that compelling and whenever I’ve hit pages where I was able to really record my experience just as it was happening, that is when I think I got to something fresh and honest. Hopefully that comes through to the reader.

Lastly on a more practical level this book happened simply because of the trip my girlfriend and I took to join her parents for a month stay in Venice, Italy (my homecountry). After a few days in this amazing city and some interesting and unexpected encounters (for example out of the blue I met Silvina Pratt, daughter of the amazing Hugo Pratt) I realized the experience would make some fun material and so I started drawing as much as I could right then and there. After the vacation I took a good part of the following year to tell the whole story and fill in the parts I couldn’t do on the spot.

O’Shea: You said part of what you enjoyed about creating the Chronicles was “telling a story at the same time as you are living it”. I’m curious, given that you took the better part of a year fleshing out the parts you could not do on the spot, did any of the scenes or elements change drastically from the point you experienced them to the point you put that part of the story on paper, months later?

Casarosa: Well it was really hard to retell things from such a distance, I struggled with it. It didn’t seem interesting to me and it got more and more difficult as time passed, it even kind of blocked me. My way of finding a solution was to make that block part of the comic too: by talking about the block I started drawing new pages, unblocking myself. Kind of silly, but that’s what happened. Also and perhaps even more importantly I made the rest of that year part of the book. So while I was retelling the italian vacation I was also trying to chronicle some of the real time events that were happening around me. So you’ll find pages recording a weekend adventure to Santa Fe’ in the middle of this book about Venice. Rather strange one could argue, but I think it’s ok … the main thread of the story is the relationship between my girlfriend and I and not only our vacation.

O’Shea: How did you end up meeting Silvina Pratt? Did you get to talk to her much about her father’s work? She would have great insight as his daughter, but even more so given that she co-wrote a book about him in 2005…

Casarosa: The book contains the encounter and how it happened, but in brief … we met her strangely enough through my girlfriend’s dad and a tennis buddy of his: Ivo Pavone. Ivo grew up in Venice with Hugo Pratt, and they made comics together in Argentina! They were long time friends. Pretty amazing uh?

We did talk about her father with Silvina yes, that is also in the book and it’s a really interesting story in itself. Her book “Avec Hugo” just got published in Italy, so I can’t wait to read it. I just sent her a copy of Venice Chronicles and she’s sending me her book.

I wish someone would publish it out here but alas Hugo Pratt might not be well known enough in the US for a publisher to take a chance on it.

O’Shea: In your bio at your blog, it says “Forever stuck between the gravitational pulls of Italy (his home country) and Japan (a cultural passion).” The pull of Italy makes sense, but I was curious what attracted you to Japan in a cultural passion sense?

Casarosa: Well I attribute my passion for Japan to all the Japanese cartoons most Italians of my generation watched growing up. I don’t know why but 95% of all japanese animation produced in the late 70s and early 80s made it to Italian TV. We grew up immersed in it. I could name you more than thirty different series that we all loved and followed through out our childhood and adolescence and so can most Italians of my generation.

So once I found myself starting out in the field of animation in my mid twenties I quickly found in the new wave of Japanese animation (and in Hayao Miyazaki’s work especially) a huge source of inspiration … with the added flavor of nostalgia.

So I started traveling to Japan often, learned a little bit of the language and really just fell in love with the culture. Incidentally, I have a sketchbook filled with watercolors from a Japan trip I took four years ago that is not unlike the notebook I returned from Venice with. I hope to publish it in the near future perhaps.

O’Shea: Do you think you’ll be more inclined to publish the Japan Watercolors collection sooner if response to the Venice Chronicles is strong?

Casarosa: Well, the Japan sketchbook is similar but also quite different to The Venice Chronicles. It only has drawings from life and thoughts. So it’s really a carnet de voyage without an actual funny story or characters. I was more internal on that trip I guess and I was also on my own. The inspiration behind it is the amazing “Paris Sketchbook’ illustrated by Ronald Searle and written by his wife. I love that book, it has a wonderful mix of drawings and written impressions.

I’d like to do something similar to that and maybe try and add an “travel help” side to it: adding drawn maps of the locations, so that someone could actually find it helpful and possibly even follow my specific itinerary. I like books about traveling and I love to take a book that can add some depth to a trip somewhere. I’d only be too happy if people took the Venice Chronicles on their trip to Italy.

My impossible pipedream of a job is “travel book watercolorist”. I’d be payed to travel the world and do watercolors of all that is around me. Eh eh … dreaming is cheap.

But to answer your question, I think if this book did well, yes, honestly it would be a nice overall booster and it certainly would make it much easier to invest more time and money in making these books. I love to do it, but it has to make some sense … even as a labor of love.

O’Shea: Does your work at Pixar help influence your approach in storytelling on projects like Venice Chronicles?

Casarosa: I think it does and it doesn’t. There are very specific sets of boundaries that our job involves, a storyboard artist is there to help a director tell his movie. We can creatively add to the story but we can’t make it our movie or you’d end up with too many cooks in the kitchen. These books on the other hand are a playground in which I can tell stories freely. It’s a great outlet in which you can play by your own rules.

In other respects though there is no way that my day job couldn’t find its way in my comics. We deal with stories and how best to tell them everyday, that is part of what I do and that certainly comes into play in my comicbook work too.
So I guess the answer is that it’s a bit of ying and yang thing.

O’Shea: How helpful was your blog audience in terms of developing Venice Chronicles, for example a look here reveals that you got a great deal of input on the cover approach for the book.

Casarosa: I released the Venice Chronicles online in the space of almost a year, I’d post more pages just as I was finishing them. Serializing it that way was a huge help, especially in motivation and drive. The idea of readers waiting for the next installment can really help keep things cooking. As far as the cover goes, I really enjoy reading about process, so I often share my way of doing things. It was very interesting to see the amount of feedback those posts got, but to be frank at the time I posted all the cover studies for the Venice Chronicles I was already finishing the final one.

O’Shea: When did you first realize that you had the knack for storytelling?

Casarosa: Ah, never. Eh eh. I don’t mean to be falsely modest, it’s just that story is hard. It’s not a linear process, it’s a lot of trial and error. Throwing things away and trying new ones. So, especially here at Pixar it’s a tough process made of many steps that most artists will find humbling. What I know I do have is a passion for storytelling. I enjoy the process of finding these stories, fumbling through them or not. I love when things start to click and you can get some emotion or laughter from your readers, listeners or viewers. That’s the fun part of it.

O’Shea: Are you already trying to plan a sequel work to the Venice Chronicles–or where would you like to creatively explore after Venice Chronicles?

Casarosa: There’s a couple of older projects I left half done that I’d love to go back to (Like the Adventure of Mia and Haiku5-7-5) but unfortunately the main challenge is finding time for these projects while still working fulltime at Pixar. It really depends on how much responsibility and time my dayjob will require.

There is one upcoming thing, a 3 men artshow coming up in January in Paris with my friends Ronnie del Carmen and Tadahiro Uesugi, called “Three Trees Make a Forest“. It’s a sort of reunion after an artshow we did in LA three years ago. So, I need 48 hours days … really.

O’Shea: What is it about the other two artists’ work in relation to yours that made you want to do another art show with them on “three trees make a forest”?

Casarosa: Ronnie and I have been huge fans of Tadahiro Uesugi‘s work for a long time now. He’s one of Japan’s top illustrators, if not the top illustrator. We’ve become great friends with him and his lovely wife after a few meetings in Tokyo. The three of us have shared the walls of two exhibitions and a book collecting our artwork (“three trees make a forest” published by Gingko Press). So when we were asked if we wanted to have an artshow in Paris (at Galerie Arludik), the idea of getting the “three trees” back together, in such a locale, seemed too good to pass on.

O’Shea: Can you tell us more about Like the Adventure of Mia and Haiku5-7-5?

Casarosa: Well, The Adventure of Mia is the first comic I ever did. I started it for the anthology Monkeysuit more than ten years ago and then I made two issues of it in a paperback format.

It’s about a young girl pilot in pre-war Italy, fascism, the Italian Riviera, lots of planes … oh and it’s a world of cats. It is very much inspired by Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso. A fun project that honestly I feel really bad I haven’t carried on with. My style and sensibility have changed and while I’d love to get back to it I am afraid of my style being a little too different from the original now.

Still I’d love to find a way. Some books change visual style half way through and you still go with it. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it.

Anyway … Haiku 5-7-5 is an online comic that I started a few years back. I only got through a handful of pages of it but it’s a yakuza story … with a gangster with the heart of a poet at the center of it. I have a nice arc figured out for that story but again, I am gonna sound like a broken record here, it’s hard to find the time for all this.

O’Shea: What are you working on at Pixar at present?

Casarosa: I am finishing work on “UP” the movie directed by Pete Docter that is hitting theaters next June. We’re pretty excited about it, I’ve worked on it for almost three years.