‘Elemental’: How Director Peter Sohn’s Experience on ‘The Good Dinosaur’ Informed His New Pixar Film

thewrap.com:

seven – years of hard work on his sophomore film and the culmination of a journey that began at the end of his first feature, “The Good Dinosaur.”TheWrap spoke with Sohn and producer Denise Ream at Pixar Animation Studios about the unlikely origins of the film and why it took so long.“So much of the time was figuring out the pipeline,” Sohn explained. “Because none of this had been done before.

We were pulling people together for these experimental runs. There was a lot of happened in seven years for us.” The lengthy production was actually something he knew he needed, from experience.Sohn recalled making his short film “Partly Cloudy,” which was released in 2009 and attached theatrically to Pete Docter’s “Up.” At the time, making a character out of clouds was super difficult; the technical team asked if he wanted to push back the project a couple of years so they could noodle with the technology.

Sohn refused. “But the film, in terms of the look, you can see the places where it suffers that choice,” Sohn admits now. This helped him inform his decision to push for a longer time on “Elemental.” “I understood that moving down the deadline was going to be very helpful for us,” Sohn said.Ream said that they maybe could have made the movie in five years, but even that would have been pushing it.Time has never been on Sohn’s side.

And “Elemental” feels like Sohn’s first true movie, especially after he was given “The Good Dinosaur” after the original director was removed and the storyline heavily reworked (for a while the movie had no director, with several filmmakers at Pixar contributing to the project).