Pixar recently debuted the official trailer for Elemental and following its release, we were able to preview about 30 minutes of exclusive footage from the film before talking to director Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur; Partly Cloudy) and producer Denise Ream (The Good Dinosaur; Cars 2) about the stunning animated adventure.
Elemental tells the story of Ember (Leah Lewis), a fiery woman who's always stayed relatively close to her home in Firetown. However, as fate would have it, a chance meeting with a water elemental named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) forces her to venture out of her comfort zone and explore the spectacular world of Element City.
Speaking with Sohn and Ream, we learned more about the story's extremely personal origin, introducing older characters, telling an authentic story, where the idea of Cyclone Stadium came from, and a whole lot more.
Read on for our full interview below and please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel!
ROHAN: After watching the 30 mins of footage, it surprised me how much this story resonated with me, since I'm also the son of immigrants. What kind of conversations did you have with your own parents before you started coming up with the story and making this movie?
PETE SOHN: The conversations with my parents, I never really told them clearly that this film was going to be so much inspired by them. I was just curious about, you know, like, when I started developing this thing, one of my executive producers explained, you should talk to them, because they had experienced loss, and you should get these stories from your parents before they go, and I was like, Okay. I didn't think they were gonna pass away, I thought they had plenty of time, and so I started talking to them about all these experiences for this project, but there was never like, oh, dad tell me this thing, because I'm gonna use it. It wasn't anything like that.
I've always, as an adult now, it took me a while. As a kid, I didn't appreciate everything they had done. I just didn't, I couldn't grasp it, but every milestone of going off on my own to find a job, speaking the language of this country, but I would go like, oh, how the hell did my parents do this without understanding language, you're signing all these contracts, how did they do that? And then, you're going to the next phase.
So, all those pieces started to form from these conversations with my parents, and then, talking about the movie and pitching it early on, there was just something natural about the chemistry of bringing that idea into this sort of diverse world of elements, because it was my upbringing, I just grew up around a lot of diverse people in a city where they were all on top of each other.
It was just a natural thing that began to fit in. The story that came out of that was a more difficult challenge, but these ingredients definitely all sort of fit into a place that felt like, oh, there was potential for something.
ROHAN: Denise, since this is such a deeply personal story and instantly relatable, as a producer on the project, what was important to you about telling this story about Ember?
DENISE REAM: It was important to, I think, bring people on that did connect to the story. That was something that I felt pretty passionate about. To infuse it and add layers of authenticity, we had a big technical challenge. So, getting sort of also the right people together to do what we had to do. I mean, it was a logistical challenge up above, which I've never really tackled anything like this.
So, it took the brains, the collective brains of just the smartest people in the studio, and, I believed in the heart of it. I love the fact that Pete, at the core, it was inspired by thanking our parents, and that's something that I knew universally or anyone that's taken care of us, it doesn't have to be a parent. I really loved that aspect of story pretty, pretty passionately.
ROHAN: Like Lightyear, this film also deals with older characters, Ember and Wade, who are both young adults. What went behind that decision of having these more mature characters at the center of your story?
PETE: There were two layers, it wasn't just arbitrary, it was really connected to, on two personal things about understanding identity, it's not something that, for me, was in my teens at all. It was when I was essentially in my 20s that I really started to appreciate what my parents had gone through and all those pressures of what's your next phase in life, you know, started to build so that was one aspect of it.
Then, there was the other aspect of making connections at an adult level, what love was, there's teenage love and blossoming love, but then there was love that could be deeper, that could represent something deeper, and so, that's sort of forming. Oh, they should be this certain age. And, those were the two ingredients for sure.
ROHAN: There are subtle moments in that opening sequence where we see Ember's parents immigrate to Element City and struggle to initially find a home, amongst other things, how important was it to you to include these small character-building moments that are often glossed over?
PETE: Yeah, I mean, it was the story team, for sure, and the writers. When we were first collaborating on every aspect of this, of trying to understand those situations. Look, the film at one point was like 140 minutes, there was so much material on that, because we had our story artists that were first-gen, second-gen, and, some of them literally immigrants themselves and they were, Balen brought his, because he's from France, his immigration issues there, coming to that country, he had boarded a whole sequence of a narrative of that sort of opening that you're talking about, that was full of so much real, but, it got dark, and it was full of all these truths, and we had to boil it down to real pieces. But it really came from the collaboration of a really diverse crew.
ROHAN: Fire and water naturally don't go together, but this film makes it work. There's a very fun romantic comedy element to the film - was that sort of your entry point into this story?
PETE: It was the entry point of the story, and then everything else started to fill in, but that question of what would happen if fire and water connected, where they fall in love, all was the first question that sort of intrigued everyone when I started pitching.
ROHAN: As a huge NBA fan, I have to ask about that standout air ball sequence, which is basically like basketball in the clouds. What went behind creating that sequence? Did it stem from your own personal experience growing up in New York?
PETE: Yeah, it was hilarious. Speaking specifically to that airball sequence, I grew up going to Madison Square Garden, I grew up with the Knicks and then, going there, you know, there are these maniac fans, and Stephen Shafer, our editor, is one of these maniac fans. Well, we needed a character that could stand toe to toe with Ember’s fierness, and building Gale, this just massive, crazy fan that like lived and died with every move of the players was one aspect that started to build it.
But then, there was another thing that we needed for weight to be really empathetic to another character, which, came from years of like feeling like, oh, man, you know, Steph Curry. He had a daughter just now and so, you're always adding that into the game of it. But, all of a sudden, how is it elemental?
And so, there are all these layers that you start to build into it from all of our experiences, the wave build, our board artists loved this concept of like, yeah, in sports you do this wave, and then, he made a water wave in one of his first pitches that had us on the floor of like, oh my god, if you could make that real, that would be so funny. But again, all layers to balance the story and then exploiting elements. Sports nerds, for sure, though.
Also, please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel below for more exclusive content:
Disney and Pixar’s “Elemental” is an all-new, original feature film set in Element City, where fire-, water-, land- and air-residents live together. The story introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in. Directed by Peter Sohn (“The Good Dinosaur,” “Partly Cloudy” short), produced by Denise Ream (“The Good Dinosaur,” “Cars 2”), and featuring the voices of Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie as Ember and Wade, respectively, “Elemental” releases on June 16, 2023.