Stepping Up
Film director Pete Docter amazed critics and movie goers alike with the release of his film. Reviews were incredible. London’s Telegraph called it
a film so fantastically buoyant, so soaring and so universal, that it’s hard to check the urge to get down on one’s knees before the cinema screen and give thanks for the joy of being a moviegoer.
The New York Times compared it to one of the all time film greats, Citizen Kane. Most striking about that comparison was that the film was animated, a genre mostly dominated by kid material. It was the first animated film to ever open the Cannes film festival.
But such a tremendous outcome was not always so readily apparent. The film took five long years to make, which, apart from the time-consuming tasks of animation, casting voices, editing and working out distribution details for the film, included significant time figuring out what the story would even be.
The original concept was about a castle in the sky. A king lived in it with ambitious princes, each of whom wanted to inherit. Their fighting caused them to fall to earth, leaving them struggling to figure out how to get back to the kingdom. Somewhere along the way, a bird helped the two brothers reconcile.
If that sounds unfamiliar to you, it should, since in the final story everything about it had changed, except that the bird played a role, and the title remained: Up. [1]
The original plot just didn’t seem to work, and Docter and his team of filmmakers at Pixar went through hundreds of script revisions, deep soul searching and intense personal doubt over five years of making the film. Docter suffered through harrowing overwhelm that haunted him throughout. Feeling overwhelmed led to despair and wanting to give up.
The only way to keep going required entering an entirely different mental space. If it were physical, it would be quite different from what was expected, like intending to visit the beach but arriving in a precarious mountainous terrain, with sheer cliffs, strong winds and pop-up storms. Richard Rohr calls this uncharted territory “liminal space” [2]. Liminal means threshold, as in, doorway. It is a threshold or doorway between the known and the unknown, a place “betwixt and between,” he says, “where we can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways.”
For Docter, the challenge of shaping the story into a compelling narrative brought with it the “feeling that everything is wrong.” He couldn’t know whether the story would work out well. He experienced failure, blocked paths that hinted at disaster. Those moments felt like “the world [was] crashing down and all is lost.”
Entering liminal space is truly like entering a dark wood, and fear lurks there. Perhaps that is why so many content creators stick to safe stories, and find reason to be fully justified in their choice. Maybe that’s why so many of us stay in safe, boring and ultimately unfulfilling jobs.
As Docter pushed through the doubt and fear, he discovered along the way that making a movie about fighting princes was only at the surface of the real purpose of his work. The struggle to make a film that worked revealed that he wanted to capture the essence of human experience in a compelling, moving way that inspired wonder. And ultimately, discovering the right plot to reveal it was what took so much emotional, mental and physical labor.
That space is familiar to creatives, but also to anyone undergoing intense change like a new job, or a new role in life, like becoming a parent or a spouse. As Rohr says, “all transformation takes place” in that space between what we know and what we do not.
Rohr describes a healthy response as one that requires humility and spirituality, and ushers us from the known to the liminal (threshold) of the unknown. Only then can we “reenter the world with a freedom and new, creative approaches.”
Docter’s response won the admiration of his team and his CEO, Ed Catmull, who said,
The Path he followed on Up was difficult and unpredictable; there was nothing about where the movie started that indicated where it would end up. It wasn’t a matter of unearthing a buried story; in the beginning, there was no story.
Rohr calls the place where we don’t know where we will end up - “God’s waiting room.” We have to show up and face the unknown to discover the right path. This is sacred space.
We read the reviews of well-made art and we admire it. We sense that we too can be a part of having great impact, that our lives can experience deeper meaning. But the transformational journey from the known and safe into liminal space and its wild, unknown territory terrifies. Many of us settle for comfort, even amidst all the brokenness and loneliness of our world. God made us to be a part of something much bigger, he calls us out of what we know into the liminal. Impact can only await by taking a leap.
[1] This description of the making of Up comes from the book, Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. It can be found on pp 148–152
[2] Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, by Richard Rohr (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 1999), 155–156.