“Now, instead of focusing on all the things that aren’t working, I want you to think about what could be right. I want you to envision your biggest hopes. If we could do anything, what would you want to see on the screen?”
The group sat quietly for a few minutes. Then people opened their eyes and started describing what had excited them about this project in the first place. Some had been drawn to Frozen because it offered a chance to upend the way girls are portrayed in films. Others said they were inspired by the idea of a movie where two sisters come together.
“My sister and I fought a lot as kids,” Lee told the room. Her parents had divorced when Lee was young. She had eventually moved to Manhattan while her sister became a high school teacher in upstate New York. Then, when Lee was in her early twenties, her boyfriend drowned in a boating accident. Her sister had understood what she was going through at that moment, had been there at a time of need. “There’s this moment when you start to see your sibling as a person, instead of a reflection of yourself,” Lee told the room. “I think that’s what’s been bothering me the most about this script. If you have two sisters and one of them is the villain and one is a hero, it doesn’t feel real. That doesn’t happen in real life. Siblings don’t grow apart because one is good and one is bad. They grow apart because they’re both messes and then they come together when they realize they need each other. That’s what I want to show.”
Over the next month, the Frozen team focused on the relationship between Anna and Elsa, the movie’s sisters. In particular, the filmmakers drew on their own experiences to figure out how the siblings related. “We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true,” Del Vecho told me. “The thing that holds us back is when we forget to use our lives, what’s inside our heads, as raw material. That’s why the Disney method is so powerful, because it pushes us to dig deeper and deeper until we put ourselves on the screen.”
Jerry Robbins pushed his collaborators in West Side Story to draw on their own experiences to become creative brokers. The Toyota Production System unlocked employees’ capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.
“Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.”
This lesson isn’t limited to movies or Broadway. The Post-it note, for instance, was invented by a chemical engineer who, frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, decided to use a new adhesive to make them stay put. Cellophane was developed by an exasperated chemist looking for a way to protect tablecloths from wine spills. Infant formula was created, in part, by an exhausted father who suspended vegetable nutrients in powder so he could feed his crying child in the middle of the night. Those inventors looked to their own lives as the raw materials for innovation. What’s notable is that, in each case, they were often in an emotional state. We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings. Psychologists call this “creative desperation.” Not all creativity relies on panic, of course. But research by the cognitive psychologist Gary Klein indicates that roughly 20 percent of creative breakthroughs are preceded by an anxiety akin to the stress that accompanied Frozen’s development, or the pressures Robbins forced onto his West Side Story collaborators. Effective brokers aren’t cool and collected. They’re often worried and afraid.
A few months after the story trust meeting, the songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, anxious about all the songs they needed to write, when Kristen asked, “What would it feel like if you were Elsa?” As they walked past swingsets and joggers, Kristen and Bobby began discussing what they would do if they were cursed and despised for something they couldn’t control. “What if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn’t matter because people constantly judged you?” she asked.
Kristen knew this feeling. She had felt other parents’ looks when she let their daughters eat ice cream instead of healthy snacks. She’d felt glances when she and Bobby let their girls watch an iPad inside a restaurant because they wanted a moment of peace. Perhaps Kristen wasn’t cursed with some deadly power—but she knew what it felt like to be judged. It didn’t feel fair. It wasn’t her fault that she wanted a career. It wasn’t her fault that she wanted to be a good mom and be a good wife and a successful songwriter, and so, inevitably, that meant things like home-packed snacks and sparkling dinner conversation—not to mention thank-you notes and exercise and replying to emails—sometimes fell by the wayside. She didn’t want to apologize for not being perfect. She didn’t think she needed to. And she didn’t think Elsa should have to apologize for being flawed, either.
“Elsa has tried to do everything right, all her life,” Kristen said to Bobby. “Now she’s being punished for being herself and the only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.”
As they walked, they began riffing, singing snippets of lyrics. What if they wrote a song that started with a fairy-tale opening, Bobby suggested, like the stories they read to their girls at night? Then Elsa could talk about the pressures of being a good girl, said Kristen. She jumped up on a picnic bench. “She could change into a woman,” she said. “That’s what growing up is, letting go of the things you shouldn’t have to care about.”
She began singing to an audience of trees and trash cans, trying out lyrics for Elsa to convey that she’s done being the good girl, that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks anymore. Bobby was recording her impromptu song on his iPhone.
Kristen spread her arms.
Let it go, let it go.
That perfect girl is gone.
“I think you just figured out the chorus,” said Bobby.
Back in their apartment, they recorded a rough draft of the song in their makeshift studio. In the background were the clinks of plates from the Greek restaurant downstairs. The next day, they emailed it to Buck, Lee, and the rest of the Frozen team. It was part power ballad and part classical aria, but infused with Kristen’s and Bobby’s frustrations and the emancipation they felt when they let go of people’s expectations.