When the Frozen team gathered at the Disney headquarters the next morning, they put “Let It Go” on the sound system. Chris Montan, Disney’s head of music, slammed his hand on the table.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s our song. That’s what this whole movie is about!”
“I have to go rewrite the beginning of the movie,” said Lee.
“I was so happy,” Lee told me later. “So relieved. We had struggled for so long, and then we heard ‘Let It Go’ and, finally, it felt like we had broken through. We could see the movie. We had been carrying the pieces in our heads, but we needed someone to show us ourselves in the characters, to make them familiar. ‘Let It Go’ made Elsa feel like one of us.”
IV.
Seven months later, the Frozen team had the first two-thirds of the film figured out. They knew how to make Anna and Elsa likable while driving them apart to create the tension the film needed. They knew how to portray the sisters as hopeful yet troubled. They had even transformed Olaf—the f’ing snowman—into a lovable sidekick. Everything was falling into place.
Except they had no idea how to end the film.
“It was this huge puzzle,” said Andrew Millstein, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “We tried everything. We knew we wanted Anna to sacrifice herself to save Elsa. We knew we wanted the movie’s true love to exist between the sisters. But we had to earn that ending. It had to feel real.”
When filmmakers get stuck at Disney, it’s referred to as spinning. “Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore,” said Ed Catmull. So much of the creative process relies on achieving distance, on not becoming overly attached to your creation. But the Frozen team had become so comfortable with their vision of the sisters, so relieved to have figured out the movie’s basics, so grateful that the creative desperation had lifted a bit, that they had lost their ability to see other paths.
This problem is familiar to anyone who has worked on a long-term creative project. As innovation brokers bring together different perspectives, a creative energy is often released that is heightened by a small amount of tension—such as the pressure that comes from deadlines, or clashes that result when people from different backgrounds meld ideas, or the stresses of collaborators’ pushing us to do more. And these “tensions can lead to greater creativity, because all those differences trigger divergent thinking, the ability to see something new when you are forced to look at an idea from someone else’s point of view,” said Francesca Gino, who studies the psychology of creativity at Harvard Business School. “But when that tension disappears, when you solve the big problem and everyone starts seeing things the same way, people also sometimes start thinking alike and forgetting all the options they have.”
The Frozen team had solved almost all their problems. No one wanted to lose all the progress they had already made. But they couldn’t figure out how to end the film. “You start spinning when your flexibility drops,” said Catmull. “You get so devoted to what you’ve already created. But you have to be willing to kill your darlings to go forward. If you can’t let go of what you’ve worked so hard to achieve, it ends up trapping you.”
So Disney’s executives made a change.
“We had to shake things up,” said Catmull. “We had to jolt everyone. So we made Jenn Lee a second director.”
In one sense, this change should not have made a huge difference. Lee was already the film’s writer. Naming her as a second director, with equal authority to Chris Buck, didn’t alter who was participating in the daily conversations. It didn’t add any new voices to meetings. And Lee herself was the first to admit that she was as stuck as everyone else.
But, Disney executives hoped, disrupting the team’s dynamics just slightly might be enough to stop everyone from spinning in place.
In the 1950s, a biologist named Joseph Connell began traveling between his home in California and the rain forests and coral reefs of Australia in an effort to understand why some parts of the world housed such incredible biological diversity while other regions were so ecologically bland.
Connell had picked Australia for two reasons. First, he hated learning new languages. Second, Australia’s forests and seascapes offered perfect examples of biological diversity and homogeneity in close proximity. There were long stretches of the Australian coast where hundreds of different kinds of corals, fish, and sea vegetation lived in very close quarters. Less than a quarter mile away, in another portion of the sea that seemed essentially the same, that diversity would plummet and you might find only one or two kinds of coral and plants. Similarly, some pockets of Australia’s rain forests contained dozens of different types of trees, lichen, mushrooms, and vines flourishing side by side. But just a hundred yards away, that would dwindle to just one species of each. Connell wanted to understand why nature’s diversity—its capacity for creative origination—was distributed so unevenly.
His quest began in the Queensland rain forests: 12,600 square miles that contain everything from forest canopies to eucalyptus groves, as well as the Daintree tropical forest, where conifers and ferns grow right at the edge of the sea, and the Eungella National Park, where trees are so dense that, at ground level, it can be nearly lightless in the middle of the day. As Connell spent his days walking under green canopies and hacking through thick foliage, he found pockets of biodiversity that seemed to erupt out of nowhere. Then, just a few minutes away, that medley would dwindle until just one or two species remained. What explained this diversity and homogeneity?
Eventually, Connell began noticing something similar at the center of each pocket of biodiversity: There was often evidence that a large tree had fallen. Sometimes he would find a decaying trunk or a deep indentation in the soil. In other verdant pockets, he found charred remains underneath the topsoil, suggesting that a fire—perhaps caused by lightning—had blazed for a brief but intense period before the rain forest’s dampness had extinguished the flames.
These fallen trees and fires, Connell came to believe, played a crucial role in allowing species to emerge. Why? Because at some point, there had been a “gap in the forest where the trees had come down or had burned, and that gap was big enough to let sunlight in and allow other species to compete,” Connell told me. Retired now, he lives in Santa Barbara, but he remembers the details from those trips. “By the time I found some areas, years had passed since the fire or the tree fall, and so new trees had grown in their place and were blocking out the sun again,” he said. “But there had been a time when enough light had made it through that other species were able to claim some territory. There had been some disturbance that had given new plants a chance to compete.”
In those regions where trees hadn’t fallen or fires hadn’t occurred, one species had become dominant and had crowded out all competitors. Put differently, once a species solved the problem of survival, it pushed other alternatives away. But if something altered the ecosystem just a little bit, then biodiversity exploded.