How Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Screenwriters John Hoberg and Kat Likkel Found Emotional Vulnerability

Set in Element City, where Fire-, Water-, Earth- and Air-residents live together, Elemental 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.

Pixar's latest film Elemental leaves no emotional stone unturned. What may be an immigrant story on the surface, the heartbeat of this film is undoubtedly and unabashedly about love. Whether it be the love of a parent, a significant other, your community, or yourself - the list is endless. Box office numbers be damned, this is a film worthy of purchasing a movie ticket for.

Pixar films are known for putting the best of the best trusted creative teams behind their projects. Kat Likkel and John Hoberg happen to be one of the many key collaborators and storytellers behind Elemental, both of who have had successful careers as TV writers in the live-action and animation space. And they happened to stop by Script and share a peak behind the curtain of the writing process and collaboration at Pixar, their writing journeys, and they touch on the importance of emotional vulnerability in the room and on the page. Plus, they share "cheat codes" on how to break into TV writing, and so much, much, much more.

This interview does include spoilers and puns. But that should only inspire you to read on, take notes, go watch the film, and write!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I can imagine so many reasons why you two were brought on board for this story specifically, but what was it that spoke to the two in that you knew you would be the perfect storytellers to shepherd this story forward from where it was last left off at Pixar?

John Hoberg: It's funny, because Pixar finds you, you don't find them. Kat always says it's like being tapped on the shoulder by the Queen's Secret Service or something. [laughs] But do you remember Kat, we had that meeting, we were at Austin Film Festival and our manager called and said, ‘Pixar wants to meet you for breakfast.’ And we're like, ‘OK, that's cool.’ And we assumed it was gonna be a meet and greet and maybe we'll never talk again. But we got there, and they had a huge stack of our scripts that they'd read already. And we're like, ‘Well, they're serious about this.’ And they basically said, 'We don't know when we're going to bring people up. But we're really interested in working with you. It could be three weeks, or it could be three years, we just don't know.' And we ended up getting that call, and then went up and met Pete. We weren't told what the movie was. We weren't allowed to know, but we just had a meeting with Pete Sohn. And I think that's where we just started to connect.

Kat Likkel: Yeah, and it was really about connecting with the director. You have to work so closely with the director, and you got to have a trust level between you, because making a movie is a vulnerable thing in the best of worlds. And Pete was telling a very emotional and very personal story. And so it was, I think, it really was key that we all connect. And my life is very different than Pete's life, and John's life, but we had those emotional connections with family. I had a very difficult family situation, and so I could relate to Ember, John could relate - can we all make that emotional connection together? And that's the most important thing and then working on from there.

John: Looking back to that lunch after we found out what the core of the movie was - he was really probing kind of our lives and everything - and one of the things he was really looking at is our relationship being like a married writing team and I think he ended up seeing in us - the relationship, it's really based on Pete and his wife, because Pete's Korean and his wife is Italian American and their cultures in that clash, but like Kat is saying, we had so much of that in common to the point where I think he saw a little bit of the overly friendly, sensitive water guy in me [laughs] and then the tough fiery woman in Kat. It was just a really nice match when we all started working together. So, I think that's when we were like, 'OK, we can bring something to this.’

Sadie: I love that you are tapping into your personal lived experiences for this story. It is very much about the immigrant story, about life and loss, but it’s also this love story between father and daughter and the love story between Wade and Ember, and it was really great to see how those two kinds of ebb and flow with each other.

Kat: Yeah, there's so many things about it that were great. I come from a family that emigrated, we're not first generation, we're like third generation, but I still have my grandpa's stories, you know, hearing things like what mistakes Bernie made. And so we had those stories to share. And then also being John and I, Ember and Wade are not based on us [laughs] at all, zero, but we do have personally and our relationship, some similarities to those things. It was a good fit and a good working relationship with Pete.

John: I think, and what you pointed out, is sort of the balance between the father relationship and the Wade relationship and the immigration story in that, that was one of the things that was really on all these versions, how do you get that balance to work out? And I think that was, in some ways, the trickiest thing to just make sure you emotionally balance all that properly. Because in some ways, it's a love triangle, but not. 

And it was really important for all of us that Bernie, I think an easier direction would be the dad is like, 'No way. You're gonna take this shop over!' and he would have been almost the antagonist. But in some ways, he is the antagonist, but it's an accidental role. Where instead, it's like he's got this trauma with his dad that he's trying to make up for, and then accidentally traps his daughter in the same thing until he can finally resolve it. And so that balance was kind of the most challenging thing I think to find.

Sadie: And going into that with the character development because it feels so authentic also, I mean, it's a cartoon, but it still has emotional authenticity. As you’re developing the characters, you’re also in some way breaking the mold on stereotypes of the immigrant life and story, but also like you said, the accidental antagonist. Which, I feel like it's all very internal for all of them, especially Ember, she has this temper, and how does she learn patience and evolve?

What was the process of tapping into those character traits to kind of give them that unknown motivation that they need in order to have these authentic relationships?

John: Well, I know one of the trickiest things with Ember was early on, Kat and I are big believers in a story truly has to have three ingredients and they have to be working at the same time. And it's the hero; it's their goal; and then it's the obstacle that's in the way, right? And that's got to be in the world. But it's also got to be within them. 

And Ember's goal, when you boil it down, it's the core element, sorry, [laughs] is that she wants to be a good daughter. That's what she wants. And how do you be a good daughter? You take over the shop. And she thinks her obstacle is her temper. But then when she digs into that temper, she discovers, 'Oh, no, that obstacle is actually my temper is telling me that I'm the obstacle in becoming a good daughter.' And once we all sort of started to distill it to that, it felt like, ‘Wow, we've got a more mature protagonist’ --

Kat: A more mature story.

John: Yeah, because there was early talk of maybe she stands on the rooftop, more or less, and looks off at Element City - and it felt like a younger person's story in that version. And Pete was talking a lot about, ‘Not until I was 24 to 26, I didn't really realize that there were these feelings of responsibility and burden and all these other things.’ So, I feel like, Kat do you agree, but that's how we were able to find emotional vulnerability as a really key part of her that she's trying to run from.

Kat: Yeah. And it's the stuff you tamp down that is that fire that burns inside of you. Every pun intended on that one. [laughs] But it's like that thing inside, that deep in your belly feeling is, I think, where all story comes from. And so that was the most important thing to identify and tap on and then use that as fuel, again, [laughs] to fuel the rest of the story.

John: I feel like in a story when you get to the part where it's no longer intellectual, so much of a story is how do you take away all the shields that a character has put up in their status quo when you meet them and slowly take away their defenses until they get to this point? And for Ember, it's on that bridge. And she's looking at this glass ball and she goes to throw it and basically, it's like, ‘Why can't I just be a good daughter?’ And she's past the intellectual now. It's just now to the point of like, 'Ahhh!' And that's where it felt like, OK, this is getting successful, because it's not an intellectual moment for her. It is the deepest moment of kind of that scream into the void sort of feeling.

Kat: I always call that the gorilla growl. [laughs] It's like when you get to that, like deep gorilla growl that you can't have words for that's when you've tapped into the core of everything.

Sadie: Yeah, and then you wrap that up with a dad saying, ‘You were always my dream.’ And now it’s just tears because universally, that's what you want to hear from your parents.

Kat: It's also about how much misunderstanding can happen between a parent and a child. He was not intending to pressure her at all. He wanted what was best for her. And she took that as a burden. And it truly felt like a burden to her. And I think he was unintentionally burdening her. And I think that happens in the parent-child relationship, so often. I think things are so real, and we wanted to tap into those real things. Even though it's such a wildly imaginative world, those base human emotions have to be there.

John: I think it's why the bow works at the end so well is because, until that moment, she found out that ‘you were the dream’ and that her father loves her. But it's not until she gives him the bow and he returns it that she finally can close off that she's accomplished that goal, which is ‘I'm a good daughter, he's given me the bow ‘ and by doing that has released her own father. That's why I think it's such a moving moment for people, because it actually, you forget about it, but it's like she has unfinished business. And then that last moment is the finishing of the business.

Sadie: Right, and also for the father character, he has that closure, he knows he's a good father too. It’s full circle. Knowing that both of your backgrounds have been heavily TV influenced, and you both have done some animation as well. Were there things that you had learned from that TV background that you were able to carry over into write a feature animation script?

Kat: There were a lot of things actually from our TV background that I think were really helpful, that in some ways, might have been more helpful than just having a full, even animation background or feature background. Because in some ways, writing a Pixar movie has some similarities to TV because you're writing script, after script, after script, after script. And you are also sitting in the room with the storyboard artists and your director…it's a writers’ room. It's similar to a television writer’s room where you're with everybody and the storyboard artists are all in there with you and they are as valuable to story. It's not like the story is coming out of me and John, it is a writers’ room.

John: You're like a hunter-gatherer there to be like, ‘Oh, that’s sticky that’s sticky. Let's try to build.’

Kat: And we'd be pitching our points or coming up with ideas, and then one of the storyboard artists would suddenly pick up their pad of paper and do something and it's like, ‘Is this what you're talking about?’ or ‘I was thinking about this.’ And you're like, ‘Oh, yeah, that was much better that you did that in like the three seconds of drawing what I took just half an hour to say.’ [laughs]

John: And that was one of the big breakthroughs for us working there, by the way, is in those early meetings, because I looked at the number of sequence drafts in the file when we were ending the job, and I think there were 730 sequences, and that sequence is obviously it's not a scene, right? And some of them were small additions, some of them were brand new. So, you're generating so much material.

And one of the scariest things in a way when you show up is you're gonna write something. And then people might just be like, 'Meh' and then they hate it, and you move on. And so, we had this breakthrough moment that, like Kat's talking about, this story artist might just sketch it. And we're like, ‘Wait, they're not spending an hour making the perfect drawing?’ They're literally just doing emotional ‘here's what I'm doing.’

Having worked in multi-camera, where there's an audience there, and you have to rewrite a scene sometimes while they're waiting. We've run a couple of shows - we were shooting in a castle in England, and there was a NATO Summit with fighter planes going over. So, we had to rewrite an entire scene on the fly. Weird Al Yankovic's there. And it's the only day you can have this castle, right? [laughs] You learn to write well --

John: [laughs] This is the lie, John. There's so much in that has to be untrue. Weird Al. Castle. NATO Summit. [laughs]

Sadie: Where's that movie? [laughs]

John: But it's all true! [laughs] So Kat and I are like in this cold basement, like, ‘OK, well, this has to work, you got to cut this.’ And that's the only way to survive. But you learn to write really fast and at not your 100%. But you're 80 or 90, but airable fast. And then you can fix it in the edit a little bit.

But what we realized is that our version of sketching is writing really fast. And so, this was where this leap of faith Kat was talking about with creative trust, where we came to our director, we're like, ‘Look, how would you feel if we gave you really rough ideas fast that we knew would be still good, but that we're going to spend 25 minutes on versus a day? And you can then look at them and say, I liked this or I don't.’ It takes pressure off of him because he doesn't feel like, ‘Oh, they just spent a day on this, what do I do?’ And then if you like it, now we can make it as good as we possibly can. 

And that just opened up this creative floodgate for us. And I think it's gonna stick in how we write because suddenly you're like, ‘Wait a minute,’ you don't have to just keep what you wrote, because you wrote it. It's like, that's always going to be there, try something totally out of left field.

So, we started turning in things Pete would expect. And we'd be like, ‘And here's this sort of insane thing. This is totally different.’ And I feel like eight times out of 10 Pete's like, ‘I like that.’ But there'll be something that comes out of nowhere and that's sort of what the story artists are doing too.

Kat: Yeah, from their side, sometimes when you would start to see the animatic, the rough stuff, you'd be like, ‘Oh, look!’ Lee Tang was lead story, so we worked with him quite a lot. And it's like, you would see something that was the scene we had written, and then Lee would have done something different in it that made it slightly funnier, slightly better, slightly emotional. And you're like, ‘Well, I got nothing to say to that, because it's great.’ And on the other side, we would do things or say things that they hadn't thought about either. And so, there was a really good working relationship back and forth.

John: It can be a hard place for some writers, because also the processes, you'll write your sequence and then there's a handout process. Pete, who's actually a really good actor, he's been in a lot of their movies, and Pete would read the scene out loud to the story artists, and whoever has been assigned it. So, say Lee has been assigned this, then we would jump in, and Pete would talk about, ‘Here's the core emotional beats that we really want. Kat and John, is there anything you want to add?’ And if there was something that he didn't hit, we'd want to be like, ‘Yeah. What really matters to us is that Ember leaves this scene down versus up.’ And so now Lee has this freedom to go with these pages and hit those emotional beats but then the freedom to just change it if he wants to.

And usually, the story artist would come in with kind of what we were doing, ‘Here's a version that sticks to the script. And here's a version that kind of I played around with.’ And again, the one that was played around with, often is the one that got everybody excited because it's like, ‘Oh, wow, that's a brand new way to look at it.’ So, you can't be precious there, because it will kill you. [laughs]

Kat: You've got to be so free and open. And I think some writers haven't been able to work with that. Especially in television writing, you're used to more of a back-and-forth; feature writers are used to having a lot more control when they're writing their script. And I think we might have been the first television writers, they brought on --

John: And Brenda came from TV too.

Kat: Oh right, Brenda Hsueh came from TV too! I think the way television writers work works really well with a Pixar process, because we're used to doing draft, after draft, after draft, making changes, because a joke doesn't work. If it's live, you're putting it up in front of an audience and getting that automatic feedback and puddling between scenes, 'Do we need to rewrite this scene?' And you gotta be willing to throw out your babies and find new ones.

John: And equal to that is you're chasing, unless you're running the show, you're chasing someone's vision and trying to make it the best version of that vision it can be. We always think of a boat analogy, like you have an oar and you're rowing, and then the captain is the showrunner or the captain is the director. And you can be like, ‘Let's row over here for a little bit.’ And then if they're like, ‘No, I want to go this way.’ You have to, with the same amount of enthusiasm, row that way. And I think that's part of the TV writer thing that works there, too.

Kat: I think writers who come out of features over there have --

John: A lot of them a really successful there, too. So it's not a universal thing.

Kat: No, it's not a universal thing, but what I think is a personality thing. Like when you or what your expectations are, when you go there, you're gonna be part of a team. There's everything about the strike now 'writers are being treated terribly' but in the writers’ room, we are listened to, and our opinion matters. And I think when you're getting so much back and forth from a director, or especially when you've been a showrunner you're like, ‘I know this works.’ 

But at Pixar, you got to take that step back and say, ‘I'm always going to be willing to do this again. There's always another way.’ Which, quite frankly, is how we've worked in a lot, even when we run our own shows, there's always another way to do it. Somebody hating something is actually for the best, because now I'm going to find something even better.

John: The way you last a long time is you're the one who finds if the showrunner says, ‘I want this to be an underwater ballet.’ And everyone's like, 'What?' You're like, ‘Here's a way to do it.’

Sadie: There’s similarities to that in a writing partnership. It’s what is in best of service for the story. And having that ability to pivot.

John: That was an early thing when we teamed up because a writing partnership is hard, and especially when you're married, because we had to. This is so corny and Kat's going to be mad that I'm gonna say this on the record, but we started doing this…it was almost like therapy speak where we would be like, ‘OK, we are now switching from being married to writing and we need to be critical when we write.’ And then at the end of the writing session, we'd literally say, ‘OK, we're now switching to being married, so we can't be critical.’ [laughs] And it kind of got our minds working that way. And then through that, we had this little breakthrough that I think just helped our whole career.

We came to this point of like when one sees it this way, the other sees it this way, and we're kind of at an impasse, we had this rule, ‘we have to find the third way.’ Half the time someone is like, ‘I don't want to figure out the third way.’ [laughs] ‘You're more passionate than me.’ But find a third way, I think is just great writing advice. In general, even if you're stuck on a script on your own, and you're like, 'Ugh!' if it doesn't want to go there, it might be telling you something - it's not wanting to go there, find another way.

Kat: But that ‘find that third way’ is also good advice for working in television with executives, and studio executives. You will get a note from a studio executive, and then you're like, 'Ugh...' but you assimilate it, you maybe take a drink of something --

John: It’s what adult drinks are for. [laughs]

Kat: [laughs] It's what adult drinks are for and then you figure out how to do it. And this is the thing about notes, not just talking about executive notes, but notes from anywhere, even if you don't agree with them, you hear something, you're like, 'That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.' Think about it again. Because that person is feeling something, something is bumping them. And they might not be able to put it into the words that I would understand more there, they can only say it in some emotional way. Like, ‘I kind of felt like - eh' or whatever. And it's important to look at the note behind the note, always look at the note behind the note. Figure out what somebody is really saying, and then deal with that.

John: And I think as you said, feel, and I think that's a great way to get through a note, because people will often be like, ‘I hate this scene. I think it's boring.’ And if you can probe, ‘What do you feel? Where are you feeling something?’ Because it's often the problem. A lot of times it isn’t in that scene, it's in four scenes before. But if you can probe ‘what are you feeling’ versus ‘what are you intellectualizing?’ Because I mean, that's all these things are, they’re emotional delivery devices. [laughs] And we all spend all this time trying to intellectualize an emotional delivery device. And it's like, you got to just keep being like, ‘No, wait. It's all about feeling. That's all I gotta do.’

Sadie: Yeah. I had this really great conversation with the showrunners from Abbott Elementary and how in their writers’ room it's really important to give feedback to your writers and listen, but also like the power behind 'yes and...' in the room to build off of that. I wonder how much of that has carried from rooms you’ve been into this project and working with the storyboard artists and Pete?

Kat: I think our television experience was the most valuable experience we could have had coming into Pixar. Yeah, seriously, because of all of these things; because you had to be 'yes and...' And you had to listen to ideas. I mean, there's so many times in that room that if I had been there if it had been my show that I was showrunning, there's a couple of ideas I would have just been like, ‘No, I don't want to go there. Let's just shut that down and look in this direction.’ But you can't do that in this situation. And honestly, as a showrunner, I shouldn't be doing that either. I should be listening to people and hearing it out, which is something you learn as you go through the process of going from a writer to a showrunner, it's a big transition.

And so, you've got to have that open mind constantly to listen to other people's ideas, work with them, compromise, and have faith that you will find that thing. You're never not going to find that thing. And it just might take longer than you hoped it would. [laughs]

John: I think 'Yes and...' is if you want a cheat code for a writing career, ‘yes and…’ is one of those cheat codes. And another one is listen. This sounds so simple, but what we learned when we jumped into running a show versus being on a show, some showrunners are different, and we learned this from Dan Fogelman, who's a brilliant showrunner, and he's like, ‘I'll just sit there and let people debate it out and listen, and listen, and listen.’ He's like, ‘Half the time the room will figure something out just in their own debate. And if I don't like it, then I'll maybe steer it another way. Or if it comes to a true impasse, and I'll just make a decision.’ And he gave us that advice, both for production and also just in general with stuff, and I think it's perfect, because you can sit there and then now you're almost seeing the matrix and feeling it.

And that's what we did a lot on this Pixar job is people are talking about stuff and then our job is like, ‘Ok, that sounds good.’ And then be like, ‘What if you put this with this?’ And they're all other people's ideas…and then you patched it together that way. And that was some of the fun of this. And I think that that came from 'yes and...' in a lot of ways.

Sadie: Pixar films, in general, and as you’re explaining they run like a writers’ room, you’re working collectively to serve the story. And it doesn't feel like it's 30 different voices, it’s a cohesive vision.

John: That's credit to Pete. The guy is heck of a leader. He is so creatively giving, not just because this is public, he truly is one of the most creatively giving people. I think anybody you talk to who was in that creative circle would say, ‘Yeah, there's a lot of me in there.’ Because he's not saying, ‘It has to come through me.’ He's doing that thing we were also trying to do, which is ‘Oh, I love that. I love that. Great idea. And what if we bring them together?’ But then they all come through the Pete filter of what his vision is. And that's a hard job to do.

Here's the weird thing - when you've run a show, it's like you've stepped on the other side of the curtain somehow. And you go from like, ‘Ugh, I wish they would take my ideas.’ Like the next time you're in a room not running a show after you've run the show, all you'd want to say to the showrunner is, ‘How can I help? What do you need?’ [laughs] Because you've been there and you know how hard it is.

At one point, Kat and I found a picture, it's from World War Two. And it was a bunch of soldiers. And they're all walking up a mountain or a hillside and one of them is carrying a donkey on his back, like literally carrying a donkey. [laughs] And we took that and we printed it out when we were running Downward Dog. And we're like, ‘This is how it feels. We're the ones with the donkey on our back.’ [laughs] Everyone else is walking up the hill --

Kat: Running with their gun, excited. [laughs]

John: We gave a printed-out copy of that to Pete when we all left for the pandemic. And we're like, ‘I don't know if you relate to this. But we think we know how you feel sometimes.’ And at one point during this, it was right after we left our work on it, and he just sent the picture of it. He's like, ‘I'm really feeling the donkey right now.’ [laughs] It's not a negative, it's just you have so much to carry.

Sadie: I can imagine! Let’s take a quick step back, would love to learn about your individual writing journeys. What inspired you to become a writer and get into this business? And then become collaborators?

Kat: I always wanted to be a writer. When I was little, I would freak out my mom, because I would sit down and write little stories or poems or whatever. And she said I would sit at the kitchen counter, and I would just look away and think and she would almost be doing this [waving hands] and she's like, 'You really freaked me out when you were doing that.' But that was me writing stories. So, I think from the time I was about 13, I probably started writing little stories, and then they got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I always thought maybe that I would want to try to write a book - is kind of what I thought I would do, but it didn't seem practical for real life. And so I did several other things. And then ultimately --

John: You wanted to be an actor.

Kat: Yeah, it seemed more practical to be an actor than a writer. [laughs] So I started going on auditions and things like that. And I crashed and burned so fast. And in the meantime, I'd worked at AIDS Project Los Angeles, doing deathbed wills at the height of the AIDS crisis in Los Angeles, which was incredibly I mean, just hearing what it is, you got to imagine how incredibly emotional and incredibly emotionally taxing it was. And I was talking to so many people who as I was helping them with their will, they were telling me things they wish they had done in their lives. And it made me really think about what do I wish I had done in my life. And I realized deep down that my passion was writing. And I was afraid of it.

John: How am I supposed to top deathbed wills, Kat?

Kat: Sorry. No, you'll say something funny, and it'll be great. But anyway, so that was it for me. Very shortly thereafter, I went on leave from AIDS Project, trying to figure out what I was going to do. They wanted me to come back. And in that two-week period that I was on leave, a friend of a friend who knew I had an interest in writing came to me and said, 'I just got picked up for an animated series. And they're looking for a writer and I know you want to be a writer; do you want to do this?' And that was the beginning of my writing career. And then from there, I went from television animation to sitcom, to suddenly being tapped on the shoulder by Pixar.

Sadie: I love that. And what about you, John?

John: I never even thought of being a writer. I grew up in a family - I had this grandfather who lived to just be 104, but he was a fighter pilot in two wars. He's from South Carolina, one of the funniest people I've ever met. And he's a storyteller - everybody tells stories. And I feel like there was a culture in the family of at dinner if you're gonna say something, there better be something that's funny or interesting about that story. And especially when my grandpa was around, if you tried to tell a story, and it's not funny at the end, he's kind of like, ‘What was that ride for?’ And so, I always liked that.

But it didn't cross my mind you could write TV. When I got out of college. I'm sure if I really thought about it, I would have figured that out, but then I worked in book publishing briefly. And I was reading the slush pile and there's a book by a TV writer about the job and I was it was a light bulb moment, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And so, from there, I met another guy and we wrote some scripts together, moved to LA and Kat doesn't like it because I had it very easy...I showed up. [laughs]

Kat: [laughs] I was broke. When John met me, I had zero money and I couldn't pay like an electrical bill or something like that. And I wouldn't let John loan me money. And so he bought my favorite lamp from me because he wanted it.

John: It was a terrible thing to do.

Kat: It was Lucille Ball's lamp. I have Lucille Ball's lamp.

John: And it was a steal for $60. [laughs] But I got really lucky when I showed up. I had met two women in New York in book publishing who were doing a pilot at Universal, and they needed an assistant. And so, I got in the business relatively quickly.

Sadie: That’s also a great story, but most importantly, do you still have the lamp?

Kat: Yes, we do. That's it right there!

John: [laughs] It's on my desk.

Sadie: OK, that needs to be protected at all costs.

John: We keep it very safe.

Kat: I should notate on the bottom that this was Lucille Ball's lamp.

Sadie: And yours! So, how did you two become writing partners?

John: We said we're never going to do it. We got married first. And everyone's like, ‘How cute, you're going to write together.’ And we're like, ‘There's no way.’ And then our friend Cindy Chupack is a really good television and feature writer, she had a pilot in New York, and she flew us out to help with the pilot - that's what you do in television, you bring your friends in to just do punch up for the week. And Kat and I were both there, and we were a little nervous, because you can try to hide the truth of anything in a writers’ room for about eight hours and so there's a little bit of like, ‘OK, how's it gonna go? What if suddenly we disagree and now it's you invited too many people to the wedding and off we go?’

And what we found in the room is we really worked well off of each other and we had two perspectives on the same thing. And we also were very comfortable being 100% honest in front of each other. And I think that's where we're like, ‘Wait a minute, maybe this could work.’ And we were both desperate to get out of, we were doing kids television, we really wanted to get into broadcast network, and we just separately weren't hitting. And we wrote a script together and within four months, we got our first network job. So, something of one plus one equals three when we work together. I don't know what it is.

I almost wish I could go back and just be like, ‘Thank you guys for making that decision.’ Because everything in our lives is because we made that decision to team up. And really, I mean, it's a gambler's lifestyle off and on. And we both were like, ‘Let's just go for it.’ And I think a lot of it, like Kat was talking about her experience at APLA…and we just were like, ‘This is what we want to do more than anything else.’

Sadie: Any advice for animation writers or writers who want to break into the TV space? What should they be prepared or have prepared in terms of specs and anything else?

John: Well, right now, the industry standard is original pilot for television. I personally really liked it when we were reading specs. I know some people have specs, but you also have to have original material for sure. And my kind of advice on what to write, which people are asking a lot, is as far as original material, try to write something that is very personal for one of your specs, I think that's really important because you won't have IP, but you're kind of that IP. So that makes it like, ‘OK, well, you're the only one who could write this.’ But also, it shouldn't be your only spec.

The other thing that someone gave me this advice early on, and I think it's great, is look at the marketplace, because if you want to be a professional writer, yeah, art is great, but you need to look at the market. It is a business. And look how many shows are family comedies, how many are office comedies - if it's mostly workplace comedies, have a workplace comedy, because that means your odds of getting a job are better because you've got a spec that speaks to those shows. And it's a very non-artistic way to look at things, but I think the business of it all, kind of do the math and figure out where your best shot you want to play the odds.

Kat: Yeah, I would say write more than one spec. Because your first spec may be brilliant, but the more you write, the better you get, the more you learn. And so, your first spec, you might think it's perfectly great. And this should suffice. Write another one and then write another one. And while you're waiting for those jobs, keep writing.

And I know that the business is so different now than it is when we started. And I know there's so much content out there. And I also know there's people scrambling to try to get jobs even though there's more out there. But keep writing specs. Don't stop at one. Every single one is going to teach you more about your own writing. And you're going to be that little bit better. So don't write what you think is the perfect one and stop there. Keep going.

John: Our friend said this great thing to a young writer and I think it's perfect - write it, put it aside, because you don't know enough yet to know why that's not good enough. You will learn it and it will be your fourth or fifth spec and you'd be like, ‘Oh I see what I did wrong.’ But you don't know enough. You think you do because we all tell stories all the time. So, you think you know, but you have to learn it. You wouldn't just suddenly say I can speak French, you got to learn French. [laughs]

Kat: Also get into a writers group. Connect with other writers. If you can figure out where showrunners are hanging out, go hang out where showrunners hang out.

Sadie: Turns out they're all at the picket lines. So go there.

John: Go to the picket lines. 100%

Kat: Go to the picket lines, show your support. And because it is also a business of connections. And it was an accidental connection. It was somebody who knew I wanted to write, who knew somebody who worked in Disney Animation, who connected us together. And if that person in the middle hadn't known that I wanted to become a writer, I never would have made that original connection. So, tell people. Don't be ashamed. I want to be a writer!

John: One last tiny thing is, get comfortable with failure and embrace it, because you learn from it. It’s so counter to how we all want to be, you actually learn so much more from failure and putting yourself out there than you learn from success.

And also, a lot of TV writers love baseball. And my friend has a theory, it's because if you bat 300, you're a really good baseball player. And that's three out of 10. Right? And I think writers feel a little bit like if you're hittin' three out of 10 in the writers’ room, you're valuable. And if people love three out of 10 of your scripts, you're gonna get a job.

Sadie: I like that analogy a lot. What do you hope audiences take away from watching this film?

John: For me, it's the connection and love are the most important thing in life. And we get so bogged down in all the other stuff, if you can, try to push past all that.

Kat: That's what I was gonna say. So now what I'm gonna say is like Ember, her temper is trying to tell her something. We all have that little voice inside that we kind of tried to stuff down that is trying to tell us something, be open and listen to that voice inside yourself. And don't be afraid to take some steps towards something new, even if it's scary. That may be where you find your true happiness.

John: OK, that's better.

Elemental is now in Theaters.