Peter Sohn never wanted to be a director, but after a 23-year career at Pixar, he's at the helm of his second feature — and it's his most personal work yet.
Sohn drew from his own life experiences for "Elemental," out Friday, in which characters embodying fire, water, land and wind co-exist in the technicolor Elemental City. Ember, the lead, is a fire type set on taking over her family's convenience store on the outskirts of town until an encounter with Wade, a water type, threatens those plans.
Sohn, 45, tells CNBC Make It his goal with the film was to create "a love letter" to honor the sacrifice and hard work of his parents, who immigrated from Korea to New York City and opened a grocery store in the Bronx. Much like Ember, Sohn says it was expected he would help take over the store, but his dreams of becoming an animator stood in the way.
Sohn says his parents didn't understand how someone could survive off a career in the arts and almost didn't get their approval until, one day, an animator came into their store.
His father asked the customer how much money he made in his line of work, and apparently, it was enough to help him see that there could be job and financial security in it, Sohn says: "The guy told him, and my father turned to me very quickly, and said, 'OK, let's get you into the arts. What do you need?'"
The best career advice he's ever gotten
That level of curiosity is something Sohn says he learned from his father and is the best career advice he lives by today.
"My father always told me to ask questions," Sohn says. "I know for him, it came from learning English. But he always said to ask questions, because they usually lead to opportunities, and that was his whole philosophy."
Sohn went on to graduate from CalArts and worked at Disney and Warner Bros. before landing a job at Pixar. More than two decades later, Sohn has worked on Pixar classics including "Finding Nemo," "Ratatouille," "Up" and more, spanning from writing to animating to lending his voice to characters onscreen.
The two types of people in a workplace
The biggest key to his success in building a long-lasting career at Pixar is learning "how to present yourself in a collaborative setting," Sohn says. "So much of the job in animation is about working with a lot of people, because this stuff is painstaking."
Throughout his career, he's come to realize there are two types of people in a workplace: Ladder-climbers, who view projects as ways to get ahead in their own careers, and knife-sharpeners, or people who are critical and honest to help sharpen each other's talent to get better.
Working with "knife-sharpeners" has been critical to helping Sohn grow as an artist and work well with colleagues to put out a good movie, not just to get ahead at work, he says.
Why he doesn't consider himself ambitious
Sohn doesn't consider himself an ambitious person in the traditional sense of chasing after new opportunities. "The only ambition I do have is learning to make the project as best as it can be," he says.
So it came as a surprise to him when he was approached to take over as director for Pixar's "The Good Dinosaur" in 2015 after the original director was removed over storyline concerns.
He didn't feel ready to take on the challenge: "I said, 'Nope. I have never done anything like this before. I do not feel like I have the prerequisite to really take this challenge.'"
He asked the executive producers why they wanted him to direct the project, and they assured him they thought he had the experiences that would allow him to do it. Sohn took over responsibility for the crew, which had grown frustrated by the increasingly complex storyline, and re-worked the film with its more simplistic, original arc. "The Good Dinosaur" came out in 2015 after an 18-month-delay to strong early reviews, but it ultimately performed poorly at the box office.
Ever since, Sohn set out to develop his own more personal story in "Elemental" as a tribute to his parents, who both died at different points during the film's production.
Putting out such a personal movie is "terrifying," Sohn says, but he gained confidence from the film's cast and crew made up of other first- and second-generation immigrants.
"So many of our artists added their personal touches that allow me to continue to be brave about the little seeds that I injected into it," Sohn says. He often thinks, ''Oh, I'm honoring their stories, too. I've got to fight harder, because so many of our crew members gave us gifts that you just want to protect and make sure that you do right by them."
"I'm just very passionate about the people that I work with," he says.
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