Interview: ‘Coco’ and ‘Lightyear’ Screenwriter Matthew Aldrich
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Matthew Aldrich is a screenwriter known for his work on the Pixar movies Coco and Lightyear. For Animation Month, we spoke with Matt about making Coco, the inspiration behind Lightyear, why storyboard artists are so important, his go-to screenwriting advice, and more!
This interview has been slightly edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the Matthew Aldrich origin story?
I was writing for a long time before I knew that’s what I wanted to do. In high school, when I started doing theater, I was performing and that was great because, you know, people clap and you go “I must be good at this.” But we were also writing all of our own stuff that we were performing, so most of the plays I did in high school were written or directed by me or by friends. Everybody kind of wore every hat. It really wasn’t until college that I started taking writing classes and some of the professors steered me in that direction. I went to UCLA and studied theater. I walked in as an actor and walked out as a writer.
And then once I was out of college, I was in LA and I got a job working for the Sundance Institute. At the time we were doing screenwriter labs in other countries for writers in those countries, and my job was kind of producing those labs from the U.S. side. This was in the late ’90s, early 2000s when Sundance was really at the center of the universe at that point. American independent film seemed like it was everything. I found myself rubbing elbows with some pretty amazing people, and learning by talking to them about what the job of a screenwriter is. They helped demystify that for me. To the point where after a few years, I decided to start writing a screenplay. I wrote one and it was terrible. And then I wrote another one and it wasn’t as terrible, so I started showing that around to people. That’s what got the ball rolling in terms of getting me an agent and making the break and quitting my day job to try to do writing full time. That was about 20 years ago now.
2. We’re covering animated movies this month, and Coco is in our Top 10 of all time. What memory stands out for you from the writing or production of it?
I was on that show for three years, day in and day out, so there were three years of memories. But I think for me one of the turning points was when we went down to Mexico to celebrate Dia de Los Muertos with families down there. We embedded with some families over the course of those nights and got to celebrate with them, break bread with them, go to the cemeteries with them, and talk to them about the people they’d lost, along with their relationship to the holiday and what it means to them. A lot of the older folks were worried the younger folks weren’t taking it as seriously and that it was going to die out, and they were really sad about that.
That trip for me made concrete everything that was sort of ephemeral or theoretical up to that point. I had been on the movie for less than a year at that point, so we had been just trying to figure out what the general shape of the film was going to be. You can say, “OK, our heroes go to the Land of the Dead.” But as a writer, you know there’s a day coming when you have to sit down and actually write that scene. So you go, “OK, Interior: Land of the Dead…” But you have no idea what’s there, so you go, “We’ll put a pin in it and figure it out later.” But we got to go to Oaxaca and this lovely city called Guanajuato, which architecturally is an incredibly unique city and in so many ways was the model for the Land of the Dead. Once I was able to walk around in those spaces and feel, smell, and be there, I was like, “I know how to write this. I know how to move people around in space.” Maybe it’s the theater background in me. I feel like I need to be in a three-dimensional space before I can write something like that.
3. Typically dying is the highest stake in a movie, but in Coco it’s being forgotten. That’s such an emotionally rich storytelling device, but also leaves the audience thinking about their ancestry in a way few other movies have done. Who’s someone in your past you’ll never forget?
That’s a great question. I would say my grandfather and my grandmother. Those are the two I knew the best in terms of people who are on my ofrenda. There’s no reason you should have, but if you’ve ever watched Coco to the end of the credits, there’s an ofrenda. Everybody who worked on the film was invited to submit a photograph of somebody they had lost and who they wanted immortalized in the credits of the film. So there’s this wonderful patchwork quilt of everybody’s passed-on relatives. There’s a picture of my grandparents that I love from their honeymoon and it’s up there in the lower right-hand corner.
4. Starting from when Miguel plays “Remember Me” to Mama Coco all the way through “Proud Corazon” wrecks me every time. First off, how dare you. But I’m wondering how a powerful and emotional sequence like that gets translated from page to screen. How well can you sense if something like that will work before the animation and voice work and music are added?
That sequence is a unicorn sequence in that it never changed from first draft to final film. It is probably the only thing that never changed. I wrote it, and I remember Lee Unkrich giving me a few notes on the pages. Really just tweaks like “Let this moment breathe 10 seconds longer” and that kind of stuff. And then the process at Pixar is that you go through a series of table reads, and then after the table reads the storyboard artists are brought on to board the sequences. Those are edited together with temp music and temp dialogue and then the whole movie screens. Then the whole thing starts all over again. So there’s tons of time for things to get murdered. Many points of failure along the way.
This is one of those things where I wrote it, we tinkered a little bit with it on the page, it always played in the table reads, and then Jason Katz, who is the head of story for the film, boarded that sequence. He knew how it needed to play and that it was the most important sequence of the film, so he boarded it, Lee edited it, and it was done. I remember for the second screening, Lee went back to try to shave some time out of it. He changed it just a little bit and it didn’t work. Everybody was like, “No, no, no. Go back.” And so it went back to the way it was and it stayed that way. And yeah, it still gets me too.
5. Lightyear was an inspired piece of sci-fi storytelling. What initially sparked the concept and what were the influences that guided it onto the page and screen?
I can only speak to some of that because I was only on Lightyear for a year. I had done three years on Coco. I left for about a year and a half, but I was still coming back periodically to consult on things in the Brain Trust or to have a brainstorm day with somebody. Angus MacLane pulled me in a couple of times because he was developing what was going to be his first feature, and they wanted him to do something in the Toy Story universe with a new cast of characters. He was getting ready to pitch that to the Brain Trust, and then he needed a second thing to pitch because you have to have a couple things to pitch. He said he had this other idea, which was “What if we made the movie Andy saw?” And I was like, “They’re going to pick that pitch. I’m sorry you’ve done all this work creating this really beautiful, poignant story over here, but they’re going to make the movie that Andy saw because that’s too good an idea.” So that first year was cracking that story.
And you really can do anything if it’s the movie Andy saw. It could be Aliens, Star Wars, Blade Runner. We had the whole menu of sci-fi open to us. His name is Buzz Lightyear, so something about the speed of light had to be involved. There was a very different version where Buzz was a test pilot, kind of like Alan Shepard trying to break the sound barrier, only he was trying to break the light barrier. That felt very Buzz. In the very early conversations we were having about it, what we found was if he goes faster and faster, he travels further ahead in time and then he gets to a place where he doesn’t recognize the world he left behind anymore because it’s been overrun by robots, and now he’s got to figure out what to do. As we were developing that story, we were like, “Oh my God, this is Toy Story. This is Buzz crash-landing in an alien world he has to figure out and acting out the movie he was just in.” I wrote the first draft and then Angus and Jason Headley did the hard work of actually making the movie out of it. I was so happy when I saw the finished film because I knew the look and the flavor of it was Angus through and through. I’m really proud to have had a hand in that.
6. Which supporting character in a Pixar movie deserves their own standalone story?
I’m going to steal an idea from my son, who asked if there was ever going to be a Coco 2. I said I don’t think so. But I asked if he could make a Coco 2, what would it be? He thought about it for a second and he was like, “At the end, De la Cruz had the bell fall on him. I want to see him get out of that bell.” I still think that would be the best Buried Alive kind of film—very tense, very indie. All about him coming to terms with the man he has been and having a change of heart right in the bowels of the bell.
7. What’s a job in an animated film crew that deserves more recognition?
I think the storyboard artists are kind of the glue between the theoretical and the practical. They’re incredibly talented people. Their job is to kind of realize a section of this script, right? So they’re given 1/4 page or three pages depending on what kind of scene it is, and they have to then act, direct, light, and be a cinematographer all at the same time in bringing that to life in a black-and-white pencil sky. We’re talking super minimal, like sometimes there’s not even backgrounds—you’re just focused on the shape of the head and the eyebrows, but they’re able to convey some really subtle things. Getting to work with them and iterate with them… there was a learning curve to it, definitely, but they are a crack squad. They really help everybody see not just what it can be, but when it’s not working. It becomes very clear that what you swear to God is working on the page, when you see it storyboarded you’re like, “Oh yeah, that actually doesn’t work. I need to go back and redo that.” So I don’t know if they’re unsung, but definitely those artists are phenomenal.
8. You cohosted a podcast all about the year 1982 in film. Why 1982 and what was a key takeaway from that experience?
This was my weird COVID thing when we were in lockdown. Everybody did something weird, and this was my weird thing that I did with a friend of mine who has a podcast about movie sequels. He invited me to be on and he said to pick a sequel I would want to talk about. I was kind of poking around and then thought Grease 2 would be great to talk about because boy, we don’t talk enough about Grease 2. And that got us both to look at other films that were made in 1982 and suddenly that year seemed incredibly significant. There was something unique in that year’s lasting impact on film today that we’re still remaking films from that year specifically. My friend and I realized these were the films of our youth, and now the people greenlighting films are all about our age and they’re all looking back nostalgically at these films from the early ’80s. We found that when you watch them in the cold light of day, it really makes you stop and reconsider what you’re nostalgic for and why. So it was part “Let’s watch old movies and talk about them” but let’s also talk about how these movies actually shaped who we became and how we saw the world. We talked a lot about how it was like reading the ingredients on a box of Twinkies: What did I eat? What was I fed back then? So that was really what we set out to do and it was a lot of fun.
“Storyboard artists are kind of the glue between the theoretical and the practical. They’re incredibly talented people.”
9. Hollywood just emerged out of a brutal season of strikes. What makes you hopeful about the future of filmmaking?
Well, this was my second strike, so I never thought this was the end of the world. I felt that this particular strike was actually overdue. We were probably going to go on strike in 2020, but the pandemic sort of scuttled that. A lot of people in the WGA have been expecting this to happen for a number of years, so when it happened I never panicked. I’m overjoyed with how it got settled, and I think the timing of it is going to end up being very significant. I think if we had struck in 2020, AI would not have been in the discussion. And when it finally did come time to put AI in the discussion, there would have been no appetite for a strike. I don’t think you can tell the story of the strikes without telling the story of COVID. So ironically, that’s what makes me hopeful is that because of the timing of the strike and because we established jurisdiction over AI, we have precedent now that the writers have a seat at the table when it comes time to write the rules around this new technology. That we are not going to be told how it’s going to go, but that we are going to help shape the rules.
10. What screenplay do you consider the gold standard of the form?
I don’t know if this answers your question, but the first movie I ever saw that I knew there was a screenplay and that it was good was in my teens. I remember walking away from the movie thinking, “Oh my God, somebody wrote the hell out of that,” and that’s All the President’s Men. It struck me as so crafted that it was probably the first time I was even awakened to the concept that these things need to be written down first. I don’t know if that’s the best screenplay ever written, but it’s up there for me.
11. What’s your go-to advice for aspiring screenwriters?
Well, what comes up more often is “Do I need an agent?” and “How do I get started?” and all that stuff. What I usually say to people is I could tell you how to get started in 1998, but I don’t know how to get started in 2024. Maybe it is now finally cheaper and easier for you to just go out and make your movie. In 1998 it wasn’t. We were still shooting on film, so going out and making your film was not on the table for most people. I would say build off the relationships you have. I think it is actually very important to get a job in the movie business just to see how it all works. Find a perch where you can observe how films are developed, how they’re produced, or what postproduction is all about. Wrap your brain around one part of that process so it stops being theoretical.
12. What’s your proudest accomplishment as a baker?
I actually used to teach classes for people to learn how to bake very simple breads. I did this for a number of years and there were just a few students who really took to it and still bake. We are in touch and we send each other pictures of what we bake and all that, so that’s probably what I’m most proud of. But this is something I’ve been doing for 20-plus years. It’s very much part of who I am at this point. Right before I got on with you I was rushing to get my panettone in the proofer because I’ve got a new recipe I was dying to try out, and it takes a couple days. So I was really jamming to get it in the proofer because panettone waits for no one.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What movie are you looking forward to the most coming out this year?
Chad: Man, there’s a lot. We should have seen it already, but Dune: Part Two is top of my list. I had never read Dune or engaged with it at all before seeing the first one and then it just kind of blew my mind. So I’m really excited to see where that story goes and hopefully watch them stick the landing.