Pixar, those uncomfortable moments happen in what they call BrainTrust meetings. The BrainTrust is Pixar’s method of assessing and improving its movies during their development. (Each film is BrainTrusted about half a dozen times, at regular intervals.) The meeting brings the film’s director together with a handful of the studio’s veteran directors and producers, all of whom watch the latest version of the movie and offer their candid opinion. From a distance, the BrainTrust appears to be a routine huddle. Up close, it’s more like a painful medical procedure—specifically, a dissection that
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