‘Dream Productions’ Creates a Battle to Control Riley’s Dreams in ‘Inside Out’ Spin-Off Series
With “Dream Productions,” Pixar’s “Inside Out” spin-off series, creator/director Mike Jones (co-writer of “Soul”) delves into the pressures every night inside Riley’s head to shoot the next hit dream. He utilizes a mockumentary framing device that wraps around chaotic battles to control the style and content of Riley’s tween dreams.
The four-episode series takes place between “Inside Out” and “Inside Out 2” and functions as an indie movie punctuated by cliffhangers. It finds Dream Productions’ top director, Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell), struggling to keep up with Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotional changes. She clings to the childish tropes that no longer connect with Riley and hits a losing streak. To shake her up, Jean Dewberry (Maya Rudolph), the head of Dream Productions, assigns her nephew, Xeni (Richard Ayoade), to be Paula’s new assistant. But he’s a smug daydream director who plots to unseat the star director, prompting a battle of wills between the commercially-minded control freak Paula and the improvisational, non-conformist Xeni.
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Production overlapped with “Inside Out 2,” which impacted its staffing and schedule. “We had a little bit of a compressed time frame, and we were a bit under the budget of typical Pixar movies,” Jones told IndieWire. “And it meant that we had to really iterate. And find ways of producing it. But I don’t think you could bring the crew together unless you really knew what you were saying.”
However, producer Jaclyn Simon found working simultaneously with “Inside Out 2” allowed them to share assets. “Characters and sets and collaborating at the same time was beneficial,” she told IndieWire. “But Mike did a great job of keeping the whole thing in his head, like the overarching story and where we want to land. Then we could navigate along the way.”
Simon also found the mockumentary style a unique experience in the layout of scenes. “One thing that’s very exciting is the idea that they’re looking directly at camera,” she said. “So interviews and moments of characters who accidentally look at the camera, or have a reaction, that was really fun to play with.”
The series allowed Jones to explore some personal themes about working in the industry and being a father. As a successful screenwriter for nearly 20 years before joining Pixar, he related to Paula’s predicament. “You’re only as good as the last thing you sold,” he said. “And you could ride that for a little while, but then you needed a new bag of tricks. And I think Paula is at that place where she was a really successful director for Riley when she was very young. But it’s kind of like Busby Berkeley coming back and saying, ‘I’m going to do the same song and dance numbers that I’ve always done and people will love it.'”
Jones could also relate to the changing dynamic between Paula and Riley, which serves as the story arc. “Paula is so confident that she thinks she knows how to talk to this little girl,” Jones added. “And that has a lot to do with me being a parent to my sons in that, as they grow up, you have to find a different way of talking to them. As they mature, they don’t want stupid, goofy dad all the time. I missed playing with them as children. That never got old for me, but it got old for them.”
Riley’s dreams revolve around her fears concerning the upcoming dance. The first two episodes were directed by Valerie LaPoint (who worked on “Inside Out”), whose dream sequences included a glittery musical tribute to Berkeley, a goth reworking of the Rainbow Unicorn dream from “Inside Out.”
But LaPoint had a personal experience as well, which helped inform the dance dream in the second episode. “There’s a particular scene in Episode 2 where she’s trying on a dress that her mom loves,” she told IndieWire. “And it was her mom’s dress. And that was literally something that happened to me, where we were in a store and it was this very little girl dress. I had reached that threshold where I didn’t want to wear things like that anymore. But I could see that my mom was hanging on to it in that inner conflict. So it’s nice to be able to pull from your lived experience.”
The third episode, directed by Austin Madison, has Riley sleepwalking. “Personally, I had a lot of fun working with the actors in the booth,” he told IndieWire. “And we were really trying to capture an element of spontaneity that you don’t necessarily get in a feature. And more of a feeling of messiness and people talking over each other and dialogue that feels a little bit more off the cuff. So I think that definitely helped us when they’re feeding off of that. And Paula and Richard got to work with each other, even though he [was virtual in England]. So there’s just chemistry you could never get separately. An example is a double-talking head at the beginning of the third episode, where Paula is trying to make a point, and Richard is adding little interjections, so that has a musicality.”
Meanwhile, Jones directed the finale, which contains a lucid dream for Riley inspired by many of his own. The idea was to take the franchise inside out and back in again for the first time.
“I think my goal always was bringing the crew along to that final episode, to that lucid dream,” he said, “where we can do something that ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Inside Out 2’ haven’t done. We can literally bring Riley into the mind world and have all of these mind workers stunned at the fact that they are finally able to speak to this girl one-on-one. It’s kind of breathtaking.”
“Dream Productions” is now streaming on Disney+.
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