‘Transformers One’ Filmmaker Josh Cooley Is Still Playing with Toys and Loving It

Like Woody at the end of Toy Story 4, filmmaker Josh Cooley was striking out on a new adventure. It was March 2020, and the filmmaker had won an Oscar for Toy Story a month earlier. Despite the accolades, he made the consequential decision to leave Pixar, the company where he had spent his entire professional career after starting there as an intern 18 years earlier.

It was a Friday, his last day of work before he uprooted his family to try his luck in Los Angeles. He had made the decision after realizing that given the realities of the Pixar slate pipeline, if he stayed he wouldn't release a movie for another decade. He was sad, but excited.

Then came Monday, March 16. The day America shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A sickening knot in his stomach twisted and squirmed.

"I don't have health insurance for my family anymore. Did I just make the worst decision of all time?" Cooley remembers thinking at the time.

He did have one thing in his pocket. That previous Friday afternoon, he quietly signed on to direct an animated Transformers feature for Paramount Animation, a move that could be seen as risky, since the last time an animated Transformers movie hit theaters back in 1986, things didn't go so well.

Now with the pandemic, the move was looking riskier and risker. With no end to quarantine in sight, would people still be making and going to the movies? "I had no idea if these projects would even still be there," he recalls thinking.

Almost five years later, that feature, now titled Transformer One, is completed and opening in theatres today. The movie is an origin story, focusing on how two of some of the most popular Transformers, Optimus Prime and Megatron, went from best friends to archnemeses. Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry voice the two characters, with Keegan-Michael Key and Scarlett Johansson also in the voicecast. The reviews have been most excellent. And perhaps surprisingly for a movie with "Transformers" in the title, it is generating awards buzz.

All that is welcome news for Cooley, who is sitting with me in a corner of a restaurant in Los Angeles, where he's home for a scant few days amid the worldwide promotional tour. Cooley grew up in Livermore, Calif., a city in the Bay Area. His parents were artists – his mother was a professional cellist and teaches music, his father builds and plays guitar, although he worked for Chevron for years. When Cooley was older and married with two kids of his own, his parents retired and for 15 years ran a specialty toy store in the town.

"I would jokingly say, 'You wait until now?!' but it was great," Cooley says. "My kids got to grow up and have grandparent with a toy store. When they decided to close it, they brought in all the grandkids and said, 'Here's a bag, grab whatever you want.' I got to live a dream through them."

He adds, "I've always been a huge fan of toys. I never got rid of my toys as a kid. It's a big thing in animation that people just tend to hold onto toys or collect toys. Then having worked on a Toy Story movie, then Transformers, I was like, "Well, yeah, that just feels right."

Over the next hour or so, while plates of lettuce wraps and glasses of boba come and go, Cooley talks about having his life changed by Robert Zemeckis classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, doing magic tricks on Fisherman's Wharf, the glory days of Pixar, why animation directors belong in the DGA, and why he isn't going to convince Quentin Tarantino to see Toy Story 4 .

What were you obsessed with when you were growing up?

As far back as I could remember, I was always drawing. My parents were constantly giving me sketchbooks and stuff to draw on. I was obsessed with Warner Bros. cartoons and the Disney classics and just cartooning. At a certain point, I was like, "I'm going to be an animator." I told my parents, and unlike everybody else's parents, they were like, "Of course you should do that. Why wouldn't you?" They were totally supportive of it. And when I was 11 years old, Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out, and that was a movie that completely blew my mind.

How so?

That's the movie that made me go, "I want to be a filmmaker." I remember sitting in the theater, my mind just literally being ripped open, like, "What is happening? I don't understand, how's this working? How he's actually talking to and picking up a cartoon character, and the character is knocking things, and it's affecting the world." It was like magic for me.

At the time there was no behind-the-scenes features of how anything was made. But Robert Zemeckis was putting on all this behind-the-scenes stuff on ABC, on Roger Rabbit, or Back to the Future II, or whatever. I remember obsessively recording all that, and just loving watching all that.

There's also stuff with magic as well. That was part of (my childhood).

Oh, really?

My brother and I would go to a magic store and just hang out. There's obviously some correlation between movies and magic, because some of the earliest filmmakers were stage magicians that were playing with film for the first time.

Are you a member of the Magic Castle?

Not yet. I'm thinking about it. I was a street magician when I was in college in San Francisco.

Holy cow.

For a little while. It turned out it was illegal. I didn't know that you needed to have a street permit to do that.

Did you get cited?

I got threatened a couple times to get cited, but then I'd show them a magic trick and they'd go, "That's pretty cool," then they'd kind of leave me alone. During my spare time, I would just grab a pot and go down to Fisherman's Wharf, wait until tourists came up to me, and then just perform for tips. I did really well.

How did your Pixar era begin?

I was at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I wanted to be a 2D animator, so I was studying hand-drawn animation. And this was the end of 2002. Everybody's doing this fake new-fangled 3D animation. I'm like, "I'm going to stick with 2D."

I'm getting close to graduating, and all of the 2D studios start to shut down. The Disney Florida Studio and their Paris studio and all these commercial studios that are making 2D, they're all shutting down. I'm freaking out, going, "Okay, I think I just learned a dying art."

I took a story class being taught by a story artist at Pixar. On the final day, he brought in Joe Ranft, who was the head of story at Pixar, and he was watching us all pitch our finals. I knew of Joe. I was like, "I'm going to impress this guy. I pitched my final, and he liked it a lot. Then we just stayed in touch with each other. After I graduated, about five to six months later, I got a call. "Hey, we're working on this movie with cars in it. Would you like to come in and be an intern in the story department?" I was like, "Great. I love to draw cars." I can't draw a car to save my life! But I came in, and I was technically the first story intern at Pixar.

How was that like?

I was helping people paint up their boards, or I was cleaning up their drawings. Storyboard artists have hundreds and hundreds of drawings to do a day, and sometimes they do them really rough and they hand them off to me and go, "Hey, can you just make these look better?" I was basically re-learning how to draw while being an assistant to everybody. It was the greatest education. I don't think anybody had this education or could have this education again, because of the timing. This is when Cars was going on, Incredibles was going on, Ratatouille was going on. This was before Disney bought it, and they weren't trying to do a movie every year.

I was working on Cars and then they'd go, "Okay, we need to write some stuff. Why don't you go help out on that superhero movie over here?" I'd say, "Okay, cool." I'd go over there and help out and work with Brad [Bird] and that team, and then they'd go, "Okay, we're good here, why don't you go work in this rat movie?" "All right, I'll go over here."

Cooley was named junior story artist and a month later was promoted to story artist. Pixar had rejected him twice before when he applied for positions there but had now gotten in through the back door. "I still have those letters," he says.

You sort of touched upon it, but what was it like working at that time at Pixar? You never know you're in a golden age until it passes.

I haven't fully thought back on it. At the time, it just felt fun, like anything was possible. Who makes a movie about rat? I remember that feeling of even working on Up, this movie about an old man and a little boy going on these adventures, like, "What are we talking about?!" I really looked forward to coming to work every day, just because you'd never know what you'd see.

Who was your favorite person there?

Joe Ranft. He was my mentor. And he was also into magic, so we had that connection. He was the greatest. He died in a car accident in 2005. There were a couple of key moments at the studio where you felt the entire thing change. That was the first one that really, really was a blow for everybody. He was like a father to me, but also a father to the studio. My son's named Joe after him.

I guess a second big moment when you would say the culture shift was when Disney bought Pixar?

Yeah. The big question was what was going to happen?

Were people panicked?

Oh, for sure. Ratatouille was the last film in the deal that they had made initially with Disney to release the films. After Ratatouille, people were going, "What's going to happen if they don't renegotiate a distribution deal?" I remember having company meetings, and people saying, "Well, [Bob] Iger and Steve Jobs were not getting along." I think Disney had started to create this other studio to start cranking out sequels to Pixar films and everything. It didn't feel good. But at the same time, from what I remember, (we were told) "We're going to keep making films the way we know how, and then see what happens."

I remember when Iger came to the studio, I was actually really impressed with him. He came to a company meeting and said he went to Disneyland and looked around, and saw that everything was Toy Story. The Pixar influence was just everywhere, and there was very little Disney at that point in time.

He said, "You guys are doing something right that we're not doing." I was like, "Wow. It's pretty impressive for him to say that." I think part of the negotiation was that Jobs said to him, "Things can't change here. We got to leave the culture the way it is." I didn't feel a change happening for quite a while.

Tarantino recently said he has never seen your movie Toy Story 4. Is he crazy for not giving it a shot?

He can do whatever he wants, honestly. I heard that interview. He's Tarantino. And I love he's so passionate about everything, and he's so passionate about for him that trilogy works. Great.

What would you say to him to try and convince him to see your movie?

I don't want to have to convince him to see it. If he doesn't want to see it, he doesn't have to.

You left after Toy Story 4. What was the thought process behind that?

After working on it and having an amazing time, I stepped back and looked at the development slate. And if everything went perfectly, which never happens, then I wouldn't have a movie come out until 2029. It's a very small hourglass that (the movies) are funneled into. And I didn't want to wait. And then I got the script for Transformers One , and was like, "Oh, this feels totally different from everything I expected with the word Transformers on it."

Going back to Pixar for a sec. Was it hard to watch from the sidelines as it struggled during the pandemic? The movies weren't as well received and then there was the Disney+ decision.

I think it was a huge mistake to decide to just put Pixar on streaming for free. That I did not understand at all. I think that really hurt the brand. And I understand why they did it, to sell more D+, but I think that hurt more than helped.

If someone's going to do, say in 20 years, this history of Pixar, they are going to come to that phase of movies, whether it's Luca or Turning Red, that are these personal stories. Not the popular movies from before.

Yeah, I know what you mean. And the difference in my mind is if you look at Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. or Bug's Life or any of those initial films, they're very much, "Everybody knows that their toys are alive when they're out of the room." That's just something that is in the zeitgeist, in our subconscious that we don't think about, but all kids play that way. Everybody knows that there's monsters in their closet. There's stuff that they tap into early on that was universal without us knowing it.

I never thought about turning into a panda bear or turning into a fish boy. It's just a different style of story. And for me personally, I prefer the monsters in the closet, and I think that's why for me it was more successful, story wise for that reason.

The word "Transformers" can induce some eye-rolling, like why should I take this seriously?

And I'd say this is something I brought from Pixar. I've made movies with cars and toys and emotions. Those aren't us, but they have human characteristics. And I think that's why those movies work so well. It doesn't matter what they are, they're feeling like you and people can connect to them. Why can't I do that with Transformers?

And this movie took five years to make?

I started in 2020 but it actually started earlier, I think (producer) Lorenzo (di Bonaventura) was saying that after the second live action film they pulled together a bunch of writers and asked, "Where can this universe go?" And everybody was really interested in this prequel story, this idea of seeing where they were when they were friends.

So what cracked the code?

Making an animated film, as opposed to live action. Lorenzo always says, "If this movie was full on CG it would cost $2 billion dollars to make it because it's so detailed and so realistic." And so having it be animated where we can stylize it more and tell the whole thing with just the Transformers on their planet, that was key to doing it.

There is a tragedy element to the ending. Is that a risky move to make for a movie right out of the gate? You're giving the audience an Empire Strikes Back before a Star Wars.

I never thought of it risky, because the audience knows it's coming. They know these two will be enemies. That's how we've known them for 40 years. So, I was playing into that. I knew if we can get them to fall in love with these two together in Act I and go, "Oh, I really like seeing them together," you're always going to have that in the back of your mind. "Oh, this isn't going to work. This isn't going to last." And so you're just waiting for the shoe to drop and going, "When's it going to happen?"

There's been talk about the harsh working conditions in animation. Are they really that rough?

I personally have not been on a show where it's been as rough as I've heard, but I've heard stories (with animation) and visual effects as well...The only thing I do know is that people want these movies cheaper. Studios want them cheaper and faster, but that shouldn't come at the expense of the crew that's working on. To me, that's just common sense. But I'm just saying this very generally. I've not experienced this at Paramount or personally at Pixar.

The subject of animators not being part of the DGA came up last week. You had a Tweet on that, too. So, what's the core issue here on this?

I don't know the answer to why the DGA doesn't allow animation directors to join their union. I'm able to join WGA because I've written in live action. If you're an animation writer, you're under the Animation Guild, part of IATSE. But animation directors, they're not allowed to join. I wish I knew the answer.

It might come down to maybe, still after all this time, animation is still looked down upon by some segments of the industry.

That hasn't changed. I just want healthcare for my family. That's what I'd like. And residuals, that'd be nice.

What's next for you? Are you looking to get into live-action?

I just want to keep making great movies and telling great stories, whether that's live action, animated, sock puppets. I want to keep pushing the boundaries of what people are expecting. Like I said, I was obsessed with Roger Rabbit. I'd love to do a hybrid at some point, but at the same time, I'm also loving a movie like Longlegs. I'm just open to anything.