Matt Barber sent me this GigaOM interview with director Brad Bird regarding how he engenders a creative environment. He sounds like a fascinating manager. Bird has made some of the most original and multifaceted films in the past ten years. He doesn’t receive the attention he deserves and I think that’s because his films are animated, as if that medium is somehow deficient compared to live-action movies. But Bird’s three films, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, are testaments to his imagination and skill at inspiring people under his leadership to express their creativity. Here are a couple of their exchanges.

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

What would it look like in churches if we employed similar ideas? It might be chaotic, but there is certainly something beautiful in Bird’s sense of we are stronger together than as individuals.

There has been some good discussion and debate. I thought I’d take a moment to lighten things up since it’s Friday. Over on my arts blog, I wrote about some promising developments in the film version of The Hobbit. Not the least of which is the opportunity to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again. Here is a fantastic clip from the show Extras where he explains his acting method, using his portrayal as Gandalf as an example.

Of all the stages of grief, I find the one I have the most difficulty with is anger. Similarly, others around me seem confounded with the anger. I can appreciate denial, depression, bargaining, and acceptance as natural stages in which it is reasonable to experience without any need to seek a resolution. Anger is a different animal, however.

At its best, anger acts as an emotion or state of mind that responds reasonably to injustice, injury, or simply to things not being right. Anger often moves us to seek solutions to the problems we see. And there lies my difficulty with my anger in my grief. I’ve found myself entering cycles where I am furious at God, Death, or just the fact that my father is dead and then I am mad at myself for being so angry because the thing I want so much is impossible. What solution can come in my angry that will satisfy me? Can I bring my father back to life? I also find myself on edge and in a general state of anger. Little things that normally wouldn’t bother me or might mildly annoy me set me off on tirades.

I’m trying to learn to accept my anger—and anger without resolution in this case—as reasonable. I’m trying not to beat myself up because I want the impossible, as if I would feel better if I only didn’t want my father to come back from the dead. I come from a long line of people who bottle their emotions and so it is difficult to express my anger. Generally, I’m better at distracting myself than with dealing with my anger in the moment. Grief, however, doesn’t allow itself to be ignored.

I know I speak of the stages of grief often and please don’t read into it that I’m trying to compartmentalize mourning—I simply find the stages a helpful matrix to locate myself from time to time.