Welcome to the set of Diary of a Future President.
We're excited to have you. Welcome to our little world.
Action!
You need a very special individual to play Mulan
and Yifei was brilliant.
We're gonna get to talk to Burny and Andreas, two Disney legends.
I haven't seen these in ages.
We are on set of Diary of a Future President
and today, we're gonna have shooting, some prepping of 107,
and a table read, do some editing, talk to some crew,
um, and hopefully, you know, I will eat lunch.
My name is Ilana Peña, the creator of Diary of a Future President.
We're doing ten episodes.
This is just the beginning.
It's fast, crazy and fun. We're in the middle of it.
I'm excited for you to see it.
Uh, this show is about a 12-year-old girl,
Elena Cañero-Reed. She's just trying to make it through middle school,
just trying to sort of get through sixth grade.
Ultimately, she becomes President of the United States of America.
This is her house. Let's go to the Cañero-Reed family house.
This isn't just Elena's story,
it's also her brother Bobby's, and her mom Gabi's.
This is a family that reads a lot, so there are books everywhere.
Um, this is the living room.
We've got family photos around and some of them are the actors now,
and some are baby pictures of our actors, which is fun.
You know, we're crafting this world to make it as special as it can be.
I went through all of your page notes.
Oh, did you understand them?
- Almost all of them. - Oh, great, okay. Let's do it.
Remember when I entered the mall poetry contest?
Of course.
- I'm a finalist! - Oh, my God!
If you win, don't you get a billion dollars?
Don't winners get a billion dollars in glades gold?
Actually, it's only $50, but the check is really big.
I used to go to this arts camp
and I would run around with the camera and make little short films
in the woods with my friends.
It was like guerilla filmmaking and it was the happiest I ever was.
And what's crazy is this feels like that.
For people to trust my own point of view has been so empowering.
I think the experience of girlhood inspired me to write this show.
We've seen a lot of boyhood stories, but not as much girlhood,
and not as much girlhood with permission to be flawed
and permission to be imperfect,
and still that piece of clay that isn't totally molded.
I wanted to tell a story about the molding of that clay.
I do have my diary.
The very first paragraph is, "This is it. I'm going to do it.
"I'm really going to start a diary, for real.
"Not a one-page piece of junk. A real diary."
And then I go to a new paragraph and I say, "And you know what?
"I think I'm going to have fun."
So my dad passed away when I was younger, like Elena's dad.
That was another thing important to me.
I wanted to tell the story of a family that had lost somebody,
um, but that wasn't a tragedy.
My childhood was joy, full stop.
And that is something I credit entirely to my mother.
And my mom always taught me, you know, to be in touch with my grief
and to feel it and to not bury it,
but to allow it to let me live.
- Hi, post! - Hi!
Yeah, usually, I'm eating on the go.
We have a table read in ten minutes,
so this might go in the fridge and I will eat it after the table read.
Welcome to the table read for episode 107!
It is called "Foreign Relations."
Let us start in at Orange Bay Middle,
it's homeroom, Elena sits in her seat next to Sasha,
she sees Joey Feldstein walking with
cute-boy swagger, bathed in an angelic light,
before taking out his spitty retainer and sticking it in his pocket.
She heaves a deep sigh.
That'd be great if there was multiple things.
- Two or three more. - You got it.
- Watch this girl. - Assiduously.
- Got it.
Assiduously.
When I received the script from Ilana Peña,
who's a Cuban-American from Miami
and was writing her story,
and the reflection of hope that she would love to see...
I love you all so much.
All right, here we go.
It filled my heart with joy to think that this young girl
imagined that space for a Latinx woman to become the leader of the free world.
Here are my updated remarks on the first day address.
So, after the strategy session...
You have the meeting.
- Saw the prep materials? - Assiduously.
It ignites so much power and strength in what you can do with art.
Yes, yes, yes.
- Sorry, I have to take this call. - Okay.
Wait, who's it? Wait, who wants to meet me?
- So this is Mia. - Hi.
- And this is Zoe. These are both... - This is the writer!
- Hi! - She read it and loved it.
You read it? Oh, my God.
- Hi. - And loved it.
We're super excited about this show.
Feels like it's so timely.
It's exactly what little girls need to see.
Exactly.
Oh, that means the world.
We're really proud of you.
Truly, I would have been nowhere without Gina.
So, thank you.
Wait till you guys see her in this. I mean, she's so good.
And you're gonna want her to run for President.
Yes.
Hey, Kyla.
- Hey, how's it going? - It's good.
It's been a dream working with Ilana.
She's been super nurturing of experimentation
and trying things to make the story the best it could be.
Gina does a great face there.
- This? Like this? - That little lip when her...
Something with her lip. It's just a great face.
Working on a show with so many female producers,
a female DP,
it's been really, um, empowering.
You could feel that in the energy of the crew,
in the energy of the footage that I get.
It's just that everyone's really here to tell an empowering female story.
- Background. - And action.
About a female President of the United States,
which, you know, let's do it.
Hello, world. Or should I say...
dear diary.
There is not a moment that goes by that I don't feel grateful
for this opportunity and experience.
You know, so many hardworking people worked together
to make the tiniest things happen. And it's such a gift.
That feeling of gratitude and the weight of that responsibility,
I do not take lightly.
And I hope that kids, adults, parents, teenagers
can watch the show, see themselves in it,
and see a little bit of hope for our future and for themselves.
Three, two, one. Action.
We're doing a rehearsal with her,
- so I can understand the timing. - Okay.
And if that's easier for you, we can do that with Liz.
Okay.
I've always had a really big vision.
And until this movie, the budgets didn't meet the scale of it.
Sound speed!
Action!
Movies of this genre and this scale
are most often quite reliant on green screen and CGI,
and right from the beginning
our intention was to shoot in real landscapes as much as possible,
which is why we had units all over China.
It's kind of an old-fashioned approach to take your camera and your crew
and your 1,000 extras and all your horses
into an actual location to shoot an actual battle.
And yet, when I watch it, it seems so kind of fresh and modern.
The biggest challenge is casting.
You need a very special individual to play Mulan.
She needs to be a brilliant actress.
She needed to be able to pass as a boy but be equally compelling as a girl.
So, after a year, we had not found her.
And, um, it was devastating,
but we rolled our sleeves up and started again.
We went back to all the actresses
that weren't available to us the first time around.
And Yifei was one of them.
So, here we have an actress that's flown across the world,
hasn't slept, in a high stakes audition
where I had her for two hours and I really pushed her.
She was brilliant.
But if that wasn't enough, we sent her to a physical assessment
of really hardcore physical training.
I could see she was getting right to her limit.
But never once did she back down, never ever did she say, "I can't do this."
And at the end of that day I was convinced that,
not only had I found Mulan
but I had found a warrior and a brilliant partner for me.
'Cause this is a hardcore collaboration between director and actress.
Action.
I think it's the only time in a movie of this scale and genre
where the movie has been run completely by women.
Movie sets can be kind of aggressive, macho environments.
Our set was kind of the opposite of that.
And yet, we do this strong, really robust work.
Mulan is that very rare creature, which is an enduring heroine
who has lasted for centuries.
And, here we are in 2020, waiting for this movie to come out
to see the story being told again in yet another way.
So, I hope we can all be inspired by her.
Picture wrap on esteemed guest number one.
All right.
Welcome to the Fort Knox of animation.
This building is the animation research library.
Today, two Disney legends, Burny and Andreas, are gonna be here.
All the artwork that they created is housed in this collection.
It's going to be interesting to go down memory lane with Burny
and check out those films we worked together on.
It's so amazing that all this work was kept.
This is going to be a great day
'cause I'm going to see my friend Burny Mattinson.
There's Burny, hey.
- Hey. - Hi, Burny!
- Andreas. - How are you doing?
- How have you been? - Pretty good. Wonderful.
I think, at this point, Burny is the longest employee
at Disney Animation ever.
He's going on 67 years,
uh, and I spent 30 years here.
This is gonna be about us.
- Just the two of us. - Yes.
When you think about it,
Walt Disney and all of his artists were actually developing
the art of animation.
They were expanding the art of animation.
And the Disney Legends have been an ongoing part of that process.
They're really key people who have added to that legacy.
- Let's look at some art. - Oh, fantastic.
Burny and Andreas are Disney Legends.
When they stepped on the studio lot,
all they ever wanted to do was be a part of Disney Animation.
- Right this way, gentlemen. - Into the vault, and after you.
Burny and I worked on a lot of movies together,
like The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective,
Oliver & Company, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin.
I have never looked back on my own work,
so this'll be cool to see those old sketches and drawings again.
- Look who I found. - Hey!
- How're you? - How's it going, Fox?
- My goodness. - A little birdie told us that you'd be by,
so we pulled some artwork that both of you have done.
In case we've forgotten what we did.
You never know.
This was one of the first drawings of Gaston that I did.
It was immediately an issue
because, Burny, I drew the jaw very large.
That's right.
And I said, "But, he's the villain. He has to have broad features."
But they explained to me the Beast is ugly,
Gaston has to be handsome.
Had to change the size of the jaw,
get rid of the mustache.
But he was tough to animate. He really wasn't easy.
We have some of your story sketches from Aladdin as well.
I haven't seen these in ages.
You know how you can recognize Burny's drawing style?
You have a very light touch, Burny.
And a lot of your lines end up with a little curly thing.
And we're like, "That's Burny."
I have never thought of that.
- It's... It's the truth. - Oh, my God.
I was really pretty good then.
Burny, you're good now.
You're great now, actually.
And then, we actually have some of your sketches
from Winnie the Pooh.
- Oh, wow! Look at how pretty... - Look at that.
Oh, for heaven's sakes, yeah.
Had such a charm to it.
You worked on the old ones, the early ones?
The old ones, yeah.
- The one in... - Starting in the '60s?
The Many Adventures of...
I imagine that's Burny walking.
That's me. I have an affinity with Pooh.
You would remember this from back in the days
when they were making The Little Mermaid.
In this building, right?
My office was over there against that wall.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- The theater was somewhere... - Right in here.
- This area was the theater. - Yeah.
Have you seen this pencil test, Andreas?
No! Oh, my gosh.
This is the picture that made me wanna come to the studio.
- Really? - Was it?
Yeah. My mother took me over to The Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco
and I saw this picture and I thought, "I gotta be a part of that."
I didn't know Pinocchio was that movie for you.
That was my movie. Yeah.
How do you make lines on paper just...
- Do that. - Do that?
Bring it to life.
Over here is our design team area where we work on displays
of all the artwork that we have in our collection.
We have some reproductions of artwork from the collection of yours,
and so, I'll leave it to you.
I loved always working in charcoal.
It's nice and dramatic and dark.
But I like these, too.
My heart rate still goes up after 40 years of doing this.
Once a scene is done and you see it for the first time
in motion, it's...
It's big. It's a big deal.
Being a Disney Legend is quite an honor.
These people were giants.
And you never expected you'd ever be in that position.
When I actually said to my friends I wanna do this,
work at Disney,
and they rolled their eyes, "Sure, you will."
And my family was the same way
'cause it just seemed impossible.
There was this girl who says,
"Mr. Deja, I don't really wanna say very much
"but I wanna thank you for drawing my childhood."
- I lost it. - What a nice thing.
- I mean, it's a simple phrase. - Yeah.
That was too much.
So there.