Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke and ‘Inside Out 2′ Filmmakers Talk Pulling Off the Climatic Anxiety Attack Sequence Which Required ’25 Meetings’ to Plan For (2024)

SPOILER ALERT:This story discusses major plot points, including the ending for “Inside Out 2” now playing in theaters.

“Inside Out 2” director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen held “a good 25 meetings” in preparation for the film’s climactic scene — when Riley, the movie’s teenage protagonist, suffers an anxiety attack. But these weren’t any average production discussions, they were “the gatherings of the mind council,” which summoned all the department heads together to strategize the execution of the scene.

“Simulation, effects, lighting and animation all together like, “‘How are we going to do this?'” Neilsen tells Variety.

“We had a gong our visual effects supervisor [Sudeep Rangaswamy] would ring at the beginning and end of every meeting,” Mann adds. “It was a collection of all the heads of the different departments to figure out the difficult things.”

“Inside Out 2” follows a now 13-year-old Riley who must grapple with a new set of overbearing emotions while staying at a sleepaway hockey camp — with the most controlling emotion of all being Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke). In the film’s third act, Riley’s nerves bubble over when her coach banishes her to the penalty box during her final scrimmage. Inside her head, a tornado of anxiety forms around the central controls, while in the real world, Riley breaks down into a panic.

Because the film was produced “more or less in show order,” the anxiety attack scene was tackled toward the end of the production schedule. With a hard deadline on the horizon, the Pixar team needed to hustle up if they wanted to make the June 2024 release date.

“You want to make sure that it feels real and authentic,” Mann says of the scene. “To come up with a look that achieves that is really hard. It took lots of different departments all working collaboratively in order to pull that off. We also did it right at the end. Time was running out.”

Two department heads critical in achieving the scene’s authenticity were co-cinematographers Jonathan Pytko and Adam Habib. Because of the time constraints, the ending sequence was “coming in hot,” requiring Pytko and Habib to operate “on the fly” without storyboards. However, considering the importance of the moment, the pair had a number of conversations throughout production about how they wanted the anxiety attack to look.

“We started doing a lot of things like tightening up the shutter angle, so, suddenly, everything’s a lot sharper and the focus got a lot deeper as Riley’s putting more and more pressure on herself,” Habib explains. “Then, when the anxiety attack hits, suddenly we flip everything. The focus goes extremely shallow and the world drops away.”

Adds Pytko: “That moment in particular was interesting because we had talked about, what if we start vibrating the background as Riley gets deeper into this panic attack? We overexposed the light a lot and really flooded this light coming around Riley as she’s going through this moment. Then adding that [vibration] in there really sold what happened.”

As “a person who has had an anxiety attack,” Hawke brought that personal experience to her voice performance, leaning into the voice she created in her own head when she gets anxious. “I broadened her and strengthened her as a character for this movie, so I felt really connected to it,” she says. And when it came time to shoot the scene, Hawke focused on her breathing to capture the feeling of panic.

“Your breath moves to a different place and you can’t breathe as deeply as you want to,” Hawke adds, explaining that she worked with filmmakers to determine the right amount of breath to use to portray Anxiety’s spiral. “I saw it as the air not going down into her breath. It was like a tornado, and you can’t breathe when you’re stuck in the middle of a tornado.”

Amy Poehler described the moment as “painful” for her character, Joy, who tries to calm Anxiety down as the mother figure to Riley and her emotions. As a mother to two teenage boys, Poehler related to Joy’s struggle to help despite not having the answers.

“That’s a hard thing, when you’re a parent and you don’t know what to do when you’re trying to help your child. If Riley is Joy’s kid, then Joy is kind of like ‘What’s happened to my kid?'” Poehler says. “Pixar is so smart to have Joy take her foot off the gas, and by doing so, and not pushing so hard, Riley just soothes herself, which is the hard lesson of growing up.”

As Riley regains control of her emotions (and inside of headquarters, her emotions embrace each other), there’s a touching moment where the console calls Joy back to it, to pilot Riley through the remainder of her playing time in the scrimmage.

“It’s so deep,” Poehler says of the moment and the larger metaphor it represents as the teenager learns to play with joy again. “It’s an adult lesson – you keep forgetting why you even started doing anything once you get caught up in all the other stuff.”

In reprising her role from 2016’s Oscar-winning film “Inside Out,” Poehler was particularly intrigued by the big feelings the sequel asked Riley and Joy to navigate.

“Riley is growing at a rate that’s uncomfortable for Joy and she has to catch up. Riley is pushing herself a little bit, trying new things and Joy is a little left behind,” Poehler explains. “She acts like she’s very brave and courageous, but she likes things to stay the same, so she is forced to grow and change.”

Hawke sees Riley and Anxiety on similar missions in the film. “Or maybe I’m just projecting that,” she quips, “But it’s a lot about control: Anxiety really wants to take control over the console and believes that if she were able to have that kind of control, she’d be fine. And Riley is trying to control the outcome of whether or not she gets onto this team, control where her friends are going to go to school, control how she feels, control how she plays.”

Their lesson by the end of the film is learn to let go and lean into their being present and joyful. It’s understanding that “I can’t control everything, but what I can control is myself and how I’m behaving,” Hawke explains. “Am I treating the people around me with respect or not?”

That sentiment resonates with Poehler, who chimes in with more food for thought. “What does a win look like?” she asks, posing another existential question the film explores. “What is winning? Is it enjoying what you’re doing? Is it beating the other team? … I love that question. It’s a good one to keep thinking about for your whole life.”

Additional reporting by Jazz Tangcay.