Soul didn’t find its pulse until Kemp Powers came aboard. Pixar’s latest movie was originally about a character named 22—a soul that has not yet taken human form because it can’t figure out its true purpose. Gradually, though, producers switched its focus to Joe Gardner, a Black, middle-aged jazz pianist who finally clinches a life-changing gig right before suffering a tragic accident. Joe, a band teacher, is ambivalent about working full-time with benefits at the school; it’s not stability he’s seeking, but inspiration.
Powers was brought into the fold as a consultant and then, as his expertise became more central, as a cowriter and codirector alongside Pixar’s resident genius Pete Docter, who directed Up and Inside Out, among other movies. Instead of centering the untethered spirit, Soul is more interested in a worn-down one—a surprising premise for an animated film whose primary audience is children.
“That’s part of the special sauce that makes Pixar films a bit different, in my opinion—a bit existential,” Powers says. “With Soul, when you ask [young people] who their favorite character is, by default you think they’re going to say 22, because 22 has all these funny lines.” But the kids who attended focus group screenings of the film singled out Joe, he says. “And that was illuminating.”
Powers’s trajectory, like Joe’s in Soul, was winding and uncertain. He worked as a journalist, moving to L.A. only to find that his much-admired scripts were repeatedly labeled unproducible. He found himself rewriting others’ screenplays, which themselves were rarely actually made into films. “It was soul crushing,” he says. “Yes, you’re getting paid to do this. But as a journalist, that’s the equivalent of living off of kill fees.”
Powers couldn’t just shut up and take the money, so he stayed in L.A. but returned to the media scene. “To be perfectly honest,” he says, “if the internet didn’t basically decimate the journalism industry, I’d probably still be doing it now.” In time, though, Powers found himself shifting focus once again. “I’ve always written for fun,” he says. “[And I] grew up in New York City, so theater is one of those things that’s in the background.”
Before Soul, Powers had already been building his reputation at events like the Moth—telling personal stories about his kids and the childhood tragedy illuminated in his memoir, The Shooting. “My voice, I guess, stood out amongst that community,” he says. “And it was because of that that I fell in with a very small 99-seat equity-waiver theater company here in Los Angeles.” His work generated audiences, and soon he wrote his first full-length play, One Night in Miami…. This time, Hollywood was interested.
“The wonderful thing about having such an awful experience with Hollywood 10 years earlier is that I was older and wiser,” Powers says. “So I was suddenly in this position where I wasn’t interested in doing everything that came to me. I was much more interested in telling original stories, the stories that people 10 years earlier told me no one would ever want.”
