[mezentius]

A small point: "Don't give the audience 4, give them 2 + 2", as articulated in that way, does not originate with Pixar and Andrew Stanton. It comes from the film director Ernst Lubitsch, as told to his disciple, Billy Wilder.

[zimpenfish]

Minor nit: [1] cannot find any citation that it came from Lubitsch.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/04/two-plus/

[mezentius]

Aside from Billy Wilder saying repeatedly--both in print and in person from 1976 onward--that it did? This is picking a nit on a nit, but I'm not sure that qualifies as 'quote investigation,' as by the same reasoning, we can't attribute anything to Socrates because his teachings were only later articulated by his students.

You have to remember that we're talking about a pre-TED-talk era--that is, prior to the boom in independent cinema and 'the democratization of film'--in which émigré directors who worked within the studio system had no real incentive to lecture in public about how they did their work, particularly if, like Lubitsch, they never achieved fluency in English and retained a heavy Germanic accent. Since Lubitsch never produced any written instructive material about his process, it's not mysterious that it would be hard to find a citation for this idea. And while it's possible that Wilder made it up, there's no real evidence to suspect he did. After all, nearly all of the anecdotes we've heard about Lubitsch come from his colleagues.

The quote is usually attributed to "Ernst Lubitsch, as told to Billy Wilder," which is entirely accurate as far as anyone knows, and was good enough for the fact checkers who reviewed the New Yorker's recent profile on Lubitsch [1].

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/ernst-lubitsch...