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Meg LeFauve's parents made an impact in Trumbull County during the family's time here.
Her father, Richard "Skip" LeFauve, was an executive at Packard Electric and later became the president of General Motors' Saturn Corporation. Her mother, Mary Paul LeFauve, was a driving force at Trumbull Art Gallery and instrumental in developing art education programming.
Meg LeFauve made her impact in Hollywood.
She is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter whose credits include Pixar's "Inside Out" and Disney / Marvel's "Captain Marvel." Her latest film is the animated feature "My Father's Dragon," which premiered Friday on Netflix.
Meg LeFauve said she lived here until she was 16 years old, when her father was transferred to Michigan in the early '80s.
"I was born in Trumbull Memorial Hospital and lived in Howland," she said. "I went to Blessed Sacrament, St. Mary's Middle School and (John F.) Kennedy High School … I spent my formative years in Warren."
She has fond memories of taking dance lessons at Warren Dance Centre when it was on North Park Avenue, going with her mother to TAG when it was in the Gillmer House on Mahoning Avenue NW and playing in the woods around the Japanese-style house her parents had built in Howland.
"So much of my imagination was formed in the woods behind my house, tromping down to the creek," LeFauve said.
LeFauve started filling notebooks as a young child with the stories she imagined. And after growing up going to see movies at Eastwood Mall in Niles, she decided to go film school at Syracuse University to become a screenwriter. She got a degree but didn't take a straight path to screenwriting.
"I chickened out because it seemed too hard and how would I ever do that and what do I have to say and what kind of stories do I have to tell? I think it's a normal artist doubt that rises up," she said. "I think I'm a good balance of my father, who was an executive, and my mother, who was a painter, and I just really channeled myself into the executive side of my brain first."
After several other jobs, she ended up at Egg Pictures, the production company started by Oscar-winning actor-director Jodie Foster, and eventually became its president. With Egg she produced such films as "The Baby Dance," starring Stockard Channing and Laura Dern for Showtime, and "The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys," which won an Independent Spirit Award for best first feature.
"I learned a lot about Hollywood and how it works, how movies are made," LeFauve said. "I saw how the sausage is made, shall we say. I was so lucky to have a mentor in Jodie Foster, one of the greatest actors, directors, storytellers going. Learning movies and storytelling from her really shaped so deeply who I am as a storyteller. It was an incredibly wonderful time for me and I got to work with incredible filmmakers all the time and learn from them.
"I did that for 10 years, but there came a moment in my life, that can often happen to people, where I realized that my true heart was in telling my own stories and writing. If I don't make that change, I'm going to be 80 and wonder what I could have done if I had followed that instinct. So I jumped off that cliff."
Foster encouraged her decision and suggested books she should read. Then LeFauve spent several years of trial and error, something all aspiring writers must do.
"You can intellectually know about story, but writing is a totally different part of your brain," she said. "It was also tricky because the development part of my brain was telling me that everything was terrible that I wrote. So it took some time to lower the voices of doubt and fear and all the emotions driving me and to let the writer part of me come out. I wrote so many bad scripts until it rose up and I was able to master the craft and find my voice."
Marvel superhero movies and animated features that open on 4,000 screens don't seem to have much in common with smaller, independent stories she shepherded at Egg. However, LeFauve said the objective is the same -- what is the story about emotionally and what is the character's journey? -- whether it's an intimate drama or a summer blockbuster. And she believes there are no better storytellers than the creative team at Pixar.
"While I didn't train in animation or have a background in it, I wanted to be a room with that level of storytellers and be challenged at that level," she said.
The experience was valuable in developing "My Father's Dragon," which is based on a 1948 children's book by Ruth Stiles Gannett about a boy who travels to a strange island to rescue a young dragon being held captive there by the other animals. LeFauve enjoyed the book as a child and read it to her sons, Aidan and Julian, when they were young. LeFauve, her writing partner John Morgan and Julie Lynn optioned the book from Gannett (who is still alive at age 99) and partnered with Cartoon Saloon (an Irish animation studio that earned Oscar nominations for its first four features) to produce it.
The movie is directed by Nora Twomey and the voice cast includes Jacob Tremblay, Gaten Matarazzo, Judy Greer, Dianne Wiest, Leighton Meester and Ian McShane.
"I love their (Cartoon Saloon's) work artistically," LeFauve said. "If you can get Nora to be the creator of anything you write, you've won the lottery."
LeFauve is back with Pixar working on a sequel to "Inside Out" and has several other projects in the works that she is developing with her husband, filmmaker Joe Forte.
"What I would like to do is take the skills I learned as a producer and the skills as a writer and put them together. Where I can do that is television. I'm pitching different series ideas to see if one of them clicks."
To suggest a Saturday profile, contact Features Editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com or Metro Editor Marly Reichert at mreichert@tribtoday.com.