“The Lego Movie” Producer Dan Lin Takes on Lionsgate Film “For All Time” (EXCLUSIVE) 〉The project is being described as an event-style science-fiction film. Big-time producer Dan Lin has found his next project: Lionsgate’s time-traveling adventure FOR ALL TIME, with a script by relative newcomer David Crabtree. Lionsgate acquired the rights to Crabtree’s original spec at the end of 2013. The movie is set in the future where time-travel has been invented in order to fix past mistakes. These missions, in order to course-correct history, are executed by “temponauts” aka time-travel secret agents. When one of these temponauts goes rogue on a standard mission in order to save the woman he loves, a fellow temponaut, an intense battle erupts over the fate of the future. Time-travel is a staple of the science-fiction and fantasy genres and has been depicted in a variety of ways in films such as 12 Monkeys, Looper, Back to the Future, About Time, Groundhog Day, and the Harry Potter franchise.
This film’s premise of time-travel agents brings a unique twist to the tried concept. The film has been set at Lionsgate for some time now, but Lin only recently signed on with this production banner Lin Pictures. He will be joined by executives Ryan Halprin, Jonathan Eirich, James Myers, Matt Janzen, and Erik Feig, who will be producing as well as overseeing the project for Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment. Since 2004, Lin has served as an executive and producer for numerous projects, including the Oscar-winning films The Aviator and The Departed, as well as Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films and the current LEGO Movie franchise from Warner Bros. Pictures. In the television world, he is serving as executive producer for the movie-to-TV adaptations of Lethal Weapon for FOX and Frequency for The CW. He is repped by UTA and UFUSE Management. —TO SEE ALL THE PROJECT DETAILS CLICK HERE— 1 - BREAKING NEWS, 2 - FILM NEWSCreator Christopher Miller:'The Lego Movie did better than we could possibly have imagine'
HENRY FITZHERBERT meets the college ‘knuckleheads’ who have put the heartback into Hollywood blockbusters NEW YORK TIMESFor Phil Lord and Christopher Miller “Everything Is Awesome”, to borrow the title of the irritatingly catchy theme song from The Lego Movie which they wrote and directed.Not only did the film earn a fortune (£300million worldwide) but Lord and Miller also directed this summer’s hit sequel 22 Jump Street,starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, cementing their status as arguably the most reliable hit makers in Hollywood. Since their feature film debut with 2009’s Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, the pair, both 39, have not put a foot wrong, earning critical acclaim and monster box office. The Lego Movie is tipped for awards glory and this week beat Disney’s Frozen to win Best Feature Film at the BAFTA Children’s Awards in London. They offered us a job as a team. It kind of happened by accident “The Lego Movie did better than we could possibly have imagined,” says the fresh-faced Miller.
“We were very nervous that people would discount it because it is called The Lego Movie.”They were not alone. The Lego Group was very jittery about damaging a brand that needed no help in selling kits from Hollywood. “The attitude of a bunch of Lego executives was basically ‘we have a very healthy business, we don’t need this film’,” says Lord as we chat in a London hotel.It did not help that Lord and Miller (a pair of “knuckleheads” in their own words) had plans to spoof, as much as celebrate, the product with an adventure set in a world of mind-numbing uniformity and a dim-witted hero who was a lobotomized drone: Emmett, voiced by Chris Pratt.“Lego have a number of guidelines regarding the way they want the brand to be perceived and we broke all of them,” chuckles Lord, who met Miller when both were students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The pair, however, were adamant the film would work only if it did not feel like a toy commercial.Indeed, they initially turned it down because of such fears.
“We said very clearly it can only work if it does not feel like it is coming from The Lego Group or Warner Brothers,” says Miller. “So we said: ‘We’ll come on board only if you let us make it the way we think it should be made. It can’t feel like it’s a corporate product."They wanted the film to have a "grass-roots” feel inspired by the hundreds of homemade stop-motion fi lms using Lego bricks posted on the internet, made by enthusiasts. They realized “what a fun tool for creativity” Lego is and on that basis found common ground with the toy company. “The brand stands for creativity and innovation and quality and those are all things that are important to us,” says Lord.It is that ability to work both sides, corporate and the exuberantly creative, that have turned the pair into such in-demand filmmakers. At the heart of the success of The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street lies the duo’s wickedly successful signature approach to blockbuster filmmaking: embrace it but send it up at the same time.
So are they just out to disarm critics? 22 Jump Street makes constant references to the fact that it is a sequel to a story that really didn’t need one.“It is a cynical attempt to critique ourselves before anybody else does,” laughs Lord. “I think it’s our personality as filmmakers. We are so aware of how silly our movies are as we’re making them.” Some of the biggest laughs in The Lego Movie come from the incorporation of Lego versions of movie icons like Hans Solo, Dumbledore and Batman (the latter now being rewarded with his own spin-off Lego movie). “That was the big comedic possibility of the picture,” says Lord. “Suddenly Batman and Hans Solo can have a conversation.”Still, what was easy enough to write in a screenplay proved tortuous in terms of negotiating the necessary legal hurdles.“We wrote it assuming we’d get all the rights but it was very hard to actually make that happen,” says Miller. Lord quips: “In legal terms it’s very hard to express: ‘it would be really cool’.”
However, there is more to their work than just a stream of clever gags. All their pictures have heart and the pair attribute that to the steep learning curve they experienced making Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.Before coming aboard to direct the film, based on a popular children’s book, the pair (then best known for writing Clone High, an MTV comedy show) were first hired to write the screenplay. They got fi red and other writers came and went.A year later they were rehired and also given the opportunity to direct. “We said we’ll come back but only if we’re the real authors of the movie,” says Miller. As they developed the screenplay, however, they hit a sticky patch with Amy Pascal, the head of Sony. “She got so angry with us,” recalls Miller. “She kept saying: ‘I don’t feel anything’.”The script was full of jokes but there were no substantial relationships. “We wereso afraid of being sincere or earnest, we just wanted to be cheeky, that ultimately we couldn’t hold your attention or make you care.”
After laborious reworking the end result did just that and now the duo “try to put as much heart into our movies as possible”It is a lesson makers of today's spectacle driven blockbusters should heed. Although the pair admire much contemporary Hollywood product (“Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes was really well done,” says Miller), they cite the “original” blockbuster Jaws for its quieter human moments.“It’s easy to forget that when you take out all the shark stuff, Jaws is a really beautiful human drama,” says Lord. “I think that part of the formula has been lost.” Next up for them is a sequel to The Lego Movie. “We’ll be typing up the first pages on the flight back tomorrow,” says Miller, revealing: “Emmett and many of the characters are back.”It has been a dizzyingly rapid ascent up the A-list for this personable, down-to-earth pair. And it might never have happened had an interview with Miller in the Dartmouth College magazine not caught the eye of then Disney boss Michael Eisner.“