Not to be confused with Chris Miller (animator). Philip A. "Phil" Lord (born July 12, 1975) and Christopher Robert Miller (born September 23, 1975) are American film and television writers, producers, directors, actors and animators. Lord and Miller met at Dartmouth College. They are known for directing and writing the animated films Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and The Lego Movie (2014), as well as directing the live-action comedy film 21 Jump Street (2012) and its sequel 22 Jump Street (2014). Their films have received critical and commercial success. According to The New York Times, Lord is from Miami; his mother is a Cuban-born psychologist, and his father recently retired from the aviation business and before that directed a dance company, Fusion, for 10 years. Miller is from the Seattle area, where his father runs a lumber mill. Lord and Miller both grew up making short films with an affinity for animation. They met freshman year of college at Dartmouth and quickly bonded after an incident where Chris set fire to Phil’s then-girlfriend’s hair.
[] On campus, the two had separate columns in the school newspaper. Lord was a member of Amarna, a co-ed undergraduate society while Miller was a brother at Alpha Chi Alpha. During his time in college, Christopher met his girlfriend, now wife. During their time at Dartmouth, the school paper published a profile on Miller, which caught the attention of then chairman of Disney Michael Eisner. According to Lord, Eisner brought the profile to the attention of his fellow Disney executives who then offered to set up a meeting with Miller. Miller agreed to the meeting as long as he could bring Lord. After three months, the two moved to Los Angeles and after one meeting were offered a two-year development deal for Disney Television Animation. Though nothing they pitched made it to air, they produced the pilot to Clone High, which was subsequently dropped by Fox. After they wrote and produced on a series of sitcoms, MTV informed the duo that they were interested in purchasing a 13-episode season of Clone High.
Although the show was met with acclaim, MTV canceled the series after hunger strike protests occurred in India over the show’s portrayal of Gandhi as a motor-mouthed partier. In 2003, the two were tapped to write a screenplay for what would become their first feature film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. After a year working on the script, they were fired for story issues and replaced with new writers, who after a year were also fired. Lord and Miller were then re-hired in 2006. The two completely redid the script, this time with the creative input of their crew. The new draft had the protagonist as a failed inventor who wanted to prove himself to his town. The two were almost fired again after Amy Pascal, head of Sony, criticized the film for a lack of story. Although the film succeeded on the comedic front in the animatic stage, Pascal cited the lack of an anchoring relationship in the film as a failure in the story telling. Unable to create new characters and environments to suit the new story demands, the two elevated the character of the tackle shop extra to be the protagonist’s father, thereby creating the relationship Pascal had requested.
The pairs' experience on Cloudy taught them two valuable lessons: the power of creative collaboration and the importance of emotion in a story. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was released in 2009 to critical and popular acclaim. After the film was released, the two sought to try to make something different from Cloudy and pitched themselves as possible directors for the 21 Jump Street script that Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill had written. The studio agreed and the two directed their first live-action R-rated film, once again released to critical and popular acclaim which led to the production of a sequel titled 22 Jump Street. In an interview with Robert K. Elder for his book The Best Film You've Never Seen, Lord stated that "in an animated feature, you remake the movie three or four times, and it's really easy to get bummed out that the way you did it before didn't get greenlit, didn't get paid, and you're making a totally different version of that movie." During the production of 21 Jump Street, they pitched a take on a possible Lego film to Dan Lin. Lin and Warner Brothers loved the take so Lord and Miller wrote and eventually directed their third feature film together, The Lego Movie.
The duo were picked by Warner Bros. to write the script for the upcoming superhero film The Flash.[6] The duo were also picked up in 2015 by Sony Pictures to make an animated Spider-Man film with the option to direct. The duo have recently developed a live-action/animated series, Son of Zorn, for Fox, with Jason Sudeikis voicing the lead role of animated character Zorn, and Johnny Pemberton and Cheryl Hines playing the live-action roles.[8] They are also producing a cable-TV drama based on the popular NPR/This American Life spinoff podcast Serial. They will also direct the untitled upcoming Star Wars film about Han Solo. ^ The Best Film You've Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love ^ a b c Nominees Full List ^ 72ND ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE® AWARDS NOMINEES ANNOUNCED. Retrieved 11 December 2014. ^ a b cI’d say our style has been pretty consistent,” says Phil Lord on the phone from his publicist’s office in Beverly Hills.
“I’m not sure we made each film so much as got away with it.” “Like those Jump Street movies,” offers Christopher Miller, his writing and directing partner of 16 years. “I can’t believe they’re out there and made money.” “When we’d got so far in this business that we were making something called The Lego Movie and were getting to do very strange jokes in the middle of it… that’s, like, why we get up in the morning,” continues Lord. "Our career sometimes feels like a big, all-encompassing prank.” Clearly the directors of the aforementioned films, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and the forthcoming Han Solo spin-off movie in the Star Wars cinematic megaverse aren’t getting by on cheek alone. Also on their plate are an animated Spider-Man movie they're writing and producing for Marvel, a Flash movie for Warner Bros, several TV shows, and not forgetting the three Lego Movie spin-offs and sequels currently in development. But even their greatest admirers – of whom, full disclosure, I’m one – may have arched an eyebrow when it was announced last month that the twosome would be a star turn at this year’s Bafta Screenwriters’ Lecture Series, alongside such hallowed international auteurs as Kenneth Lonergan, Maren Ade and Park Chan-wook.
The pair are both 41 years old (they’ve been friends since university), but seem somehow spiritually suspended in mid-20s-hood: you’d less expect to see them declaiming from behind a lectern than sliding on their knees at the back of the hall. That’s largely because they’re funny – a bias Miller both recognises and bridles at. “Sometimes comedy feels like the kid brother of drama, trying to get attention by being the class jokester. But it’s actually really hard to tell a story while also making people laugh. It’s like trying to do two jobs at once.” Lord mentions a bone of wisdom that was recently slung at him by Lawrence Kasdan, the venerable Star Wars and Indiana Jones screenwriter with whom they (and also Kasdan’s son Jon) are collaborating on the Han Solo project. “Larry said once, ‘I never did a movie that I loved that wasn’t funny.’ By which he means, the best dramatic movies all have a sense of humour. Gosh, even Schindler’s List has one laugh in it.
A sense of humour is never a handicap.” Working on the Han Solo script with the Kasdans, they agree, has been something of a masterclass. “We’ve been trying to get the script to a stage where it reflects the tone and vision that the four of us have for the movie, and it’s really been the four of us figuring out what that voice is together,” says Miller. A new resource proved unexpectedly fruitful: the creature designers at Lucasfilm, whose ideas for the film’s various nonhuman characters gave Lord and Miller comic ideas to riff on. Lord recalls visiting the department one day and realising how potentially funny one alien’s movements might be – “so we got excited, and talked to Lawrence and Jon about it, and were able to fold that into the scene.” Their enthusiasm for sharing credit was there from the opening title card of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 2009, which read: “A film by a lot of people”. “All of our movies are collaborative efforts, and movies like this one take so many people to realise, and that work doesn’t happen in isolation,” says Miller.
“You’re always talking about the story, and those ideas constantly affect it.” The Han Solo film seems likely to continue the new Star Wars tradition of cast diversity: alongside Alden Ehrenreich, who plays the role Harrison Ford immortalised in 1977, and Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian, three actresses of colour – Tessa Thompson, Zoë Kravitz and Naomi Scott – are rumoured to have been shortlisted for the co-lead. /HlteYut6m0— Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) May 4, 2016 Did they write diversity into the script? The answer’s yes, though in a very different way than you might imagine. “The needs of the story come first,” says Miller. “However, when we’re crafting a character we’re also trying to work out what the most specific, least generic, non-stock-version of that character might be. Then we start to talk about gender, ethnicity, their look, how they dress, and so on. Sometimes we might write with a specific actor in mind, and sometimes you know the character will just be her own thing, and trust you’ll find an actor who can fit it.
And then when you cast, you can go through the script again and tailor the dialogue to them.” “We try to stay as open-minded about casting as possible,” Lord continues. “When you’re getting things down on paper, you might even avoid writing down a name, let alone if they have blonde hair or this or that, to stop. The great ideas start flowing when you stop thinking about the obvious way of doing it.” That freedom is a standard part of the Lord and Miller Method. “We uncoupled the critiquing process from the creation process early on,” says Lord. “Creation is loose and open-minded, then come the moments where we’re much more self-critical.” Having each other as sounding boards helps. “Our advantage is that I’m not just trying to make myself laugh, I’m trying to make Phil laugh too,” says Miller. “And when something you put on the page is something we both stand by, when we go up against the Forces of Moviemaking, that have a tendency to shear the edges off things, we can be a little more insistent that we do it our way.”
That became particularly useful during the making of The Lego Movie – a best animation Bafta-winner in 2014 – which the two were determined shouldn’t feel like a corporate branding exercise. “We were keen that it felt like the people who were making this movie didn’t necessarily have permission to do it,” says Lord. In the end, they sold Lego on that hard-to-pitch aesthetic by showing them clips of unauthorised, fan-made Lego animations – “stuff that people had made in their basements because they were inspired,” Lord continues. “It became less about selling the toy than selling what the toy stands for. Engineering and creativity and” – he laughs, probably at the sentiment's swelling grandeur, but he’s right – “even democracy.” Those are serious aims for a film that in anyone else’s hands would have probably turned out to be a feature-length toy advert, but Lord and Miller learnt early that the wrong way to do things often turned out to be the best one.
Their first big break was the short-lived animated series Clone High: a spoof of American high school dramas starring teenage versions of resurrected historical figures, including Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. Lord looks back on the gig as “a hard show that tested our friendship”, and notes that the pressure they felt manifested in their work in increasingly odd ways. In show 10 (of 13) they killed off the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, voiced by Luke Perry, and set out to make the aftermath of his death “as serious and chilling as possible”. To that end, the pair borrowed stretches of dialogue “almost verbatim” from the episode of the (entirely serious) teen drama Dawson’s Creek in which Dawson’s father dies: “lots of trauma, sadness, angst, pain and cosmic irony,” says Miller. The best way of skewering the show’s absurdity turned out to be copying it. “So there’s a good screenwriting tip,” adds Miller. “Why don’t you steal the work of other people?”