Co-directors
Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Chris McKay spoke to the press at Comic-Con about
the upcoming The Lego Movie.
“LEGOS
are a pure toy for creativity. How did
you guys adapt the idea to lead into an actual narrative that’s entertaining
and explores the LEGO world?
Phil
Lord: That’s funny. We figured out that
we started with this idea that they are a machine for creativity and let’s make
a movie about can a regular construction worker learn those skills. We found out that we had to really hide the
ball because the more you say the word “creativity,” the less you want to hear
it. It started to get tired pretty fast,
so there are versions of this movie that felt like a college paper or something
like that.
Chris
Miller: The word creativity is actually not in the movie at all but it’s
obviously all about creativity. The idea
is there are two different ways that people play with LEGO. There are people who buy the kit, follow the
instructions, and build the thing exactly how it is, and that’s awesome,
because then you have this really cool thing.
It’s a Millenium Falcon or something.
And then, there are people who just dump all the bricks together and
build whatever they want to do. And
that’s awesome as well to learn to have the whole thing be a dialectic about
the different ways there are to make things.
Lord:
That sounds super awesome. That’s what’s
going to be on the poster: It’s a wonderful dialectic.
Chris
McKay: I think the most fun thing about it is, these guys especially, when they
opened it up to everybody on the crew to access their inner child. It was a lot like play the way we set up the
environment for all the different departments from when we started working on
the storyboards and then going into animation and layout and everything
else. It was just play like you’re a
kid. Have fun. What if the story was this? You just start
running with ideas and that kind of thing.
It was very organic and almost improvisational throughout the entire
process. It was just how crazy can we
make this. The way these guys talked
about it originally was like if Michael Bay had kidnapped Henry Selick and
forced him to make The LEGO Movie and it’s inside Michael Bay’s brain, that’s
what this movie is, but it is literally those two guys coming together. It’s an explosion of creativity and that’s
what makes the movie, because it is.
It’s kind of like a joy ride through a 10-year-old’s imagination.
Lord:
McKay built a creativity machine that was the production, and he did it in a
way that was flat and allowed for a lot of dialogue in between departments
without a lot of layers so that the editors could talk to the storyboard
artists and request some drawings and try things out without showing us first
so that you got everybody. Everyone’s
office is right next door to one another’s.
So it became a very fluid and iterative creative process which was
great.
…
Can
you talk about the look of the movie? Everything about the movie is so
LEGO. Where did the decision come from
to give it that look?
Miller:
It was inspired a lot by brick films that people make online. There are a ton of these on YouTube where
these people very creatively make funny, funny LEGO movies and the limitations
of the characters is kind of funny.
Also, there are some photographers that photograph the little LEGO
people and try to make it look really epic, just from the lighting. And we thought that was pretty cool when they
tried to marry a cinematic lighting style with a brick film aesthetic.
Lord:
I think it was a choice we made the instant that Dan Lin pitched us the
project. We were like, “Well, if you did
it like this, we would be interested.
But if you don’t, if no one will commit to that, then there’s no way
we’ll do it.” I don’t know why we were such hardliners about that, but for
whatever reason, that was what was inspiring to us.
…
Are
you able to reveal any of the other superheroes that appear?
Miller:
Yes, we just said in Hall H that there are other DC superheroes in it. Superman is being played by Channing Tatum
and Green Lantern is being played by Jonah Hill, and Wonder Woman is being
played by Cobie Smulders. But there are
a lot of other characters that we’re not allowed to talk about right now from
other IP, other movies, other LEGO sets, and they all interact in a way that if
a kid was playing with a bucketful of LEGOs, they would make them play
together. That’s a really fun part, but
we can’t tell you about that stuff just yet.
…
How
did you guys choose which LEGO characters to use and which ones not to use?
Miller:
There are so many obviously and a lot of them are originals and stuff.
Lord:
There are a bunch of classic worlds that LEGO’s been doing for years and we
wanted to make sure that each of those worlds was represented and we wanted it
to feel like we were mashing all these different genres. It ended up being dictated by the story
obviously.
Miller:
We started with the ones that we could remember from our childhood and tried to
extrapolate from that. I think that the
toughest thing was to convince our partners that we should take discontinued
and old vintage things and put them in the movie along with everything else
because that’s what would be at the bottom of somebody’s toy chest.
McKay:
And that’s another [example] of where the movie wasn’t quite an ad either. It’s like stuff that you were talking about
in the beginning. It’s like what are the
things that you remember about the sets that you had and some of those things
aren’t necessarily products that they want to promote.
Lord:
They’re not selling Classic Space or Pirates from years ago, or that type of
stuff, but we wanted to put those things in there.
…”
Via Collider
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