Phil Lord and Chris Miller- Like Spaghetti and Meatballs, A Partnership In Comedy

There are many famous directing teams in Hollywood, the Coen brothers, the Wachowski brothers, the Farrellys, and each team has its own dynamic, but Hollywood’s newest directing team are not family, they are friends. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs is the writing and directorial debut of Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Having met at college, they founded a friendship based on humor, sarcasms, sardonic wit, and the love of a children’s book named Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.

Both with an animation background, Chris Miller received the attention of the Walt Disney Company when an over-exaggerated college newspaper article regarding his accomplishments, caught the eye of Dartmouth alumnus Eric Eisner, Michael Eisner’s son. “I got this call in my dorm room saying hey, we want to fly you out for a meeting,” says Chris. “But I said, naaah, I got midterms; because I’m a total idiot.” Chris did, however, send them his student films along with those of his friend, Phil Lord. Upon graduation, they took that meeting and Disney assumed that they were a team, so they went with it. The rest, as they say, is history.

Their first animated project together was Clone High, a High School comedy where all the students are clones of famous people like Abe Lincoln and Gandhi. This series brought them to the attention of Sony Entertainment who was looking to do an animated film. When Sony offered to develop a project with them, they learned that Sony had the rights to Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Chris explains, “Once we heard that they had the rights, we commandeered the meeting.” He adds, “We forced them to let us do this film.”

Being fans of the children’s book they loved the tone and whimsical, tongue in cheek quality it presented, but as animators they were excited about creating a world where anything was possible. They saw Cloudy as a fantastical disaster movie. To prep for the film, Phil Lord said they watched every disaster movie there was. “We rented Armageddon, and Earthquake, we watched every Irwin Allen movie that’s ever been made.” And to refine the comedic aspects they studied the master Buster Keaton. When they saw this slapastick genius dodging giant boulders in Seven Chances, they could instantly imagine their character, Flint Lockwood, dodging giant peas, or meatballs.

During pre-production it was interesting studying the many aspects of food falling from the sky. Every food lands differently and creates its own unique sound. “On a scale from one to awesome,” says Miller, “The most fun was dropping action figures into giant vats of Jell-O to see how they bounced.” When Phil was asked if playing with food was fun, he recalled a time when the cast and crew had to experiment with the effects of talking while eating cheeseburgers. Of course that meant, “We gotta get cheeseburgers for every buddy, right?” Phil goes on, “We’re all eating them because we needed to know how to direct them. It was like, now, put more burgers in your mouth. Now, say it again. It was a lot of fun”

When asked what the most difficult part of making this film was, the answer was the script. To flush out this story in order to create a feature length film, Lord and Miller created an entire back-story for the town of Chewandswallow and developed several new characters. As television writers for How I Met Your Mother, they were accustomed to television writing, which is loosely structured and based on gags and one-liners. But in a feature length film you must have a tighter structure and an emotional through-line. This was difficult for them because they had never done it before.

Chris and Phil have a partnership based on mutual respect and a compatible sense of humor. They’ll riff off of each other, make sarcastic remarks and are often self-deprecating. But when one, or the other, gets off track, the other one will gently put him back on course, or fill in a missing detail. The cast members all agree that they were a lot of fun, and great to work with. But they also added that they had a real strong sense of purpose, vision, and direction.

When adding to the story of Cloudy With The Chance Of Meatballs, Lord and Miller created a young scientist by the name of Flint Lockwood. Flint desires to be the greatest scientist in the world, but so far, all of his experiments have gone terribly wrong, thus we have food falling from the sky. The writers wanted to explore the loneliness of being a creative, under-appreciated outcast in a small town. A sentiment they both understand. They also believe it is important to follow your passions and embrace your inner geek. In contrast, when creating their female character Sam, they gave her a reverse makeover. She begins the film as a cute, perky TV personality, but as the film progresses, and she becomes more comfortable being herself, she stops hiding her intelligence and no longer fears being caught on camera looking anything but perfect.

To bolster their comic sensibilities for the film the directors had the privilege of casting friends and other people that they admired. When asked if the duo were big fans of Bruce Campbell, their reply was, “Of course, yeah, are you kidding?” But then true to form they joked, “We were super popular and didn’t watch movies like Evil Dead. But if we did, if we weren’t so busy dating cheerleaders, and being cool, well yeah, of course.” They also admitted to being huge fans of Mr. T., and they really loved what he added to the film.

Considering their television sit-com background, don’t expect this film to be another kid’s cartoon. Where working on a sit-com can be very dictatorial, this movie had a real collaborative process. Phil and Chris consider themselves contrarians and whenever something started to look familiar or cliché, they worked real hard to go in the opposite direction. “It wasn’t so much bringing a live-action sensibility to the film,” says Chris, “It was more about adding more comedy.” One fun thing about this film is all the details in the background. According to Phil Lord, you’ll have to watch the film multiple times to catch them all, hopefully a hundred times, and then buy the DVD. The cast and crew were encouraged to submit all ideas and the wackier the better. Many of these jokes made their way in to the film.

Once the film was completed, Miller and Lord were a little nervous about showing it to the books’ author and illustrator. They were very cooperative and supportive in the pre-production process, but now they were going to see the completed film in 3-D. When the filmmakers were asked what the Barretts thought, they said that they loved it. They were then asked what the biggest change was to the Barrett’s original work and their reply was, the color blue. The original artwork in the book was done in a three-color process; this film is exploding with color.

With spaghetti tornadoes, cheeseburgers falling from the sky and ice cream snowball fights, this is not your average animated film and this is not your average directing team. With Miller and Lord, expect a fantastical world with castles made out of Jell-O, monkeys with thought translators, shoes that grow with your feet, and an army of rotisserie chickens. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs opened September 18th.