Like so many true romances, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller first committed to each other with an act of profound cheesiness.
It was the summer of 1996, and Miller was interning at the visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic while living in what amounted to a flop house in San Francisco, the only affordable place he could find with month-to-month rent. Lord, his good friend at Dartmouth College, had flown out to visit for the weekend, and things were not going well. "It was a disastrous weekend," Lord says, rubbing his eyes underneath his black-frame glasses before sipping a margarita (on the rocks, with salt) in a packed New York City lunch spot. "I had, like, a sort of girlfriend—"
"—also visiting," Miller cuts in, sipping his own margarita (also on the rocks, with salt).
"—and Chris was living in, like, an office building, but the office part was prostitutes."
To escape, Lord and Miller decamped for Telegraph Hill, and found themselves standing at the top of the Coit Tower. They had both just finished their junior year at Dartmouth, and they were staring down an uncertain future, amid classmates with very different pursuits than the countless hours they had been spending together making their own animated student films. "All our friends were interviewing to see who got to take down the world financial system," says Lord. "And they did it!" adds Miller.
The notion that they could somehow become professional filmmakers, however, had felt to them as murky as the fog choking the Golden Gate Bridge. But in that moment, standing together atop the San Francisco Bay, with an earnest emotional flourish only college undergrads can muster, the fog over their future lifted.
"We both had this super-lame moment at the top of the Coit Tower, looking out [at the Bay] and saying, 'You know, I think we can make a go of making stuff,'" says Miller. "'I think we can do this.'"
"It's like a Nicholas Sparks novel," says Lord.
"And so we decided to move out to Los Angeles and" — Miller moves his hands dramatically — "try to make it in showbiz!"
Clone High
MTV
Suffice it to say, they’ve definitely made it. This week, Lord and Miller walked a raucous red carpet for the premiere of 22 Jump Street, their fourth feature film as directors in what has been one of the most auspicious and enviable career trajectories in modern Hollywood. They were recruited by Disney right out of college; created their own cult hit animated TV show in their mid-twenties with MTV's Clone High; began directing their feature film debut at 30 with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (based on the popular children's book); launched romance himbo Channing Tatum as a bona fide comedy star with 21 Jump Street and its sequel (based on the popular '80s TV series); and, with $462.3 million and counting, made one of the most successful films of 2014 with The LEGO Movie (based on the popular toy line).
That alone would be impressive, but all these feature films could easily have also been typical examples of slapped together, mediocre "product," spawned by Hollywood only for their brand-name value. Instead, Lord and Miller have made each of their films richly and delightfully weird, filled with the kind of smart, sharp edges that most studio films have aggressively sanded down. "You kind of can imagine the usual version of those [movies]," says Bill Hader, who voiced the wild-haired, mad scientist lead in Cloudy. "They're properties that studios want made, and so it's like, Oh, I see what that's gonna be. But with Phil and Chris, it goes through their filter, and they go, 'Nah, we're gonna make it ours.'"
"I can hear their voices in every single iteration of their creative process," adds Barry Blumberg, the former Disney executive who gave Lord and Miller their first job in Hollywood. "When I watch The LEGO Movie, or Cloudy, or 21 Jump Street, I can hear those guys talking. I can hear them pitching out the ideas."
Christopher Miller and Phil Lord at the Los Angeles premiere of 22 Jump Street
Eric Charbonneau / Invision for SPE
With 22 Jump Street, Lord and Miller, now both 38, have pushed their silly-smart sensibility even further, crafting a comedy sequel that knows it's a comedy sequel — jokes about recycling the same story over and over again and needlessly boosting the budget abound. But they don't dominate. The film never curdles into an arch, ironic meta-joke, because Lord and Miller keep the story laser focused on the central relationship between Tatum and Jonah Hill's undercover cops, two straight dudes who are perfectly matched and hopelessly devoted to each other. Kind of like Lord and Miller themselves.
"We know from being in a partnership that it's like being in a marriage," says Miller (who is actually married, to his college girlfriend, and has two small children). "It really is like being in a romantic relationship."
"You get your feelings hurt in the same way," adds Lord (who lives with his girlfriend). "Without the sex."
As a pair, Lord and Miller certainly complement each other, Miller more soft-spoken and deferential, with a head of rigid helmet hair; Lord more direct and demonstrative, his hair an unruly tangle of curls. Over a two-hour lunch before a special New York screening of their latest movie, they revisit the wild, winding story of how they've become Hollywood's go-to filmmakers for quirky, popular movies based on crass, questionable ideas — and they certainly behave like a married couple too. They finish each other’s sentences, tell stories about each other, even make sure to watch each other speak amid the noisy din of the dining New Yorkers around them. It's adorable. And instructive. These two genial nerdy guys have managed to conquer the Hollywood system while remaining steadfastly outside of it — due to their talent, their dogged work ethic, and, most importantly, the fact that they have each other.
Macey Foronda / BuzzFeed
Lord and Miller grew up on opposite corners of the country — Lord in Miami, and Miller in Seattle — but otherwise (and perhaps not surprisingly), their childhoods followed quite similar paths. From a young age, they were both obsessed with animation. "When we were kids, we watched a lot of Chuck Jones cartoons," says Miller, speaking for Lord's childhood as well, even though they didn't actually know each other until they were 18. "He was a huge part of our existence, like, doodling in class instead of taking actual notes. I tried to make my own animated thing with my parents' VHS recorder — start stop start stop. It was not very good."
Lord, meanwhile, started attending underground animation festivals when he was in middle school. "I was probably 13 years old," he says. "There was an ad for a tiny art house theater and they would collect all these animated shorts from around the world and compile them together every year." He drank in the deadpan absurdity of films like 25 Ways to Quit Smoking by Bill Plympton — whom Miller would later intern for — and Matt Groening's very first shorts featuring The Simpsons — which were also blowing Miller's mind as they played on Fox's The Tracey Ullman Show.
"There's a subversive quality to all the stuff that we really like," says Miller. "You could do a type of comedy that you couldn't quite get away with in live action for being too broad or arch. It was a way to be kind of extreme and satirical."
"It's a combination of nerdy things to get to the nerdiest possible thing," adds Lord. That love of un-cool things extended into live-action films as well. Both recall owning only three VHS cassettes at home growing up, and they hint at both their respective personalities, as well as their subsequent shared creative sensibility. For the buttoned-up and even-keeled Miller, it was Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and Singin’ in the Rain. For the energetic and expressive Lord, it was Star Wars, Howard the Duck, and the Robert Altman Popeye.
Their gravitation toward pop-culture nerddom was also informed by their figurative and literal small stature within their respective private high schools. "It took forever to get any kind of social status," says Lord, turning to Miller. "You were short until your junior year, probably. I was short until my senior year. It's just, like, your social status is so dependent on how quickly you hit puberty, basically."
Phil Miller and Christopher Lord while attending Dartmouth College
Twitter / Via Twitter: @kimholcomb
Today, both men are remarkably devoid of the kind of social awkwardness that often sticks to high school nerds well into adulthood. They share an easeful, jokey rapport in conversation, no more so than with each other, where even discussing the moment they first became friends their freshman year at Dartmouth can quickly break down into a cascade of overlapping teasing.
Chris Miller: We knew each other a little bit before then. But the big event—
Phil Lord: —what really cemented the relationship—
CM: —was his girlfriend lived downstairs from me. We were good friends, and I was in her dorm room, and she was playing Tetris, and I was playing the game called Let's See How Close I Can Get This Lighter to Her Hair Without Her Noticing. And I won because her hair caught on fire and she still didn't notice until I put it out.
And Phil, were you there?
CM: No.
PL: No, I think I was there!
CM: You were not there! Afterward, you were like, "You're the one who made my girlfriend's hair smell bad!"
PL: I induced a memory of it?
CM: Yeah, you were definitely not there. But you were there for the aftermath, and the fact that you thought it was funny, and you didn't, like, get aggro at me made us friends.
PL: I'm sure I was there. Obviously, one of us is wrong. It's obviously Chris.
CM: (Laughs)
PL: But I have a very visual memory of what that was like. Maybe from just telling the story so many times. But yes, she's fine. She's doing great now.
With so much in common, the two bonded pretty much immediately in the way that only 18-year-olds with a lot of sudden free time and freedom can. Miller was a government major, but Lord — who bounced through majors as disparate as computer science and art history — convinced Miller to take a class in animation together. ("It was the least academic pursuit that you can possibly go for," says Lord with a cheshire grin.) Eventually, they started making their own student films side by side, each providing advice and counsel to the other.
"We got course credit for it," Miller says. "It took over our lives. The college gave us a studio that we could work in, which was right next to career services, where everyone was coming in to work at JPMorgan, walking in [with] their suit and a Wall Street Journal while we were in our T-shirts and underpants playing loud music and drinking Jolt Cola to stay awake."
When Miller starts describing Lord's film as "really cool, actually, visually awesome," Lord begins vigorously shaking his head before finally jumping in. "Visually interesting, slow, painful," Lord says. "It was eight minutes long. For animation, that's like, you better win an Oscar at that length. It was called Man Bites Breakfast, and it was breakfast from the cereal's point of view. It's very college-y."
Miller, meanwhile, was adapting his a comic strip in the student newspaper — called The Sleazy the Wonder Squirrel Show, featuring the titular chain-smoking talk show host and his sidekick, Herschel the Hasidic Hamster — into a few animated shorts. "There's one where their guest is supposed to be Godot, but he never shows up, so they go to France to find him and kick his ass," Miller says. "It was very Ahhhhh, highbrow and lowbrow at the same time!" He winces. "It was so weird and pointless." Lord immediately interrupts, speaking directly to Miller with an almost reproachful tone: "It was very clever."
Miller's comic strip also turned out to be the the catalyst for the duo's first big break in Hollywood, a stroke of luck so outrageously fortuitous that Miller still can't quite believe it really happened. His senior year, Dartmouth Life magazine — a tabloid-size alumni magazine, or as Miller puts it, "alumni propaganda" — published a cover profile about Miller and his strip, greatly elevating Miller's accomplishments in the process. "The article says stuff like, 'At his internship at Industrial Light and Magic, he helped design the dinosaurs for the upcoming Star Wars prequels,' which is wrong for lots of reasons," says Lord with a laugh. "He got coffee for the guy who made the not-dinosaur. It's like when you tell your mom something, and then she tells your grandma, and then she tells your friend, and then suddenly you're directing the sequel to E.T."
Unbeknownst to Lord and Miller, they were attending Dartmouth with Eric Eisner, the son of The Walt Disney Company's then-Chief Michael Eisner, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood. "Apparently, apocryphally," says Miller, his eyebrow still cocked in suspicion, "[Michael Eisner] saw this article and passed it on to someone, who passed it on to someone, who passed it on to someone, who ended up passing it on to Barry Blumberg, who was the head of Disney Television Animation," says Miller.
It was not apocryphal — Blumberg confirms that's exactly what happened. In fact, Blumberg called Miller in his off-campus apartment to offer to fly him out to Los Angeles for a meeting. "I didn't really know what we were going to do with them, but I knew they were great," Blumberg says now. But first he had to get them to L.A. "I was like, 'Argh, I've got midterms! I'm busy!'" says Miller. "'But my buddy Phil and I are planning on moving out there in the summer, so I'll just save you the money and we'll meet in the summer.' It shows you how savvy I was. I was playing hard to get."
"We talked hard about it," says Lord. "Midterms is, like, a really good reason to delay a career-defining meeting with the biggest animation company in the world."
When they did finally take their meeting with Disney, Blumberg simply presumed that because Miller and Lord had come into his office shoulder to shoulder, they were professional partners. But despite their declaration at the top of the Coit Tower that they would strike out to Hollywood together, they had never actually collaborated on the same project. "They came across as a team," says Blumberg. "Maybe that's in friendship, and sometimes in friendship are formed great partnerships." He hired them together into a development deal. At just 22, Lord and Miller had landed their first paying job in showbiz.
Macey Foronda
In their first year as part of the team at Disney Television Animation, Lord and Miller estimate they pitched roughly 40 different shows. "We were scared to death," says Lord. "We were like, These guys are paying us thousands of dollars. We've got to get them their money's worth."
As good friends as they had become, however, sorting out how to work together on the same project did not come easily. "The first year was particularly challenging," says Miller, "as far as, like, us both being used to doing our own thing — getting input and help from the other person but, at the end of the day—"
"—making the choices [ourselves]," says Lord, jumping in. "Having the power makes you more generous. When you don't have the power, suddenly you get defensive, because it's not up to you, you have to convince the other guy." He smiles. "It's infuriating."
Not one of their pitches, meanwhile, made it on the air. It was a period of great expansion for what a "Disney" project could be, from Lizzie McGuire to the Pirates of the Caribbean films. But Lord and Miller's heady mix of silly erudition still didn't jibe even with the (somewhat) looser boundaries of the Disney brand. "One of the first things they produced never saw air, but it's one of the funniest things I was ever associated with," says Blumberg. For the variety series One Saturday Morning, Lord and Miller cooked up a commercial for a toy line of famous literary figures. "They had made action figures inspired by the Brontë sisters," says Blumberg. "They were like Transformers, so the three Brontë sisters could come together and form the Brontësaurus." He still chuckles at the memory, but he says he could not get it through the Disney system. "Whoever the powers that be were above me did not get it. People just didn't know what to do with that."
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