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Philip Anderson Lord and Christopher Robert Miller are an American filmmaking and acting duo. Their films are known for subversion of genre and detailed visual sensation, spanning…
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Investigate this subjectPhilip Anderson Lord (born July 12, 1975) and Christopher Robert Miller (born September 23, 1975) are an American filmmaking and acting duo. Their films are known for subversion of genre and detailed visual sensation, spanning various styles of live-action and animation.
Philip Anderson Lord and Christopher Robert Miller are an American filmmaking and acting duo. Their films are known for subversion of genre and detailed visual sensation, spanning various styles of live-action and animation. They are known for co-creating the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Lego Movie and Spider-Verse film franchises.
Philip Anderson Lord (born July 12, 1975) and Christopher Robert Miller (born September 23, 1975) are an American filmmaking and acting duo. Their films are known for subversion of genre and detailed visual sensation, spanning various styles of live-action and animation. They are known for co-creating the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Lego Movie and Spider-Verse film franchises.
Lord and Miller were the co-creators, co-stars, and co-heads of the adult animated sitcom Clone High (2002–2003, 2023–2024), and were the writers and directors of the animated films Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and The Lego Movie (2014). They were the directors of the live-action comedy films 21 Jump Street (2012) and 22 Jump Street (2014), and the science fiction adventure film Project Hail Mary (2026). Lord and Miller have also worked on the television series The Last Man on Earth (2015–2018) for Fox, Unikitty! (2017–2020) for Cartoon Network, and The Afterparty (2022–2023) for Apple TV+.
For co-producing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), they won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and garnered nominations in the same category for co-producing the sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and for producing the film The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021).
Lord is from Miami; his mother is a Cuban-born psychologist and his father retired from the aviation business and before that directed a dance company, Fusion, for 10 years. Miller is from Lake Stevens, Washington, where his father runs a lumber mill.
Lord and Miller both grew up making short films with an affinity for animation. They both attended Dartmouth College, where they first met, and had separate comics in the school newspaper, The Dartmouth. Lord was a member of Amarna, a co-ed undergraduate society while Miller was a brother at Alpha Chi Alpha. Both were members of the college's satire magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, with Miller serving as the editor-in-chief and Lord as the Arts Editor. During his time in college, Miller met his girlfriend, now wife.
During their time at Dartmouth, the school paper published a profile on Miller, which caught the attention of Michael Eisner, then chairman of Disney. According to Lord, Eisner brought the profile to the attention of his fellow Disney executives who offered to set up a meeting with Miller. Miller agreed to the meeting under the condition that he also bring Lord. After three months, the two moved to Los Angeles and after one meeting were offered a two-year development deal at Disney Television Animation.
Though nothing they pitched made it to air, Lord and Miller 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 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, their first feature film. After a year working on the script, they were fired for story issues and replaced with new writers, who after a year were fired themselves. Lord and Miller were 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, the head of Sony Pictures at the time, 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. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was released in 2009 to positive reviews.
After Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was released, the two sought to try to make something different 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, released to critical acclaim, which led to the production of the sequel 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 Bros. 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 story treatment for the then-upcoming superhero film The Flash, but dropped out of the project in favor of directing the then-untitled Solo: A Star Wars Story. The duo were picked by Sony Pictures Animation in 2015 to create an animated Spider-Man film, with the option to direct. The film was eventually made as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which the duo produced and which Lord co-wrote.
The duo have 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. They are producing a cable-TV drama based on the popular NPR/This American Life spinoff podcast Serial.
In January 2017, Lord and Miller began directing the then-untitled film Solo: A Star Wars Story, a standalone Star Wars movie based on the Han Solo characte
Source: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (CC BY-SA)
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