Luckily, The LEGO Movie leaves viewers with the nostalgic feeling that the brand still is meant for everyone. And regardless of gender or age, you and your creations really are special. In a Q&A following last night’s Film Independent at LACMA screening, The LEGO Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, expressed their devotion to the creativity the brand inspires. “Here’s this really amazing brand and we were scared of making a 90 minute commercial for LEGO, but this tool for creativity is really amazing” explained Christopher Miller. “If you look online there’s all these weird (LEGO) videos that people make and they’re really naive and they are homemade and don’t look like a movie is supposed to look. So, we thought maybe we can make the whole movie look like that… the tension between those two things is what interested us the most.”
Phil Lord explained further, “We got a huge amount of LEGO bricks that cost millions of dollars and a really great lighting team and tiny tiny cameras and made our own movie out of it.” My own daughter, Charly, is a big fan of LEGO. As we left the theatre and I asked her what she thought of The LEGO Movie, she told me “It was good. I thought there would be more tigers.” (Charly is the proud owner of a LEGO zoo set.) She added, “My favorite part was when the guy [Emmet, the happy-go-lucky construction worker voiced by Chris Pratt] was getting ready—it was so funny—and when he didn’t have any clothes on!” As for the characters, she said “I didn’t like Wildstyle [the leader of the band of outsiders, voiced by Elizabeth Banks.] “Batman [voiced by Will Arnett] was awesome.” (Charly is not a proud owner of LEGO Friends for Girls.) I think Miller summed it up best with “you don’t actually want to tell people there is a wrong way.”
