{"id":548962,"date":"2026-03-20T12:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T12:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548962\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T12:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T12:24:08","slug":"breakfast-with-gosling-grilled-by-spielberg-burned-by-star-wars-lord-and-miller-are-cinemas-hottest-duo-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548962\/","title":{"rendered":"Breakfast with Gosling, grilled by Spielberg, burned by Star Wars: Lord and Miller are cinema\u2019s hottest duo | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were starting out in Hollywood \u2013 long before they became a popcorn-flick industry unto themselves with The Lego<\/a> Movie, the Jump Street films, the Spider-Verse franchise and their latest, Project Hail Mary \u2013 the duo found themselves summoned before a panel at the formidable Directors Guild of America (DGA). Lord and Miller wanted to be credited, as they would be for the rest of their career, as co-directors, and that was something the DGA \u2013 which, as Miller puts it, prefers \u201cone set of hands on the steering wheel\u201d \u2013 was uneasy about. In order to get approval, the pair would have to plead their case to some very famous peers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like a Senate hearing,\u201d says Miller, his eyes widening at the memory. \u201cSteven Spielberg and Jon Favreau and all these people asking questions like: \u2018All right, but what happens if one of you gets sick? What are you gonna do?\u2019 It was \u2026 interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortunately, justices Spielberg and Favreau ruled in the duo\u2019s favour. Meeting Lord and Miller in a London hotel suite, it\u2019s hard to imagine the verdict going any other way. Professionally, they come as a pair. Speak to the duo for more than a few minutes and its clear that they operate on a wavelength shared with few others. They don\u2019t finish each other\u2019s sentences as much as finish each other\u2019s ideas; a mind-meld forged when the Miami-born Lord and Miller, who is from near Seattle, met as undergraduates at the Ivy League Dartmouth college.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s nice having a person with you in the foxhole\u2019 \u2026 Miller and Lord. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

The pair\u2019s inseparability can be confusing for the rest of us. In a truly mortifying moment, I greet the duo by calling Miller (science-geek haircut, stocky, shyly smiling) \u201cPhil\u201d, and Lord (think Adam Brody but with a slight shock of Eraserhead hair) \u201cChris\u201d, something they thankfully laugh off. It\u2019s evidently not the first time they\u2019ve been mixed up: they joke that, on sets in their early jobs, they considered wearing name tags. While Lord is keen to point out there are \u201cslight differences and areas of interest between us\u201d, as a directing duo, they operate as a single unit. \u201cLike any good partnership, every once in a while the polarities flip and one of us winds up compensating for the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

On screen, their shared taste, sensibility and humour has translated into a distinctive style of film-making, full of surreal humour, wild tonal shifts and dizzying visual invention. Whether they\u2019ve directed something, or quietly overseen things via their hugely successful Lord Miller Productions, you can usually tell you\u2019re watching one of their movies within minutes of it starting, from the sheer flurry of colour and imagination being flung at you from the screen. Even the strictures of the studio system don\u2019t deter them: their animated Spider-Verse films rejected the thudding functionality of most superhero movies in favour of a kaleidoscopic, multidimensional head trip; almost a full decade before Greta Gerwig\u2019s Barbie, they were smuggling consumer satire and weirdo comedy skits into the product-placement fest that was The Lego Movie.<\/p>\n

Old-school appeal \u2026 Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary. Photograph: Jonathan Olley\/AP<\/p>\n

Lord and Miller\u2019s latest is another big swing: a deep-space adventure for the age of climate collapse. Adapted from Andy Weir\u2019s hard science<\/a> novel, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who wakes up to find himself the only surviving occupant of a spaceship parked in some distant galaxy, with no real memory of how he got there.<\/p>\n

Through flashbacks, we learn that Grace was recruited by Sandra H\u00fcller\u2019s steely government agent for a mission to stop a parasitic microbe from blotting out the sun and every other star in the universe. Only one star, it seems, is immune to this nasty space virus and Grace has been given a one-way ticket on a rocket ship to find out why; there\u2019s only enough fuel to take samples from the star, send them back and then \u2013 gulp \u2013 slowly expire in deep space. With the rest of the crew already dead, Grace must complete the mission on his own, a task that will require him to make contact with, and work alongside, an actual alien.<\/p>\n

The film is far less doomy than that \u201cspace suicide mission\u201d synopsis suggests \u2013 a winningly geeky sci-fi concoction that mixes together The Martian (another adaptation of an Andy Weir novel) with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although there\u2019s a lot of Lord\u2019s and Miller\u2019s own particular filmic formula stirred in there, too. After optioning the rights to the book, Gosling sought the pair out, sending them The Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard\u2019s manuscript for the film. Is it common for one of the most famous actors in the world to stick a script in the post?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe short answer is: no. That\u2019s not common,\u201d laughs Lord. Miller Jumps in: \u201cBut we had known Ryan for over a decade. We\u2019d occasionally have breakfast with him and talk about working together someday, so he made it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spirit of collaboration \u2026 Gosling and Sandra H\u00fcller in Project Hail Mary. Photograph: Jonathan Olley\/AP<\/p>\n

Once Lord and Miller read the script, \u201cit was a pretty easy yes\u201d, says Miller. Immediately, they say, they could picture Gosling in the role, utilising what Miller calls \u201cthat big, old-school movie star stuff\u201d that he believes Gosling shares with greats like Tom Hanks or Jimmy Stewart. \u201cYou\u2019ve seen him be funny in a movie,\u201d says Lord. \u201cYou\u2019ve seen him break your heart in a movie. This is a movie where he gets to deploy all of his talents.\u201d<\/p>\n

He certainly needs them. For large swathes of the film, Gosling\u2019s only on-screen partner is a scuttling, labrador-sized alien his character has named Rocky. Given that Rocky communicates only in singsong chirrups and lacks any Disney-ish anthropomorphised features, it is one of the film\u2019s biggest achievements that his relationship with Grace is genuinely affecting. Much of that is down to Gosling, whose \u201cgreat magic trick is that, like Warren Beatty or Robert Redford, he\u2019s a handsome movie star who is able to elevate the other characters in the scene above him\u201d, says Lord \u2013 but it\u2019s also thanks to the spirit of can-do collaboration promoted by the film. Watching Grace and Rocky problem-solve together, despite the fact that, as Miller notes, they \u201cdon\u2019t look the same, or speak the same language or breathe the same air\u201d, is genuinely stirring.<\/p>\n

Anti-totalitarian antics \u2026 The Lego Movie. Photograph: Warner Bros\/Sportsphoto\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Like The Lego Movie, which Lord and Miller described at the time as \u201can anti-totalitarian film for children<\/a>\u201d, Project Hail Mary has smuggled a utopian message into a mass-entertainment product. Here, says Miller, it\u2019s \u201cthe idea that communication and empathy can help you solve what seem like impossible problems\u201d. This is hardly a firebrand notion, but at a moment when international cooperation over the climate crisis \u2013 or, well, anything \u2013 seems a nonstarter, there\u2019s something almost revolutionary about it. \u201cIt might seem like wish-casting. But I don\u2019t think it is,\u201d Lord maintains.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a spirit of collaboration Lord and Miller spotted while making Project Hail Mary, their VFX teams working alongside puppeteers to create Rocky \u2013 and something lacking in Hollywood\u2019s current bete noire, artificial intelligence, which Miller says can only \u201cregurgitate the average of things that have come before it\u201d. AI, the pair note, could never conjure up any of the film\u2019s happy quirks and accidents: the jumper Gosling demanded he wear in tribute to a fox he encountered while locked out of his London flat at midnight, say; or the scene where H\u00fcller\u2019s character belts out a karaoke rendition of Harry Styles\u2019s Sign of the Times, included on the spot after Gosling and the crew noticed her terrific singing voice between setups.<\/p>\n

Happy accidents are something Lord and Miller lean into. To them, even setbacks have positives attached. There\u2019s a great segment in a screenwriting masterclass<\/a> they gave to Bafta in 2017, where they outline the many failures they\u2019ve experienced and what they taught them. It\u2019s quite the list: they were sacked, rehired and almost sacked again on their first movie, the buoyant animated comedy Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs; their 2002 MTV show Clone High \u2013 a very funny cartoon sitcom about a group of teenage clones (Cleopatra, Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc) \u2013 was cancelled after a mass hunger-strike<\/a> in New Delhi over the depiction of one of its characters, a hard-partying frat-boy Gandhi known as G-Man. (The show was revived in 2023, minus the Gandhi character.)<\/p>\n

A buoyant debut \u2026 Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Photograph: Sony Pictures<\/p>\n

Even more high-profile was the incident three months after that masterclass, when the pair were sacked from the Star Wars prequel movie Solo over creative differences. (Ron Howard took over directing duties for the film, which would lose more than $100m at the box office.) Nearly a decade, and a string of global hits, on from the Solo debacle, I wonder if the pair think it would happen the same way today. Surely Lord and Miller are too big and too bankable to be treated in that way now? They aren\u2019t so sure. \u201cIt can happen anywhere. It can happen to anybody,\u201d says Miller. \u201cTalk to any film-makers who are a generation ahead of us \u2013 they all have war stories,\u201d adds Lord.<\/p>\n

All you can do in that situation, then, is take your licks and move on. The pair, both big basketball fans, follow the old sports credo that there are only two options: winning and learning. \u201cYou get to be like: OK, I got some reps in. And now, on the next one, I\u2019m going to bring that knowledge with me,\u201d says Miller. \u201cIt becomes a chip on your shoulder that makes you play, aggressively,\u201d adds Lord, a hint of steeliness in his voice.<\/p>\n

Besides, bouncing back is far easier to do when you have a co-director to do it with. \u201cIt\u2019s nice having a person with you in the foxhole,\u201d says Miller. \u201cWhatever is coming down the pipe, you can look at each other and, if you both think it, then you\u2019re like: OK, I feel confident in my point of view.\u201d Surely that\u2019s an ethos that Spielberg, Favreau and the rest of the DGA could get on board with.<\/p>\n

Project Hail Mary is in UK cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were starting out in Hollywood \u2013 long before they became a popcorn-flick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-548962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}