The animated blockbuster The LEGO Movie was more than just another nostalgic romp through the world of anthropomorphic toys. As we learned in that film’s surprising climax, it actually takes place within the imagination of a child. To young audiences, this was a mindblower. To older audiences, it was a head-scratcher, which raised a lot of questions about how this world really works.
In a Q&A after Tuesday's screening of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, Phil Lord and Chris Miller - who co-wrote and directed the original film, and co-wrote and produced the sequel - revealed that they have answers to our nerdiest questions about the underlying laws of the LEGO movie universe.
And trust us, in The LEGO Movie 2, those laws get complicated, because the story isn’t just taking place in Finn’s imagination, it’s also taking place in his sister’s, and often at the exact same time, because she's stolen his favorite toys.
“You started this movie [The LEGO Movie 2] knowing that there was a human world,” Chris Miller explained, “and that the world of LEGO was the world of Finn’s imagination. And so going into the movie, most people are armed with that information, so we wanted to try and tell a more complicated and sophisticated version of that story, where we had two different imaginations coming together. And part of the fun of the movie is trying to figure out what’s happening in the real world and how that’s represented in the world of the LEGO."
“I mean, you hope that if you’re making a sequel, it should be more ambitious and not less,” Phil Lord continued. “That’s the hill you want to die on, right? Trying to up the ante. So we definitely felt like it didn’t feel right until we were doing something really hard, or trying to do something really hard.”
“I feel like when we struck on the idea of, maybe, we could tell the story from the brother’s point of view and the sister’s point of view at the same time, and it would both work… and this is the best we could do at that,” Lord laughed.
And in order to keep those points of view straight, they had to think about when Emmett and Wyldstyle’s stories were being told by which character, and whether that would effect their personalities.
“We have a whole storyline that makes sense to us, yes,” Miller said. “As [to] who’s playing with who at which point.”
“There needs to be a chart," Phil Lord joked. “We could pass it out with popcorn.”
“But we like that people can interpret it their own way,” Miller continued. “Even people in the crew interpret it differently. But the general idea is that when Bianca, who is played by young Brooklynn Prince, who is an absolute delight of a human being, takes the […] characters upstairs she’s playing with them and telling a story of her own, that’s sort of analogous to a story that Finn was telling in the first movie, when he was playing both sides of a war that was happening with President Business, who represented his dad in the story. She’s telling a story of converting these…"
“She’s kind of imagining how they [the LEGO characters] are experiencing it,” Lord interjected. “One interpretation is not that they are retaining their personalities across two imaginations, but rather that…”
“It’s her representation of what his point of view would be,” said Miller, finishing Lord’s sentence.
“Right,” Lord continued. “She’s imagining his point of view of them, and that they represent that, and that she knows that it’s going to take a while to convert them over.”
“Meanwhile Rex [a new character] and Emmett are in a battle for Finn’s soul,” Miller adds.
But haven’t we also seen these LEGO characters move on their own, when they’re not being played with? Lord and Miller have an explanation for that too.
“In the first movie Emmett wiggled off the table and it was up to your interpretation whether that really happened or not,” Chris Miller said. “Similarly, it’s up to your interpretation whether any of that stuff is really happening. At one point a character [in The LEGO Movie 2] says ‘None of this really happening.’ You can believe that or not believe that. It’s your choice!”
“I’d say, at least how we felt about the first movie, and why did Emmett wiggle, is real corny film school stuff,” Phil Lord explains. “But the idea is that ideas are free-floating things, like a virus or something. You can pass it from one person to another, and they do, in our experience, have an existence outside of one person’s mind, because they can be shared. And that’s kind of what we’re saying about these characters in this movie, is that they’re being shared between two storytellers.”
That phenomenon isn’t limited to the two “LEGO Movies,” but to The LEGO Batman Movie as well. The 2017 blockbuster hit was also taking place in a child’s imagination, and Chris Miller confirmed that it wasn’t just any child… it was Finn.
There’s an early joke in The LEGO Movie 2, in which the Justice League goes off an adventure without Batman, because he’s having one of his solo adventures. Miller confirmed in the Q&A that the gag refers to the events of The LEGO Batman Movie, so IGN had to ask: does that mean that The LEGO Batman Movie was also just Finn, specifically playing with Batman the whole time?
“Ohhhhh…” Chris Miller teased, before concluding: “Yes. Yes it does.”
The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part hits theaters on February 8, 2018.