Phil Lord and Chris Miller Talk About Writing THE LEGO MOVIE 2

The LEGO Movie was one of my favorite films of 2014, so I was thrilled to hear that writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller would be returning to write the upcoming sequel. In a new interview with Empire, the filmmakers - who are producing all of the upcoming LEGO movie projects - spoke about the full slate of brick-based movies ranging from Ninjago to The LEGO Batman Movie (starring Will Arnett) and offered some thoughts on what they'd like to do with the sequel to 2014's smash hit.

On whether they'll direct The LEGO Movie 2:

Miller: "I don’t think so. We’re writing the sequel right now and obviously producing all the other ones. There’s a challenge to make each one feel like its own thing. Part of the fun is finding people like Charlie [Bean], who’s doing the Ninjago movie, and Chris McKay who did so much on the first film. Each of them have their own distinct voices and ideas for tone. So it will each have its own personality and not just be, ‘Hey, remember that last movie? Here’s another one just like it!” So that’s been a big challenge but so far it’s been going better than I expected."

Lord: "I think it’s nice for all these other films to have their own voice and that’s what’s neat about working with all these other filmmakers. They come up with solutions you wouldn’t think of. Watching Charlie Bean’s sequences for Ninjago is so gratifying because he’s able to make it play without any dialogue and has a really great visual style. It’s really nice and refreshing. I think it would get boring if we directed them all, quite honestly."

The pair wasn't originally going to write the sequel, so what changed?

Miller: "We thought we’d said everything we wanted to say about creativity and imagination and the inherent nature of Lego, and that left-brain/right-brain nature. So we were scared about trying to write something that felt like the next chapter and new ideas and not just a rehash."

Lord: "We also worried we didn’t have enough time. Luckily, [Chris] McKay and Jared [Stern] and Michelle [Morgan] all worked on the movie a bit in our absence and really cracked the beginnings of a story and got us really excited; excited enough to write it. We should be writing right now. We’ve opened a Final Draft document and titled it. I mean, that’s really the hardest part. And we’ve chosen the formatting. That is all that’s happened so far. We’ve been outlining a bunch."

Miller: "There are some really fun new themes that we didn’t explore in the first movie and got us really excited, so that it’s its own thing. With 22 Jump Street we did the whole making fun of yourself for just doing the same thing again. We can’t do that ever again. You can only go so far up your own rear end."

And what can we expect to see in the story for The LEGO Movie 2?

Miller: "Well I don’t want to give you spoilers but we were really interested in what happens to that boy who’s in the meta story in the first movie when he’s four years older. When he’s an adolescent how does that change his point of view?

In addition to all of that, Warner Bros. Pictures has just released a brand new featurette called "Creating the Bricks" as a way to promote The LEGO Movie and likely raise some more awareness for the project in hopes of scoring an Oscar nomination (and potential win). Check that out below!