‘Spider-Verse’ Producers Chris Miller, Phil Lord Promote Their Oscar Contending Animated Feature On Late Night TV

Awards season is heating up, and big names attached to this year’s animated feature contenders are hitting the campaign trail to promote their films.

Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of the main frontrunners to take home this year’s animated feature Oscar, and celebrity super-producers and writers Chris Miller and Phil Lord recently stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers to talk up their Spidey-sequel.

After rattling off a list of popular IPs that Miller and Lord have adapted as films in the past, such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, Lego, and now Spider-Man, Meyers asked about their approach to handling material which already has a dedicated fanbase.

According to Lord:

We try not to play tight, right? The confidence that people have in that piece of IP should give us confidence to get nuts.

Miller added that working with an established IP is:

Like a Trojan Horse. You can sneak in something good because [fans] are like, ‘Oh, it’s like, 21 Jump Street? What are they gonna do with that?’ If it seems like a bad idea, we’re interested.

Elaborating further, in a later answer about working as a duo, Miller explained:

We talk something through and we try and figure out what is there about it that can be interesting, or new, or fresh, or different. We don’t wanna do something that’s been done before. So, every time, we’re like, “What’s the thing that no one’s ever seen before?” That’s the first thing. And when we find something that we don’t know how to do, but we think would be interesting if pulled off, that’s when we get excited enough to like, jump in on a project.

According to Lord, the partnership often creates results which are greater than the sums of their parts:

And I think we also understand that it’s not gonna be my idea, it’s not gonna be your idea, it’s gonna be some third thing that we come up with that we couldn’t have thought up on our own.

The interview is short, but Miller and Lord manage to sneak in brief stories about how they became friends (Miller lit Lord’s girlfriend’s hair on fire in college), their early careers, and working with more than 1,000 artists on what they call “the most ambitious animated film ever attempted.”