Interview with Christopher Miller (Oscar winner for ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’), creator and director of a murder mystery in which each testimony takes the form of a different kind of movie
In today’s pop culture, everything, or almost everything, is a remix. But there are remixes and remixes: most are lazy, but there are also those built with such imagination that what is known becomes unprecedented. “It’s what Phil [Lord] and I are dedicated”, explains the filmmaker in an interview by video call Christopher Miller. “Viewers know a lot right now. They’ve seen a lot and they don’t want to see what they’ve already seen a million times. So you have to find a way to tell a story in an unexpected way. Or show something that hasn’t been seen before.” . How do you turn around what we think we know?“.
Miller & Lord have been answering that question over and over again for a couple of decades. with the lively ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ scored a gleefully and satirically free adaptation of the classic 1978 children’s book. As screenwriters of ‘How I Met Your Mother’, taught how to dynamite the foundations of the generalist sitcom from within. ‘The LEGO Movie’ It is the empirical proof that making a great movie based on a toy brand is possible.
And put to review a series, ‘New policemen’, let’s say, what better way to take humorous advantage of their worst ideas? The result was ‘Infiltrated in class’ and its sequel, surely two of the best big studio comedies of the last decade. Hollywood did not allow the duo to review the ‘Star Wars’ universe (they were fired from ‘Han Solo: A Star Wars Story’ for being too free), but they did give the greatest arachnid icon a new flight with the Oscar-winning ‘Spider-Man: A new universe’, produced by the duo and co-written by Lord.
Stars in their own movie
The Serie ‘The afterparty’ (Apple TV +, from Friday, the 28th), dreamed of by Miller for more than a decade, is not based on any known intellectual property, but it is also the clear product of an exorbitant love for popular culture. Everything starts in a more or less recognizable way. A pop star, Xavier (Dave Franco), pronounced ‘Ex-avier’, dies after falling into the void during a party in his luxurious house facing the sea. Police Danner (Tiffany Haddish) is (self) in charge of the case and brings popcorn to question the guests, former high school classmates of the dead man. “As a teenager, I devoured Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie novels. I was always hooked on any episode of ‘Colombo’ or ‘Murder She Wrote.’ I’m passionate about the mystery genre,” says Miller.
But this ‘who-did-it’ has an important twist; and not only comic, as is to be expected from its creator and director. “In the beginning, the idea was just to have each character give their perspective, a bit like Rashomon by Kurosawa Miller explains. But the idea was evolving. I wanted each story to be really different from the others; the more different they were, the more interesting they would be“.
“We are all the protagonists of our own movie & rdquor ;, Danner says at a crucial moment in the series. All the guest-suspects may have seen the same thing, but each one has seen it differently. In Miller’s mind, this translates into custom-designed ‘mind movies’ for each character, each belonging to a different genre (romantic comedy, thriller, musical) and featuring the visual style, aspect ratio, or kind of soundtrack we associate with those genres. “The character told me what kind of genre someone like that would tell the story in. But as I created that mental movie, I adjusted the character a little bit to ironize the archetypes of each genre even more. And of course, once we’re on familiar ground, the fun is shaking up expectations.
Who-is-who of modern comedy
You start each episode of ‘The afterparty’ not knowing what you’ll see, but you go in with total confidence that you’ll be happy. It can only be this way with a series created by Miller and with a cast in the form of a who’s-who of modern comedy: the irresistible Haddish has John Early (‘Search party’) as a partner in his investigations, and the cast of suspects includes Sam Richardson (‘veep’), Ben Schwartz (‘Parks and recreation’), Zoe Chao (‘Love life’), Ilana Glazer (‘Broad City’) or, coming from the other side of the Atlantic, Jamie Demetrius. “I follow British comedy and I love ‘Stath Lets Flats,'” says Miller. “Jamie is a genius to me, just that. He’s not as well known in America yet as he is in Europe, but he’s destined to be a comedy legend.” “.
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Miller and Lord are currently working on ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Part one’, in which, as following the model of this series, each dimension will have a different artistic style. But they’re also into horror comedy Cocaine Bear, about that bear that swallowed more than 30 kilos of cocaine. And in a ‘reboot’ of ‘Clone High’. And in a series of real images of the superheroine Silk. And in the film adaptation of the book ‘Hail Mary Project’ by Andy Weier. How do they do that? Free organization tips: “We try to spend big blocks of four hours or more on one thing. Otherwise, you can’t get into a creative trance. It takes a while to get into that flow. But sometimes we have a hard time organizing, more than anything because we want to put the best of ourselves in everything we do”.