The Toughest Scene I Wrote: “The LEGO Movie”

Once again, Vulture does screenwriters a solid:

Over the next few weeks, Vulture will speak to the screenwriters behind 2014’s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. Which pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?

In this article, Philip Lord and Chris Miller, co-writers and co-directors of The LEGO Movie, talk about the difficulty of working out the story’s big narrative twist:

The live-action segment with Will Ferrell definitely went through the most iterations. It was baked in from the beginning, but it changed and changed and changed. We knew we were gonna do it and I had faith it was going to work, but it was a lot of buttressing and throwing things out. How much live action should we reveal before we got to that moment? We storyboarded that sequence for a year and a half before we got to it, and tried it a million different ways.

The son wasn’t always in the movie. That was a thing that happened two years ago, when we finally figured the scene out. It was just going to be about Will Ferrell, but we thought, The movie can’t just be about one character, it has to be about a relationship. Maybe this movie is about a father and a son. And that’s what opened it up for us, and seemed to resonate for a lot of people.

For the rest of the article, go here. Kudos to Vulture for this annual series which puts the spotlight on screenwriters.