Phil Lord And Chris Miller Discuss Their Firing From 'Solo: A Star Wars Story'

There Are Two Sides To Every Story.

By Culture SlatePublished 2 years ago • 4 min read

As far as Star Wars movies go, fans can mostly agree it has been a bit of a letdown over these past few years. The only exceptions are the success of The Mandalorian series that premiered in November 2019 with a Rotten Tomato score of 93%, and the highly-anticipated seventh season of the 2008 The Clone Wars series that finally came out in February of 2020. The movies that have been released over the past few years have been lacking to many fans. This is no exception for Solo: A Star Wars Story, which debuted in May 2018. Despite having a Rotten Tomato score of 70% it is one of those movies that is not really talked about among Star Wars fans. This is surprising since Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the people behind movies such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, and both 21 and 22 Jump Street, were brought on to direct the film. Now they have come forward on The Business podcast and discussed their firing from Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Christopher Miller had this to say:

“Well, there are two sides to every story, and every success that is public, there are many things that don’t come to light and many disappointments. At the end of the day, you’re always in film school. You’re always learning and trying to become a better filmmaker. So, as negative as the ending was, and as deeply misunderstood as we felt, the lasting memory is of the great collaboration we had. We shot, 90 days on that movie, you can’t take the experience away from us, you can’t take away the pencil miles from us—a term we use in animation—and we had a very fruitful, creative time with all the departments and with one another and we became better filmmakers for it. At the end of the day, in a funny way, it isn’t a debacle. It’s actually just on the continuum of learning and becoming a great filmmaker.”

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller stayed positive when reflecting back on their work and kept a good attitude despite their departure from creating Star Wars films. On the other hand, they did not shy away from expressing what went wrong while directing Solo: A Star Wars Story. Phil Lord said:

“If you’re giving the audience exactly what they expect and a bunch of ‘fan service,’ they’re going to end up disappointed. They’re gonna be like, ‘Yeah, this is stuff I already knew, the trick is to figure out what it is they don’t quite yet realize that they want and every idea that you add into the stew is something that you’re like, ‘Oh, that would be a cool thing to see that I haven’t seen before and isn’t the thing that’s expected because I think people are really savvy now and so you have to stay two steps ahead of them and I feel like that’s our job.”

Christopher Miller adds:

“You can’t play scared. So, I don’t really relate to some fear of a fanbase. We don’t think about it that way. There are people out there, I suppose, that are trying to game the marketplace and follow a formula. They’re trying to serve the quarterly earnings of a big company, but a company doesn’t make a movie or write a song, these things are made by human beings, and we’re always trying to serve the human beings making the movie and the human beings witnessing the movie, always remembering, what you’re putting out there, that’s only half of it. The other half is, there’s a person in a movie theater and you’re beaming sound and light into their face and they make the movie in their brain. So you have to understand that as a relationship and a conversation, put yourselves into the shoes of that person.”

In the end, it really boiled down to creative differences between them and Disney before they were replaced by Ron Howard. They still went on saying

“…we met such amazing, talented crew that we still work with, and love and are in touch with to this day...”

Despite everything, they claimed that it was an overall positive experience. Fans of their work will be glad to hear that the two did not stay down long before winning an Oscar in 2019 for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.

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