Over the last few decades,Christopher MillerandPhil Lordhave become some of the most interesting creators working in comedy today. The pair wrote and directedCloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,The Lego Movie, as well as directed21 Jump Streetand22 Jump Street, and worked on such projects asSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verseand the upcomingAcross the Spider-Verse,The Last Man on Earth,The Afterparty, and many, many more things you probably love.
But Lord and Miller got their start withClone High, an MTV series that only lasted a single season (which didn’t even air all of its episodes in the United States), and which was also one of the funniest shows of the 2000s. In the show, we followed the clones of famous historical figures as they went to high school together and experienced scenarios that matched the high school dramas of the time. The school included the awkward Abe Lincoln (Will Forte), his friend who is secretly in love with him, Joan of Arc (Nicole Sullivan), and the womanizing JFK (also voiced by Miller), amongst many others.
After two decades, however,Clone Highis finally back on Max, and with a two-season pickup, there’s no need to fear that this is just going to be a quick visit with our favorite high school-aged clones. In a conversation with Collider, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller discussed what it was like coming back to this world after all these years, introducing new clones into the mix, how the last two decades since the first season have changed their approach to this show, and what we can expect in Season Three.
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COLLIDER: So I just wanted to start off by saying, you guys have made some of my favorite movies and shows of the last 20 years and I’ve been obsessed withClone Highsince high school, and it’s just an honor to speak to Professor Scudworth and Mr. Butlertron, and I’m so happy about it.
PHIL LORD: Right on!
CHRISTOPHER MILLER: A man of excellent taste.
So, you guys have said that your entire career has been about trying to getClone Highback on the air. How does it feel now that it’s back?
LORD: [Laughs] True.
MILLER: Now our careers are over, we’re done.
See you guys later!
LORD: Goodbye! Signing off forever. No, it’s really great. It’s so satisfying to see something that we put out into the world so long ago sort of take root, and have like a TikTok moment, and find its way back into the culture, like a zombie.
When you guys were making the first season originally, I’m sure you had plans for a second season, in your head at least. What did you originally have in mind for the second season, and how has that changed in the last 20 years, with the exception of the obvious 20-year time jump?
MILLER: We didn’t have a lot planned out. We wanted them to, you know, wake up not remembering what happened, and on their way to school in the morning again, which is basically what happened. Beyond that, we didn’t have much of a plan. We knew we wanted to shake up the relationship dynamics in the way that the teen dramas do, and we wanted different people dating different people, and to change all of the relationships and the dynamics, and that was done as well. Thankfully, we weren’t tied to some, you know, harebrained thing that we came up with 20 years earlier. We had a fairly clean slate for the team to come up with all these stories.
What was it about the new characters that you introduced that made them the perfect historical figures to bring into this update?
LORD: They were recognized by teenagers.
MILLER: You don’t need to explain who they are.
LORD: Yeah, you don’t have to explain who they are, and, really, Erica [Rivinoja] and the writing staff came up with just great characterizations for them that added so much to the relationships. So like, Frida being the coolest girl in school and that driving Cleopatra insane; Topher Bus being afraid for people to know that he is the clone of Christopher Columbus is such a clever idea; Harriet Tubman trying to, like, go kill it in Hollywood, and just being a super high achieving person is really great; Confucius being a very lovable, but maybe not the brightest dude is really cute.
MILLER: Having to live up to the pressure of being the wisest person to ever have lived but being a dumb teenager is a really funny place to start with a for a character.
Are there any characters that you’ve wanted to have in this series that just haven’t worked out? Like you’ve tried to figure fit them in there but just could never crack it?
LORD: There’s nothing off the top of the head, but obviously the characters that you pay attention to are the ones that kind of break out. Do you have something on your mind, Chris?
MILLER: No, no, there’s no, “Oh, if only we could have…”
LORD: A great, white whale, our Moby Dick. Our Moby Dick is Herman Melville.
He just has a whale with him at all times.
LORD: Yeah, exactly.
So since originally this was like your first big project, how do you think the last 20 years of all the work that you’ve done changed how you approach the show 20 years later?
MILLER: It’s interesting, you know, I think obviously we feel like we’ve learned a lot about what makes for a successful story, and needing to love all your characters, even the ones that are not good people, and needing to find moments of emotional sincerity and truth amongst all the jokes. When we first started, we were like 24 making this show, and we wanted to poke the world in the eye, and I think the spirit of that is still there in this show. But we sort of figured out early on while making the show that, you know, you need to actually care about these relationships for you to be invested in the show. We couldn’t just make fun of that, and that’s only become more true. The more we’ve worked in this business, the more we realize that you have to really care, and the emotions have to be real, and that’s the foundation that you build all the jokes off of. I think we feel much more confident in making sure that the stories have some of that sincerity in them along with all the crazy shenanigans.
LORD: Yeah, when you’re young you just want to deconstruct everything, and as old farts, we also would like to construct something, you know? And I think that you look at the show and it’s doing both, it’s tearing apart high school teen dramas, but also building one [laughs]. I’d say that we care more about storytelling and character, we care more about the characters themselves than we ever did.
Yeah, I think that definitely shows, even in the first season, I think.
LORD: Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing that actually makes the show work is that those things that we’re imitating, like, they work!
That’s how you do great parody.
LORD: Yeah, exactly. As satirists, we were just trying to understand the clockwork of these shows and imitate them, and in so doing, we stumbled on something that made you care about the show, which is that the characters, their desires, are taken seriously.
What are your favoriteClone Highrunning gags? My favorite is the dolphin, and in all of your stuff, I still look for the dolphin.
LORD: I think we’ve pretty much kept to the dolphin. It’s our Oldsmobile.
MILLER: We definitely did. It really is. The dolphin has been the thing that sort of– it just started happening, and then it took on a life of its own. Now we feel like, every now and again, we’re like, “Oh, crap! Does this have a dolphin? We gotta find a place to put a dolphin!”
LORD: Is there a dolphin in [Spider-Man: Into theSpiderverse]?
MILLER: Yes, you didn’t know about that?
LORD:Spider-Verse 2?
MILLER: Yeah!
Isn’t that when they’re getting sucked into the– Or in the first one they’re getting sucked into…
MILLER: Oh, you didn’t hear it last night?
LORD: I can’t remember. What reel is it in?
MILLER: I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll talk to you about it offline.
LORD: I remember that we did it. Sometimes during the sound mix we go like, “Oh, crap!”
MILLER: Just chuck one in there.
So, can you tease anything about Season 3?
MILLER: Yeah, I think that Season 3 builds on these relationships and mixes things up again. Now you actually know who the characters are and what their comic voices are, and you can really get deeper into it, and it’s really found its rhythm, I think, even farther. I’m trying to think of one tease that we could give that wouldn’t be too much of a spoiler. There’s religion and there’s snorkeling, how about that?
