The LEGO Movie & The Dance of Creativity 

By Jacob Krueger

PODCAST EXCERPT

There are two right ways to build with Legos and there are also two right ways to build a film. There’s the purely organic way, where you just follow all of your instincts. And then there’s also the other way, where you sit down with a producer, manager, agent, writing partner, or director and you ask them, “what do you need?” And you find a way to deliver what they need.

There are many different ways to build a movie. But we all eventually end up at the second way simply because all of us are eventually going to find ourselves in a notes meeting with a producer who needs something from us. And we’re going to need to take their notes and integrate them without destroying our script.

In order to do all this, there’s a dance that we need to learn, as screenwriters. It’s a dance between our wild creativity and the part of ourselves that wants to glue the darn Lego pieces together and make sure they don’t come apart. But, in order to create the movies and stories that we really want to tell, we have to be willing to break them.