Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have been making animated films together since their time at Dartmouth College. They created the MTV animated series Clone High and then wrote for the live-action TV series How I Met Your Mother. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is their first feature-length film. In a roundtable interview session, they addressed several questions.

When asked about the process of getting to make this film, Miller answered:

Basically, we found out that Sony had the rights to this book and it was our favorite kids' book growing up. They happened to like Clone High and brought us in for a meeting and wanted to pitch us some other things, but we just commandeered the meeting and basically tried to do whatever we could to get them to let us make Cloudy into a movie. I think it was our enthusiasm for the project that had them going "Hey, we'll give them a shot on that." And then we wrote the script and it's gone through many, many changes, but the tone of the script has remained the same and everybody was really on board with the sensibility of the way we wanted to make the movie. They were crazy enough to give us a shot to make it.

When asked why it was their favorite book and how it continues to resonate with them, Miller said:

That book and Steve Martin were like the two things that developed our absurdist humor. The book is really filled with lots of little details of somewhat ironic little inside jokes and funny details, and the whole concept is so absurd and whimsical&ellips;. It's a visceral type of comedy that we reacted well to.

When asked about the responsibility of bringing such a well-loved book to the screen, Miller said:

We were extra nervous to show an almost finished cut of the movie to Ron Barrett and Judi Barrett, the author and illustrator, because we'd been talking to them throughout and showing them artwork we'd been doing. They were really supportive of us and let us find the whole movie from the source. But we were extra nervous and they loved it, so it was such a huge sigh of relief for us that they appreciated it and they were so excited about it.

The film opens with "A film by... lots of people." They spoke a bit about how the entire team collaborated to make this film. Lord began:

There were so many people who contributed to the film, from the storyboard artists to our production design team, to the folks at Imageworks that executed the shots. We tried to have an open-door policy so that anybody could contribute an idea if they felt like it.

Miller: It's such a long process that you're constantly reevaluating every part of it, picking it apart and throwing out new ideas. Our policy was definitely: if there's a great idea and it fits the story, you gotta go with it. There's the Jello mold scene, for example. There's a signature image from the book: there's a big sunset and a giant Jello mold in the field. So we had this scene between Flint and Sam that's a very sweet scene. They were originally sitting on a log looking at the sunset through the Jello. We put the scene up in storyboards and our editor's like, "Why don't you go inside the Jello mold? It would be so much more interesting." And we're like, "Of course. Now we have to completely remake the scene."

Lord: And the poor storyboard artists who had already done six iterations, then had to do six (at least) more.

When asked about their own collaboration as a team, Miller said:

We are like the least efficient team ever. Some teams split up: "You do the visual stuff and I'll do the writing." Whatever. We both have strong opinions about everything.

Lord: There are a lot of redundancies in our process.

Miller: It's a very slow process of working back and forth. That's why we're so happy to have so many collaborators sometimes.

Lord: Because sometimes you need a tie-breaker. We had 500 tie-breakers. People we really respect.

Miller: It's great to have somebody in the foxhole with you. It's great to have somebody to tell you when you're crazy and when you're not. And the material always gets better because you're applying more rigor to it than if you're just doing it yourself. Basically, only your A material gets through, but the stuff that is slightly less than A, he won't like it as much as I will, so you have to come up with something together that's even better.

Lord: By the way, we're both super-duper sensitive, and not thick-skinned people at all. We've been working together twelve years. You develop a shorthand. I'd say over the course of the twelve years we've only gotten better at working together.