“I never even really decided one day to be a filmmaker. It just seemed obvious,” says Josh Miller, who began making movies in third grade after his family got their first video camera in the 1980s. These weren’t just simple home movies – Miller was already creating feature-length productions. “I didn’t even know what a short film was necessarily. I just knew movies are ninety minutes to two hours long, so that’s how long my movies need to be.”
Josh Miller’s partnership with Pat Casey began unexpectedly in eighth grade detention, but it wasn’t until high school that they started collaborating creatively at their local cable station in Bloomington, Minnesota. “We both wound up on this show, which we then pretty soon found ourselves in charge of basically,” Casey recalls. “We had a weekly live TV show for all four years of high school.”
Even during college, with Miller at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and Casey at Boston University, they maintained their creative connection. “We would email back and forth or spend hours on AOL instant messenger, just working stuff up,” says Casey. “I thought I was going to become a lawyer or something reasonable, except then very quickly at school, I realized that I just didn’t care about this other stuff. My parents were horrified.” He jokes, “Now they’re happy.”
Breaking Into the Film & TV Industry
Their entry into Hollywood came through an animated series called Golan the Insatiable, which led to a pivotal meeting with Toby Ascher who produced all three Sonic The Hedgehog movies to date. “We were meeting with Toby Ascher, and we didn’t know it at the time, but he had just helped secure the rights to Sonic from Sega,” Miller explains. “We noticed, ‘Hey, this guy’s got a lot of Sonic stuff.’ Unless this guy’s just a mega Sonic super nerd, it probably means he’s trying to do a Sonic the Hedgehog movie.”
Patrick Casey & Josh Miller
The company was looking for a replacement for the original writers. “A couple of months later, they called us kind of out of the blue to be like, ‘Oh, were you guys serious about Sonic? Like we’re starting over with Sonic. You guys have an idea for this?'” Casey remembers. “And we said, ‘Yes, we do.’ And then we hung up and we’re like, ‘Now we got to think of an idea for Sonic. And we got to have it very soon.'”
The adaptation presented unique challenges, as the original game offered minimal story elements. “The original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis has no story. It’s just Sonic freeing animals from robots that were made by Dr. Robotnik,” says Miller. “That’s just how Sonic looks. He looks like Felix the Cat.”
Crafting a New Vision for Sonic the Hedgehog
Working with director Jeff Fowler who directed all three Sonic movies, they developed a fresh take on the character. “Jeff had this vision of Sonic as a kid,” Casey notes. “We embraced that and working with that idea rather than he was already an established hero. But even then, the studio said, ‘This movie has to take place on Earth. It has to be about Sonic hanging out with human actors.'”
A breakthrough came when they conceived Sonic as an outsider yearning to connect. “We should start with him arriving on Earth and this whole thing where he grew up in a cave, sort of observing the humans and wanting to be a part of our world,” Miller explains. “The Little Mermaid element, which I think did a lot to make Sonic a sympathetic character instead of just like a wisecracking cartoon.”
They were particularly careful about how they handled Sonic’s knowledge of Earth culture. “It’s a pet peeve of ours when a character who wouldn’t know anything about Earth culture is making pop culture references and jokes,” Casey says. “So Sonic is an Earthling. He grew up in hiding, watching TV and stuff over people’s shoulders. That was our trick for the whole movie.”
Gerald Robotnik (Jim Carrey) Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Sega of America, Inc.
The casting of Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik added another dimension to their writing process. “We feel we are the Jim Carrey generation, because we both loved In Living Color,” says Casey. “When you look at his recent filmography, he’s only been making Sonic the Hedgehog movies, which is crazy.”
“After the first movie, we got to go to his home and meet about what was going to happen in Sonic 2,” Miller adds. “There was a meeting where we were pitching stuff, and he was doing act outs as we were talking. He was giving us a full-on, 100% Jim Carrey performance of just bits we were throwing at him in real time.” By the third film, they were able to dig deeper into Robotnik’s emotional complexity while maintaining his wild energy.
[More: Pat Casey and Josh Miller Discuss ‘Violent Night’]
Writing Sonic the Hedgehog 3
For the latest installment, introducing Shadow (Keanu Reeves) presented new challenges. “He was tricky because there was certainly the danger of just accidentally repeating the Knuckles (Idris Elba) character from part two,” Casey explains. “Shadow’s backstory is such an important part of the character for the fans, from the games. We had to honor what had come before.”
“We wanted a lot of thematic connection between Shadow and Sonic, so it feels like you’re getting a complete thing, and that their conflict at the end, when Sonic goes over to the dark side, it’s they’re both, it can be one sequence that’s the culmination to both of their arcs, in a way that hopefully feels satisfying.”
Looking back on their journey, the pair emphasizes the importance of persistence and direct action for aspiring writers. “Don’t be afraid to go after what you actually want to be doing,” Miller advises. “If you get stuck in, ‘I’m going to work my way up through this part of the thing,’ those systems feel like they’re a little broken as far as if you wait, especially now, you’re never going to get anywhere.”
“Each year it feels like there’s even more competition for more people seeing if they can take a swing at this career,” Casey adds. “If we really knew how to break in, then it wouldn’t have taken us so long to do it,” he jokes. “But the thing is to make stuff too, even if it’s super DIY, because that’s how you learn what works.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
