Chris Miller and Phil Lord managed to transform colorful bricks and minifigs into a surprisingly moving film with last year's The LEGO Movie. And they're not done with the construction toys yet, as they're returning to write the sequel. Empire spoke with the collaborators about their take on The LEGO Movie 2 screenplay.

After confirming that they won't be directing the sequel, Miller and Lord explained why they agreed to tackle the script after initially saying no. "We thought we’d said everything we wanted to say about creativity and imagination and the inherent nature of LEGO, and that left-brain/right-brain nature," Miller said. "So we were scared about trying to write something that felt like the next chapter and new ideas and not just a rehash."

"We also worried we didn’t have enough time," Lord said. "Luckily, [Chris] McKay and Jared [Stern] and Michelle [Morgan] all worked on the movie a bit in our absence and really cracked the beginnings of a story and got us really excited; excited enough to write it. We should be writing right now. We’ve opened a Final Draft document and titled it. I mean, that’s really the hardest part. And we’ve chosen the formatting. That is all that’s happened so far. We’ve been outlining a bunch."

When asked what the plot of the sequel would revolve around, Miller gave a few details. "Well I don’t want to give you spoilers but we were really interested in what happens to that boy who’s in the meta story in the first movie when he’s four years older," he said. When he’s an adolescent how does that change his point of view?

"And it’s nice to have the characters start in a different place from the first movie. Emmet, for example, was in an existential crisis of having seen another dimension and was questioning the whole point of his existence."

Ninjago flips into theaters on Oct. 14, 2016, The LEGO Batman Movie debuts on Feb. 10, 2017 and The LEGO Movie 2 will premiere sometime in 2018.