A chat with Secret Level Creator Tim Miller and Executive Producer Dave Wilson

Being fans of Tim Miller and Dave Wilson’s previous work it was a real honor to get to chat with them to discuss their latest project Secret Level (see our review here), an animated anthology series which is now available on Prime Video that takes videogame IPs and creates short stories for each — ranging from Warhammer to Pac-Man to Sifu. Benny and Tyler get to ask some questions about choosing the IPs, to how working on anthology style short stories compares to feature length films… and more!

Below is the transcribed interview in text form, but you can watch it below or here on YouTube as well. Enjoy!

Benny Rose
First and foremost, it’s a pleasure and an honor to meet you both; I was an existing fan prior to Secret Level, so this is a real honor. I just wanted to take one quick moment and just thank Tim from the bottom of my heart for when this show was announced, and you were on the stage, and you were very vulnerable; I took so much value from that because, as a fellow creator in arts I know what it’s like to be in a moment of pure passion and joy, to be able to celebrate something you work so hard towards and to be able to talk to it, you know at the masses. I-I was choked up at that moment, too, but the excitement for the show just skyrocketed because I knew that this was coming from your heart, like everything else you’ve done, so I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for that.

Tim Miller
Thank you, I appreciate that, and it was, it was a vulnerable moment, but I have to say that I have to give Dave credit for that, too because when it was Gamescom in Germany, it was a busy time, and we were finishing this, and I said ‘Oh man I gotta fly to Germany and get up on stage and maybe we should just do a video thing that intro’s that’ and Dave said ‘No you fucking won’t, you will fucking get on a plane and fly to Germany because the fans deserve it, they want to know this, and you gotta show that you love the show by taking that time to fly on the plane’ and I said-

Dave Wilson
My wife would say, ‘Being present matters’ and I remember, like everyone that comes. I like when the creators come and talk to you and speak from the heart; it shows that it’s not just another thing on the calendar.

TM
As soon as he said it, I knew he was right; there was no argument about it. I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going,’ ‘You’re right’

BR
Best thing you could have done, so thank you for that,

DW
Thank you for acknowledging it.

BR
Absolutely my pleasure; I figured I’d let Tyler go first, if that’s okay, we can get started,

Tyler Nethers
Yeah, guys, I know we’re short on time, I don’t want to drag anything out and take too much-

TM
You’re the last one, so if you do, it’s all right.

TN
Oh, perfect, thank you. So, obviously, Love, Death & Robots is anthology style, Secret Level is anthology style; what are some of the cons to doing anthology stories like that as opposed to doing singular stories and feature-length shoots?

TM
I would say that why I love anthology is because it’s like, every day is a different assignment, it’s a different task. If you’re going to do, I mean, look, Terminator is interesting, but try thinking about it for two years, seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, it’s a fucking intellectual desert after a while, and as much as you love it, it might not deserve that much of your cranial space. And with this, it’s like I sit down, and we get to pick these stories, and they’re wildly different. We get to work with a lot more different creative voices, and that makes the whole process a lot more interesting. And I just, I have, I love anthology because I love fantasy, I love science fiction, I love horror, and I love adventure, and, I couldn’t say I only want to do one genre for the rest of my life, so I love the options that anthology gives us.

DW
It is not dull, you’re never bored. I will say, the pros and cons are inherent in the concept, in that there’s something for everyone, which means some people will love some of the episodes and some people will be like, ‘Those weren’t for me.’ And that’s actually something we wanted to do from day one: it can’t be just shit, we want to see like, and it’s kind of amazing seeing folks react to them because they’re like, ‘I love this episode!’ Or they’re like, ‘Oh my god, you’ve disemboweled my childhood! I hate you!’ But that’s okay. And what I would say, what I love most with the anthology format, and, especially one with as rich a buffet of IP as we have, is that we get to take bigger swings than you usually would when somebody’s going, ‘Here’s 150 million dollars.’ Because with that 150 million dollars come a lot of guardrails. So we can take some bigger swings and hopefully inspire something more ambitious in the future.

TN
That’s perfect, so that kind of leads into where my second question was going. With some of the episodes, exactly what you said, some of them everyone seems to react very, very favorably toward, and then some of them it’s kind of like, maybe not so much. Do you think you have any interest in the future, taking some of the very successful ones and maybe exploring that property a little further, like, ‘Hey, Warhammer did amazing, so let’s do maybe three or four more episodes in the future,’ or just let it go where it goes.

DW
We don’t like to work with anyone twice (Laughs). No, of course, like, you mentioned Warhammer. I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, so if they rolled in and said we’d like to do some more, I’ll be the first in line.

TM
Dave mentioned it before, but it was almost 20 years ago today when Blur did the Warhammer 40k cinematic, and Dave did that, and it was one of the most memorable experiences in the studio for a lot of artists, and then we got a chance to do it again.

DW
We didn’t sit by for 20 years; we asked for 20 years, ‘Can we do more?’ but yeah, no, I love that, and I think it’s what’s great about it is, you know, it’s not just a proof of concept if you will for the audience it’s, you know, it’s ‘We’re gonna do it, here’s how we would do it, here’s the tone,’ you know, they already trust us I think, and that’s why we were able to get the series going, but I think it’s a nice way to make everyone feel comfortable that it’s not just, you know, we’re not crazy thinking that these things could be their own things. So, yes. Short answer: We’d love to do more.

TN
Excellent! Yeah, I was sold; the Warhammer one was one of my favorites. When I was going through and doing my review, in my notes, at the end, I think I just put ‘I want approximately a thousand more Warhammer episodes,’ and that’s how my notes ended. So that one, you guys, you fucking nailed it. It was phenomenal.

TM
That was all Dave.

DW
Thank you, thank you.

BR
Awesome! I, on the other hand, am a diehard Mega Man fan, and I was bawling like a child at the moment of the teaser and then seeing that episode, and then being more upset that it was over. The question I had for that was when we think about the resurgence of IPs that have been around for a long time that maybe don’t get the recognition they do when something is celebrated, like an anniversary. There is always a demand, you know. Something I’ve seen on social media is a lot of talk of ‘Oh my god, Mega Man needs, it needs something.’ You know, we’ve had stuff over the years, but it’s always been either overly cheesy or something that maybe didn’t come through; there’s been games that cancel things like that. Have you thought about, you know, if Capcom is embracing similar questions as far as taking that to the next level, helping maybe other IPs that you might love get a chance at, you know, a resurgence of interest? Like, I know you did Spelunky, and there are other indie IPs out there that have that potential. Is that something that’s crossed your mind, to be able to say, ‘Hey, this, we love this, nobody’s talking about it, let’s get some more love out there for it by creating something special’?

TM
I can tell you in, in doing these interviews, it’s been increasingly obvious to me that, you know, our thinking going in was that maybe the indies and the nostalgia titles would not be as interesting to the audience as the big AAA games that were out there and boy were we wrong about that, because we’ve just gotten a lot more interest there. On the flip side, that may be a negative, we’ll see, I think a lot of the game companies that, let’s just say there was a concern that if they put something out there for Megaman, or a game that wasn’t in existence that the fans would have a bit of a backlash, say ‘Hey, why don’t you have another Megaman game out there, or why don’t you have an Unreal Tournament game out there’ and that I think that was probably a very real fear. Hopefully, the fans see that it is not like somebody dismissing what they want but, rather, just maybe something that hasn’t happened yet. And if you want to give these guys a bonus question because we were late, feel free. (Laughs)

DW
We’re not going anywhere. (Laughs)

BR
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Tyler, if you don’t mind, I definitely wanted to bring up Borderlands if that’s okay. I just wanted to ask, obviously, you know, you did reshoots for the movie. What was it like working with Eli Roth, and since you are in the world of doing video game episodes now, is that an IP that maybe you’ve considered could potentially fit the Secret Level World?

TM
By the time I came on, it was really just me fighting fires and Eli was off doing his Thanksgiving movie, so he didn’t have time to engage, so it was really just me and the editor Julian Clark, who did Deadpool and Terminator with me trying to sort of pick up the pieces and accomplish the goal of just making things more cohesive across the board and reshoots are more of a surgical operation and, you know, my goal was twofold. One, I just want to help anyone’s video game adaptation be successful. Clearly, I didn’t accomplish that task here, but I tried and actually, I’m prouder of the movie, about how it turned out, and I think the movie deserved a little bit better, but whatever (laughs). And then secondly, I wanted to work with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, and, that was a great opportunity, so I enjoyed the fuck out of that, so there was that. What was the other question? Was there another one I missed? Oh, yeah, we did talk to Borderlands about that, let’s just say that we didn’t convince them to be in it, but there’s, maybe, if we get another season, we can convince them then. I love the IP, and think we could do something really interesting in animation for sure.

DW
Especially, yeah, there’s certain video games that I feel are best if they stay in animation, and I would. I’d actually put Borderlands in that category. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t swing for the fences in other ways, but yeah, even-

TM
Dave just watched it on the plane on the way down, and I know that because I sat next to him. (Laughs)

DW
(Laughing) You can’t say that, no, directors should never say that they watched anything on a plane, it’s like, no one wants to hear that (laughs)

TM
(Laughing) Well, it was doubly insulting because I was partially responsible for it, and you didn’t care enough to not watch it on the plane.

TN
That’s excellent, excellent. Well, thank you guys both, seriously, I appreciate it.

TM
You get another question, come on.

TN
Oh, okay, all right, I’ll take it. I actually have a question for you, Tim, on Neuromancer. Do we have anything? Is that coming? Is that happening? Do you have any details, or did it fall apart in the merger?

TM
Uh, yeah, it’s happening on Skydance; Skydance is making a television series which is, I think, on Apple, and yeah, it’ll be interesting, but it makes I’m sad because I had a fucking awesome script, but yes, it was lost in the Disney-Fox merger. But, no matter what, I got to talk to William Gibson on a regular basis for quite a while there. I really loved the scrip,t and it’s one of my favorite books; I’ve read it four or five times, and you know, and everything from getting to solve some problems like that I felt with the book, like you can’t set up a fight between the two best-the best ninja ever and the best street fighter ever-and then not have them fight. You have to solve that problem; and then things like little weird things, like Straylight was a sailboat that some friends of Bill’s sank in Vancouver Sound, or that Case is in the name of a pocket knife, and that’s where that came from, so it’s just like all these little tidbits that yeah, it’s great.

TN
That’s fantastic. I’m sorry that we don’t get to see your take on it, that was, I mean, one of the projects I was most excited for when it was announced, so yeah-

TM
Thank you, me too. I was brokenhearted, I really was. Yeah, C’est la vie.

TN
That’s how it goes, I guess.

TM
Yeah. Maybe we wouldn’t have done secret level if I had been off directing a Neuromancer movie, so-

BR
Yeah, that’s a good point.

TN
Well, either way, Secret Level is fantastic. Love, Death + Robots is fantastic, I love Terminator, and, Dave, –Bloodshot– pretty great.

BR
Thank you both, appreciate your time, have a great day!