He’s going to play a big part in 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' next year, but we’ve discovered that everyone’s favourite bin-shaped droid R2-D2 was almost a main character in ‘The Lego Movie’.

We caught up with the film’s writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who told us that Artoo was a key player in early drafts of the script.

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“He was a Batman-level character,” Miller tells us, referring to the Caped Crusader who in the film is one of hero Emmet’s core group of helpers.

Adds Lord, “We figured we could get R2-D2 because his voice wasn’t a human being.”

“A kid doesn’t have lawyers that won’t allow the toys to play together,” admits Miller, explaining that they wrote the film without worrying about which studios owned the rights to whom.

“Part of the appeal for us was that ‘Roger Rabbit’ thing that you can get these characters together that you couldn’t get in any other type of movie. Watching my own son play, he does put Batman on the Millennium Falcon and there’s no-one saying they take place in completely different times and galaxies.”

The filmmakers, who met at university, are now part of the Hollywood A-list, thanks also to the recent success of ‘21’ and ’22 Jump Street’. “We have an inadvertent studio,” says Lord, joking they are in the business of “self-hating franchises”. ‘The Lego Movie’ has become one of 2014’s biggest hits, has multiple sequels and spin-offs in the works and is being talked about as an Oscar contender.

“That wasn’t a hot topic [when we were making it],” laughs Lord. “We never once thought that this would be something people think about come awards season, but we did think about holding ourselves to that high standard.”

“I personally was nervous that people were going to discount it because it felt like a big toy advert,’ adds Miller.

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