Everyone has habits related to their favorite game developer. Since the mid-1990s, the first thing I'd do upon popping a new CD-ROM from Blizzard Entertainment into my PC was watch the trailers for upcoming games. Yes, even before installing the game for which I'd been waiting months, if not years, and from which I'd torn and discarded shrink wrap on my bedroom floor. Blizzard's cinematics were so impressive that I let always treated my senses to the spectacle of what was coming next before turning my attention to the game in my disc drive.

Blur isn't a game developer, but the sight of its logo flashing across my screen inspires that same giddy sense of anticipation. Founded in 1995, Blur has built a reputation as a premiere cinematics and animation studio in the film and game industries. I may not be interested in the game that follows Blur's trailer, but I know the trailer itself will make my jaw drop.

From medical videos on sexually transmitted diseases to watching with pride as Microsoft's Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley took the stage to announce Xbox while using one of Blur's videos as a showpiece to demonstrate the console's capabilities, studio co-founder and Hollywood film director Tim Miller is living the dream. For him, that dream is "making cool shit," whether that's an executive producer role on 2020's Sonic the Hedgehog movie adaptation, directing on the set of Terminator: Dark Fate, or, back in 2000, creating a computer-generated film at the behest of Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley, who called Tim and asked for a miracle: A jaw-dropping video in three weeks, when he and Bill Gates were scheduled to take the stage at the Game Developers Conference and announce Microsoft's first game console.

Tim and I talked for an hour about the opportunity to become part of Xbox history, the studio's lean years, his thoughts on building a true work family, our mutual love of reading, and more.

David L. Craddock: Okay, we're going to talk video games, but first, you have to tell me about your home library. I could stare at that wall of books all day.

Tim Miller: I'm actually at Blur. It's great, isn't it? My wife made that for me. We have 25,000 square feet of almost empty space now that almost everyone’s working offsite during the pandemic. I think there are four other people who come in with any regularity; it's often me here by myself. I love the place. It's a great studio.

Craddock: Do you spend a lot of time reading?

Miller: I'm a huge reader. The bottom part is art books; everything above that is comics. Then I have on my desk, which you can't see over here--I'll turn a bit--there's a stack of regular books, although I haven't read a non-Kindle book in maybe 10 years. I love my Kindle.

Craddock: It's so nice. You can take an entire library with you wherever you are, even on your phone. I'm in the doctor's office in the lobby, reading a Kindle book on my phone. I'm just getting into manga. My wife shows me animes, and I'm a big Dark Souls fan, and I know Hidetaka Miyazaki has said Berserk was a big influence. I bought the collector's edition and have it sitting here—unopened, because I've been working on this Xbox feature for so long, but I'm looking forward to digging into it.

Miller: Man. Dark Souls. You're a masochist.

Craddock: Yeah. I've played literally thousands of hours of all those games. I really enjoy them.

Miller: We did some of the cinematics—I directed one for Dark Souls 2.

Craddock: That's my favorite one. I'm a vocal minority, but I love Dark Souls 2. The cinematics and everything were really cool.

Miller: Sadly, I kind of dropped off the video game wagon. We used to have daily Quake games. Descent was really big; Duke Nukem. Then it transitioned into the newer Wolfenstein, but it was more strategy. I just want to get in and shoot people. So I kind of quit playing for a while, and then I'm usually busy. If I do have downtime, I almost always choose a book.

Craddock: I'm the same way. I use Goodreads to keep track of my yearly reads, and I review everything I read just for the mental exercise as a writer, getting down my thoughts. Right now I'm thinking, I've only read 60 books this year. I'm behind. Not that I want to gamify everything, but I usually read closer to 100. Writing and reading--not a bad way to spend life.

Miller: I do make a list of what I read and send it to all the artists. I'll send you my book list. My reviews are often very short. I feel like, with the younger folks here, it's so hard to find great books, and I've read so much that I feel like I could keep someone in good books for years at a time. It's subjective, but my dad gave me John Carter Mars in the fifth grade and finished it and begged, "What happens next?!" I haven't stopped since.

Craddock: I review books because—and I've found the same thing about video games—I'll play a game, and then a year, five years, 10 years later I'll look at it and go, "Have I played that? Did I like it?" I store all my book reviews in a Google Doc, just to get thoughts down.

Miller: While we're on the subject, the first Xbox [cinematic] that was done for Seamus [Blackley], we were able to do it so fast in part because I had optioned this book called Mindbridge by Joe Halderman. It was the first book I'd ever optioned. These characters go around in these big suits; TAMER suits they're called. We had been building this TAMER suit because we were going to do a proof of concept of Mindbridge. That’s when Seamus called and said, "I've got three weeks. What can you do?"

Ninety-nine percent of that decision was based on the fact that we already had this model built and rigged. So I wrote something short that I knew we could do. It all came from my love of books.

Craddock: I'd like to go back. Blur is one of those studios where I always recognize the logo because I've loved your cinematics in games for years. I didn't realize you had also done in the film industry, so this conversation so far--here comes a book joke--has been a prologue.

Miller: [laughs]

Craddock: Chapter one is, how did you get started in film and animation?

Miller: I was trained as an illustrator. I wanted to do editorial illustration and I wanted to write comic books, which I tried to do in New York but couldn't get a job. Nor could I get much of a job doing illustration. I waited on lots of tables; I worked at a bookstore at night. Eventually, I stumbled into a job in Baltimore that made medical films. They had a thing called a Dubner 20k graphics computer. This was back in '89 or something. It was a 256-color paint system, and they said, "Could you learn how to use this thing and help us make medical films?" I'm like, "Sure. I'm a smart guy. I can do that."

As I learned this program, I thought, “Oh my god, this is the greatest art tool in the history of the world!” It blended in with my nerdy love of sci-fi and I felt like I was on the cutting-edge, I’m Case in Neuromancer, hacking cyberspace. I fell in love with the medium and it completely obsessed me. It was the dawn of the computer-graphics age and every year felt like a new age - the work kept getting better and better. The first film I ever directed was called, "So You Have an STD."

Craddock: [laughs]

Miller: But I left there after about a year and went back to Washington, D.C., where I'm from, and worked at a place called Capital Video, doing National Geographic openings and graphic design on the computer. I learned this other French computer system and came out to Las Vegas to demo it at NAB where I got a job offer in L.A. At the time, that was the computer graphics mecca. I moved here to work at a post production house in Hollywood that did mostly commercials. Not HUGE commercials at first, more like Spanish Pampers commercials. But it was fascinating at the time because I was learning so much, you know?

Craddock: When you set out to found Blur, did you have that mission statement in mind: "We're going to make animations and cinematics." Or did that happen organically?

Miller: It was Cat Chapman who was our department secretary/producer at Sony; and David Stinnett, who was another animator at Sony. David's a super nerd; we bonded on that level. We had talked to a couple other people in the department--it was originally going to be five of us--but when they realized we we couldn’t take salaries for six months to a year, they said, "Yeah, fuck that." So it was just the three of us.

It's really still the mission statement now- "Make cool shit." I’m often asked for a more elaborate strategy, but I don’t have one. I just want to make cool shit." [laughs] We took anything that was interesting, but around year two or three, this guy, Trey Watkins came to meet with us. I don't know how he found us. I think this was before the Xbox project. Trey was doing a game called Dark Reign, and another company had been doing cinematics for him but it hadn’t worked out. He said something like, "I had $120,000, but now I've got $40,000. Can you do something?"

We did, and it didn't suck. Looking at it now, it's primitive, but at the time it was pretty cool. So we started actively looking for more that type of work. And Trey also brought us Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was really cool. But the great thing about the games industry, aside from generally great people... was that people would come to us and say, "We just want to do something cool for our game. Help us." A lot of that help was storytelling, which is what I love.

It was an opportunity to make little movies. It's not film effects where somebody's already decided what the story is, how the shots are lit, what the character says. And it's not a commercial where it's 30 to 60 seconds of content. Game cinematics allowed us to tell stories, so we became known as a company that could pick up the ball and run with it instead of needing to be told what to do. We leveled up from there.

Craddock: So you grew primarily through word of mouth, developers recommending you to other developers?

Miller: I can tell you that the first six months--it's burned into my brain--was Cat Chapman going, "Hi, I'm Cat Chapman. I'm the producer of a new company called Blur Studio in Venice." Then the next call, and the next call. But I've always been a bit of a networker. We had no sales department for the first 16 years of Blur; it was all me going, "Oh, that project looks cool. I want to work on that." I'd find out who I needed to call, and dial them up, "Hey, I'm Tim Miller. I would love to help with this LEGO thing. It looks really cool."

Or I’d see a game with mechs - I love mechs - so I'd call and ask, "What can we do?" It was all driven by a passion, but we would do anything I felt the artists could get excited about. I didn't want to give an artist work that they didn't care about doing. And I don't care about too much money, so we were always riding on the edge of insolvency. At least twice a year for the first 16 years of Blur, I would have to make a list of who we’d have to let go if certain jobs don't come in. We've never done layoffs, though; even now, the 120 people who should be in the studio with me are all working from home. We've been very lucky.

Craddock: My breakout books were a trilogy about the history of Blizzard. I've had people ask, "How'd you talk with so-and-so?" I just emailed them. I just called them. It's funny that people are surprised when you just say you reached out and asked someone. You probably never expected to hear from some dude over LinkedIn: "Hey, can I talk to you about Blur's Xbox cinematic?"

Miller: [laughs]

Craddock: If you just reach out and ask, most people will say, "Yeah, I'll talk about that."

Miller: I do that with authors. If I'm interested in a book, I want to talk to the author directly. I'll make contact directly so I can show my enthusiasm. It’s always nice to hear, and it's genuine. Later, you can get to the agents.

I've managed to befriend a few authors over the years like Joe Abercrombie and China Miéville. Getting to know William Gibson was amazing and he introduced me to Bruce Sterling. John Scalzi’s fantastic. Joe Halderman and his wife, Gay, took me to the Nebula awards (twice) and Gay introduced me to everybody. Even Ray Bradbury! I went last year when Gibson got the Grand Master award and got to sit at his table. I get to talk to Greg Benford, David Brin, etc. etc. so many authors whose work I love. It's the greatest thing.

Craddock: How'd you decide on Blur as the name?

Miller: When we had those original five people, we went out to lunch, and said, "Anybody can submit a name." If nobody hated it--it stayed on the list. We came away with a list of names and voted on it and the winner was Spiral Blur. They voted me president of this company-to-be at this meeting and when I went home and told my wife, Jennifer, "Okay, the name of the company is Spiral Blur." She said, "That's a stupid name Tim. You can't do that."

Cat Chapman was already down registering our company. So I called her and said, "Cat, my first executive decision is to overrule all of you because my wife tells me to. The name should just be Blur."

Craddock: Already throwing your weight around?

Miller: [laughs] I know. That wasn’t the last time I had to change course from a stupid idea.

Craddock: Did you want to be president of a company? Did you worry that would get in the way of being creative?

Miller: No. Yes. [laughs] I mean, I didn't want to run a company, and yes, I do think it gets in the way of creativity. There's a whole book to be written on that topic. First of all, everybody thinks, You're an entrepreneur! You must have always wanted to be that! Well, no, I didn't. I just wanted to work on interesting things, and people in charge of companies seemed to care more about money than they did about interesting things. So I thought, Well, if I own a company and I care about interesting things, money can take a backseat.

All the while, I believed that if you do good work, money will take care of itself somehow. Which is true-ish. I felt like if I wanted to control the work I do, I have to own the company. Then the truth starts to seep in as you hire people. Everybody thinks “the boss” gets to do whatever they want. Well, you don't. If you're not a gigantic asshole, the first thing you learn is, "I need to give all the good stuff to the employees and take the shitty projects. Because if they're not happy, they'll quit and go somewhere else."

So you end up doing the shitty shots. For instance on a game called Interstate 77 we underbid the cinematics - badly. We were doing 11 minutes and ran out of budget with six minutes of animation still to go. So every night after my regular assignments at Blur, I'd animate shots on I77. I did the whole six minutes by myself over four months. If you didn't own the company, you’d never do anything stupid like that.

So running a company is a mixed bag. Plus there's the fear of not being able to take care of everybody. But there's also joy. A lot of artists have worked here over the years and generally, we get a lot of love from them. Some tell us it's the best place they ever worked. We’ve tried to create a family. You definitely have to turn the other cheek every once in a while though and it’s confusing at times.

For instance, once we had two guys who sat next to each other in our modeling department. They both quit within a week of each other. One guy does his exit interview and says, "This is the worst place I've ever worked. It's like the Ninth Circle of Hell. I hate it." The other guy says, "Best place I've ever worked. The only reason I'm leaving is because a game company is offering me $10,000 more and I need to take it for my family."

How do you run a company where those two different experiences exist simultaneously? They're working on the same projects with the same people, yet one person's experience is, "Ninth Circle of Hell"; the other's is, “Great!”. Over time, you stop sweating it and just think, "I do the best I can." Sometimes it's not the best thing for everybody, but we're not doing this to cheat people." I don't drive a fancy car. Actually, I don't drive any car because mine was stolen yesterday - ha! But before that, I drove a Miata.

I remember another CG company started nearby in the late 90’s and somebody told me their animators had gone on half pay, while their owner drove up in a new Porsche. I actually commented to someone who was friends with the owner and he said, "Well, it's a lease." Yeah, right, not a good way to run a company. I'm a socialist at heart.

Craddock: That's something you hear a lot of company leaders say: "We're like a family." Usually, that's some marketing line. I'm not accusing you of that, but I'm genuinely curious what you feel is involved in making a workplace more like a family? How does Blur do that?

Miller: There are so many ways. In the old days, we tried to give out bonuses when we could; we felt that was important. But study after study shows people don’t really don't value that and we saw that was mostly true. We would give out big bonuses some years and people would say, "Yeah, well, I worked extra so I deserve it." The only bonus I ever got -and I’ve always worked hard- was a cheese log one Christmas.

We're also very open with employees. We have staff meetings where we tell them what's going on. We care about what they work on. We're trying to help folks out through the Covid lockdowns so they don’t go crazy. We've never laid anybody off, even when it costs a lot of money to retain staff through thin times. I think it comes down to what your attitude is. Do you value these people or not? We’ve always cared if folks are happy, even when we had a reputation as a sweatshop - which we definitely did when I was in charge. But it was because we wanted to do better work than our clients could afford to pay us for. I was there 100 hours a week with everybody else in the trenches. At the time, it made the long hours sort of okay. And I wasn't driving home in a Porsche.

But ["like family"] is overused, probably.

Craddock: 2020 feels like a litmus test for a lot of companies. How flexible are they? How much are they going to work with me with all this shit going on?

Miller: My wife, Jennifer Miller, went into action mode. As soon as all the pandemic stuff started, she made sure we could work from home and people could take care of their families. We never made a mandate of, "You have to come back to work on site." We’ve tried to evolve and be flexible, we just sent out an email, "We don't know when this will end, but for the next six months at least, if you need to move out of L.A., your job is safe."

On the reverse side, you don't always get the respect back and you just have to accept that.

I remember an argument with an employee after an artist left. I'm complaining because I’m a whiner, "Fuck, man. We paid for his move to come out here from the east coast. He's been here less than a year, and he goes to Blizzard!" The artist I was talking to says, "Tim, he's getting another 15K a year from them. Why do you take this shit so personally? That's bullshit."

I said, "Let me give you an example. Say there's a kid coming out of college who’s amazing and I can get him for $15K less than I pay you. So I fire you and hire that kid. What would you think of me?" He said, "That would be a dick move!" To which I said, "Why is it a dick move for me, but not for the artist who just left? We moved him and his family out here and he leaves the first chance he gets. Why isn't that a dick move?" No answer.

Craddock: I believe you worked on two projects related to the Xbox. First, the logo at the console's startup, correct?

Miller: We did some logo designs, but I don't think ours was the one that won. We also worked on some interface designs.

Craddock: We discussed this a bit earlier, but I'd like to start from the beginning. How did your involvement with the Xbox begin?

Miller: It was Seamus Blackley who came to us and said, "Bill Gates is going to announce the Xbox in three weeks on stage, and I need something to play behind him. What can you do? I hear you guys are the Navy SEALs of 3D Studio Max." So we scrambled to put that piece together with Raven and the robot. Microsoft loved the video

And they liked working with us. Then Horace [Luke] called us about the logo stuff. But I don't think that went anywhere other than some prototype designs. My wife, who runs the company now, is a brilliant designer and handled most of the logo exploration. She joined in year three because she said, "I'm never going to see you unless I come and work at Blur."

I came up with a lot of interface ideas too but I'm not a designer, so they were more illustrative, conceptual ideas. I don't think any of that was useful.

Craddock: So Seamus calls and says what he needs. The thought process for Raven and the robot was connected to the Mindbridge video we discussed earlier, correct?

Miller: It was literally, "What can you do in three weeks?" We'd been doing that test for Mindbridge, and in that book, people get into these robots called TAMERS to explore other planets. We had the robot built, and we had a 3D model of Raven’s head. We quickly designed the rest of her body and did some mocap super-quickly. I wrote it out [for Seamus]: "Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have the robot come out and stomp around, and then it'll split and the girl will come out and she's controlling the robot." Seamus was like, "Okay, great, go."

We mocapped it, and we worked with this composer named David Norland, who did some fantastic music. It's funny how you remember these moments in time: The final version was playing on our PVR after a horrendous three weeks of long nights. Do you remember those PVR things? They're little disc recorders. The coolest things ever. Anyway, it's playing back, and there's this shot where the camera swoops down in a big arc as Raven's controlling the mech, and it was just so perfect. The music was perfect; the robot was super-cool; Raven looked badass. Everything I wanted in life was on the screen right there. I thought, “I'm living the dream right here!”

I even started crying, which is not saying much; I get emotional easily and cry all the time. Anyway, it was one of the first times as an owner of Blur that I felt, Wow. We're doing cool shit.

Craddock: That's significant because for four or five years at that stage, you'd gotten to work on significant projects like Wolfenstein. What do you think it was about that moment that really drove home your reality for you?

Miller: There was the not-to-be-overlooked effect of working really hard to achieve something that people thought might not be possible. There's a value to suffering for art sometimes. That was one of those moments. We had suffered. Not for long, but the accomplishment meant something. I tell our artists all the time: "I know you're tired right now, but you will look back on this and remember it with far more pride than the five easy projects last year where you didn't have to work late nights."

And that's true, but it only works in hindsight.

Craddock: Besides Seamus needing something in three weeks, were there any other parameters? Did you know, for instance, what the Xbox specs would be so you could create something without giving false impressions of what the console could do?

Miller: I can't remember what the poly count was; half a million or something. We stayed within the Xbox poly count limit, and the number of shadow-casting light sources the hardware could do. I think it was three; don't test me on that. They wanted to be able to say, "This is pre-rendered but is within the technical specifications of what the Xbox will be able to do in real-time." Later they even recreated our piece for a real-time demo.

Craddock: You mentioned being emotional, and that resonates with me. I think a lot of creative people are emotional whether they want to be or not; when you're pouring yourself into something, seeing it come to fruition, regardless of whether it goes anywhere, is a pretty powerful feeling. Did you get to see the fruits of your labor at the conference where Bill Gates and Seamus showed this thing?

Miller: [shakes head] I don't remember why, but I didn't go. I don't remember wanting to go and not being allowed. I've been to far more E3s; I think I've only been to GDC four or five times. I've gone to a lot more SIGGRAPHs.

Seamus was cool and we got along well. We still talk from time to time. I'm friends with Neal Stephenson as is Seamus and Neal was telling me some bizarre, ancient ritual with horseshoes Seamus did for his wedding in Ireland, Seamus was always an interesting guy.

Nobody viewed Microsoft as being able to compete in the console business at the time, but in hindsight, it seemed to make perfect sense. Seamus was also responsible for another big relationship in my life, which continues today: he introduced me to David Fincher. We're doing Love, Death, and Robots right now for Netflix, and that started because David wanted to do a game about what would happen if a 12.0 earthquake hit L.A. You're a FedEx guy delivering a package downtown when an earthquake hits and you have to get out. Seamus said, "David, you should do a proof of concept and the people who we should go to for that is Blur."

He brought David down, and we bonded over a love of animation. He really liked the studio and that family atmosphere. Since then he’s helped me with a ton of projects. We tried to get a Heavy Metal film made for years; I did 40 meetings with David with all the top people at the studios. It was great because David’s the alpha dog, so I'd get to sit back and watch how the relationships work. Eventually, when it came time for me to pitch movies, I was sort of a known quantity. I was a guy that David Fincher had said, "This dude sort of has his shit together and is somebody I want to be in business with."

So I hit "get mail" one morning, and 600 emails flood my inbox, 400 of which are, "You're the biggest asshole in the universe," and the other 200 are, "You're my hero." The guy had watched a My Simon commercial Blur did some animation on and tracked us down and emailed, "I found this commercial really annoying and unpleasant. What were you thinking?"

So I write back, "Thank you very much for your critique, Mr. so-and-so. First of all, did you get entirely bored with masturbation and decide to write this email?" It went downhill from there. I have a sophomoric sense of humor at BEST and I was just trying to get a laugh from the other animators. We were only 16 or 20 people back then. Then it went to Fucked Company, and then Salon picked it up,. and for about three days I thought I'd destroyed my company.

Craddock: Was your wife involved with the company at this point? You mentioned her running it, and I can only imagine what she must have thought about this situation.

Miller: Well, it was just another in a long string of disappointments by me. [laughs] So, you know. I don’t have the best filter. I do try to be more careful these days. When we were shooting Terminator [Dark Fate], Mackenzie Davis and I would have some lively debates and she’d often explain why something I’d said was insensitive. And she was always right.

So I try harder. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

Craddock: I've read studies that say people who read more are more empathetic and willing to grow. So, you and I are very thoughtful, erudite gentlemen.

Miller: I like that. I read yesterday that for introverts who read a lot, it’s their way of building a broad set of experiences. There was an article about how Steve Jobs said that if you want to differentiate yourself, go to a foreign country and have experiences that are unique or at least not normal. Readers do that by experiencing [events, people, and places] vicariously.

I cannot tell you the value I feel I’ve gotten from being a reader - especially when it comes to ideas. If I had a dollar every time I’ve run into a problem and thought, “hold on, I read a scene in a book where this happened and,” I have a store of problem-solving ideas based on the hundreds of books I've read, and I'm not afraid to steal from my betters.

Craddock: Back to Xbox, what did getting to work on not only a new console, but the first console made by Microsoft, mean for you and for Blur at that point in its history?

Miller: We were still 16 to 20 people in a building of about 4,000 square feet. It was a nice size. I can tell you that when Microsoft optioned Raven and Rex, it was the first time somebody had given us money for nothing. That was an eye opener. I was like, "Hey, original content is great!" Not because I care about money, but I care about what money represents in terms of the company. I'm not a worrier, but there's always the concern of, how are we going to make payroll?

Every time you make a connection, whether it's a big game company like EA or Ubisoft, or Microsoft, you feel like, Okay, this is good. We’re going to build on this relationship. They've got a lot of stuff coming, and I can keep work coming in the door. You feel like you're building momentum. Back then, every project felt like that, but Xbox was the biggest thing we'd done by far. Until then, it'd been little bits and pieces. Working on Xbox felt like we were on a much bigger stage.

I always felt this sense of personal creative destiny, which is total ego bullshit of course. But I thought, "All right, now we're going to really do something cool!"

Craddock: Final question. Top five favorite books, but they can be in any order except for number one.

Miller: Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie. Count Zero by William Gibson, the second book in the Sprawl series. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Beat the Quarters by C. S. Forrester. Best Served Cold and Count Zero might be a tie. Fantasy and sci-fi are at war in my head. And Best Served Cold must be listened to on Audible.

Craddock: You recommend the audiobook?

Miller: The guy who reads it -Steven Pacey- is amazing. I want to have his baby. I've listened to his books so many times. He’s helping me on a story for Love, Death & Robots this year.

It’s a story that I’ve always loved, but could never get the rights for. I finally dug up an illustration I'd done-from the story- for a fan magazine in high school. It was Richard Kadrey talking about J. G. Ballard’s work. I hoped that would show just how much and how long I’d loved the story and that I'm not just some Hollywood guy. And it worked, finally, they let me have it.