Frank Miller Pt 2: BATMAN, SIN CITY and more
THE BEAT: Let's talk about All-Star Batman and Robin a little bit. I got the impression that if you walk out of BATMAN BEGINS, if you want to see Batman and Robin running around, this will be a good starting place. Is that part of your approach to it?
FRANK MILLER: They really wanted this book out of me, and Jim [Lee] and I have been wanting to work together. I thought it would be a lot of fun. I've insisted that the title be Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. I want „The Boy Wonder“ part in because the way I'm structuring it now Robin is going to be the audience's character. Batman is a rather remote scary guy.
THE BEAT: Is it hard to go back to these characters?
MILLER: It's fun, my main problem is that I don't read much superhero stuff. I'm always in danger of repeating what somebody else has done. So I count on them to tell me. I mean, I want to mine the old stuff. I'm going through the archive editions from the 40s. I've got my own specific ideas of where this is going, but I might as well be informed. It's just that I don't want to get mired in DC continuity. This is like Batman: Year 1 1/2. He's still quite young. But Robin is going to be a kid.
THE BEAT: He's fresh from the circus.
MILLER: [Laughs] Yeah. He's kind of sticking to Batman's boot like a wad of gum. He just can't shake this kid. I'm treating this like the first Batman book you ever read. I got some good training on how to do that particularly from Jim Shooter in the olden days. When I took on Daredevil he had these god-awful typeset captions at the start of every issue so you'd know who the characters were, and they were just ghastly. I said to him, I'll tell everybody what they need to know in the first three pages, if you'll get rid of these things. But it became habit.
THE BEAT: Dark Horse is releasing all seven SIN CITY graphic novels in a new, smaller format. Are you hoping for a new audience for them now?
MILLER: I thought it was time for a relaunch. It was also an opportunity to sucker Chip Kidd into working with me. I like the [smaller] format better for the books, it makes them more intimate. And as crass as it sounds, it means you can put them in your purse.
THE BEAT: You didn't have any qualms about the smaller size?
MILLER: It was my idea.
THE BEAT: What about the future of SIN CITY comics. You've always said you had a few more stories up your sleeve.
MILLER: Oh yeah. I think that SIN CITY in a way is like my home. I may be the prodigal son but I've got more stories and I'm planning them. The Sin City stories take a long time to plot. They're very emotionally intense and I'm guiding these characters that nobody has ever touched and it's not the same as playing with other people's toys. I have a story about Nancy Callahan that I think will break your heart. But it's not ready yet. I've got notepads filled but I don't have the next real run of stories. I think what I'm going to do is a run of short stories with different characters for each one.
THE BEAT: So you have no immediate plans for a return?
MILLER: No, it's still a little vague. When these things pull together it goes from a dead stop to suddenly roaring together. Right now it's percolating.
THE BEAT: How long had you wanted to do Sin City? You talked about coming from Vermont and learning to do superheroes. Was it something you always wanted to do?
MILLER: When I was an amateur in my teens, I just started drawing crime comics. I didn't have the name „Sin City“ or anything, but the sensibility was starting to form. Of course, there's nothing like life experience and research and all that to make something really take form. I always loved the feel and the look of crime fiction. It's maybe overly simplistic but in a lot of ways when I came up with Sin City I was thinking what's really fun to draw, because that's what fun to look at. And also, what do I really like? It really did boil down to tough guys, vintage cars and beautiful women.
THE BEAT: Visually it looks like it was drawn in a night of passion. [General laughter] There's such a fever dream component to it all. Is it hard to conjure that up?
MILLER: It's a reduction process. One of my favorite ones is „Family Values“ because it takes place in an hour or two and it just never lets up. It started out as a much more complex story but as I reduced it, and turned it into what it became I was really happy with that. I don't want SIN CITY stories to sprawl, they're very intimate stories. I don't mean intimate in a good way always. But once I started drawing Miho on roller blades I said, I think this is my story because she looks cool. I do tend to start out with notes for much more complex stories than I wind up doing.
THE BEAT: Is it storytelling and visual reduction as well?
MILLER: If you look at my pencil drawings and my inks you'll see a lot more pencil drawings than there are inks. A lot of stuff just gets left out and other things I realize, sure, they might look good but they're not telling the story.
THE BEAT: Well it's so intense, unbelievably so. Were there any hard parts in transferring the look of the comics to the semi-real world of the movie? Were there any things that didn't work or were just really hard to solve?
MILLER: Hm. There were along the way. But because of the CGI stuff I got my flying cars. I got Old Town. And the action sequences are pretty close. I'm not trying to shine you on, but the CGI makes it so that you're working with actors but you're essentially doing animation and everything behind the actors is made up, like drawing. So it's a startling process to be part of, because there was this airplane hanger, and working with actors and shooting this--I was in this obnoxious green room. Everything was green and so everything looked terrible until I went to the B&W monitors. And Robert [Rodriguez] had this all figured out. I don't know how his retinas stood being cameraman all that time. But now I'm seeing the results of it and I'm realizing how much of the work was done was after our work.
THE BEAT: SIN CITY is one of the first movies, like SKY CAPTAIN, to be made with so much of everything made up in green screen. I guess you could say George Lucas is doing it that way, but he's not really doing it for the same reasons. I know for the actors sometimes this process is a little bit hard.
MILLER: A lot of them really dug it. Some were hating it especially, the ones who had to work in separate weeks on the same scene. We have a scene between Rutger Hauer and Mickey Rourke where you'd swear they were in the same room and they were done weeks and weeks apart.
THE BEAT: The process itself can be used for anything. If they had tried to build sets for it would probably have cost a lot more than $40 million.
MILLER: And it also would have ended up looking like an episode of Kojak.
THE BEAT: Do you think – granted this is your first movie and you're doing it in this revolutionary kind of style – but do you think that it's an application that will catch on?
MILLER: I hope so, because it's a hell of a lot of fun. And it's great to look at, too. I also want to do some straight up animation. I'm talking about one project with some people. I think it would be fun to do an animated movie, anime style.
THE BEAT: This is obviously a dream project in working with somebody who has so much respect for the source material and your vision. So what's your new dream project?
MILLER: Oh jeez…I don't know. There are so many. I'm finishing the next Batman book [HOLY TERROR, BATMAN] and I want to do some more SIN CITY. My next dream project is one I can't really talk about. It's a new series I'm developing that will essentially be my Corto Maltese.
THE BEAT: That would be awesome. Hey, there's one question I have to ask for all the loyal BEAT readers. Wh-what was it like to work with…Clive Owen?
MILLER: [Laughs] Well…[Just then the tape malfunctioned. Drat.]
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