July
27
Comic-Con: Miller Shows Some Spirit
Frank Miller's The Spirit may be too smart for the room. (Here's my interview with Miller.)
The footage for Miller’s homage to his comics mentor, the late Will Eisner, looked fun but strictly narrow niche, much the way Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse played best for folks who felt the same way about their B-movie inspirations.
Miller is a gifted, crafty storyteller/entertainer who clearly is having fun playing with his new medium while staying true to Eisner. “I grew up on Superboy, my love of telling stories derives from that,” said Miller at a director’s panel. “Any way I can explore the hero and bring him to life is another way to do my life’s passion. It’s my job to give you what you don’t ask for and don’t know you want.”
“We wanted the voice of the artist on the screen,” said producer Deborah Del Prete at The Spirit panel. “We went to Frank because of that vision.”
Miller embraced the advantages of his new medium, he said at the directors' panel. "I first went crazy with sound and movement. You don't understand how big that was. I was doing boxes with words over heads. My idea of an explosion was to write BOOM. I had some wonderful moments cutting shot to shot. Some aesthetics you develop translate beautifully into film."
When Samuel L. Jackson (The Octopus) kept demanding bigger and bigger guns, Miller asked the prop department to wire some guns together. “We made up the meanest, nastiest bad guns you’ve ever seen in your life,” said Miller. “When he holds them he looks like a robot transformer.”
Then Jackson had to work out in order to carry them. “I lost some weight that day,” he said. “I became a black skinhead.”
Lead Gabriel Macht plays a cop who comes back from the dead with some extra skills and juiced up pheromones, so that every woman he meets falls in love with him. While there are a bevy of bodacious babes (from Eva Mendes to Scarlett Johannson) in this stylized Sin City-style green-screen movie, and leads Macht and Jackson make powerful opponents, Lionsgate has some tricky marketing challenges ahead on this pic, which opens Christmas Day.
Miller says he dropped a half-finished graphic novel to work on this movie. According to Zack Snyder, Miller is also working on the prequel to 300, about an historic Spartan battle set shortly after the Battle of Thermopylae. Miller handed in the script for Sin City 2 some time back. I asked Rodriguez what was going on with that. Clearly the Weinsteins did not encourage him to rush ahead with that one, and he’s put it on a back burner in favor of something else, he said.
Here's The Spirit trailer.
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