Millar Light

By this time you will have read many interviews with Mark Millar, author of the comic books Kick-Ass, Wanted, The Ultimates: The Avengers, Civil Wars, Nemesis and others, who was in Manila last month to do a signing for National Book Store.

Well, here’s yet another Mark Millar interview. We were his last appointment on that Saturday, and between his jet lag and a bottle of Shiraz our half-hour chat about comics turned into a two-hour conversation about everything.

 PHILIPPINE STAR: When Filipino viewers saw Hit Girl wielding a balisong in the Kick-Ass movie they went nuts. Did you know anything about Filipino weapons when you wrote Kick-Ass?

 MARK MILLAR: I just googled “weapons” and it came up. Johnny (John Romita, Jr, penciler and co-creator of Kick-Ass) is a weapons expert, he’s Italian, he’s probably killed lots of people and everything. And we had a stuntman who was playing Hit Girl was probably Filipino, he was this tiny, tiny guy wearing the wig.

When you say you’re actively involved in screen adaptations of your work, does that include casting? Were you the genius who got McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to play Red Mist?

I’m sort of Forrest Gump, the lucky guy who’s in the right place at the right time. I think the secret is to surround yourself with really brilliant people. With Matthew Vaughn directing, Jane (Goldman) writing, you’re bound to have something great. Immediately you’re in a very safe place.

Christopher Mintz-Plasse is going to do horrible, gruesome things in Kick-Ass 2. He said to me about three years ago that while he loved being McLovin, it’s hard for an actor to escape a role where people identify him as the character. He said, “I’d like people to see me as threatening, not as McLovin.” Well look how he’s identified on my phone (Shows us his phone directory: McLovin). 

He’s a very good actor so deserves to get new roles. His name changes from Red Mist in the second Kick-Ass movie because he’s decided to become the ultimate supervillain. He said he wants to be scarier than Heath Ledger as The Joker so he becomes the character known as The (unprintable) and he does the most terrible things. He’s the worst super-villain you’ve ever seen in a superhero movie.

Have you seen a movie called Once Upon A Time In The West where Henry Fonda, who’s the ultimate good guy, shoots a child? The crowd gasps out loud. I think when you see an actor you love do something terrible it’s 10 times more exciting. When you get an evil-looking guy doing something terrible you kind of expect it, but when the sweetest guy in the world does stuff that’s terrifying…

The movie Wanted (starring James MacAvoy and Angelina Jolie) was very different from the comics you wrote.

The second half of the movie has nothing to do with the comics at all. It’s great because I didn’t write it as a movie, I wrote it as a comic. If they’d made a movie of the comic it would’ve been flat. The comic has a lot of in-jokes that require a deep knowledge of comics so (the moviegoer) might not get into it. The hundred or so people who’d read the comics would go, “Oh, I get it” while everyone else would go, “What the hell is that?”

When Universal approached me about doing Wanted and said they were attaching this mad Russian genius (Timur Bekmambetov) to direct I said, “Are you sure?” Then they showed me some stuff he’d done on the computer and it was the most amazing stuff. He has an eye that he brought to the project. He’s just done Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and then we’re going to do something together again.

Comic book fanboys and girls are very protective of your work.

They were ready to destroy the movie. Just before it came out they were like, “We hear changes were made to the second half, what do you think?” I said I was happy with them, they worked very well and they all kind of relaxed. It’s so nice that your audience is so protective of you.

It’s the same with other writers. With Watchmen, as soon as they heard Alan Moore was unhappy — when he said, “Kill” — all the fans killed the movie on his behalf. The power the creators have now, with their vocal fan base online, is wonderful. I love the democratization that the Internet has wrought.

I’ll give you an example. Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News — I saw him at the San Diego Comic-Con. He was sitting back and there were three famous directors — one talking to him, two waiting to talk to him. They were hanging over him like he was the Baby Jesus and they were the Three Kings with gifts. I thought, that’s how powerful the Internet has made the individual. In the past these guys would be queuing up to talk to the film reviewer of the New Yorker, the New York Times, and now critics online are as vocal and influential as any of them. The individual has been empowered by the Internet. If you have a website you’re probably reaching more of their demographic that the traditional outlets.

I’m happy that guys like us who in the past were marginalized have become an important community. In 1978, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the men who created Superman, weren’t even invited to the premiere of the movie. There had to be a campaign to get them to the premiere. Now that would never happen. The producers would be assassinated for even considering such a thing.

The Avengers movie was based in large part on your work on The Ultimates. Were you a consultant on the movie?

No, I was leaving Marvel by that point. I’d done all my Ultimates stuff in 2001-2006, so they had our books there. When Kevin (Smith, the director) saw The Ultimates he said, “Okay, I get how The Avengers can be a movie.” Before that everyone thought a movie couldn’t be made because Thor seemed quaint and why would Captain America and Iron Man get together? But The Ultimates brought them together under the S.H.I.E.L.D. banner and Kevin said, “I get it, an external threat brings them together.”

They do that a lot in the movies, like the Spider-Man movies have stuff from the old Spider-Man comics and Tim Burton’s Batman had a lot of things from Alan Moore’s Killing Joke… 

The Ultimates collection even has an introduction by Joss Whedon.

Yeah, obviously at the time we had no idea.

And the casting of Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury was totally your idea.

It was 2001 when we came up with that.

Do you prefer the term “comics” or “graphic novels”?

Comics. “Graphic novel” sounds like it’s ashamed to be a comic.

Are there comic book writers who turn you into a gibbering fanboy?

I see Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Stan Lee as my parents and grandparents. Stan is my hero; as a kid his was the first name I remembered from all the comics I read.

I’ve never met Alan Moore. 25 years ago when I was a schoolboy I went to his signing and waited three hours for my turn but then I was too nervous to speak to him because there were a hundred people in line behind me. Then I got moved on by security… That’s why I’m always super-respectful whenever someone has waited hours to get their book signed.

Warning: at the signing you’re going to get hugged. The thing with having such vocal fans online is that they will turn on you in a second if a character goes someplace they don’t like.

The guy who runs Marvel said this brilliant line: “The readers think Spider-Man is real and the creator isn’t.” And it’s a very good point. When they don’t like something happening in Spider-Man they say, “Kill this guy!” Spider-Man is the one they protect, they don’t care about the human guy who writes him.

I get it, it’s your childhood you’re protecting. I remember at age 29 going to see the Star Wars prequel and being so angry. ‘Cause it’s your childhood and when someone makes a wrong move with something you love, it’s powerful.

I like that, it keeps you on your toes… You can’t screw up, knowing there’s 100,000 people waiting to kill you. It makes you try harder.

Having worked on some movies, do you also want to direct?

I started directing a film last year. What happened was that I got some private money together to finance this movie. It’s a British superhero movie about four guys who get superpowers, and one of them becomes evil so the others have to stop him. And I heard about Chronicle when I was five days into shooting it and I go, “(Bleeeet).” I even had the same thing with the levitating camera!

The worst thing is that Chronicle is brilliant, one of my favorite movies from the last couple of years, so I would’ve had the lamer version of Chronicle. I had to let it go. But a couple of years from now I’d like to try again. I’m producing quite a few movies now, like Kick-Ass 2, Nemesis, Superior, and I’m trying to find financing to do American Jesus, a book I did a few years back.

Producing is actually more interesting than directing to me. I like the idea of bringing in a great director; it’s a very different skills set. I love movies and I can tell who’s a good director so I can bring them in and get them to look after my book.

How do you feel about doing cameos?

At the end of Kick-Ass you see the camera panning up a comics shop and you hear my name as you see the comic book at the end…

You know how when you’re watching a movie and you see a cameo, it reminds you that you’re watching a movie and it throws you out of the movie a little bit? I loved Avengers but when you see Stan Lee at the end… I love Stan’s cameos but they remind me I’m watching a movie. I love how Hitchcock would be the guy getting on the bus carrying a double bass, I’d prefer it like that.

The worst one was Daredevil — the people who worked on the comics had cameos in the movie and it threw me right out of the movie because they were all my friends. It wasn’t a great movie but the guy who directed it is a sweetheart, a really nice person. Makes me like the movie a little bit because he’s such a good guy, you know?

Like Fantastic Four — the movies aren’t very good, but I took my oldest daughter to see the first one and it was the first movie she actually loved. She was only about six. That’s what I liked about it — it was light so children could get into it. They don’t all have to be like Dark Knight. Towards the end of the movie, where you see the Fantastic Four fighting Dr. Doom, I was thinking, “This is kind of lame,” and she put her hand on my hand and said, “Dad, thank you for taking me to this movie. This is the most exciting film I’ve ever seen.” And I actually thought, “This movie’s awesome!” It went from being a slightly lame movie to being kind of wonderful.

Tell us about the Hollywood stars you’ve worked with.

I love Nicolas Cage, he’s one of the greatest actors. I didn’t appreciate how great he was until I watched him do take after take, and every take he made interesting. Different from the previous take. You know that scene where he says, “One balisong, two balisong” — every take he brought something else to it, laughing sometimes, serious sometimes.

You’ve said that Kick-Ass is based on yourself; who is Hit Girl?

My teenage daughter is who I based Hit Girl on, and she chose Chloe Moretz to play Hit Girl. The stuff Hit Girl and Big Daddy do is stuff my daughter and I do. Next year there’s a DVD and director’s cut coming of Kick-Ass with an extra 20 minutes, and you know the training exercises they do? That’s my daughter. I’d take her to the park and go, “Do you want to do some commando exercises?” and I’d take out a stopwatch while she ran around the park and did chin-ups. Their relationship is quite like ours.