Last week I got to talk to Mark Millar on the phone. Even if you haven’t heard of Millar — which you probably have — you know his work. He did major work on X-Men and Captain America. He did Marvel’s Civil War. He did Wanted. He did one of my all-time favorite graphic novels, Red Son, wherein Superman lands in Soviet Russia instead of Kansas. (Stalin means “Man of Steel” in Russian. Go from there.)
Basically he’s a truly great, important comics writer. His stuff is instantly recognizable — there’s something about his comics that feels realer and goes further than you would have thought was possible.
Millar also did Kick-Ass, which is about to be a movie (complete with making-of book), a good one from the looks of it, and which is why I called him. Millar is Scottish, which means you can’t understand a bloody thing he’s saying for the first 10 seconds. Then you get your Trainspotting filter on and you’re fine.
Normally when you interview somebody you do half an hour, then you look at the transcript, and 80% of it is boring, so you cut that stuff, and you end up with a couple thousand usable words. In Millar’s case, practically everything he says is both funny and interesting, and there just wasn’t that much to cut. He’s a genius, and he’s read everything you’ve read and thought really hard about it, and what part of that do you want to miss out on?
So like I did with my bangs back in the 1980s, I left it long.
LEV: I’m going to start by asking you to talk about something that you’ve possibly talked about so much that you can’t stand to talk about it anymore: the genesis of Kick-Ass, and that period when you were experimenting as a kid with being a superhero.
MARK MILLAR: Yeah, it’s tragically incredibly autobiographical. This is the George Costanza to my Larry David, you know? One of those things that’s going to become a monster, and how people remember me.
As a teenager, that obsessiveness you either get with music or sports? For me it was comic books. Back then comics weren’t that cool, so I had to kind of love the stuff in private, because I did pass off that I was quite an ordinary person at school. Another friend got into it too, and the two of us just said, well, Batman doesn’t have any powers, Rorschach doesn’t have powers, Daredevil doesn’t have powers, really. In fact he’s even blind. Let’s go to the gym, let’s get pumped up, and let’s go out and start some shit.
We came to our senses, but for a good six months we really were absolutely serious. This was as important to me as getting a job when I left school. We designed costumes. We made up names for ourselves, and the name that I came up for myself was Mr. Danger, and I was a kind of lame-looking Rorschach character. You know, with a trench coat and a hat. My friend’s name was Batman. He didn’t put quite as much thought into it.
LEV: He didn’t anticipate any trademark litigation issues.
MARK: We talked about that. That was the funny thing, we actually talked about it. I remember we were sitting in physics class in school and I said, I think we could get into some real shit with the whole Batman thing, because the costume’s the same, and D.C. will sue you, and he said they’ll never know who I am. They won’t know where to send the letter!
LEV: “Mr. Danger” is pretty good though. Have you ever used Mr. Danger?
MARK: I haven’t actually.
LEV: It’s like when Steve Jobs started Apple computer and Wozniak says, well, you know there’s an Apple records? That the Beatles have? And Jobs was like, yeah, don’t worry, man. That’ll never be a problem.
So the costume was Rorschach-style?
MARK: The costume was an absolute swipe of Rorschach’s costume. It was just a mask, a hat and a trench coat kind of a thing. I went for something that was quite easy to make.
The martial arts skills, that was tougher. My friend actually got really good. He got to brown belt, and I hung around the lower rungs of martial arts. We got reasonably fit. We weren’t quite jocks, but we were maybe halfway there. And then we thought, hang on a minute, why don’t we maybe try to cop off with girls and things instead? Puberty ended up taking us in another direction.
LEV: The first version of Kick-Ass that you actually wrote, it says in the book that it was mostly about Big Daddy and Hit Girl.
MARK: Yes, originally I had the book start there. Issue one was originally what I used in issue six. It was a year before I showed anyone, and I just looked at it and I thought, this is really good, and the characters are really good, but they’re just not human enough to be the leads. The comparison I always make is Star Wars starring Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker. You needed to have the slightly duller, humanizing character as the reader’s point of entry into the story.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrKHu2UX1vA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
So I put it on the back burner. Issue 6 was sitting there on my hard drive, and then I realized, I’m just going to make it autobiographical. Then it’s going to be easy. So I created the Dave character and brought Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the series a little bit later.
LEV: But you didn’t go so far as to set it in the town you grew up in, or anything like that.
MARK: One thing I’ve realized that if you set something in Scotland you have an absolute maximum audience probably of six million people. Even then 99% of them won’t be interested. There’s something amazing about America. The Empire State building means as much to someone in China as it does to some one in New York as it does to someone in Scotland. We all recognize Scorsese’s Mean Streets and that kind of thing in a way never would with something set in rural Scotland.
LEV: So at what point did Matthew Vaughn get involved? Because there’s this unusual thing where you’re working on the movie while still working on the comic …
MARK: Matthew and I have a mutual friend who’s a big TV guy over here called Jonathan Ross. Jonathan actually is the UK’s biggest fanboy. I think he has got the biggest collection of original comic artwork in the world. He doesn’t just have one copy of the first appearance of Spider-man, he’s got three copies, and each one’s like a couple hundred grand or something.
We’ve always just been friends on a personal level, never professional, and he was telling me that Matthew was doing the Thor movie at the time, and it wasn’t quite working out for Marvel, and he put me in touch with Matthew, and Matthew and I became friends — Matthew invites me down to the after-party after his last movie, Stardust, and we really hit it off. It was one of those odd things where when we had our first phone call, normally it’s that slightly awkward five minute call, and it ended up being three or four hours long. It was just insane.
So Matthew says, have you got any of your own books, that I could maybe adapt? All the good ones seem to be taken at Marvel and DC. I said yeah, actually, I’ve got this thing called Kick-Ass, I’m just writing issue three at the moment, I could send you the first two issues. So I sent him the first two, and he said, I absolutely love this, when are you going to finish three? I said, well hopefully tomorrow. I fired it down, and he said, when’s the next one? And I was all, for fuck’s sake! Because normally I’ll have to take a couple weeks to write something.
He got me down to the house — he’s got this amazing, big country estate — and then I found out that he’s married to Claudia Schiffer, which was a bit of a shock, you know? I spent a day at his house, and he blocked out the way that he wanted the screenplay to go. There’s a difference between a monthly format and a two-hour movie, and just structurally there had to be some changes. I remember thinking, this is as good as it gets. This guy is just wanting to make it the way I want it to be done, there’s no studio heads chucking in stupid ideas or anything like that, and Matthew was very confident about getting everything greenlit and moving quickly.
LEV: God, how does a guy who is married to Claudia Schiffer — who is essentially super powered — flash on a property like this? How does he even identify with somebody like Kick-Ass?
MARK: The nice thing — one thing I’ve found as I’ve sort of adjusted from just doing comics to comics and films, you meet some pretty interesting people, and you realize that everyone is kind of geeky, you know? Matthew and I must have spent an hour of our first chat talking about The Incredibles and Star Wars.
There’s a kind of geek mafia in Hollywood right now, which is lovely, to the point where some people who aren’t geeks are pretending to be geeks. One of my friends, you know the guy Damon Lindelof, he works on Lost? Damon’s got a name for them; he calls them Ferds, which is fake nerds. It’s like, you know those agents who come in who try to bullshit the way they’ve been nerds, but they’re not really nerds, but they know where the money is right now? Matthew is just like the rest of us, he grew up liking Spider-man, Superman and Star Wars, and so all the reference points just all touched.
LEV: I’m 40 and I was really into comic books, but it was really shameful, there was a huge stigma associated with it. The idea that you could have a movie of The Lord of the Rings that would be a big hit, it was unthinkable.
MARK: The idea that someone could take someone now to a movie like Lord of the Rings and get laid afterwards is just insane. Growing up you would have been beaten to death going to see a movie like that. And I just turned 40 as well, so it’s exactly the same thing. I think it got cool around about 1999 to 2000 — I think it was the minute that respectable Hollywood guys like Brian Singer and Chris Nolan and Sam Raimi came in. Suddenly you thought, oh, these are all very worthwhile and authentic.
I mean, I used to be so ashamed of reading comics, I wouldn’t read them in public. You would read them inside newspapers if you were on a train. Hiding it inside pornography, that would be less shameful.
LEV: Let’s talk about the extreme-ness of the violence in Kick-Ass. Did you ever sort of think of something, block it out in your head, and then say no, no, no that’s too far, it’s too much, I can’t do that?
MARK: No, I’d say I go the opposite. I really love to start where other people draw the line. I get a lot of criticism for it. A lot of people will say, oh, you’re just trying to shock, and I just always think that’s the weirdest thing to say. It’s like saying, oh you’re just trying to entertain. Or you’re just trying to make someone laugh.
The conversation continues tomorrow…