Mark Millar Interview, Part 2: On Being Punched in the Face

  • Share
  • Read Later

Part 1 was Wednesday. This is the second and final part.

Here we discuss why the Kick-Ass movie was almost a huge disaster, Millar’s three favorite comics, Dr. Manhattan’s giant blue dick, what he learned from being punched in the face, twice, and the failure of a generation of comics writers.

It’s important to imagine Millar speaking with a thick, marble-mouthed Scottish accent. If you can imagine somebody pronouncing Kick-Ass as Keck-Ass, you’ve got it.

LEV: Kick-Ass was a big hit at Comic-Con last year. I was in the audience, and it was pretty electric. Did you even have a distributor at that point?

MARK: Oh no, no, we had nothing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the story, but Kick-Ass was almost the biggest disaster in history. What happened was, Matthew and I had sort of blocked out the screenplay, and written up a first draft, and he got Jane Goldman, who’s Jonathan Ross’ wife incidentally, to polish it and make it sing, and we sat back very satisfied with ourselves and said, yes, we believe this is the Pulp Fiction of superhero movie scripts, this is going to change everything, it’s brilliant.,

And then Matthew took it out to the studio that we had the deal with, and they said, we absolutely fucking hate this rubbish.

And we were like, what? And Matthew was like, oh, it’s OK, we’ll sell it somewhere else. And inside a week he had rejections from everyone. It was so weird, because we were so sure that we’d created a next generation of superhero films. But everyone hated it. They didn’t take the usual week or two to think about it, they all got back within 24 hours.

I’d never seen anything like it, and Matthew was so insulted by it, and what I really like about Matthew is that most people would then think, oh well then, fuck, I’ll go and make Die Hard 5 or something. But Matthew said, “Look, I know they’re wrong, and I’m going to show them they’re wrong.” So what he did was, he went off and raised $45 million himself, personally, just from friends, and this wasn’t like $45 million from AOL or something, this was like off his mates, and luckily Matthew is a rich dude and went to a very posh school and knows lots of rich guys. He went and he borrowed $45 million, he put some of his own money in, and the rest all came from investors, but his track record is good, and they trusted him. And he made the movie independently.

I think Peter Biskind is going to end up writing a bloody chapter on this someday. The notes we did get, one studio was kind of feigning interest in the script, and they wanted to make Hit Girl 25 years old, and all that kind of thing.

LEV: It’s a great story. How close did you feel like you had to keep the movie to the look of the comic?

MARK: You know Johnny and I were producers on the film as well and Matthew was amazing at keeping us involved at every stage — costumes, casting and everything. So he didn’t make any changes without us all talking about it, either me coming down to London, or we’d talk on the phone for a couple of hours. But really we just had to be practical. Like, Kick-Ass’s costume is identical except that when we started in rehearsals we realized that the actor couldn’t really express himself enough by not showing a little bit of his mouth. So we made a hole in it.

Hit Girl is pretty much the same, and Red Mist — it just didn’t work practically. Sometimes what works on the page doesn’t work in real life, and those bands across his face somehow didn’t work in real life. And Big Daddy, again, it was just one of those things where we wanted to show his face while he was acting. Especially when you have a name, the only name in the movie really is Nicholas Cage, and to have his face completely covered up for most of the movie would have been crazy.

LEV: I have to admit, I’m curious about Chloe Moretz [who plays Hit Girl]. She says such filthy things with such incredible conviction. Did you ever have a moment where you thought, my God, I’m debauching this innocent young girl?

MARK: No! We didn’t put any of those lines in the film. She ad-libbed a lot of that stuff. We had no swearing at all. She just thought, oh this will be good.

LEV: I think that if she’d even twitched or blinked a tiny bit before she says “cock,” then it would have completely not worked. But as it is it’s just cold steel.

MARK: Oh, it’s amazing. The thing that I loved — I mean, we looked at loads and loads of kids, and everyone else seemed like child actors. Some of them were quite big ones, that had been quite big in other movies — the usual three or four kids about that age — and it was unconvincing. Like, you’d seen them in something else already, and you just thought, she could never pull that off.

I think it would have been the same as casting a name actor as Superman at the time instead of Christopher Reeve. You bought Christopher Reeve as Superman because you’d never seen him anywhere else before. If we’d gone with Dakota Fanning or someone like that as Hit Girl, I don’t know if you would have bought into what she was doing.

LEV: For me, Watchmen was just such a seismic event. It realigned how I read comics and looked at comics. How big an influence is Watchmen on Kick-Ass?

MARK: Not much actually. I absolutely love Watchmen, it’s one of my three favorite comics of all time, and it’s influenced other things that I’ve done. But I would say Dark Knight was more of an influence on me. Dark Knight is like a forgotten masterpiece, always, because Watchmen is a more sophisticated piece of work, but I actually think that Dark Knight, the lineage is definitely closer to Kick-Ass in the sense that it’s a gritty, urban, sort of Scorsese thing that’s very cartoony in places and very emotive. Alan Moore I think writes to the head and Frank Miller writes to the gut, and I think that Kick-Ass, even by the very title, is much more to the gut.

LEV: There was a moment when I read Watchmen where I though this is it, man. Nothing will ever feel realer than this. But, Kick-Ass is real in a different way — there isn’t any difference in the world that it takes place in and our world.

MARK: That’s the silly thing, because people keep saying to me, “Oh, rubbish, there’s been loads of comics that’s taken place in the real world, like Watchmen.” Watchmen, I mean I love it and I absolutely don’t mean to put it down, but by page 20 you’ve got a guy’s big, giant, blue dick hanging in front of you, and he was 50 feet tall, and he was fighting the Viet Cong. It was a realistic take on an unrealistic subject.

Whereas Kick-Ass is absolutely the world outside your window, and I don’t think there’s ever been a superhero comic done like that before. I’ve never seen one. Even Batman has his morphing cloaks that let him fly across Gotham and all that. He has all that daft shit that doesn’t exist really. Whereas Kick-Ass just has two iron bars.

LEV: After I closed the book, the making-of book, the one question that stayed with me was, there is a point where you say you’ve been punched in the face twice in your life. What can you tell me about that experience? Was it comic-book-like in any way?

MARK: Actually it was quite interesting, because you see it in movies and comics where people get punched. Like Batman gets punched in the face 20 times and he still looks handsome the next day. But no matter how many pushups you’ve done, if you get punched in your face, your face changes shape for about three days.

The last time I got punched in the face, I think I was at university, about 19, and then when I was at school, about 17, and both occasions I was drunk, which didn’t help. I was really, really, really drunk, hammered, walking home with my friends and both times we got attacked by gangs and we managed to get away. We struggled slightly and fought back a little, but we were so drunk — even with our superhero training from a couple of years before.

Both times I was punched in the face and my lip. I couldn’t believe it, how big my lips went. I looked like a Disney cartoon character or something. That made me think, that’s quite interesting, because we’d never really seen that in a super hero comic before. So I love the idea of, after one fight scene you could be in the hospital for six months. If you’re doing realistic superhero comics, that’s the logical conclusion of it.

LEV: But it’s harder to make it work dramatically.

MARK: Well, that ‘s why, those six months, I just had four panels, one page of a comic, you know? So I had psychological rehabilitation, physical therapy and so on, and then cut to six months later. I like the idea that when I’m writing the sequel, he could spend two years in the hospital, but he’s a little kid and he’s so determined that he just get’s up and keeps going.

LEV: OK, last few questions. You mentioned earlier, Watchmen, one of your three favorite comics. What are the other two?

[I know that interview-wise, this is kind of a dick move. But the door was open.]

MARK: I would say that the Dark Knight Returns definitely is my all-time favorite comic. Number two I would say would be Watchmen. The other one I’d say would be Frank Miller, it’d be a toss up between … yeah, Batman: Year One.

Actually, if I could even change my earlier thing, I’d say that’s probably even more of an influence on Kick-Ass, because that’s about Bruce Wayne putting on his tights for the first time and going out and trying to get into trouble. That is the comic that actually inspired my friends and I to begin doing it. So yeah, that’s absolutely the origin of Kick-Ass. I hadn’t actually considered it until I’m saying it out loud, but we were so impressed by Batman: Year One, and it seemed so real to us that it was possible.

LEV: Are you going straight on to a sequel? Or what’s next?

MARK: Most comic books are on a monthly schedule and run for years, but I quite like to do special projects. I never want to be a hack, and just have good periods and bad periods on a run. I’d rather put everything I’ve got into it. So I’ve always seen Kick-Ass as a trilogy, and it may go bigger, because I think there’s a lot of potential with it.

The first book’s all about superheroes. The second book I want to make like A Clockwork Orange, and make it all about street gangs being super villains,and those guys are on Facebook with each other, and recording on their cell phones terrible things that they’ve been doing, and posting it up on the internet. So I just thought there could be something cool, kind of like Warriors or A Clockwork Orange, where you have gangs of heroes versus gangs of villains.

And then finally a third book I have an idea for as well. So yeah, probably a trilogy.

LEV: Do you have another project in mind with Matthew Vaughn?

MARK: It’s funny actually. Matthew and I just clicked. So we’re certainly planning on doing the sequel, but we’re going to do another movie in between Kick-Ass 1 and 2. It will be another comic book property that we’re just going to create.

This is quite an important thing that I’m really starting to realize, which is that in the 1930s, you had all those characters like Superman and Batman created in what we call the Golden Age of comics. And then nothing happens for a generation, and then you have Marvel and its nuclear age heroes, with Spiderman and all the radioactive heroes, Hulk and X-Men and so on. And then just nothing happened. It was really odd. What was happening was that writers and artists were coming in wanting to write and draw the stuff they grew up, with as opposed to creating the next generation of characters. So really in the 90s we should have had a wave of characters, but it never really quite happened.

I was talking to Stan Lee about this, and he said, “I don’t know why anyone isn’t doing this, because if I had just written Superman and Batman and the stuff I read in the 30s, you would have never had Marvel comics.” So somebody has to come in and do the new stuff.

Since then I’ve seen it as my kind of mission, I’ve started up this Millar World line — American Jesus, War Heroes is over at Sony as a film, there’s Kick-Ass coming out through Lions Gate, and the next one coming out is this thing Nemesis. So I just feel over the next five years I would like to create, maybe, 10 to 15 big books that could go on to have lives as movies or video games or whatever and just add something to the mix? Because nobody else is doing it. Everyone else is doing Superman and Batman. I’d love to create the new wave.

LEV: Well, good luck to you, man. If anybody can do it, it’s you.

MARK: I don’t know why it’s ended up being some stupid guy from rural Scotland who dropped out of university, I’m sure there had to be a smarter American who should have been doing this.

  1. Previous
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3