G4: How would you say Sin City came together?

Frank Miller: It’s ironic really because what happened was I had been working in movies as a screenwriter and I had gone through the longest period of my life not drawing (which was two years) and really kind of burned out from the way movies were made. I don't have anything bad to say about any of the people I worked with, but I couldn’t stand losing any control. So I sat down in my new home in Hollywood and I just decided I was going to start drawing again, and I was going to draw exactly what I wanted. Damn Hollywood--I wasn’t going to work for anybody anymore. And so I started Sin City. It was something that had been gelling in my mind for years and I just decided to completely please myself. I was very nervous about what reaction it would get because it was black and white and it was crime stories when mostly what comic books do is people in tights hitting each other really hard. 

I called up my publisher and said, “I want to do this book, but I’ve got to do it absolutely my way. And if it loses money, I’ll share in the loss,” which was unheard of.  And he said, “No there’s no need for that, it’s not going to lose money.”  And I draw this comic book that is everything I always wanted to draw. It’s a dirty little secret of comic book artists that what we do--cartoonists in general--is we construct stories around things we really like to draw. And so the first three priorities were tough guys in trench coats, beautiful women, and vintage cars.  So I constructed an entire world where these [ele

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G4: How did Robert Rodriguez convince you to okay the project?

FM: Robert Rodriguez hunted me down like a dog. He had a vision for this movie that at first I couldn’t accept. He saw--because of his work in CGI and because of the aesthetics of the book, ‘cause he loved the stories--he saw that a different kind of movie could be made. When he first approached me, I was just awful. I really didn’t want my baby loose. I’d gotten a lot of offers for Sin City and they’re just always…there’s a tendency in Hollywood movies to give everything a happy ending, which Sin City almost never has, and to…I felt that if Hollywood got their hands on Sin City, it would turn into another cop or crime movie, just like all the rest they do. Robert had the idea of making it graphically identical to the comic book. And so he coaxed me into hooking up with him in a Hell’s Kitchen saloon, where he really was a straight guy in Hell’s Kitchen wearing a cowboy hat, and I couldn’t quite believe it. He showed me some things he worked up, and they were really quite lovely, quite beautiful. And these were things he'd just done with his crew and with his sister and so on, just things to show me graphically how it would look. And I was very impressed, but I turned him down again. A few weeks later, Robert called me up and said, “How about you come to Austin. We’ll shoot a test for a day. Fly to Austin and we’ll shoot a test and we’ll see if we want to do this thing or not. And if you don’t want to do it, we just won’t do it.”  So I said sure. 

I showed up in Austin and there was Josh Hartnett standing with Robert’s crew. And there was Marley Shelton. It leapt to my mind, test my ass, this is the first day of principal photography, we’re in business. But I was still skeptical ‘cause I’m so protective of my baby. He said he would be perfectly faithful. And as much as I had an immediate liking of him, those are words I heard before and couldn’t entirely trust. But then we shot this one day sequence and I got to work with actors, which I never knew I had loved so much. And Marley Shelton came over and asked me a question about my character and the hook was in my mouth. Robert had pulled it off and I never looked back--we had a great time. I just wanted to start casting that day. And we developed a remarkable partnership I think.

G4: What was it like gathering the cast for the film?

FM: I think it’s Robert; it’s most of it...that a lot of people want to work with him. Right now he’s got the magic touch and he’s immensely popular. He’s fun to work with, and as we approached people, some of them responded just to the chance to work with Robert, and some of them responded to the material. I’ll never forget the afternoon that Robert and I went to Bruce Willis’ house--one of his houses. And at this point, we had what we called the test and we put it on Bruce’s big screen. Bruce sat on a bear mattress and watched it. And he kind of stood up and said, “Those the words from the book?” Robert said, “Yeah.”  [He replied] “I’m in.” And he was a dream to work with every single step of the way. The cast just came together. It was almost like everybody wanted to be in this thing. And Robert has quite an eye for casting. I mean, we cast it together, but he was the one who knew everybody’s names. He had the rolodexes.

G4: What was your impression of his adaptation of your stories?

FM: It was Robert’s structure for the thing that impressed me the most because he had a structure for the movie. I had always thought that it if were adapted...I mean, I even wrote a screenplay for Sin City once they adapted the first story, the one with Marv in it now called the “Hard Goodbye.”  But Robert’s idea was to make it an anthology and so it has a short story with three of the novels incorporated, about forty minutes each. And you move from one to the other and you really get the sense that it’s a single world.

G4: You've worked with Hollywood before, but never as a director. Can you tell us about your first time directing?

FM: I loved it. I loved directing. I had no idea what it would be like. I didn’t know how much I loved actors. I expected the worst and I got the best. The first day Bruce Willis showed up, I was terrified. I thought, “I’m a first time director and he’s Bruce Willis,” which means there’s the floor and I’m the mop. He showed up and though we had talked before...he’s a really nice guy, but I still thought he was Bruce Willis. It was like working with Humphrey Bogart or something. And we were working on one scene which had kind of a funny voice-over line that had the crew laughing, which I regard as dangerous because you don’t want the crew to be laughing. It leads to actors playing to it and things getting goofy and you end up with something on the screen that’s unbearable. And so the crew is laughing, I went over to Bruce and I said, “You know, this is a really sad scene. When you see Carla Gugino come in, you’re seeing everything you’re giving up.”  And he just gave me that Bruce Willis glare.  We all know the glare. And he just poked his finger at me and said, “You keep telling me that man, I need to hear that.” When Truman Capote said that actors were stupid, he proved he wasn’t a director.

G4: Have your opinions on Hollywood changed as a result of your experience?

FM: Not necessarily, but it sure changed my opinions of Austin, Texas, because we shot Sin City there and it was a dream--we had an amazing level of liberty. There were no studio reps all over us or anything and we made the movie we wanted to make. And when there were disagreements between me and Robert--which were few--they were between me and Robert. They weren’t between the two of us and a larger entity. I loved working in Austin. I loved the town and the crew was just astonishing.

G4: So, tell us about your other projects. We hear you're writing the new Batman and Robin series...

FM: It's called Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. And Jim Lee is going to be illustrating it.  And it’s going to feature a young Batman in his early 20’s that just essentially had foisted upon him this very young boy who wants to be his sidekick. And he can’t get rid of the kid. The kid just sticks around. The reason I call it Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is that Robin is really the main character. I want to do a story where you see his journey begin as a superhero and where Batman is not really the most likeable fellow in the world. I never thought he was likeable. He’s the guy you want in a blind alley with you, but he’s not the guy you want at dinner with you. And I want you to fall in love with Robin.

G4: What is it about Batman?

FM: You do Batman right, and he’s going to be popular. He’s a great character. I was once asked by somebody if writing Batman was like holding a Ming vase or something. And I said, “No, it’s like holding a big-ass diamond that you can’t break.”  You can throw it against the ceiling, against the floor, anywhere, and you just can’t break Batman. There are ten ways to do him and they all work.