Kurt Busiek sat down to talk with CBR TV during CCI. He discusses the potential Astro City film, "Kirby": Genesis, his new Batman project and his collaboration with Alex Ross.
I have transcribed a portion of the interview in which he discusses Astro City but be sure to check out the video.
It's funny, I used to tell people that we couldn't really do an Astro City movie. I spent about seven years of the series turning down any offer that came in because, at least at the start. What I would say was you can't do an Astro City movie because it's all about relationships, it's all about character interaction. But, it's got to have all this big special effects stuff as the context, so basically you're talking about a $200 million chick flick. And then Titanic came out and I couldn't say that anymore.
So, so um, we've just, you know, about seven or eight years ago we started developing the project for, for film or television with a producer named Ben Barenholtz who has worked with the Cohen Bro's and others. He's just a terrific guy who really knows the industry inside and out. And um, ah we talked to a number of different places and overwhelmingly the response was either there's so much to this that we don't know what to do or we will just take Samaritan and we'll just make a traditional superhero movie. Or we'll take the Confessor and we'll make the traditional superhero movie. And I, you know, those were the deals that we walked away from because the bottom line is that Astro City is not a traditional superhero story. And when I first talked to the guys at Working Title their reaction was - we've seen a lot of superhero projects and we're sort of interested in getting into that area but all the superhero projects that we see tend to be about really buff guys in skin tight clothes beating the crap out of each other as they fall off buildings and we don't know how to, we don't get that. We work from character out. And that's the first point where I started going 'yeah I feel sort of at home here.'
They weren't 100% sure what to do because Astro City isn't a story, Astro City isn't a specific cast, it isn't a specific concept. You have to look through all of this stuff and find the story and that's kind of what we're in the process of doing right now.
The deal is Working Title has optioned the property. I get to be the first writer in the pool adapting it. I will be Co-Executive producing it with Ben Barenholtz and with Jonathon Alpers who was also instrumental in bringing us all together years ago.
Beyond that, I can't tell you what the story line is because A. we don't know yet and B. if we did, I'm contractually forbidden from telling you. So even if I know I can not talk.
On what they say to people that question if it is going to be an action movie....
We're not making The Remains of the Day. Whatever story it's going to be it's a character story, but it's a character story set against the backdrop of big events, big splashy stuff. You can compare it to, if your cinematic history goes back that far, something like From Here to Eternity, which is three character stories braided together that leads to Pearl Harbor. From Here to Eternity is not a movie that people go, aw no, there's no action in that.