Kurt Busiek talked with Newsarama at the Mid-Ohio Con about the future of his ex-Wildstorm comic
Astro City. The main topic of discussion was the titles move to DC with the collapse of the Wildstorm line. Yet, inevitably the topic of the
Astro City live action movie came up and Busiek shed some light on just where the project stands at this point.
This from Newsarama....
What's the status of the Astro City movie?
I'm working on the screen treatment now.
So it's very early in the process?
Yes. But Working Title films, who did Four Weddings and a Funeral, Nanny McPhee, Mr. Bean, The Boat the Rocks, Billy Elliot...
I just saw something they did. Oh, I know, Frost/Nixon, which was a critical hit...
Yeah. They were interested in Astro City because, although they've never done anything like it, everything they do focuses on character. And everything they'd seen that in the superhero arena was about spectacle, about action or about fighting. So they it didn't seem like their kind of thing until seeing Astro City.
Do you know how they found out about it?
They actually saw it because the Coen Brothers sent it to them.
So they read it and said, "This is big and sprawling and enormous, and we don't know what the road in is, but it all comes out of character. We get that. We understand these characters."
And that was where we started working together on it.
They've optioned the rights and they've hired me to do the screen treatment. And we'll see what goes on from there.
Did you have to change much? Obviously, you have to take this enormous world and trim it down to a two-hour movie that's digestible to a mainstream audience. But it sounds like it's still character focused?
Well, I can't tell you any details. I also can't promise anything, because just the fact that I outlined it doesn't mean it won't get changed.
There are certainly changes that I made. There are changes to establish characters, because this is a different medium. We're telling a story in a different way. Where I could have a character flying around for a couple pages with narrative captions explaining everything I want to explain, you can't do that in a movie. The character flying around would bump into all those captions.
So we're adjusting things. But I know how to write an Astro City story, so if I have to change a character's origin, or if I have to put somebody in a different job than we saw them in in the comic, it's in the service of telling that story.
The outline that I've turned in has changes. It's clearly not exactly what's in the comics, but it's very much the spirit of what's in the comics. It's the characters that are in the comics. And it feels very, very much like an Astro City story. Things may change along the way, but right now, the changes are the sort of changes you have to make for an adaptation if you're telling a character's story in two hours instead of 10 issues.
Then to finish up, just to ask about one of your fan-favorite characters is there a certain character in the Astro City film treatment that has a noose around his neck?
I can't tell you. But on the other hand, I can't tell you that he isn't in there either.
Hawksblueyes: To read the interview in it's entirety click on the link below.