The Timesonline recently reported this interview.
Owen Vaughan caught up with the creators of Kick Ass, a comic you may not know about yet, but which will be everywhere by mid-summer
Wanted writer Mark Millar and Spider-man artist John Romita Jr have revealed a few details of what to expect in the upcoming movie adaptation of their hit comic book, Kick Ass. For those not in the know, Kick Ass is a rich satire of superhero origin stories that poses the question: what would happen if someone in the real world donned a mask and went out and tried to fight crime? The answer is they’d get their asses kicked by the first gang they came up against and that’s exactly what happens to the comic’s hero, Dave Lizewski, a geeky high school kid who loses himself in the world comics. He’s not alone, and
during his super-misadventures he meets a masked 11-year-old girl who fights crime with a big sword and foul language and a mysterious vigilante who calls himself Big Daddy. The movie version, which stars Nicolas Cage, as Big Daddy, and Superbad’s McLovin’, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, has finished shooting and its director, Matthew Vaughn, who helmed Stardust and Layer Cake, is busily working on the edit.
Millar said that film was a Pulp Fiction for superheroes: “This makes Wanted look like the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. We had a screening last week and we showed about 40 minutes of it to the marketing people and they had huge grins on their faces. Our sales pitch is it’s Superbad meets Spider-man: when it’s funny, it’s genuinely funny and when it’s exciting, it’s genuinely exciting. It’s unlike any other superhero film — it will make a fortune.”
However, when Vaughn touted the idea to the studios, they all passed because they thought it was too outrageous. “Luckily Matthew is like a billionaire. He just phoned round a few pals and raised $50 million in a week,” Millar said. “So although it’s a big blockbuster movie, it has been independently financed — there’s no studio. What we’re going to do is sell it to the studios for twice as much as they could have done it in the first place. They didn’t understand it at first but now a lot of them of them have seen a rough cut and are saying, ‘Ah, we get it now.’ Matthew’s attitude is, ‘Too late, now you have to pay twice as much money.’ I've sold other movies but Kick Ass was the one the studios were nervous about. They just didn’t get it because it was something new.”
Millar believes comic fans will get a kick out of it. “On the first day of shooting I realised that Matthew reads comics, I obviously do and Nic Cage has a brilliant collection — all these first editions of Superman — and it struck me that this is a movie about comic fans made by comic fans, and it feels genuine because of that. It was a weird labour of love for everybody involved. The whole movie, although it’s very harsh, is a love letter to geekdom.”
Romita Jr, the book’s artist and co-creator, said that the film would include some animation. “Matthew wanted the movie to be true to the comic and there’s animation for a flashback scene. It’s for the origin of Big Daddy and Hit Girl and it comes from the fact that Big Daddy draws a comic of his exploits. In his twisted mind, this is how he remembers his beginnings. Matthew wants the comic to morph into an animated flashback, which I’ll be directing and illustrating.”
Romita Jr has also done the all artwork that Cage draws in the movie. “I had to draw the wall of villains. In the film Nic Cage has a trophy wall for his vigilantism. On it he puts sketched faces [of his targets], crossing them off as he gets closer and closer to the ultimate prize, which is his true revenge and the movie’s bad guy.”
After Kick Ass, Millar and Vaughn will be collaborating on another project, American Jesus, which tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who discovers he is the second coming of Jesus. Millar also let slip that Hollywood was gearing up to make two more sequels to Wanted — “We start shooting number two in June” — and that a script for a Kick Ass sequel was already in the works.
Millar also has plans to make a Lord of the Rings-type epic of the Man of Steel. “Superman Returns was a disaster. It cost about $300 million and didn’t make much more than that back. It was also an incredibly small film on DVD. [Warner Bros] was looking to reboot the franchise and I had already said that I’d love to do it but Warners said bugger off, which is fair enough.” Warners then offered Superman to “a big director who I’m not allowed to name but who is a really good pal of mine — it’ll be obvious who he is when this [interview] comes out. He then asked me, ‘Are you still interested in Superman? Do you want in?’ So we talked about it but Superman is still in stasis at the moment because the last one lost so much money and [Warners] are scared to do anything with the character right now. I’m not holding my breath, so the director and I are moving ahead with another property. We’re certainly not doing anything on it in the next year and a half. (NOTE: Bryan Singer has since been confirmed as director for the next Superman ouiting)
“The plan I've got is that it’ll be a big, eight-hour, Lord of the Rings-type epic over three films. It will be non-stop drama. The old movies were limited by the special effects of the time and, apart from Superman 2, didn’t really feature any supervillains. But if you do Superman as a big realistic epic with guys that can move at the speed of light and can lift up buildings, you’ll have something spectacular. And the mythos of Superman is such a good one. My idea is to do a complete reboot and start from the beginning, to do a Superman movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. The big thing the director wanted to do is cast someone who looks nothing like Christopher Reeve and create a new Superman for this generation.”