In an Interview with Geoff Boucher At the LA Times's Hero Complex, The comic icon discusses his past success, and hopes for his Spawn movie.
GB: The success went well beyond comics, too, with television, toys and film. Are there any new adaptation efforts in the pipeline?
TM: One of the things that happened is after the first movie came out I started the toy company and sort of got distracted. But these days, as you might imagine, with the [Hollywood] success of Batman and Spider-Man and some of the Marvel titles, everybody’s on a comic-book buying binge and the phone constantly rings. My attitude toward it is I can’t get my head wrapped around some big special-effects movie with a supervillain in there. There will be plenty of those and they’ve done pretty well.
I’ve always seen Spawn as being cut from a different cloth.
It’s more of an urban, psychological story that’s being told. The answer I’ve given the last few years is that Spawn should be a small-budget movie in which the only thing that’s out of the ordinary is this thing that intellectually we know as Spawn and there would only be a handful of people that see it. I call it “it” because it never talks, it’s just a force of nature. Really, the story revolves around the people who are trying to decide: “Is the ghost alive? Is the shadow actually moving?” When I give that pitch, some of the executives scratch their heads. To a lot of people, a movie where the [title] character doesn’t talk doesn’t make any sense. There have been a few movies like that. “Alien,” you know, that guy didn’t say much. Or ”Jaws,” the shark didn’t have too many speaking lines. “Jaws” is the closest example, the movie wasn’t about the shark, it’s about the people chasing the shark.
GB: There are so many against-the-grain films in the sci-fi or comics sector that I would think it wouldn’t be that strange of a pitch. If you consider the premise, plot or approach of movies like ”District 9,” “Kick-Ass,” “Sucker Punch“ or “Cowboys & Aliens,” how strange, really, is Spawn as a movie?
TM: The idea I pitch is that the movie shouldn’t be about superheroes and laser beams — it’s about the id of people and the group of people caught up in the story and seeing things out of the corner of their eye. And when I give the pitch, I also say that I will write and direct it. There’s the nonnegotiable pieces of it. Then I have four suitors who say, “Yeah, cool, when do we start?” It means we’re not looking for a $20-million actor and we’re not looking for a big-budget extravaganza with lots of special effects.
For the full interview, hit the link.