Mark Millar sat down with Stv to talk about his career and where it is headed. He started the interview talking about his decisions on the movie Wanted. Millar had been writing for Marvel and got the opportunity to do his own "Creator Owned" work with the comic. This put him in control when he was approached about a film version. Now that he has been in the business longer and sees the fruits of independence with Kick-Ass, he wants to direct his own movie this Summer:
“Not a cheesy BBC Scotland comedy kind of thing, but to make it cool, as cool as X Men 2 was or whatever. Not costumes and that kind of stuff, a 21st century Trainspotting kind of thing about people with superpowers and make it epic, make it big and grand in scope, try and do something that’s unexpected.
“So my plan is to start directing that in June, June and July. We’re prepping it just now. We want to do it with an entirely new cast, people nobody have seen before, young people from Glasgow and Edinburgh and work with local teams. Everyone that works on the movie we want to try and keep Scottish and just create a superhero movie with its own unique flavour.”
Millar also touched on the demeaning quality of having to pitch a project to the studios using his involvement in
Superman as an example.
“You walk in and you say ‘Please love me, please like my idea, will you give me money to do this?’ I just think there’s something horrible about that, it just seems undignified. Superman’s the perfect example. We pitched it, lots of people pitched. They didn’t want us to do it, and they moved on with someone else, which is perfectly fine, but isn’t it nice to create your own characters and never be in that situation where you’re pitching in with other people and everything? I don’t know, it’s just not the way I want my career to go.”
When asked how long it had taken him to come up with the Superman movie idea, which was to span the length of a trilogy, Millar laughed and said:
“An hour or something like that! Being Scottish I’m a great believer that I don’t work for nothing. If they want some ideas I’ll give them some very loose, broad ideas that I scribbled down on a pad.
“Then Warner Bros got in touch with Matthew and said ‘We’re really interested in you doing Superman and he said ‘I’d like to bring you in as the writer for it because I know you have this idea’. So we talked about it and he verbally pitched it to them out there, so I didn’t even go into the meeting, so no, I don’t believe in wasting your time or anything like that.”
DogsOfWar-The man certainly has a lot on his plate! He also said he plans to work half the year on Marvel and the other half on his own projects. His contract with Marvel is coming up later this year so things could change drastically.
Unfortunately, the videos are not allowed to embed, so click the link below to see the full two part interview. He goes more in depth on these subjects.