Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar has talked to STV about how the upcoming blockbuster’s independent status was preferable to the studio system behind Superman - he was behind a pitch for a new reboot of the movie franchise, which he goes into in further detail later - and explained how its success could change how film-making is approached by top directors.
He also revealed how director Matthew Vaughn raised $45m during a single party to fun the upcoming blockbuster, because no studio would touch it - at least not until they saw the finished movie then scrambled to pay a premium fee for it.
The award-winning comic book writer - his Wanted was recently adapted into a worldwide box-office success - was also involved with Vaughn in pitching for the new Superman movie, but after comparing that process with the making of their new movie thinks that the independent approach he’s taken with his own work will be the way to go in future for the likes of big-name directors Christopher Nolan and David Fincher.
Talking about how the movie of Kick-Ass came about, Millar explained how he and the film’s director Matthew Vaughn were introduced by fellow comic book geek Jonathan Ross (while Vaughn was attached to helm the X Men 3 movie).
He continued: “We got on well and he said we should meet for lunch. He said ‘I’d like to do a project with you sometime’, he liked my stuff, and I had this thing called Kick-Ass that I was writing.
“I’d only written the first two or three scripts when I met him, and he said ‘Aw, can I see that? I’d like to make something that nobody’s ever seen before.’ Because all the big characters like Superman, Batman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, they’d all been done, and they were looking for a new wave of characters to create.
“I showed him Kick-Ass and he really liked it, and he said ‘I want to do this’. He started doing to screenplay and we ended up with Jane Goldman, Jonathan’s wife who came in and did a polish on it, and we ended up with what we thought was the Pulp Fiction of superhero movies. We thought ‘This is going to be great, everybody’s going to love this’, and we were so pleased with ourselves.”
Millar added: “Then Matthew sent it to Paramount, and they were like ‘This is rubbish, we absolutely hate it’. And they said ‘Do you mind if we take it out to anybody else?’ they said ‘Feel free’. They took it to Sony, Warner Bros, everybody, and everybody universally hated it, they said it was the worst superhero thing that they had ever read, because it was so different from other superhero things, and it just didn’t follow the rules. We thought that that was what was good about it, but they said ‘We’re not putting $70m into a film that breaks all the taboos, nobody’s going to go and see this’.
“So Vaughn is quite cocky and he said I’m going to go and make this film myself, so he actually went and raised $45m from his friends, he literally had a dinner party and raised $45m, he’s got a lot of rich pals. He made the film in England with his own cast with borrowed money, put some dough into it himself as well, made the film he wanted to make totally uncompromising - not taking any notes from any studios - took it back to the studios, told them they were wrong and got them to pay twice as much money for it. It was insane.
“Looking back at it now, it just takes an amazing amount of guts, and you realise how wrong it could have gone.”
Talking about the fiercely independent approached, Millar said: “It’s funny how similar to comics it is. What happened with comics for years was you could only work with Marvel or DC Comics, if you were a writer, an artist, and what we did with Kick-Ass was we made it outside the system and we owned it then instead of Marvel or DC owning it.
“You take a risk: I did it for free, I had no salary for eight months while I was doing this, and the artist was the same. It could have wrong, it was very similar to the movie, and then it came out and outsold Spider-Man so we got a lot of money and got paid really well on the book. And the same thing happened with the movie: Matthew worked outside the system, and he’ll reap the rewards of it.
“I think that’s what’s going to happen. Really good guys like Chris Nolan and your David Finchers, the guys who do movies people like and make lots of money, they’ll be thinking ‘Why should I take a payday anymore when I can just do this outside the system? If I’m good it’s going to make money back.’”
Indeed, such a system seems a contrast to the prolonged process when it’s come to making the new Superman movie, which Millar and Vaughn pitched for but is now in the hands of Batman Returns and Dark Knight scriptwriter David Goyer (who turns out to be a friend of Millar’s).
Millar explained: “The thing is, ultimately when you go to a studio I think it’s quite demeaning.
“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.
“I like the idea of not having these people there, and generally, if you walk into a studio and it’s Steven Spielberg sitting there you think ‘Okay, I’ll defer to you, you know what you’re doing, I’ll take your advice.’ But if you’re sitting there with a guy who’s never made a film in his life, he’s probably got 10 DVDs and he’s been in that job for a year, how you possibly take notes from someone like that if you know what you’re doing.
“So I just think it’s the natural way to go if you’re any good, to work outside the system and the use the studio for distribution fees.”
He added: “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.
“I did not submit a text or anything like that to the guys. What happened was I’d tried for Superman a few years ago and they said ‘Sorry, you’re a Marvel guy, we can’t even entertain you’, and I was like ‘Okay, fair enough’.
“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.”
- Find out more about Millar's plans to direct an ‘epic’ Scottish superhero movie this summer in the first part of our interview.
- Millar explained to us why he didn't set out to offend with Kick-Ass and and character Hit Girl.
- The comic book writer revealed more about new project Nemesis and how it will "invert" the superhero mythos.
- The writer also revealed to us that Wanted 2 will be going ahead with the first film's star Angelina Jolie.
- Finally he told us that without STV show Glen Michael's Cavalcade his comic book career and Kick-Ass would never have existed. How nice of him! He also talked about the status of American Jesus and War Heroes.
