THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION
He Dared Evil on a Dark Night:
THE FRANK MILLER INTERVIEW Conducted via e-mail by Danny Fingeroth December 4, 2008
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RANK MILLER changed the way comics are done, starting with Daredevil, moving on to re-vision Barman in The Dark Knight Returns. Other triumphs for the writerartist included Martha Washington, 300, and, of course, Sin City, which was turned into a sleeper-hit movie which he codirected. A longtime friend and colleague of [© 2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.] Will Eisner, Miller was the natural choice to bring The Spirit to life as its writer-director.
Frank took a few minutes to give us talk to us about the character and the film… —DF DANNY FINGEROTH: When did you first discover The Spirit, Frank? Which characters and strips appealed to you? FRANK MILLER: I first discovered The Spirit when I was on a bicycle when I was 14 years old picking up comic books and discovering the works of Will Eisner who I thought was a new guy who was blowing everybody else out of the water. Then I discovered it was all written and drawn before I was born. So yeah, that’s how I discovered The Spirit. My favorite characters were the Spirit himself, Commissioner Dolan and Sand Saref.
The first The Spirit movie poster. Art by Frank Miller. [© 2008 Spirit Films, LLC. All rights reserved. The Spirit trademark is owned by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.]
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DF: Please talk a little about your process of using art from the Spirit comics to do storyboards. How did you go about picking stories, scenes and characters? How did you come up with the idea to do that in the first place? FM: I drew my ass off. I did not use Eisner’s artwork except as inspiration for the director of photography and for the crew and for the actors. But I did not