For a writer, Mark Millar likes to talk an awful lot, but that’s only because he’s so damn excited about what he’s doing. With Kick-Ass 2, based on his comic of the same name, heading to theaters nationwide this week, he’s got an awfully good reason to be excited. And considering his other comic book series The Secret Service is in pre-production with director Matthew Vaughn and he’s consulting on FOX’s Fantastic Four reboot, we’ve got plenty of reasons to be excited for him too.
Just how are things going in Millarworld? To find out, I sat down with the Scottish scribe to talk about Kick-Ass 2, the status of his Secret Service film, and why going creator-owned is so important to the industry.
NERDIST: Itâs been four years since the last movie. What can we expect from this one? I know it differs a little bit from the comic.
MARK MILLAR: Just a little, actually, not too bad. Maybe a couple of pacing things are slightly different, Iâd say probably 90% are scene for scene. Anything Jeff changed, he improved on. Nothing just for the sake of it. He did a great job keeping all the best bits and improving the things that didnât work as well. Itâs adapted from two comics. Itâs adapted from a Hit-Girl comic which forms the first 30 minutes of the movie and then itâs Kick-Ass 2 for the final hour. Itâs a bit long as a comic. Itâs 12 issues, so some stuff had to be clipped from the Hit-Girl comic. Generally speaking, thatâs pretty faithful. Kind of like the first movie a bit. The same level as the first movie, and I couldnât be happier with it. Iâve watched it on so many levels. Iâve seen it as a screenplay, Iâve seen it as a plot, Iâve seen every single step. And then Iâve seen it as a rough cut. Obviously, watching the actors while theyâre performing. Then, finally, a polished cut six weeks ago with the music edits.
Itâs amazing. Itâs like watching those 40 weeks of a fetus becoming a person. It feels like cells coming together, and eventually youâve got a bald thing climbing out of a womb. Thatâs what it felt like sitting in that room. It was awesome. And if it had been crap, itâd have been so disappointing [laughs]. But luckily, itâs turned out great. Iâm really, really happy with it. I sat and watched it with David Kosse, whoâs the head of Universal from Europe. David and I were in a screening room watching it in London. During it, he leaned over and said, âThis is awesome.â [laughs] And I said, âItâs awesome, isnât it?â
N: Is there any challenge in adapting your own work? Do you find it precious? Do you find it easy to just sort of cut stuff out and move it around? How closely did you work with Jeff?
MM: Matthew, who directed the first film, said to me before I met Jeff, âLook, trust me, this guyâs gonna be perfect.â And Matthewâs got a great eye. If you look at Matthewâs filmography, thereâs no shit. Everybody, by the third film, has done crap. You know, everyone. Even Spielberg, you know, with 1941. Matthewâs coming out to movie five that heâs directed, and theyâre all great. Heâs excellent. And he said, âTrust me, this guyâs brilliant.â And then Jeff comes out with a great screenplay and then after that followed through with a great movie. I was involved when he wanted to me to be involved. We spoke on the phone maybe every second day and I also stood back as Matthew did and realized heâs a very talented filmmaker and doesnât need my help, you know? So I let him go with it.
N: Very nice. One thing I really like about you as a writer is that you take something in the superhero genre and take that as a prism through with to examine real world issues. Like in The Authority, using things like military interventionism, and now with Kick-Ass it takes vigilantism and puts it in a context of âWhat if this was real? What if actual people were doing this?” Putting that in contrast with the recent Jim Carrey debacle, it sort of struck a chord with me, because it doesnât seem like the film glamorizes violence. It tries to present it in a realistic manner. Obviously, it has to be visually exciting…
MM: Obviously Jim saw the first movie, right? And he loved it! Jim dressed up as Kick-Ass and went on Conan O’Brien, you know?
N: So, when it comes to stuff like that? Is tone and intent something you have to be very conscious of?
MM: Very. Yeah. If you have a child… Killing people… you have to be super careful. It can look cool, but you canât say itâs the right thing to do. So she and the movie is asking herself, “What am I doing? I should be having a boyfriend, Iâm fourteen, you know?” You see the consequences of violence. I see something like White House Down, Man of Steel, any of these movies. You donât really see the consequences of 250,000 people who would have died in Metropolis.
N: Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. [laughs]
MM: [laughs] I like the fact that Kick-Ass is so small and so the budget is only 28 million. We donât have the CGI sets. We just have the guy get hurt and then he lies in bed the next day after heâs been beaten up. Felons are coming after him and his familyâs in genuine peril. The whole point of Kick-Ass is the consequences of violence. Itâs cool when you see violence. You know, violence is fun. I love Django, thatâs my favorite film this year. Violence can be massively entertaining. In the same way, itâs fun and aesthetically pleasing sometimes. But violence without consequences is pornography essentially. And Kick-Ass is entirely about the consequences of violence. I feel very relaxed about it.
Jim, one of my friends, wrote me up on this and says, âJim Carrey’s a genius.â I said âHow do you mean?â He said, “Heâs just bought you guys about $30 million worth of publicity.” And the beancounters at Universal said it was about 30 million dollars worth, getting on Good Morning America and that stuff. In remote corners of the world, the news programs that next morning were talking about Kick-Ass 2. They werenât talking about Johnny Deppâs film and they werenât talking about Star Trek. Itâs in the mainstream, which is amazing. I donât think that was his plan, but it worked out beautifully.
N: Allâs well that ends well.
MM: Iâm just gonna disassociate myself from the next one.
N: [laughs] I wanted to talk Marvel with you for a little bit. Creator-owned seems to be a real trend now. A real push for creators to push for creator-owned titles, creator-owned comics, sort of moving away from the model of the Big Two. What does that mean to you? Why is creator-owned an important part of your work aesthetic?
MM: Well, two reasons. One is that creatively, thatâs what I wanted to do. Thereâs only so many times you can have Doctor Octopus bust out of Rikers Island, fight Spiderman, you know? If Galactus hasn’t destroyed the Earth the first 34 times that he’s shown up, chances are Reed Richards’ just gonna stop him. I had a great time working at Marvel on all that, but I felt like Iâve done that. Iâve done those years. The Ultimates and all that. Had a good time. Loved the guys I was working with, but nowâs the time for the next thing.
One thing I really realized which came from that was that – Stan Lee was a real inspiration to me, and I interviewed him. I had this magazine called SFX that had guys doing their jobs now interview guys who did their job forty years ago kind of thing. The guy who did it had Russell T. Davies, the guy who produced Doctor Who, about five years ago interview Verity Lambert, who produced Doctor Who in 1963. They had me interview Stan Lee. Thatâs where I got to know Stan a lot, and now weâre friends. I had to explain who I was and that Iâd been doing Marvel comics over the last couple of years and I had written all those characters. He said in a really nice way, âWhy are you doing all my characters? Why donât you make your own characters?â He meant it in a nice way because he said âItâs a bit like me in 1962. Instead of doing Fantastic Four, doing Superman, Batman, Tarzan, Doc Savage.â And I never thought about it like that. He said, “You wouldn’t have had the Sixties without Marvel Comics.” It was like a light went on then. I thought, âThatâs what I got to do next. Because pop culture atrophies if people just regurgitate their childhood, which was kind of like what I was doing. I mean, I was loving it and it was attributed to things someone else was doing.
I realized I shouldnât just be giving things a facelift on an old person. I should be making a baby. Imagine an evolutionary time where we stopped having babies and just gave old people facelifts and shaved their heads so theyâd look like babies. Essentially, thatâs what happens, I guess, and what happened with DC. Thatâs fine because, as a four billion dollar company, thatâs how they made the cash. I just felt as a writer, the next stage for me was to go on, and, plus, historically, the comic book industry is not kind to its older creators. The guys who are behind the big summer movies see nothing, generally. If you donât own it, your familyâs getting screwed out of the stuff. I wanted to make sure — and I have two daughters so far, and I plan to have more children — I wanted to make sure theyâre taken care when theyâre older and they can live vacuous Paris Hilton lives [laughs].
N: [laughs] Speaking of turning these creator-owned things into movies, I wanted to talk a little bit about The Secret Service. Any movement on that?
MM: All the cast is pretty much done. The lead, I think, is getting picked this weekend. We got three guys we really like, down to two pretty much guys. The final decisionâs with Matthew. Matthewâs been very gracious with me. Matthew sends me all the audition tapes and we talk about it on the phone everyday and call back guys. Itâs massively exciting to kind of see that coming together. To hear that Jane Goldman’s back doing the screenplay? Thatâs like hearing the best footballer is lacing on his boots and coming on to help his team. Itâs really cool. So, having Jane back, Matthew directing, Colin Firth in the lead, Michael Caine as the head of the organization…
N: I remember when I first picked up the issue, I was like âI wanna see this as a movie as well.â
MM: Nobody could be happier than me about this. The screenplay, as Matthew and Jane do, they made it better than the book. The screenplayâs awesome. So this feels like… James Bond lost his sense of humor, you know?. Itâs like when the Jason Bourne movies came out. But this is everything I like about Bond. Bond for the 21st century. It feels supercool. I donât want Bond to look old-fashioned, but I feel itâs got to feel a bit old-fashioned. The main character is so unusual in a spy franchise. I think itâs gonna be unlike any representation before in a cool way. Iâve seen the test footage. The stunt teamâs already shot about four minutes worth of fight scenes and edited them together. It just looks spectacular. You forget how great Matthew is at action. That little corridor scene at the end of the first movie where she takes everyone down. Thatâs my favorite action scene in the last ten years. That’s the same stuff they’re doing here. Theyâve got the same choreographers and itâs just mind-blowing.
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Kick-Ass 2 hits theaters on Friday, August 16th. For even more Kick-Ass goodness? Read our interviews with John Leguizamo and Donald Faison. Are you excited for the film?  Let us know in the comments below!
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