He’s unmasked Spider-Man, turned Superman into a commie, and once sent The Hulk after Freddie Prinze Jr. Now, comic book golden boy Mark Millar talks to Ron Motta of our research department about the movie adaptation of his comic Wanted, due to hit screens June 27th.

PLAYBOY: In some ways, Wanted is one of the first concepts you’ve ever come up with. How did you get the idea for it?
MILLAR: I was flipping through a book one day when I was about five years old or so. I saw a picture of George Reeves as Superman and I asked my brother, “Hey, who’s that?”  And my brother said, “Oh, that’s the real Superman.”  I said, “Well, how come we don’t see him anymore?”  Because back then we didn’t get the George Reeves show on the telly.  And my brother said, “He disappeared with all the other superheroes.  There was this big war with the super-villains and the super-villains won.”  And that idea sort of stuck in my head.

PLAYBOY: Did your brother ever try and grab a chunk of that Wanted cash?
MILLAR: Nah, I just brought him a few drinks! (laughs)

PLAYBOY: You said that you weren’t entirely happy with the first draft of the Wanted script.  How did director Timur Bekmambetov coming aboard change the sensibility of the project?
 

MILLAR: When Timur came in, he brought this crazy eastern European bravado with him.  Everything about the book that had been scrapped was really all the stuff he brought back in.  He was very unapologetic about his love of violence, whereas the original draft was a bit apologetic and Wesley Gibson, the protagonist, just learned a lesson, kind of.  I was quite pessimistic about the movie originally.  I didn’t think it was going to work and I was prepared for that.  But then I went out for dinner in Hollywood with the producer and Timur, who had just come on.  Timur had his laptop and showed me the previs (a computerized storyboard) he’d been working on.  I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.  Timur not only captured what I wanted, but he’s improved on it.  Right up until I went to the screening out in Los Angeles and even then, I was hoping, “Please don’t suck,” and it just blew away my expectations.

PLAYBOY: When you and artist JG Jones were doing the Wanted comic for Top Cow, you based the look of the Fox on Halle Berry, but for the movie it’s Angelina Jolie who’s in the role.  Does Angelina have the failure of Catwoman to thank for that?
MILLAR: Yeah, what a good idea that was!  Halle Berry in a superhero suit—that couldn’t go wrong!  When I was doing it, I was thinking, “Yeah, this would be really cool, really great!”  And now, when I look at my casting compared to the movie’s casting, I can see why they get paid to be a casting director.  We also based the look of Wesley on Eminem, but it’s funny, because we never planned that to actually be the movie.  Since way back in the 1930s, characters were based on celebrities, especially back in the days when it was muddy penciling, so you could tell which character was which.  So, for Wesley, Eminem at the time just seemed to encapsulate what the book was about and I quite liked that music.  It just seemed to be the right kind of nihilistic face that you’d want on something like that and I think that was a big part of its success.

PLAYBOY: Wesley Gibson leads a mundane life and takes a lot of shit. Literally overnight he has money, power and can rape, kill and murder without consequences.  Do you think that’s something someone would do in the real world?
MILLAR: Oh, God yeah!  I think Spider-Man taps into this as well, in the sense that if a child suddenly got powers, that’s what a child would do—be like Spider-Man. But an adult like Wesley is the flip side of the Spider-Man mythos. The journey for Spider-Man is from asshole to superhero and the journey for Wesley is from asshole to super-villain.  So really Wanted plays around with that. What super-heroes have is the male power fantasy and what Wesley has is essentially a masturbation fantasy, because he can pretty much have sex with whoever he wants—it’s more of what an adult would want. In the same way that we don’t get to do those things that heroes do, it’s equally thrilling watching the bad shit happening as well, because you know no one’s really getting hurt.

PLAYBOY: Was it surreal the first time you heard your words come out of Angelina Jolie’s or Morgan Freeman’s mouth?
MILLAR: It’s funny you mention that, because Morgan Freeman is one of those guys who brings incredible dignity to whatever he’s in. It’s kind of like that’s his job. The first bit of the movie I saw, there was a scene about 25 minutes in, where Morgan and Angelina show that James McAvoy, who plays Wesley, has the ability to have the perfect shot and kill anything he wants. They’re trying to get him to shoot these wings off a fly and they say they’ll kill him if he doesn’t. Word-for-word, angle-for-angle, that’s the way we did it in the comic. That was literally the first thing I saw in the rushes and I couldn’t believe I was looking at it.  It was kind of like something escaping out of your head and having a life of its own. Just as a writer, there’s nothing like seeing the shit that you write given some dignity by a really great actor.

PLAYBOY: Even though they changed the plot from a society of super-villains to a fraternity of assassins, it seems like they were fairly faithful to the book.
MILLAR: Yeah, they were very, very faithful to even the backdrops sometimes. They’d frame the shots like the panels of the comic. The prop master would go out and find a clock that looked just like the clock in the comic and sat it next to Wesley’s bed. Walking around the sets was kind of like dipping your hand into a comic panel. I couldn’t believe I was in there. It was like being inside the frames themselves. That was quite surreal, you know?

PLAYBOY: Yeah, it’s great that now you’ve got directors who are more faithful to the source material, whereas in the past, you’d have directors who just didn’t get it, the most infamous example being Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin.  
MILLAR: When these movies first came out—comic book movies—they were done by journeymen directors.  I’ve been into this since I was four, so I’ve seen the genre go from shitty TV directors to the absolute cream of the A-list. Guys like Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and Timur coming in…these were our wet dreams when we were ten.  Who’d have believed that the biggest things in Hollywood would be the things we love most?

PLAYBOY: Speaking of which, you also consulted on another summer blockbuster, Iron Man, which owed a lot to your interpretation of the character during your run on The Ultimates, which was your re-imagining of The Avengers.
MILLAR: That’s right.  Brian Michael Bendis (New Avengers, Secret Invasion) and I have both worked at Marvel for years and sometimes we’ll do story consultancy for various Marvel projects.  So about 18 months ago, they flew us out to the Iron Man offices, which was great because there’s nothing I love more than criticizing other people and not having to do the work myself. (laughs)  It was great sitting with director Jon Favreau and reading the script. It was great because we were paid to come out for just a few days and talk bullshit, you know? (laughs)

PLAYBOY: You’re known for writing such established characters as Spider-Man, Captain America and the X-Men.  Do you prefer playing in someone else’s sandbox or working on your own original characters?
MILLAR: There’s no greater thrill than the thrill of doing your own thing.  I mean, I really, really loved these characters growing up, but I’m at this point now psychologically where I really want to do my own stuff.  Frank Miller (Sin City, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) said to me “The comics industry chews up and spits out talent.”  That’s how it goes.  Even the greatest among us, the Stan Lees, the Jack Kirbys and so on.  There’ll come a point where someone else will come along.  It might be five years or ten years, but what Frank said was, “What you have to do is when you’re at your absolute hottest, go and create your own stuff.”  And it’s great advice, absolutely.

PLAYBOY: As graphic as the comic version of Wanted was, it was supposed to be even more so.  I read you originally opened the book with anal sex and even a cum shot.  Considering that during your run on DC/Wildstorm’s The Authority you had battles over censoring your work, how did you pull yourself back?
MILLAR: I’d been writing a children’s book called for 18 months previous called Superman Adventures that was aimed at five to eight year olds, so I think it was eighteen months of not even being able to say “damn” or “hell.”  I genuinely do.  So then I went to work on The Authority.  One of the characters took a jackhammer and shoved it up the bad guys’ asses!  (pause)  Come to think of it, sodomy pops up a lot during my work! (laughs) It’s quite worrying!  Then I calmed down again doing Ultimate X-Men, Spider-Man and The Ultimates.  Sometimes those books can seem pretty edgy, but again you have restrictions.  There’s no way you can say “Jesus” or “bastard.”  So I think Wanted was a result of that, just two years of being a good boy and then cut loose and do what I wanted.  So, of course, it opened up with anal sex!  The original opening line was “This is my best friend fucking my girlfriend up the ass.”  And JG phoned me up and was so absolutely right.  He said, “I love the script, but I’m not drawing anal sex, because once you cross that line, you can’t go back.”  But you know what?  It was the best call ever.  It meant that we were just obscene as opposed to illegal. (laughs)

PLAYBOY: Yeah, you didn’t have to call in the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!
MILLAR: This interview we’re having would be from jail!  I’d have to blow someone for the money to make the phone call! (laughs)

PLAYBOY:   Right! (laughs)  Jailhouse romance aside, you’ve said that your all-time favorite movie is the original Superman and you also list Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark as some of your favorites.  Where those movies influences on your writing, given that your stories have a very cinematic feel to them, almost like you’re watching them on the screen?
MILLAR: I think the reason why I read comics when I was a kid was because they weren’t the type of stories you could get on television.  Even when you have TV shows like The Incredible Hulk as great as that was, or the 1970s Spider-Man, but you were never going to have Nicholas Hammond as Spider-Man fighting the Sinister Six.  

PLAYBOY: That used to drive me crazy as a kid where he’d fight bank robbers or mobsters when I wanted to see him against Doc Ock or the Green Goblin!
MILLAR: Yeah!  I always thought, “Okay, next week…” but I had no idea about budget limitations!  I just wanted him to next week fight the Sinister Six!  But then Superman came along and it was as epic as a comic book and that immediately made it my all-time favorite film, even more than Star Wars.  I just absolutely fell in love with it.  I made the costume, I drew Superman everyday, I was so into it.  I still am.  I think I fell in love with the idea of big stories where you can’t get anywhere else.  And cinema’s kinda catching up to comics just now.  With CGI and so on, we can pretty much do almost anything.  But that’s the one thing that comics always had over everything, even cinema.  Cost isn’t even a consideration [in comics].  It costs as much to draw two guys talking as it does to draw a thousand super-heroes vs. a thousand spaceships and that’s why I love comics.  That’s why I’ll never leave them.  It’s interesting because I’m getting actual calls now to do other people’s characters as movies, which seems insane to me and I have absolutely no experience in that regard.  But a lot of people have come forward asking me to do stuff and a lot of friends have said to me, “Well, you’re going to make that jump, aren’t you?  Move from comics to movies?”  And I don’t really see it as a promotion, as an evolution of anything.  To me, they’re both cool jobs.  I never got into comics to get out of it.  Being a comic guy was my absolute dream.  To me, the movie stuff is fantastic, it’s fun and it’s great.  What’s funny is that all my family who couldn’t give a shit about the comic world are going to see the movie! (laughs)  I love that aspect, reaching the mainstream, but my deepest wish is that people who go see the movie love it, then go check out the comic, because that’s my real job.

PLAYBOY: The summer movie season is extremely competitive.  How does Wanted stand out?
MILLAR: I think it’s the genuinely cool movie.  Tony Stark is a cool character that you can appreciate when you’re ten, getting lap dances from air hostesses and stuff.  Bruce Wayne is kind of like that, too.  It’s definitely child fantasies.  I think Wanted is the adult movie.  The other ones are children’s movies.  Wanted is the genuinely cool movie, from the super-cool cast, to the smart script, to the level of violence.  It’s so uncompromisingly brutal. I think that gives us an instant edge.  That makes me really confident that it’ll stand out from everything.

You can check out Mark Millar’s website at Millarworld.tv.  Wanted, published by Top Cow Comics, is available in hardcover from your local bookstores and online.