JEFF GOLDSMITH INTERVIEW WITH FRANK MILLER FROM THE 90s
Q: I just read an interview where you said something that echoes something I’d heard before. Like, If Hitler weren’t stopped, we wouldn’t be living in a free world is that a Nietzschean eternal return of the Spartan defense against the Persians in 300? Doesn’t evil overcome good on the field of battle over and over again and again throughout history.
A: Well, I think particularly back in ancient Greece a lot of the concepts that we take for granted were as fragile as a soap bubble. Democracy was barely being invented by the Athenians. Notions like freedom of speech were yet to be invented, let alone tested. That was where this flower began to grow. I find it in a way ironic that when freedom is threatened it’s always the least democratic part of civilization that holds the line against tyranny.
Q: Do you think that’s true?
A: We don’t send the ACLU in when we’re threatened, we send in the Marines. The Spartans were hardly democratic, but were still the side fighting for us. They didn’t win all the battles of the Persian war, but what happened at Thermapolus certainly served to unify Greece. Very much like a Greek Alamo in terms of such a moral victory.
Q: What did you read to research this?
A: Pretty much name it. I concentrated a lot of Herodotus and there were texts more specific as to the manner of combat, as to this battle itself. Also, I went to Greece and got a sense of the terrain, the people, the actual battlefield. Greeks love to talk about history. I learned an awful lot there.
Q: You looked at art too. There’s a picture of the Oracle at Delphi and the clothing she wears reminds you of Greek sculpture, the way the marble is carved to resemble cloth.
A: I was trying to evoke some of that. It was one of the reasons why, rather than being covered with armor, I drew the Spartans as nearly naked because that was the way they were sculpted. In fact, they were much more like iron men, much more like we see in the Hollywood movies, all covered from head to toe. But I wanted the physicality that comes across in those sculptures. I didn’t want them to be human tanks. That was one of several liberties I took. And even down to facial structure, the King Leonidas, for instance, I gave him a very classic facial structure, you know, lacking a bridge to the nose, which is very common in Greek and Roman sculpture.
Q: But we don’t know what he really looked like, do we?
A: No, as a matter of fact, there’s one sculpture that people think might be of him, but Leonidas looks much more like Poseidon.
Q: I’ve always liked the Delphic Oracle as an icon in history, and you were accurate even to the extent – and it’s very subtle – that historically it’s true that there was like a sulfur spring or something like that there at the oracle’s cave.
A: Every city state had his oracle. It’s interesting that you read that as Delphi, because it was actually set in Spartan in my story, but I was trying to evoke more the feeling of what I imagine it was like in Delphi. I’ve been to Delphi as well and it’s pretty astonishing place to behold.
Q: She reminded me of other women in your comics. Like Nancy in Sin City. The big wild hair. Why that image of women in your work?
A: There are a million different ways to portray women, but there is something sort of universally sexy about the woman with the wild hair and the curvaceous figure. Also, one of the things about long hair is that it implies such wonderful movement. It’s like characters with capes or long coats are such good fodder for cartoonists. You’re working in an essentially static medium. It’s for the same reason that I have the cars flying 10 feet off the ground in Sin City.
Q: Spartans take hundreds of arrows in 300, Cars fly off the ground and Marv takes 68 bullets in Sin City. Why do we accept such fantasy in our fiction?
A: Because that’s the nature of romance. That it is larger than life, over the top. As flattered as I am when people call my work realistic, I also find that kind of funny because I think what people often interpret as realism is when they feel something as emotionally true whereas there is nothing realistic about my work.
Q: In That Yellow Bastard when Hartigan is getting out of prison, his guard is thinking, “I hate my life.” I mean, that is realistic, but also absurd.
A. Well, I was going for counterpoint there. There’s this very big moment for this guy and he could only thing about his own problems.
Q: Do people think that way in real life?
A: Oh, absolutely. Don’t you think so?
Q: I do.
A: Yeah, we’re all prone to that. I think a scene can accomplish several things at once if the basic thrust is strong enough. You can play against, like where a piece of music can have a simple melody but lots of other notes are doing other things at the same time.
Q: There’s the postmodern architectural idea of complexity and contradiction from the architect Robert Venturi, classical and modern themes all mixed in the same building.
A: When touches like that work they can amplify the drama because they raise the stakes, rather than trivialize. When you want to make a monster look big, you put a little person in front of him.
Q: Speaking of big monsters, I wasn’t surprised to see one in 300, this adult deformed Spartan. In Ronin you have Agat, and in Sin City there’s that ugly politician, Roark. Why deformed monstrous beings?
A: Well, it’s different in each case you mentioned. In 300, I wanted to take the figure of Ephialtes — he might have been a real person, but he’s certainly been passed down as the traitor who sold the Spartans out. Whether it was history or myth–take your pick– I thought he could be a tragic hero. There was a Spartan poet — believe me there weren’t many, these people weren’t much into art — who was thrown from the cliff deformed and came back out of the sea and so they let him live. They routinely murdered deformed children and that had given me the idea of turning Ephialtes into that kind of figure, having him crushed and essentially go to the devil as a result. As far as monsters in general go, I have to admit as simple as it sounds, monsters are a ball to draw. That’s why I use every excuse I can to put dinosaurs in that story.
Q: Where’s the dinosaur?
A: There aren’t any dinosaurs in 300, but there are elephants and even in Sin City I have a park where there are giant dinosaur statutes. But I tend to find excuses to draw things like dinosaurs. They’re awfully odd to draw. The world is full of monsters.
Q: The world is full of monsters?
A: All you have to do is go out in nature to see creatures beyond belief.
Q: How did you end up fascinated by Japanese culture?
A: That kind of happened organically. I was working for Marvel Comics on a series called Daredevil, an unusual superhero because his main characteristic was an impairment. He was blind and the only kind of superheroes I really enjoyed doing were the ones that didn’t have any superpowers. Well, in order to make sense out of any kind of combat he would be involved in I had to start reading up on martial art. That started with Chinese material and eventually I felt myself drawn into the story of Samurai. I’ve always been drawn to stories of warriors. I’ve always been drawn to that material because it offers such strong and visual representations of the moral conflicts.
Q: There’s Miho in Sin City and the robosamurai, Robocop III. There’s something comic about those robosamurai, their distorted faces. Even though they’re combatants, there’s humor.
A: Well, if you look at much of this material there is often a great deal of humor. One of the greatest moments in I believe it was Yojimbo, when Mifune is eating rice and there’s a fly in the room. People are thinking of attacking of him and he plucks the fly out of the air with his chopsticks. It’s a brilliant and very funny moment. If you’ve seen Sin City Family Values, Miho is torturing this guy to death, slowly. I got the idea from watching my cat with a mouse.
Q: The guy she’s torturing is another one of these monstrous little characters.
A: Comics have to use every advantage they have. And rather than trying to be a poor man’s film, I’d rather go for the extreme and do cartooning, make it look like it’s done by hand and let it be, let things be as stretched out and bizarre as they can be without totally straining credibility. If you look at a strip like Calvin and Hobbs, which is one of the best drawn comic strips of all times — also the best written — but that’s not really relevant to what I’m saying — if you look at it, he employed a variety of art styles, he clearly could do anything he wanted to, but Calvin remains seven or eight pen lines, a completely ridiculous configuration, nearly as abstract as Charlie Brown, whereas the dinosaurs are fully rendered. [CALVIN AND HOBBS AUTHOR] is the perfect example of a virtuoso. I probably got the idea of my flying cars in Sin City from the way he made the television jump up and down on the table.
Q: The interesting source, completely incongruous. Track change. Xerxes has hubris, the Greek sin of pride. Don’t a lot of us have that?
A: Yeah, our general understanding of the word ‘hubris’ is simply that it’s a synonym for pride, but in Greece I got more of the sense that hubris was a state of believing oneself to be equal to the gods, and that the gods would always punish that. Themistocles won the battle of Marathon. He had Athens at his feet and decided that he would use that position to conquer the outer islands of Greece they’d been lost in a previous war. He wound up years later returning to Athens facing the death penalty that they didn’t impose because he’d already gotten gangrene and was doomed anyway. That is used as a lesson of Hubris, that it isn’t just overweening pride, it’s pride taken to the next level. I think there is self esteem, which is a healthy state, and there is pride, which is properly named a sin. And then there’s hubris which is a self destructive streak.
Q: Being punished by the gods. A lot got blamed on the gods back then. You talked earlier about democracy and some of these concepts being as fragile as bubbles. Even motivation wasn’t yet a concept, dreams were divinely inspired. I don’t even know what my question was, sorry.
A: We’re talking about people who saw omens everywhere. The reason I included the storm in the second chapter which destroyed the Persian ships, beyond the fact that it actually happened, was that I thought it important to have that moment, to show that these people really did believe that Zeus was acting when the weather kicked up.
Q: There’s a direct analogy in Japanese history when the Koreans were going to invade, and divine wind — the kamikaze — kicked up and destroyed the Korean fleet. That’s where that term kamikaze came from.
A: There was another modern comparison to Xerxes during the Gulf War. It seemed mystifying to me and to everyone I knew that Saddam Hussain set the gulf on fire because it seemed like an act of self destructive madness. But there’s a parallel. When Xerxes father failed at Marathon, he ordered the sea whipped, soldiers actually out there whipping the waves with bull whips. It’s easy to see how Saddam Hussain might have been trying to make the same gesture, punishing the sea for the fact that his land was being demolished. Magical thinking.
Q: A friend of mine who used to live in LA said he thought you hated LA —
A: Speaking of magical thinking, yes.
Q: It’s not a very good segue, is it?
A: It’s a perfect segue.
Q: Why did you leave LA?
A: It didn’t feel right. For me to be in LA I would have had to become more committed to the movie industry, because it really is a factory town. It produces essentially one product and you’re either in or out. I had to come to a decision about whether I was going to continue in film or do comics. There wasn’t really a middle ground, either is consuming for me. My deep love of drawing and my deep love of comics and the total freedom I have as a cartoonist, I made up my mind that I would continue in comics.
Q: I think that most people who are not in a position to make such a choice would almost assume that if they were in that position they would choose to go for Hollywood and go for…
A: Yeah, because the money is better and it’s incredibly glamorous. But the thing is, you serve an awful lot of masters. I refer to a screenplay as a fire hydrant with a whole lot of dogs lined up.
Q: You cowrote the screenplays for Robocop II and III and there was Batman. The assumption is the comic you created was a Batman resurrection that became the backbone for the films. Is that giving you too much credit?
A: Well, I didn’t really like the Batman movies much so I wouldn’t call it credit. Mainly I felt that what they did was they took some of the spooky imagery from my Dark Knight and put it on top of the old TV show. So I don’t really feel much association, though obviously the comic I did was plainly crucial to the movie getting made.
Q: Showing that there was still life in that masked man.
A, And showing that the character could be scary, on a deeper level than lots of black on him, lots of dark sky. I think Lynn Varley’s work on Dark Knight probably affected the movie as much as mine. The color schemes were reproduced wholesale.
Q: I almost like her work on Ronan on better. It reminds me of Moebius. Was there any intention?
A: There was on my part. I had fallen madly in love with the work of Moebius and [Goshe Kojeman] in Japan. I mean, I was a kid in a candy store playing with all these styles, working with great freedom for the first time in my career.
Q: And you still are working with great freedom. Is that the goal of the happy man? That it’s not about money, that it’s about artistic freedom?
A: That’s the most critical thing. It had everything to do with my decision to come back to comics. I’ve been able to explore all kinds of crazy things. I’m doing an historical comic book set in 480 bc, not exactly the typical fare at comic book stores.
Q: Right. If you pitched at a Hollywood studio…
A: Well, there’s actually a little more variety in Hollywood and they’d probably go, “Oh, it sounds like Braveheart.” But if I was someone they didn’t know and I came into Marvel Comics and said, “I want to do a comic book set in Ancient Greece featuring a three day battle and I want to do in 128 pages.” They’d go, “Well, what’s on page 2?” And then, “What are their powers?”
Q: Diane, your editor, told me about her first meeting with you outside of a comic book store in Berkeley.
A: A long time ago.
Q: She said you were wearing a dark coat, and that you looked like the Frank Miller she imagined. Isn’t that odd?
A: Yeah, there’s quite a connection between comic book readers and authors more so than there are in a lot of fields. It’s a small world, with people who are devoted to it on every end. I mean, I grew up absolutely mad over comic books and then got to do them. That was a transition, of course, but I can’t forget what it’s like to be waiting for the comic book to come out every month.
Q: And this is why you read the letters from your fans?
A: Yeah, for a long time I resisted this connection because I felt a good prescription for insanity would be to take one’s press too seriously, which I did for a while after Dark Knight, and to become too enmeshed with the readership. I find that some contact is very useful because I am intertwined with these people. I’m not some royalty, not Elvis showing up throwing scarves or anything, it’s too small a role for that. Comic book people tend to be highly intelligent. For goodness sake, they can read. How many Americans can you say that about?
Q: Half of my friends.
A: They’re very intelligent and there’s this weakness that is often there because there’s a shared love of an art form that is generally held in low regard.
Q: Why do you think that is?
A: Castration in the ‘50s is one factor, the fact that comic book companies, rather than fighting the censors, censored themselves and promised to be everything that the censors thought they should be.
Q: And you’re not censoring yourself?
A: Only to the degree that any artist does. I don’t draw every bizarre notion that pops into my head. I do make a decision whether it fits the material or not but I don’t worry about offending anybody else.
Q: But is there anything about Frank Miller that you don’t want to expose in your comics?
A: Would I tell you?
Q: Probably not. Thought I’d ask. You might be in a confessorial mood and I’d get a scoop, you know. Do you own a handgun?
A: No. I own a large collection of replicas. I’ve got to draw the things. I’ve got all kinds of pig iron versions that don’t fire. I mean, I’ve fired guns. I grew up with them around me.
Q: It’s interesting because you were compared to Raymond Chandler by Rolling Stone, but he was a gentleman writer, an ex-oil exec writing about his tough guy detective, Philip Marlow.
A: First of all, Rolling Stone was very kind, but I’m pretty up front about how much of my work is fantasy. I mean, I’ve had real life experiences and experienced crime and so on. There’s no reason to go into all… [The tape broke for the first time in my career as an interviewer, but this is what we talked about next. Frank told me, after I told him about a razor blade once being held to my throat, about two instances of having weapons pointed at him, once a simple mugging with a knife, once a suite of guns in a loft in New York. And then he reiterated the theme of freedom, and how much that means to anyone with an artistic urge, and I can tell you, for me, it means everything.]
