Ah, Frank Miller. You just gotta love him. But the prolific comic book writer and artist doesn't have to love you or anything you like.
Take the Batman movies, for example. Everyone pretty much agrees that Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy is the best on-screen interpretation of Batman, ever. It transcended the genre, turned it into a grounded, serious drama and high art while keeping Batman a larger-than-life figure. It even showed us action and scale on the big screen that we'd never seen before. We all love it. Well, almost all of us.
Frank Miller doesn't. The creator of books like "Sin City," "300," "Holy Terror" and more says he's never been able to sit through a single Batman film. Every time he's tried, he's walked out of the theater before the movie was over. That includes the Tim Burton films, the godawful Joel Schumacher movies and Nolan's trilogy.
"When people come out with movies about characters I've worked on, I always hate them," says Miller in a new interview with Playboy (via Rope of Silicon). "I have my own ideas about what the characters are like... [so when watching a Batman movie] I generally think, No, that's not him. And I walk out of the theater before it's over."
He goes on to say that while he doesn't condemn Nolan's work, he doesn't understand it. "Except that he seems to think he owns the title 'Dark Knight,'" he laughs. "He's about 20 years too late for that. It's been used."
Miller is referring, of course, to his highly-acclaimed, now-classic Batman comic book, "The Dark Knight Returns." A few elements from that book were borrowed for the last chapter of Nolan's film trilogy, but the on-screen adaptation that looks to lift from "Returns" most heavily is Zack Snyder's upcoming "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice." Miller offers no thoughts on that movie's prospects, though one assumes he holds some regard for Snyder, given the director's well-received work on "300."
As for what he hates to see on film, Miller doesn't keep reserve his disregard for just Batman movies. Like everyone else, he found the "Daredevil" and "Elektra" movies abysmal, even though they both drew almost exclusively from Miller's work on the Marvel comic. It's a little hard to swallow lumping those two films into the same category as "The Dark Knight," but Miller's entitled to his opinion. On the other hand, Miller quite likes the movies that come out of Marvel Studios itself.
"One reason I enjoy the Marvel [Studios] movies is that they're fun," he says. "A lot of superhero movies are pompous. At one point I was watching 'Superman,' and all I could do was an impersonation of him saying, 'Hi, I can fly and you can't.' Whereas Captain America, the Hulk and Iron Man are a bunch of mixed-up crazy kids, just like the readers."
Miller's "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For," his second co-directing effort with Robert Rodriguez, opens in theaters this Friday, August 22, 2014.
