How Sin City Reconciled Frank Miller & Hollywood
What Convinced the Comics Legend to Give Movies Another Chance
Apr 30, 2009
For years, Frank Miller was notoriously resistant to the idea of making his comic book series Sin City into a movie. Miller had a bad experience with Hollywood in the late 1980s, after he had been hired to write RoboCop 2 (1990). Miller's script, deemed unfilmable by the studio, had been heavily rewritten by others.
Frank Miller's Denials in Sin City Comics
Miller's first Sin City "yarns" appeared in 1991, and as the series became a critical and fan success, rumors spread about the inevitable movie version. But Miller denied the possibility of a Sin City movie adaptation on BLAM!, the letters page of the various Sin City series. In the one-shot issue Just Another Saturday Night (1997), one fan wrote,
"I keep hearing rumors about a Sin City movie. I hope they are unfounded. Movies always suck the soul out of comic books, and I don’t want to lose Sin City to Hollywood vultures. I know you’re a genius and if anyone can make a great Sin City movie, it is you; but why risk it? Why throw this fabulous creation to the dogs?"
To this, Miller replied, “Worry not: there ain’t no stinking Sin City movie in the works.”
What Convinced Frank Miller to Agree to a Sin City Movie
Director Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids) was among those who wanted to make a Sin City movie. In the early 2000s, he shot a test sequence to look as photographically close as possible to the original comics. It was this footage which finally convinced Frank Miller to allow a movie adaptation of Sin City. Rodriguez strove to create a “scrupulously meticulous translation,” as Graham Fuller notes in "Colour Me Noir" (Sight and Sound magazine 15.6, 2005), and this approach is apparently what Miller felt had been lacking before.
During shooting, Robert Rodriguez lit and framed the shots of his Sin City (2005) as though Sin City yarns such as "The Hard Goodbye" and "The Big Fat Kill" were storyboards for the film. The Sin City movie's footage looked so much like Frank Miller’s illustrations that Rodriguez later insisted that Miller receive directorial credit. To do so, Rodriguez had to give up his own membership in the Director’s Guild of America.
The Influence of Miller's Sin City Movie Approach
For Frank Miller, this pathological attention to the composition of a film’s visuals was, evidently, what constituted a “faithful” adaptation. The panel-by-panel adaptation of Miller's 300 followed in early 2007, and that film's director, Zack Snyder, went on to adapt writer Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel The Watchmen using the same literalistic approach in 2009.
Like Miller, Alan Moore had been lobbied for years to give the go-ahead to a movie version of his work. But unlike Miller, he wanted nothing to do with the project, evidently seeing no value in cinematic literalism. Moore even had his name kept out of the credits, granting sole credit to Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons.
Frank Miller went on to make The Spirit, his solo directorial debut, in 2008. The film's cinematography looked a lot more like the Sin City movie than the classic Will Eisner comic strip upon which it was based, though the late Eisner had been a friend and mentor of Miller, and Miller felt obligated to do justice to the original.
Although Frank Miller is now more amenable to Hollywood, Miller's favored approach isn't as novel as it once was. Both The Watchmen and The Spirit failed to win over moviegoers and critics alike, so Sin City's influence on comics-to-movies adaptations may be on the wane.
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