From Italy: Frank Miller on Alan Moore

Excerpt from an interview with Frank Miller by Luca Valtorta, printed the 8th of January on the Italian magazine Robinson.

WARNING: I translated the excerpt... from the Italian translation. So these are not the exact Miller's words. No access to the original source. 

Special thanks for the support to my friend Antonio Solinas.

Furthermore, the interview, in Italian, is available online: HERE (it's an expanded version compared to the printed one).

Luca Valtorta: What do you think about Alan Moore's statement that "superhero movies made for grown-ups are grotesque". [smoky note: I think the exact statement is a bit different. Moore said: "I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque." Source: Deadline]
Frank Miller: I have no comment, really. I don't like generalizations. I wouldn't say "westerns are bad movies". I am sorry but I am a bit more liberal than Alan.

Did you ever meet him in person?
Yes, we know each other pretty well. We disagree on many things but this has never been an obstacle to have a good time together.

Lately he has disappeared...
Yes, he doesn't like to get around that much but we all have tough moments...

Moore has declared himself an anarchist. And you?
I am a libertarian.

Maybe Moore and you agree on his declaration that movies have stolen all the characters from the comic book authors. For example, you have been involved in Nolan's Batman trilogy which references your stories even in the titles...
You see? Alan hasn't really disappeared! For sure he hasn't remained silent! This is like saying that an actor disappears if he wear sunglasses [Miller laughs].
Anyway I didn't get involved in Nolan's movies. [...]

1984 Journey to US

Excerpt from An impossibly rich celebrity's guide, a piece written by Moore chronicling his journey to New York in 1984. Published in Escape n. 6, 1985.

31st August, Friday
In the morning I meet Frank Miller and we call up at the Marvel offices, a curious place. The people seem friendly enough, but the atmosphere is very different to the informal cheeriness of DC. The centre of the floor is given over to drawing boards and labouring artisans, while the offices leading off from the main area are apparently the kind that you knock and wait at the door of, before entering. This is probably simple company bias on my part, but with Marvel I did get the impression of a company who make the trains run on time. I don't seem to have an awful lot to say to Marvel and they don't seem to have much to say to me.
Afterwards, me and Frank call in at a bar and down some sandwiches and beer. Talking to him, I feel a strong affinity of approach; he tells me about his forthcoming Batman series for DC, his face contorting into the different emotions of his characters as he describes them. This is something I do myself, and it comes from a near-unbalanced degree of involvement. Frank tells me that Howard Chaykin's approach is totally different. Howard is very cool and calculating in his construction, or at least that's how it looks to me. Frank, on the other hand, has a more personal and idiosyncratic touch. Out in the street, I notice a smouldering manhole cover reminiscent of those which populate the New York of Miller's Daredevil. I point it out to Frank and tell him I thought he'd made them up. We say goodbye and I head back to the hotel to meet Karen and the Limo to take me back to Kennedy airport. We stand outside for half an hour but it doesn't arrive. Eventually, Karen has to flag down one of the killer yellow cabs. The driver is a young Hispanic guy with dripping black ringlets in the style of Michael Jackson. He says 'I'll have him at the airport twenty five minutes guaranteed, I like to move, I don't wanna wait around, you know what I mean?' SLAM! The cab takes off on two wheels and I'm splattered against its rear upholstery by the sudden G-force. Outside, the New York landscape flashes by at an oddly tilted angle. Twenty-five minutes later we screech to a halt outside the British Airways terminal. 'Course my best time is twenty minutes!'
I catch my plane. Later I look out of the window, down upon New York and it looks like either a gigantic bird-eating spider fashioned in fairy lights or a luminous man with antlers. Dinner is served. I drink a Scotch and half a bottle of wine and then fall asleep. I awake hours later, just as we approach Heathrow. We land and I make my way through customs and find Jamie Delano waiting to take me home. He asks what America was like and all I can think to tell him about is a bumper sticker that Steve Bissette saw bearing the legend 'I swerve for hallucinations'. I am utterly blank. I've left my heart in San Francisco, my tie pin in the hotel and my brains all over the back seat of a yellow cab at Kennedy airport. As of this writing, my heart has turned up in the mail and I think I can buy a tie pin just like the old one. Why are there no major comic companies in Bali? 

The complete article can be read HERE.

Alan Moore and The Dark Knight

Batman: The Dark Knight returns.

Excerpt from the introduction written by Moore in 1986 for the hardcover edition of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight returns.

[...] The importance of myth and legend as a subtext to Dark Knight can't really be overstated, shining as it does from every page. The familiar Batman origin sequence with the tiny bat fluttering in through an open window to inspire a musing Bruce Wayne becomes something far more religious and apocalyptic under Miller's handling; the bat itself transformed into a gigantic and ominous chimera straight out of the darkest European fables. 

[...] Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape The Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time.
All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die.

[...] In his engrossing story of a great man's final and greatest battle, Miller has managed to create something radiant which should hopefully illuminate things for the rest of the comic book field, casting a new light upon the problems which face all of us working within the industry and perhaps even guiding us towards some fresh solutions.

[...] A new hero.

Alan Moore
Northampton, 1986

The complete introduction can be read here.

The Honest Moore: OWS, Frank Miller & Politics

An amazing Alan Moore portrait by Diego Maia

From a recent interview appeared on Honest Publishing website.

Read The Honest Alan Moore interview: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

With the Occupy movement, it seems you and Frank Miller have conflicting views. Would you say that he’s against it and you’re for it?
Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time. [...] 

It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say centre-right. That would be as far towards the liberal end of the spectrum as they would go. I’ve never been in any way, I don’t even know if I’m centre-left. I’ve been outspoken about that since the beginning of my career. So yes I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views upon all sorts of things, but certainly upon the Occupy movement.

As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. [...] I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.

What do you think needs to change in our political system?
Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century. [...]

Moore and... Frank Miller!

Moore from The Simpsons' episode Husbands and Knives.

In the past days Frank Miller generated a huge "controversy" with his opinion about the Occupy movement. So, it's not strictly related but it could be of some interest to read what Alan Moore said about Miller's 300 in an interview published in 2007 on Tripwire magazine (page 17, Tripwire Annual 2007, Tripwire Publishing Ltd.).

TRIPWIRE: Zack Snyder's directing Watchmen - he did Frank Miller's 300...

ALAN: "Jesus Christ..."

TRIPWIRE: Um, he did the remake of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead as well.
Actually, I didn't think it was bad at all...

ALAN: "Well, I am not interested in either of those films. I was invited to the premiere of 300 but I didn't even like the comics so... I think it's far from the best thing that Frank Miller has ever done. I got as far as the line where one of the Spartans is talking about the Anesthesias and says, "Huh, those boy lovers." I mean, Jesus Christ, the Spartans were famous for things other than being a bunch of tough guys. Possibly Frank should have read a book before he commenced that work... or, you know, more than one. I also don't understand why you want to make a film look like a graphic novel - what is the point of that? It's not a graphic novel, it's a film."

TRIPWIRE: Miller seems to have worked out how to handle Hollywood, though - be as hands-on as humanly possible...

ALAN: "... Or have material that is fairly simple. Sin City is based upon Mickey Spillane and noir films that Frank Miller has seen, so of course you can do something like that as a film. And something like 300 - this is not a complex plot. Three-hundred men defending a bridge against an invading empire - it goes back to the Dark Knight ethos of 'One good man can turn it all around' which I think is simplistic. But it's simplicity that works pretty well with contemporary Hollywood. Most of the stuff I do is intentionally complex - I'm not saying that complex is better than simple but complex you can't make into films very easily."