Not only has he managed to bring his comic-book creations to the big screen, the Scottish actor has also won over Hollywood in the process
The night before our interview, Mark Millar was drinking his way through his hotel suite's minibar. "There goes your budget, Universal Pictures!" he tweeted, later adding, "If I get drunk enough and run out of nuts I'm going to eat those minibar condoms." But when I meet the 44-year-old the following afternoon he is incredibly chirpy, enthusiasm unfettered, words flying out at 100mph. He discusses the Kick-Ass films, adapted from the comics he authored, with childlike glee. Next week the sequel is released, and this time there are whole armies of costumed cohorts, Aaron Taylor-Johnson's eponymous DIY vigilante leading the charge against Christopher Mintz-Plasse's vengeful Red Mist, now reborn as The Motherfucker. It's a big bundle of fun, and with its $28m budget (low compared with its costlier cousins), Millar hopes it will enjoy even greater success than its predecessor, which made $96m in cinemas.
He brings up Jim Carrey early. The actor plays Colonel Stars and Stripes, a gun-toting patriot amassing a team of superheroes, but recently U-turned on the film, tweeting that he was not ashamed of it but, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, was withdrawing support due to its "level of violence".
"You should never give actors Twitter," laughs Millar, who says the argument that cinema causes gun crime is "preposterous". Kick-Ass 2's violence is indeed brutal, and a sizeable chunk of it is dished out by Carrey himself. His about-turn was sudden; perhaps Carrey did not want to seem hypocritical after months of anti-gun lobbying. "I think that's exactly what happened. I think he got boxed into a corner," says Millar. "The image that was online prior to this was a photo of him pointing a gun, laughing, with headlines like 'Jim Carrey slams gun violence.' So I think he felt, well, checkmate, and he had to bail on some level."
Last weekend Millar tweeted a doctored photo of Carrey from the film, his gun replaced with flowers. He's enjoying the heat Carrey has generated. "I went 'Yes!' when I heard it," he says, "because I knew we were gonna get amazing publicity. Universal estimates we get $30m worth of advertising out of it, because it was on Good Morning America and all that stuff. So I think he's weirdly done us a favour. It worked out great."
Millar's profile is also high. Born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire (he still lives in Glasgow) in 1969, he began on Britain's 2000AD aged 20, moved to DC Comics, then in 2000 was headhunted by Marvel, where he reinvigorated many of its titles. In 2004 he began creating characters for his own Millarworld company – Kick Ass and Wanted have spawned highly profitable films, and there are more adaptations on the way.
He's particularly adept at genre subversion. "I started writing comics for me instead of what I thought an audience was going to like or what a publisher wanted," he says of his first hit for DC, The Authority, in 2000. "My idea was to do a superhero book that was the complete opposite of any superhero book I'd ever seen. It's the philosophy I've applied to everything since, to break new ground instead of 'Green Goblin busts out of prison and Spider Man fights him'. So I wanted to have the two lead superheroes as a gay couple, I wanted them to adopt a baby, I wanted to have a drug-addict superhero, just mix it up a little and throw real life in there."
DC put him on the naughty step after he photocopied an image of the gay superheroes kissing and sent it to the Sunday Times, which ran a story that got picked up internationally. "I think DC went apeshit because they're owned by Warner Bros and are always terrified of getting fired, and they had a guy who looked like Superman kissing a guy who looked like Batman and I think they just panicked and they wanted me out as soon as possible. And that just goaded me into doing it more. I found myself doing gay sex scenes, or things I knew would piss them off. It was a marriage made in hell, me and DC, because they're so corporate and I enjoy just having a bit of fun with it all."
He was soon poached by Marvel, where he was an immediate success. He revamped The Avengers: much of that work inspired the company's recent cinematic output. It was Millar who made the previously white Nick Fury black, his artist Bryan Hitch drawing him specifically as Samuel L Jackson. The alien shapeshifters in Joss Whedon's Avengers film, the Chituari, came from Millar's comics too – via David Icke. "It's funny because the Hollywood guys don't know this and I love that," he laughs. "I didn't tell them. I'm a huge David Icke fan and I took the Chitauri from there. I love the fact that it's in a $1.6bn grossing movie and it's straight from David Icke!"
Kick-Ass, first published in 2008, was Millar's postmodern spin on Spider-Man, a superhero without superpowers, suffering real consequences. When Matthew Vaughn, who directed the first film (and has produced both) touted the screenplay around, studios either turned it down or suggested changes, such as decreasing the violence and raising the age of the 11-year-old Hit Girl to 25. Vaughn declined and raised the money privately. Still, both films are more feel-good than the comics, with softer edges. For the screen, Kick-Ass 2's downbeat ending has been excised in favour of triumph, and despite Millar previously having said they would make the cut, two of The Motherfucker's grimmest moments are absent. A dog's head being sliced off and placed on top of a fresh human corpse's is gone, as is a gang rape.
"Comics and films cross over so much, but there are a couple of things that can feel too much, especially if you've been hit by a relentless barrage of it," he says. "So they had to slightly dilute that stuff, which I agreed with. I'm in all of those meetings and I totally get why that has to happen." In terms of the glummer ending, which was shot before being ditched, he says "there was just a feeling that in 2013 you want to leave a cinema feeling good".
The grisly cuts are sensible changes, but one suspects diplomacy at play here: in Millar's perfect world, wouldn't the horror remain? "I think comics are 10 years ahead of everything else," he says. "What you see in films that seems controversial isn't controversial in comics, generally. The comics audience is the most sophisticated audience. People who read tend to be smarter than people who don't read, and the comic book audience is so savvy and smart and switched on. I feel very at home with comic people."
Last September, Fox brought him on board as a creative consultant to oversee its X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises, which it bought in the 90s when Marvel was in bad financial straits. Meanwhile, Millar plans to have 20 comic franchises of his own by 2020: "I'm on number nine. My plan over the next seven years is to get the other 11 done. Stan Lee proved you can create whole universes from your bedroom, and I see that as the challenge."
It's progressing well. Wanted 2 is in the works; Joe Carnahan is adapting Millar's Nemesis; and next month Vaughn is directing The Secret Service, Millar's book about a London rioter who trains to be a Bond-esque agent. Colin Firth, Michael Caine and Samuel L Jackson are starring. Millar has Hollywood eating out of his hand, and in June he was honoured by the Queen for services to literature and drama. The man responsible for The Motherfucker is now an MBE.
"That just shows you how fucked we are as a country!" he laughs. "When the first Kick-Ass came out I expected a furore about a little girl saying 'cunt', and the violence, and everybody was like, 'What a charming film, I really enjoyed it.' I thought, 'What?! Is this how far we've sunk as a nation?'" Many would agree. He'd love that. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.
The night before our interview, Mark Millar was drinking his way through his hotel suite's minibar. "There goes your budget, Universal Pictures!" he tweeted, later adding, "If I get drunk enough and run out of nuts I'm going to eat those minibar condoms." But when I meet the 44-year-old the following afternoon he is incredibly chirpy, enthusiasm unfettered, words flying out at 100mph. He discusses the Kick-Ass films, adapted from the comics he authored, with childlike glee. Next week the sequel is released, and this time there are whole armies of costumed cohorts, Aaron Taylor-Johnson's eponymous DIY vigilante leading the charge against Christopher Mintz-Plasse's vengeful Red Mist, now reborn as The Motherfucker. It's a big bundle of fun, and with its $28m budget (low compared with its costlier cousins), Millar hopes it will enjoy even greater success than its predecessor, which made $96m in cinemas.
He brings up Jim Carrey early. The actor plays Colonel Stars and Stripes, a gun-toting patriot amassing a team of superheroes, but recently U-turned on the film, tweeting that he was not ashamed of it but, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, was withdrawing support due to its "level of violence".
"You should never give actors Twitter," laughs Millar, who says the argument that cinema causes gun crime is "preposterous". Kick-Ass 2's violence is indeed brutal, and a sizeable chunk of it is dished out by Carrey himself. His about-turn was sudden; perhaps Carrey did not want to seem hypocritical after months of anti-gun lobbying. "I think that's exactly what happened. I think he got boxed into a corner," says Millar. "The image that was online prior to this was a photo of him pointing a gun, laughing, with headlines like 'Jim Carrey slams gun violence.' So I think he felt, well, checkmate, and he had to bail on some level."
Last weekend Millar tweeted a doctored photo of Carrey from the film, his gun replaced with flowers. He's enjoying the heat Carrey has generated. "I went 'Yes!' when I heard it," he says, "because I knew we were gonna get amazing publicity. Universal estimates we get $30m worth of advertising out of it, because it was on Good Morning America and all that stuff. So I think he's weirdly done us a favour. It worked out great."
Millar's profile is also high. Born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire (he still lives in Glasgow) in 1969, he began on Britain's 2000AD aged 20, moved to DC Comics, then in 2000 was headhunted by Marvel, where he reinvigorated many of its titles. In 2004 he began creating characters for his own Millarworld company – Kick Ass and Wanted have spawned highly profitable films, and there are more adaptations on the way.
He's particularly adept at genre subversion. "I started writing comics for me instead of what I thought an audience was going to like or what a publisher wanted," he says of his first hit for DC, The Authority, in 2000. "My idea was to do a superhero book that was the complete opposite of any superhero book I'd ever seen. It's the philosophy I've applied to everything since, to break new ground instead of 'Green Goblin busts out of prison and Spider Man fights him'. So I wanted to have the two lead superheroes as a gay couple, I wanted them to adopt a baby, I wanted to have a drug-addict superhero, just mix it up a little and throw real life in there."
DC put him on the naughty step after he photocopied an image of the gay superheroes kissing and sent it to the Sunday Times, which ran a story that got picked up internationally. "I think DC went apeshit because they're owned by Warner Bros and are always terrified of getting fired, and they had a guy who looked like Superman kissing a guy who looked like Batman and I think they just panicked and they wanted me out as soon as possible. And that just goaded me into doing it more. I found myself doing gay sex scenes, or things I knew would piss them off. It was a marriage made in hell, me and DC, because they're so corporate and I enjoy just having a bit of fun with it all."
He was soon poached by Marvel, where he was an immediate success. He revamped The Avengers: much of that work inspired the company's recent cinematic output. It was Millar who made the previously white Nick Fury black, his artist Bryan Hitch drawing him specifically as Samuel L Jackson. The alien shapeshifters in Joss Whedon's Avengers film, the Chituari, came from Millar's comics too – via David Icke. "It's funny because the Hollywood guys don't know this and I love that," he laughs. "I didn't tell them. I'm a huge David Icke fan and I took the Chitauri from there. I love the fact that it's in a $1.6bn grossing movie and it's straight from David Icke!"
Kick-Ass, first published in 2008, was Millar's postmodern spin on Spider-Man, a superhero without superpowers, suffering real consequences. When Matthew Vaughn, who directed the first film (and has produced both) touted the screenplay around, studios either turned it down or suggested changes, such as decreasing the violence and raising the age of the 11-year-old Hit Girl to 25. Vaughn declined and raised the money privately. Still, both films are more feel-good than the comics, with softer edges. For the screen, Kick-Ass 2's downbeat ending has been excised in favour of triumph, and despite Millar previously having said they would make the cut, two of The Motherfucker's grimmest moments are absent. A dog's head being sliced off and placed on top of a fresh human corpse's is gone, as is a gang rape.
"Comics and films cross over so much, but there are a couple of things that can feel too much, especially if you've been hit by a relentless barrage of it," he says. "So they had to slightly dilute that stuff, which I agreed with. I'm in all of those meetings and I totally get why that has to happen." In terms of the glummer ending, which was shot before being ditched, he says "there was just a feeling that in 2013 you want to leave a cinema feeling good".
The grisly cuts are sensible changes, but one suspects diplomacy at play here: in Millar's perfect world, wouldn't the horror remain? "I think comics are 10 years ahead of everything else," he says. "What you see in films that seems controversial isn't controversial in comics, generally. The comics audience is the most sophisticated audience. People who read tend to be smarter than people who don't read, and the comic book audience is so savvy and smart and switched on. I feel very at home with comic people."
Last September, Fox brought him on board as a creative consultant to oversee its X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises, which it bought in the 90s when Marvel was in bad financial straits. Meanwhile, Millar plans to have 20 comic franchises of his own by 2020: "I'm on number nine. My plan over the next seven years is to get the other 11 done. Stan Lee proved you can create whole universes from your bedroom, and I see that as the challenge."
It's progressing well. Wanted 2 is in the works; Joe Carnahan is adapting Millar's Nemesis; and next month Vaughn is directing The Secret Service, Millar's book about a London rioter who trains to be a Bond-esque agent. Colin Firth, Michael Caine and Samuel L Jackson are starring. Millar has Hollywood eating out of his hand, and in June he was honoured by the Queen for services to literature and drama. The man responsible for The Motherfucker is now an MBE.
"That just shows you how fucked we are as a country!" he laughs. "When the first Kick-Ass came out I expected a furore about a little girl saying 'cunt', and the violence, and everybody was like, 'What a charming film, I really enjoyed it.' I thought, 'What?! Is this how far we've sunk as a nation?'" Many would agree. He'd love that. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.