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Mark Millar Announces New Spider-Man Project, Talks About His New Movie, Reads The Daily Mail

Published Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:47 -0600

Last updated Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:20:00 -0600

Mark Millar has been talking to STV, the commercial independent Scottish TV station about the independent Scottish movie that he's planning to direct this summer.

The plan with the Scottish movie was that I realised that everything I'd written, even though I'm a Scottish guy from Coatbridge, everything I'd written was set in New York or Los Angeles. I just thought that's quite weird; normally people will do something that is a wee bit to do with where they came from, so I thought that it was quite odd that I've never done that. It's a lazy shorthand to always set something in America that everybody understands.

I saw District 9, the South-African alien movie. I thought that that was quite interesting to see something that people don't associate with South Africa, which is alien invasions, to juxtapose two things and make something quite interesting and quite odd, and I thought wouldn't it be cool to do a superhero movie in Scotland.

Not a cheesy BBC Scotland comedy kind of thing, but to make it cool, as cool as X Men 2 was or whatever. Not costumes and that kind of stuff, a 21st century Trainspotting kind of thing about people with superpowers and make it epic, make it big and grand in scope, try and do something that's unexpected.

So my plan is to start directing that in June, June and July. We're prepping it just now. We want to do it with an entirely new cast, people nobody have seen before, young people from Glasgow and Edinburgh and work with local teams. Everyone that works on the movie we want to try and keep Scottish and just create a superhero movie with its own unique flavour.

So, any Scots fancy a walk-on part? But during the talk, he also mentions that, as well as his three creator-owned comic books he's creating this year (Nemesis, Leinel Yu's unnamed book and Dave Gibbons' unnamed book I think), he's also doing

a big Spider-Man story for Marvel.

His Marvel Knights Spider-Man series previously, it's argued, set the scene for much of the current Marvel tone, with a plot that saw governmental and non-governmental forces creating all the villains for superheroes to fight, so as not to see the big picture.

He also runs through the Superman pitching process and how he's so over that now. Hmm. But Millar also, far more shockingly, outs himself as a Daily Mail reader.

But I think it's quite funny, because everybody always says 'What do you think the Daily Mail readers are going to say?', and they always use that as the description. And I'm like 'I buy the Daily Mail every single day, it's my paper! So I feel – as a Daily Mail reader – that I'm very comfortable with this film.

Okay, I think that justifies any of the mad zealotry Millar-Haterz right there. Destroying childhood superheroes with iconoclastical glee? Fine. Making overblown claims in the hope some of them come true? Fine, in fact rather entertaining.

But buying the Daily Mail every day? You're nothing to me now, Millar, nothing.

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