Written by contributor Marcin Zwierzchowski
With issue #301, Spawn becomes the longest running creator-owned comic in the world. We’ve met with its creator, Todd McFarlane, at New York Comic Con and we talked about this anti-hero’s come back to the big screen.
Spawn is coming back to the big screen. Why now and how it will be different from what we saw earlier?
Well, I think I probably should have gotten it done 10 years ago. So it wasn’t such a big gap between this and the other movie. But the upside of it being 20 years later is that there has been this whole tidal wave of superhero movies globally that have now created this giant pool of geeks all over the place.
And not even geeks, because it’s too big. It’s outside the geek community.
But I think if you like these movies you’ve got a little bit of geek in you. I’m saying geek in a good way. So the more geeks the better. I think maybe one of the religious books got it wrong when they said the meek will inherit the earth. I think they actually meant the geek will inherit the earth. So we’re coming.
I think we’re there. If you look at the box office, we’re there.
I would agree we are there. But the difference being simply that the first movie was more traditional, PG-13 comic book origin, retelling of issue number one type of story that you see in a lot of those superhero movies. You know even to some extent in the latest one it comes out again, they’re trying to get to the origin, to set everything up, so that they can move forward with it.
I’ve been saying forever I want to do an R-rated movie. I’ve written a screenplay. It’s a deadly serious R-rated movie.
Not R-rated just because after Deadpool everything wants to be R-rated, but that comes from the story?
Right. So the trappings of PG-13 superheroes are still there in some of the R-rated versions. We’re way closer to what you see in most scary movies. And I hesitate to say horror because sometimes people think that’s like blood and guts. But horror, terror, supernatural thriller movies. In those movies there’s one thing in common – there’s only one element in those entire movies that’s fantastic.
Like A Quiet Place lately.
Well I’m talking about more like Jaws. Obviously there’s only one giant shark. And then, if you go to John Carpenter’s The Thing there’s only one thing, and then, if you go to The Grudge there’s only the one little girl. And even recently The Nun. So you don’t have six or eight of them. There’s usually one bogeyman. And if you take it out, like in The Exorcist, if you take out the demonic element that was in there, that one demonic element, then everything else in that movie was normal. Other than the girl and the possession, everything else in this movie is the world that you and I live in. Even to the point that in The Exorcist the next-door-neighbours probably didn’t even know what was going on.
Even as a young child I was no fan of PG-13 movies, period. I don’t know why. I’m just not wired. And part of it was that I had to give up too many elements of the fantastic. Where in a horror movie you have to give up one. So you go: ‘Do I believe your car could run out of petrol? Of course I do. Do I believe that my cell phone could run out of power or there’s no cell service? Of course I can. And then I have to walk to that house on top of the hill? Of course. And that there’s nobody in the house? Now I’ve got to try and see whether I can find something out and that within all of that could there be a bogeyman. OK I’ll give you that one.’
The funny thing ‒ the odd thing ‒ is that I do all that during the day. I draw that fantasy, I draw PG-13 all day long. So maybe it’s just as I’ve gotten older too, or I broke into the business, I just need a break from it. So for twelve hours I do all that crazy stuff: aliens and ray guns, and headquarters; I do it all. And then at the end I go: ‘I’ve had my fill’, and so when I go and watch TV and movies, 95 percent of it is just straight drama. I don’t want to see any more fantasy. I just need drama. Why? Because in twelve hours from now I’ve got to go back to the table and I have to do fantasy again, and I just need a breather for my brain.
I know plenty of people that are in this industry that don’t [need that]. They can do it 24 hours a day. They can go from doing fantasy to reading fantasy to watching fantasy to thinking about fantasy. They can do it 24 hours a day. I marvel at it. I’m amazed by it. Personally I can’t do it.
But it was always there, because I remember again as a child that my friends were going to Star Wars and I was going to a movie called Gorky’s Park. It was this spy movie that felt like a true story. And I was going: ‘Oh my God!’. And I remember from a young age, going: ‘This could really happen’. With all my movies I wanted to be that this could really happen.
So you wanted to be engaged and not escape, because many times we talk about escapism, about going into fantasy from our world. But you wanted to be engaged in the story.
I live the opposite life. You know, somebody who’s a banker goes ‘Hey I’m going to escape into fantasy’, I’m going: ‘I’ve been in fantasy all day, I need to get some reality back in my life’.
The PG-13 movies as a whole, I dub them ‒ and it’s an oversimplification ‒ “chaos with no consequence”. Which means: wow look at the visuals. They are fantastic. Look at the chases and the explosions and the battles. They are amazing. The vast majority of them are there look at.
And nobody dies.
Well it’s not that no one dies. They don’t tell you whether anybody did or did not, and none of the characters seem to be concerned about that. So you just have a chase, things explode, and as long as me ‒ the hero ‒ got away, then then the next conversation is me just going: ‘Hey I’m going to get those bad guys’, instead of turning on the TV to see if any of those exploding cars or falling buildings or flying bullets actually killed somebody.
Personally, I’m just not wired to be able to turn off that many buttons. So every time I see an action movie, I’m always trying to add logic to it. And it’s what frustrates me, because the logic starts to fall apart. And I think those movies they go: ‘Hey let’s put in the cool, let’s design these cool stories and then let’s put in reality second. Let’s wedge that reality in after the fact’.
I want to do the opposite. I want to start with reality. I want to start with real. And then I want to put the fantastic in, which is nothing unique, it’s just how it’s really how horror movies work.
So we should look at Spawn as more of a horror than a superhero movie?
Yes, absolutely. I think it’s what is confusing Hollywood. I’ve got a couple of people read it and I can tell by the comments that they are coming from a mindset of: ‘Oh I was thinking “superhero”’. I wish I could almost ignore that word when I’m talking about Spawn. Their comments are coming like ‘why isn’t he talking more?’, ‘why isn’t he on screen more?’. And it’s because in horror movies the bogeyman isn’t on screen a lot and most bogeymen don’t talk a lot, if ever. So it’s weird when they ask me these questions: ‘how can you do a movie in which the lead character doesn’t talk?’. And the answer is: ‘What were you talking about? You just had a movie called The Nun. It’s a movie that opened up to 55 million and that’s how it works. And then two weeks from now you’re going to have a movie called Halloween and it’s exactly how it’s going to work. Michael Myers is not going to be on screen very much and he’s not going to talk. It’s going to open up to 65-70 million dollars and it’s going to be a giant, giant success.’ So of course you can do these kinds of movies, if you think of them in the terms that I’m thinking.
I’ve gotten to the point that I told my agents the other day ‘I think we may have made a misstep of just sending the script alone’. Because I had suggested me going in in advance and painting a framework. And now more than ever I feel that the that when we go back to them and talk, not only must I tell them what this movie is, I need to show them what this movie is. Until I have animatics, I’ve got drawings of the costume.
Does it mean that it can’t be called “a superhero” movie? No! And I’ve got a trilogy in my head that will that will get me there. And by number three is it possible that you could see a villain? Sure! But not in the first movie, not in the setup.
So no villains?
Nothing, like a horror movie. You fell into the trap. A horror has one element. You take the one element out, there is nothing else fantastic. You take Spawn out of my Spawn, nothing else is fantastic.
But in horrors usually the bogeyman isn’t the main character. So it will be someone else’s story and then we’ll have Spawn?
But if you go into the movie called The Nun, who you’re looking for? Since the nun’s not on screen all the time, then somebody else has to drive it. That becomes the character that we hired Jeremy Renner to play. He’s a fantastic actor. So while we’re waiting for the bogeyman, we will have this fantastic Academy Award nominated actor up on screen engaging you, and then >>bam<<. Then my guy will come, the one that you and I know is the bogeyman, which is Spawn.
The thing that becomes a little curious, you’re right, is that usually the bogeyman is the bad guy. In this case the bogeyman is a good guy. So I’ve got some mechanism to get around that. But anyways, it’s just going to be a dark, serious, creepy movie.
Why do think that Spawn resonated so much that he is an iconic character?
A couple of things, probably. Number one, we were fortunate to get out of the starting blocks, because ‒ remember ‒ I was coming from an award winning run on Spider-Man. So people were then willing to give me a chance to look at my next book. A lot of books don’t necessarily get as good a chance to get out of the gate.
Something like The Walking Dead started only selling a couple thousand and then worked its way. So it doesn’t mean that you can’t find success the other way either. I’m just saying I had a bit of an advantage. And then people started to get engaged with the book, because they like my artwork. I got to deliver an interesting story that was there. Given that there is solid storytelling and solid artwork to with that, never ever underestimate longevity. He’s now been around since 1992. That’s over twenty five years non-stop.
