Behind the Scenes Compilation from the movie Unbreakable (2000).
Unbreakable is a 2000 American superhero thriller written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robin Wright. It is the first instalment in the Unbreakable film series. In Unbreakable, David Dunn (Willis) survives a train crash with no injuries, leading to the realization that he harbours superhuman abilities. As he grapples with this discovery, he comes to the attention of disabled comic book store owner Elijah Price (Jackson), who manipulates David to understand him.
Shyamalan organized the narrative of Unbreakable to parallel a comic book's traditional three-part story structure. After settling on the origin story, Shyamalan wrote the screenplay as a speculative screenplay with Willis already set to star in the film and Jackson in mind to portray Elijah Price. Filming began in April 2000 and was completed in July.
Unbreakable was released on November 22, 2000. It received generally positive reviews, with praise for Shyamalan's direction, screenplay, aesthetics, performances, emotional weight, cinematography, and the score by James Newton Howard. The film has subsequently gained a strong cult following. A realistic vision of the superhero genre, it is regarded by many as one of Shyamalan's best films and one of the best superhero films. In 2011, Time listed it as one of the top ten superhero films of all time, ranking it number four. Quentin Tarantino also included it on his list of the top 20 films released from 1992 to 2009.
After years of development on a follow-up film, a thematic sequel, Split, with Willis reprising his role as David Dunn in a cameo role, was released in January 2017. After the financial and critical success of Split, Shyamalan immediately began working on a third film, titled Glass, which was released on January 18, 2019, thus making Unbreakable the first instalment in the Unbreakable film series.
Unbreakable is a 2000 American superhero thriller written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robin Wright. It is the first instalment in the Unbreakable film series. In Unbreakable, David Dunn (Willis) survives a train crash with no injuries, leading to the realization that he harbours superhuman abilities. As he grapples with this discovery, he comes to the attention of disabled comic book store owner Elijah Price (Jackson), who manipulates David to understand him.
Shyamalan organized the narrative of Unbreakable to parallel a comic book's traditional three-part story structure. After settling on the origin story, Shyamalan wrote the screenplay as a speculative screenplay with Willis already set to star in the film and Jackson in mind to portray Elijah Price. Filming began in April 2000 and was completed in July.
Unbreakable was released on November 22, 2000. It received generally positive reviews, with praise for Shyamalan's direction, screenplay, aesthetics, performances, emotional weight, cinematography, and the score by James Newton Howard. The film has subsequently gained a strong cult following. A realistic vision of the superhero genre, it is regarded by many as one of Shyamalan's best films and one of the best superhero films. In 2011, Time listed it as one of the top ten superhero films of all time, ranking it number four. Quentin Tarantino also included it on his list of the top 20 films released from 1992 to 2009.
After years of development on a follow-up film, a thematic sequel, Split, with Willis reprising his role as David Dunn in a cameo role, was released in January 2017. After the financial and critical success of Split, Shyamalan immediately began working on a third film, titled Glass, which was released on January 18, 2019, thus making Unbreakable the first instalment in the Unbreakable film series.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00During the making of Sixth Sense, Knight told me about an idea that he had, but he couldn't
00:07tell me anything about it.
00:08I said, okay, I'll do it, just let me know when I can see it.
00:12I guess about a year, almost a year and a half went by, and he showed it to me, and
00:17I said, oh, good, okay.
00:24This is normally the first act of a movie, this whole movie, and I'm going to make an
00:28entire movie of the first act, the entire movie about a guy realizing he's a superhero.
00:33So that's how it popped into my head, the idea.
00:38After I've outlined it, I try to do six pages a day until the first draft is done, and that's
00:43how I start technically, and then I set little deadlines for myself, you know, second draft,
00:48third draft, fourth draft.
00:49We started out a very traditional movie, where the first act was him realizing his power,
00:54second act is him fighting good and bad, and then the third act is fighting the ultimate
00:57villain, and it just didn't respond to me.
01:02The second and third acts, I didn't connect with, I didn't connect with that person, and
01:07I connected a lot with somebody realizing something extraordinary about themselves.
01:12This movie, by definition, is an origin story, it's the birth of a comic book hero.
01:27Unbreakable was pretty easy because we had a lot of the same people from the sixth sense
01:31who we wanted to bring back.
01:33We made a couple of changes because of people who weren't available.
01:36We had a different cinematographer, so the movie had a different visual style to it.
01:41We had a different editor, and I think that lent a different style to it.
01:46We met, all of us as a group, about four times in the course of the four and a half months
01:50for, you know, two, three days at a time, and basically talked specifics of what was
01:54in the shot, what the image should do, what the desired effect was for sound and music
02:00and all the issues.
02:02Knight definitely has a vision and a plan, but I think he is really good at getting the
02:09best out of everybody who works with him.
02:12And in order to get the best out of people, you want to be open to their ideas and welcome
02:17their ideas and take all the good ones and use them.
02:25There's no black and white characters in the movie, in that the good person, the hero,
02:31has flaws, and that the villain is very endearing and has wonderful qualities about him.
02:39Knight wanted us to create a very literal world which was instantly recognizable as
02:44if this incredible story could be happening right down the street.
02:47He wanted to create a sense of normalcy in David Dunn's house to act in counterpoint
02:54to the incredible nature of the story that's happening to him.
02:57My character really needs to be as surprised by what's happening to him as the audience does.
03:03I mean, here's a guy that's, you know, never been sick, never been hurt.
03:06It's grounded in real human beings who experience real emotions, who have real families, who
03:11have real problems that we can all kind of recognize.
03:16It's kind of funny because you watch the movie and Bruce has got a scar, you know, where did he get that?
03:20These kind of ideas of villains and heroes are kind of from within normal people, and it comes out.
03:33The movie is very, very close to the storyboard, so, I mean, in a way, you can see the entire
03:38movie before we shoot it.
03:39I can walk you through the entire movie and say, tell you how it's going to feel.
03:43It's very important to know as early as possible what the camera moves and the camera shots
03:48might be.
03:49If a crane or something very specific is involved, that helps us better design the set.
03:54As an editor, storyboards are useful for me in terms of understanding the director's idea.
04:07For him, the camera only moves to reflect a change of emotion.
04:13Never on a move, not on a physical movement.
04:16In Unbreakable, there are over 30 scenes that are all shot in one take.
04:21It's scary to do because we never shot any safety coverage.
04:27He just knew that this is how the shot was going to appear in the film.
04:32Basically, the number one benefit of pacing it like that is that you feel part of that
04:38world more so.
04:39It helps me achieve a symbiotic relationship between the main character and the audience,
04:45which is the goal.
04:51The setting and the location and the world that filmmakers create is always an important
04:55character of the film.
04:57In particular in Unbreakable, there were really two worlds that were created.
05:01There was the world of David Dunn and there was the world of Elijah Price, the Samuel
05:06Jackson character.
05:07There was a big design premise, which was that the David Dunn world was a warm world
05:15and then the Elijah world was a cold, steely world.
05:20Ultimately, we learn that he is a superhero.
05:25The idea was that as we went through the movie, at certain points, color could be added, more
05:31sort of primary type colors that you would have in a comic book.
05:36Ed has very strong opinions about how his character should look.
05:41I would think that because of the bizarreness of Sam's character, it might have been a little
05:50easier for them to find things for me to wear, mostly shapeless clothes in this particular
05:58film.
05:59I was not looking my, it's not my finest hour style-wise.
06:03The main big design thing for him was the waterproof poncho, which then, when he goes
06:10to do his heroic act, takes on a mantle of hero, you know, so then we're going into the
06:17comic book scenario.
06:19And originally, we were going to push the fabric as well as the whole scale and structure
06:25of the garment, you know, to give it all this sort of sense of drama.
06:29In the end, we kept the nature of the fabric the same, but so we just changed the scale
06:34of it.
06:35So as he goes through that sequence, it becomes slightly more dramatic.
06:38It's very subtle.
06:40And so unless you really study it, you wouldn't notice it.
06:42I think my only contribution was purple, only because I thought of Elijah as very regal.
06:52And that's the color for regality.
06:56So he's established this sort of turtleneck and this purple color that comes into play
07:01in his childhood.
07:03Then when we see him in the comic book store for the first time as an adult, he's got these
07:08things going, blacks and purples and the turtleneck, you know.
07:12That was my idea, the glass cane.
07:14It was a great look.
07:15It was something that was almost transparent that he walked with, that he used, you know.
07:19So he had this gate and he had this transparent thing with this silver top, and it was kind
07:24of elegant to me, you know, that you could see through it.
07:26And it was a statement of sorts.
07:30Sturdy but fragile.
07:32I based his hair on Frederick Douglass, which is this sort of slightly sort of sideways
07:38thing.
07:39So that's the one thing about him, which everything else is all kind of, you know, perfect.
07:44And then there's just this slight kind of off-balance thing on the head.
07:50A lot of talk about that hair.
07:53I don't, you know, it's like, hey, it's just a character.
07:56Another reason to build that kind of structure where David would go from cool to warm and
08:05Elijah from warm to cool, it was the idea of reflections and inverted images and symmetrical
08:15things because there is something symmetric about Elijah and David.
08:20Good cannot exist without evil, and evil cannot exist without good.
08:24And so basically Elijah's character needed to find the hero so he could take his mantle
08:31and be the villain.
08:32We had very specific colors for each character.
08:35Sam Jackson had his purple color.
08:38David Dunn had, you know, his green color.
08:42We introduced in the final sequence, or the sequence that leads up to the final sequence,
08:49color that started out as sort of muted color and then became stronger as David Dunn starts
08:58to perceive his powers.
09:00When we see David Dunn in the train, there's that little girl when the camera's going back
09:04and forth.
09:05She was a color pop, you know, in that bright yellow.
09:06So we used sort of the comic book idea of color pops and tried to choreograph it, I
09:13suppose, really, so that you had always this sort of little interesting thing that you
09:18were drawn to that could be a signal or something of importance.
09:30More and more as I make movies, I find out how important sound is to movies and storytelling
09:35and the creation of atmosphere by sound.
09:38And Unbreakable was really kind of my most ambitious ideas for the movie.
09:42And so, you know, I brought in Richard King and he started working on the movie really
09:46early on and started preparing sound effects for all the scenes that we were editing.
09:52And we told him one thing, which was, don't use any sounds that have been used before.
09:56Don't use anything from a library.
09:57I want the film to have a completely unique feel, something original that we've never
10:02heard before.
10:03The scene where Elijah's falling down the stairs.
10:06We only hear the sound of him falling down the stairs when we see him.
10:09It cuts back and forth between relative silence and these horrible bone cracks as he's careening
10:16down the stairs.
10:19When he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he has this moment of horrible realization
10:24that David did see this gun.
10:28And the way, again, Knight designed that scene gave us the opportunity to use various subway
10:33train sounds, pitched to different degrees.
10:37We also used pitched wolf howls, a pack of wolves howling, and is the sound that segues
10:44into the next scene, which is David pulling up in the bus, getting out, meeting his son.
10:54One thing we did on Unbreakable that was great is to have James Newton Howard, the composer,
10:59start composing the music based on the script.
11:02The thing that we talked about mostly was the idea that the music beat, and this is
11:07a word he used a lot, have a singular quality to it, a singular quality meaning that the
11:14kind of thing that you could hear just one or two or three or four or five notes from
11:18and immediately say, ah, that's the music from Unbreakable.
11:22And that's not just in terms of melody, a thing you can whistle, but somehow that the
11:26music would have a quality to it, a tonality, a life of its own, a personality that would
11:33be just as distinctive as the film.
11:37This is East Rail 177. Next stop, Philadelphia.
11:46Unbreakable for me was by far the most I've ever put my performance in the hands of the
11:52director.
11:54He was always right on with how he saw the character, and I wanted to honor that.
11:59When you're watching the film for the first time, you're just watching a story and you
12:01don't know exactly where it's going.
12:03When the film ends, you realize that what you've seen is in a way very similar to a
12:08comic book.
12:10And I think it would be interesting for people when they go back and watch the movie a second
12:14time to observe the ways in which this film is existing on two levels.
12:21It's existing on the level of a realistic story of a man who's a security guard and
12:26a man who has osteogenesis imperfecta and the way that those two lives intersect.
12:33It's also interesting to watch how this movie is a film version of a comic book.
12:38I think I wanted to make feature-length Twilight Zones, you know, where something amazing happens
12:46in the last second and you realize you weren't watching what you thought you were watching.
12:51And inevitably, when you go back and look back at the movie the second time, everything
12:56should have that feeling that it was inevitable that this ending was going to be this way.
13:01It's natural.
13:02Now that we know who you are, I know who I am.
13:12These movies have become so known for their endings and I wanted them to be elements of
13:16the movie and not so much just an ending.
13:21That's all it is, one two-hour ending.
13:26It's something I struggle with because I basically get an idea and then I develop it and then
13:30an idea turns into this wonderful revelation.
13:34And now I sit down and go, well, do you want to do the revelation at the end of the movie?
13:41And so, you know, that's something I guess I'm going to be struggling with for a long
13:44time because I may not do the next movie with that kind of ending or I may do it the next
13:50movie after that.
13:52It's been an interesting two movies here, watching everybody getting, you know, hearing
13:57gasps in the last five minutes of the movie.
14:27I always read comics from the time I was a kid and I used to buy comic books.
14:55Shamefully say, I read Archie and Veronica and I collected Superman.
15:01We all want to be greater than we are or stronger or faster or there are things that we wish
15:08we could do like fly or see through walls and all those kinds of things.
15:13So those things always appeal to me.
15:21Sometimes we'd be Superman, people would throw kryptonite at you and you'd go down.
15:25We acted.
15:26We acted, you know, very strongly and we had theme music.
15:30We did the whole thing, you know, when we fought, we made music sounds and we'd make
15:37all the fist sounds.
15:39The superhero is absolutely essential, especially for young male readers who want to get in
15:45touch with their manhood.
15:46Well, it's no mystery that power fantasies are something that relates to an adolescent
15:52boy.
15:53I mean, what a time of our lives to have such a desire for power, such a sense of our potential
15:59power but always feel as if the world is keeping us down, keeping us from attaining that power.
16:06Superheroes are tailor-made for that age group.
16:09Superheroes are, in fact, I think justified by the fact that they are a genre mishmash
16:16of every form of fiction and this including science fiction, fantasy, mystery, magic myth,
16:26all that jumbled into one package.
16:28To me, the true superhero and the ones who have survived coincide with the true mythic
16:34hero, as I've said.
16:38They have the power.
16:39They have the power, sometimes, and they get the call.
16:42The call is a mystic thing, like I say it.
16:44It can be a bat flying in your window.
16:46It can be anything.
16:49Sometimes they avoid the call.
16:50Bruce Willis tries to avoid the call, but they can't.
16:54They can't because they are put on this earth, sometimes sent to the earth on a rocket ship,
17:00you know, but they are put on this earth to fight evil, to fight the evil to make things
17:05better.
17:07And that's the hero in his purest, or her, in his or her purest form.
17:13They're like basic morality plays.
17:14It's kind of like watching a Hong Kong movie.
17:17There's a set of bad guys, there's a set of good guys, and everybody's got a purpose,
17:21and it's very clear cut, but everybody's loyal to everybody else.
17:24The bad guys are very loyal to the bad guys, and the good guys are very loyal to the good
17:27guys.
17:28You can't have good without evil.
17:29If there's no evil, I mean, you can be a good person, but you can't be a hero with no evil
17:35because you have to have, you have to make it better, and there has to be something that
17:39you must make better.
17:40I mean, if there's nothing for you to fight, then you'll just, you'll just stay in Smallville,
17:46you know, and be a nice guy all your life, but, but you won't, you can't ever become
17:53a hero unless there's something for you to conquer.
17:56These are archetypes.
17:57These are ideas that live within our heads, that are hardwired into our brains.
18:01They manifest themselves as stories.
18:04If they're well done, they manifest themselves as stories that are appropriate to a given
18:10time and place.
18:12One rainy night, very much right out of the spirit scene, I was sitting in the studio,
18:18and I got a call from a guy who was going to be my partner in the venture.
18:21He's the guy that brought us together, Busy Arnold, from a bar.
18:25I could hear the jukebox going in the background, and I hear the tinkle of glasses, and he says
18:29to me, how are you coming?
18:30And I said, well, I said, I think I've got the first story, and I think I've got the
18:33character.
18:34And what I had sketched out on the drawing board was a guy looking like, very much like
18:39Cary Grant, you know, nice looking American hero.
18:44And he said, well, does he have a costume?
18:47And I said, well, no, he said, you've got to have a costume, said he couldn't sell it
18:51without a costume.
18:52Got to have a costume.
18:53So I put a mask on him, and I said, he's got a mask.
18:56He said, oh, that sounds good.
18:57And I said, he's got gloves.
18:58Oh, he says, go with that, go with that.
19:00That's great, go.
19:02And he hung up.
19:04And so there I was, stuck with this character.
19:08Eisner is such a great storyteller, and he came up, in fact, with a superhero, a true
19:14hero, who doesn't have any superpowers at all, but very symbolically, and this is something
19:20that happens to the hero in myth, and also symbolically happens to the hero in comics
19:25when he's the true hero, and that is that he dies and is reborn.
19:29The spirit is Denny Colt, he's a cop, and he fakes his own death so that he can come
19:34back as the spirit, and lives in a cemetery, lives in Wildwood Cemetery, so that he can
19:40fight crime.
19:41The problem I had with the spirit in the mask was that it violated something that was very
19:46important to me in my work.
19:48I want to be believed, I was dealing with reality.
19:51I look at Will Eisner's work, it remains something to aspire to for me.
19:55Emotional reality is what I'm after, I mean, I'm no realist.
19:58I don't need a character to be able to fly for a character to be heroic for me.
20:05As romantic as my stuff is, I find there's an awful lot of romance in the real world
20:09that I can use.
20:11There ain't all that much difference between a long trench coat and a cape anyway.
20:16So I think very few comic book guys decided to consciously do a myth.
20:24I think it did happen, and in the case of William Moulton Marsden with Wonder Woman,
20:29we know it did.
20:30But it's more that these are ideas that are innate, and they find an expression in a given
20:39way because of what the writers and artists see around them, the air they breathe.
20:43If you look at Superman, you see that he came from this other world, Krypton, this world
20:48that exploded, and that he's come to America, he's taken on this very super-American kind
20:56of identity.
20:57I mean, he's clothed himself sort of partially in the colors of the flag.
21:00He's changed his name from Kal-El, his Kryptonian name, to this very arch wasp name, Clark Kent.
21:11He's redefined himself, reinvented himself on these shores.
21:15And it's very easy to look at the Superman story as being at least in part the story
21:19of an immigrant, an immigrant from another world.
21:23And of course, Segal and Shuster, these were two sons of immigrants, of Jewish immigrants
21:29from Europe.
21:30You know, if you look at the creators, a lot of the early creators in comics, a lot of
21:37them were Jews, and a lot of them were the children of immigrants.
21:40It seems that the majority of them grew up in New York, grew up in either the slums or
21:44at least working-class neighborhoods.
21:47These kids lived in apartment buildings.
21:49They didn't live in single-family dwellings in the suburbs.
21:53And this might have a lot to do with it.
21:55They saw much more of life than those kids from the suburbs, you know.
21:59And they had to make it.
22:00They had to make it.
22:01They were poor.
22:02Their parents had come to America.
22:03They were brought up on the American dream.
22:05I definitely think there's at least some element in the whole sort of superhero myth, the narrative
22:13of the superhero, that is at least in part coming out of the promise that, you know,
22:18that is made to the immigrant, that when you come here, you don't have to be what you were
22:21there.
22:22You can be something totally new.
22:24Superheroes are the biggest melting pot, I think.
22:28And I think that's why their particular entertainment value has sustained for so long.
22:33I think Pfeiffer wrote an article once and said that we all knew that the spirit was
22:38Jewish, even though his nose was short and he had an Irish name.
22:42Well, you know, I couldn't see making a superhero named Sam Goldstein or something like that.
22:51It wouldn't work out.
22:53Even an Italian name wouldn't work out.
22:55Would it work now?
22:56Have the audience...
22:57Might work now.
22:58Might work now.
22:59I think of myself as a second-generation comic book guy.
23:03Now, the first-generation comic book guys were inventing it.
23:06When you do comics, your enemy, your biggest enemy is time.
23:11Because you've got to find the right way to involve the reader in such a way that he or
23:17she doesn't speed through it.
23:19Because technically speaking, a comic book can be read in no time at all.
23:24But it isn't enjoyed if it's read too quickly.
23:27The spirit had several problems when I started.
23:30First of all, I had only seven pages to tell a story.
23:35Now, some of my stories were long and some of them were short, but I only had seven pages.
23:39I couldn't tell the short story in less than seven pages.
23:41I couldn't tell the long story in more than seven pages.
23:44So I had to devise ways of moving the story quickly.
23:48And that gave me an opportunity to invent panel arrangements.
23:53For example, some pages I had 10 or 15 panels on a page, and some pages I had only about
24:00six panels on the page.
24:02The panels I learned became part of the vocabulary, they became part of the punctuation, a form
24:10of punctuation.
24:12And they affect the rate of reading, they affect the psychological approach that you
24:18take the story.
24:20They can convey claustrophobia and they can convey openness.
24:23Representing motion was a particular challenge for comics artists.
24:26Somehow we had to describe the motion of a figure running or a car driving and do it
24:33with a still image.
24:34So we created this convention of the motion line or streaks or blurs in the background.
24:40We have all these different ways of doing it.
24:42I'm mad about the idea of closure, that how much the eye can do with how little information,
24:48which I think is the entire science of comic books.
24:51You only get one image out of a potential thousand as you read a comic book.
24:55And we're creating so many between those panels, it's wonderful.
24:58I feel that the ultimate thing that people were looking for, like myself as a reader,
25:03was a feeling that this material we were reading about was truly real.
25:08We didn't necessarily want to believe it was a cartoon, we didn't want to dismiss it in
25:11that fashion.
25:12It's magic realism.
25:15It is not real stuff.
25:18It is a funhouse mirror reflection, and we hope an entertaining reflection of reality.
25:25And you're allowed to be psychologically realistic and still play fast and loose with physical
25:31reality.
25:32The trick was and is, what is the archetype?
25:35What is this character really about?
25:39You can answer that and then put a contemporary sensibility on it and you have a way to do
25:46any of these characters.
25:48You know, I've also gone to another place too, like the crime comics or the more violently
25:56themed comics.
25:57If I had someone that didn't know a lot about comics, I would take them into the comic book
26:02store.
26:03And depending upon their sensibilities, I would give them all the Frank Miller I could
26:08find.
26:09Well, comics definitely got darker in the 80s.
26:12And that's definitely probably due mostly to two people, and that would be Frank Miller
26:16and Alan Moore.
26:18People knew for a long time that the superheroes in general were in trouble.
26:22Sales were so bad.
26:25This created a really nice atmosphere where publishers started saying, look, let's let
26:28the inmates take over the asylum and see what happens because, you know, things are getting
26:32pretty flat out here.
26:34And some of us were allowed to do so.
26:36With Watchmen, I think what Alan and I were trying to do was not deliberately dirty everything
26:41up or show that all these idols had feet of clay or that it was all a terribly psychologically
26:49flawed concept because, you know, Alan and I both grew up loving superheroes, the best
26:54of superheroes, you know, what superheroes could be.
26:58But I think what we were interested in doing was saying, well, supposing superheroes really
27:03existed because clearly, you know, the kind of Batman TV series showed that the traditional
27:09superhero would just be absurd in the real world.
27:12I mean, it just doesn't work.
27:16So we thought, well, supposing there was a rationale for there to be people who put costumes
27:19on and there was a real Superman, for instance, what would he be like?
27:23And when you extrapolate from that, you realise that the people who were given the superpowers
27:28or who decided to go and fight crime might do it for much more human reasons than just
27:34this kind of abstract, you know, I have been gifted with powers.
27:38So I must save the world.
27:39You know, I think arguably, and I wouldn't want to be too cynical, that most people think
27:42I've been gifted with powers.
27:44Great, I can look through the wall of the girls' locker room.
27:46You know, I mean, you know, I'm not saying that's what I'd do.
27:49Clearly I would save the world.
27:50But, you know, these things are interesting to explore.
27:53And that's very different, really, from what Frank Miller did.
27:56Frank Miller just, the Dark Knight, I mean, he really made it dark and grim and the complete
28:04opposite.
28:05Okay, Batman was always kind of a dark character, you know, the forces of the night and bats
28:11and everything.
28:12But he was just like all the original characters from the 40s, the superheroes from the 40s,
28:16he was very pure.
28:17He was there to fight evil.
28:19He was pure.
28:21Frank Miller made him very complicated and dark and took away the purity.
28:25He's not pure at all anymore.
28:27He isn't pure at all.
28:28In fact, Frank Miller's characters all have this corruption in them.
28:32Here's the problem with talking about Miller.
28:34His trick is he doesn't like heroes.
28:36Well, you know, my big problem with Batman is why would the world need him?
28:41The world's this perfect place in DC Comics land.
28:44And I thought, well, I'm looking out the window.
28:47That's not what I'm seeing.
28:49And it was kind of irresistible to do an anarchist superhero in Reagan's America.
28:59My guess is that they saw those characters as manifestations of the establishment and
29:09decided to give them feet of clay.
29:13And I think that's a perfectly reasonable enterprise.
29:15It does diminish the hero archetype a lot.
29:20And if it's badly done, it's awful, it's sophomoric.
29:24To take some character who a couple of generations of Americans have looked on as a paragon and
29:32show that he's really a terrible jerk, where do you go with that?
29:37If you can get stories out of it, that's always my criterion.
29:43If you can use this as a point of departure to tell a terrific story, that's a reason
29:47for doing it.
29:48Frank Miller can do a corrupt hero.
29:50He's a great writer.
29:52It's like the fad.
29:53This is the fashion in comics today, is to do corruption, is to do darkness, is to do
29:58vicious comics.
30:00And you have to be really good to do this.
30:03And most of them are not good.
30:04And all they have, then, are bleak stories, are stories of corruption, are stories in
30:09which there are no real heroes anymore.
30:12And there's a sadness to this, of course, because young boys are reading this.
30:17Young boys used to read Superman and Batman when they were true heroes, and read this
30:22and say, yes, I want to fight evil.
30:24I want to be good.
30:25I want to be a good person, because only by being a good person can I be a hero.
30:31Well, young men are rebellious.
30:34And in fairness to Alan and the other people who were doing that, there was a lot to rebel
30:39against.
30:40There still is.
30:42I think that we're outlaws.
30:46I don't want people to be outlaws.
30:47I want us to be outlaws.
30:48We're born for it with this form.
30:50You know, we've talked about superhero comics, and we've talked about why superhero comics
30:55came to be the thing they are.
30:56But I honestly do think that superhero comics are a genre that's taken over a medium.
31:04They should be part of comics, yes, because they work very well in comics.
31:08But the fact that they more or less dominate the comic book field, particularly in the
31:12USA, is a source of great imbalance.
31:15And I think what we're finding is that, you know, as adolescents don't come into the field
31:21anymore, that the kind of basic raison d'etre of the superhero is kind of fading away.
31:27I would like to see a change, and possibly comics will diversify.
31:32And you'll have things, comics that are aimed at more than just a young male audience.
31:37I want to get just about everybody I can lay my hands on.
31:41I want to get all the guys who are getting concert tickets to buy my comics.
31:44I want to get all the girls who are going to see NSYNC to buy my comics.
31:47I want everybody.
31:49I want your parents.
31:50I want your children who aren't even born yet.
31:52And the thing is, I think that there is potential within the medium to do that.
31:56And the way I've orchestrated my particular work is to try and make it all as palpable
32:01and as real to you as I want to believe it is myself.
32:04I don't really have a nihilist streak.
32:07My stories are essentially romantic.
32:09They just are rather harsh about it, that's all.
32:14But where comics can go is anywhere.
32:17I mean, I think it's very good that there are now several crime comics out there that
32:26each have completely different personalities.
32:28I think that the future of comics is limitless because the idea of comics is just so simple
32:34at its heart that it's infinitely adaptable.
32:38It's possible for comics to adapt to any environment.
32:41Comics isn't just about paper and ink.
32:44As the web is becoming more important, it's very easy for me to see how comics can evolve
32:49and change in a digital environment in a way that stays very true to that basic idea of comics.
32:54I still like mythology.
32:56It's a mythology thing for me.
32:58Those are still the Greek gods of American culture for me.
33:03I don't believe superheroes will disappear or go away.
33:06They'll just continue to mutate until forever.