Trying to locate a city’s seamy underbelly? Consider Frank Miller your MapQuest. A comic-book artist and writer long recognized as one of the boldest stylists and most distinctive voices in the business, Miller has made his name largely by taking readers into all the dark places inhabited by established characters like Batman and Daredevil. Miller’s seminal series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns informed the more anarchic elements of Tim Burton’s Gotham, and 2003’s Daredevil movie was even more directly influenced by his work.

And then there’s Sin City, Miller’s over-the-top, wickedly depraved, yet often dead-on contemporary homage to Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane, and the other greats of hard-boiled crime fiction. First published in 1991, the black-and-white comic quickly became a fan favorite. Now, fittingly, the film noir–channeling series has been adapted to film, with Robert Rodriguez and Miller codirecting.

The $40 million movie incorporates three Sin City stories, anthology-style. “The Hard Goodbye” casts Mickey Rourke as the franchise’s signature character, Marv, a hulkingly grotesque, pill-popping wild man out to avenge a dead prostitute he worshiped. (You might have caught Marv in miniature at your local comic or collectibles shop—he’s the “action figure” in the electric chair who calls you a pansy when you turn on the battery-powered juice. Really.) In “The Big Fat Kill,” Clive Owen is Dwight McCarthy, a marginally better-adjusted but equally lethal nighthawk caught in the bloody fallout from a dirty cop’s slaying by the hookers who rule Sin City. “He’s this twisted Marlowe,” says Owen. “Same noir rhythm, but [operating] in this crazy place.” And finally, in “That Yellow Bastard,” Bruce Willis stars as grizzled, ailing cop John Hartigan, a rare clear-cut good guy in this universe, who pays the price for emphatically incapacitating a corrupt politico’s pedophile son (Nick Stahl).

On the page, these stories spill over with highly stylized visual flourishes. Mood-setting seas of black ink will sometimes be parted, arrestingly, by a character’s image in white silhouette. The requisite noirish rain looks mesmerizingly like a downpour of skewers, stabbing characters as much as drenching them. Embracing the challenge of rendering this world on film, Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the Spy Kids trilogy) shot the action against green screen and, from his Austin, Texas, mini-studio, worked with effects teams to create backdrops and insert “props” digitally. Not only did the Sin City milieu need to look cool, it needed to work in black and white. And it needed to appeal to an audience that responded with a yawn to a similar exercise in digital creation, last fall’s highly touted Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. “Going in, I knew that even if we shot the books straight we’d have a great movie because of Frank’s characters and original, unpredictable story line,” says Rodriguez. “But that would rob an audience of the experience you get from the books, where the imagery is as heightened as the story. My idea was that it should translate directly to the screen because both mediums are about visual storytelling. But you must have both going on. It can’t just be about the visuals.”

PHOTO: Frank Miller, left, and Robert Rodriguez with Brittany Murphy.  "It was a very un-Hollywood experience," says Miller.



This article originally appeared in the April 2005 issue of PREMIERE magazine.

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