Steve ‘Frosty’ Weintraub talks to director Sylvain White about adapting Frank Miller’s Ronin over on Collider.com; it seems Sylvain wouldn’t want to slavishly copy the original graphic novel but adapt it to the film medium while drawing on the style and flavour of the comic, staying truer to the feel of the book rather than trying to recreate it scene by scene in film form, which makes sense to me (sometimes being too true to a book can hurt a film, although we reserve the right to complain if it isn’t true enough, of course):
“What’s great and what for me works in the graphic novel, aesthetically-speaking, is the design of Aquarius…the design of New York. So I would pay homage to him more in the production design versus the actual frames. The frames in “Ronin” are some beautiful frames, and some I would go with, but what’s beautiful to me about “Ronin” is the production design and the character design and the colors that are used. I think framing – you can frame things with much more depth and beauty on film than you can in a graphic. Replicating frames…that’s a different language. You want to always stay true to the graphic novel, but you’re watching a different medium. You never want to remind the audience that they’re watching a graphic novel or something from a graphic novel source. You just want them to watch a great movie. And if they know it’s based on a graphic novel, awesome. And if you make the fans happy because you paid good tribute to the source material, awesome. I don’t think you make fans happy by just replicating frames. What they want to see is that you stayed true to the story, true to the characters and true to the design.”
(artwork from Absolute Ronin by Frank Miller, published DC)
Wed, Sep 16, 2009
Comics and cartoons, Film, TV and radio