Frank Miller has been getting all kinds of love from Hollywood ever since Sin City impressed critics and 300 made a ton of money. Unfortunately, Mr. Miller should have been content being an artist and writer, as his rookie directorial debut with The Spirit was, frankly, brutally bad. As horrible as The Spirit was, it hasn’t tarnished the prospects of further Miller graphic novels being turned into films, as Ronin is the latest to enter the fray.
Ronin is still in the script stage and Sylvain White is tentatively slated to direct. He doesn’t have an impressive track history with only a few movies to his credit, including Stomp the Yard and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer(oooph). Steve Weintraub of Collider asked Sylvain White about his current plans for Ronin:
Q: If you happened to do “Ronin”, it has a lot of comic book fans who are reverent to the material. How much would that affect the way in which you stick to shots? Would you do it like Zack [Snyder] did with ‘300??
Sylvain: The fortunate thing is that ‘Ronin’ is some Frank’s earlier work. 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.
