Marley, before we started shooting, she convinced me. She came up to me and stared at me with those impossibly beautiful blue eyes of hers and said, “Um, Robert tells me I hired this guy to kill me. Why?” So there I was, talking to my character, telling her her backstory. I told her the whole story that I had in my mind, all these years, about why she did that. And then she nodded and went out and gave just a killer performance and I shook hands with her and said I’m in, let’s go.
Would you care to share any of that backstory you told her?
The backstory would probably bore you, but it was essentially she had broken out of a bad marriage and the husband had told her that he was going to kill her, but she wouldn’t know when and wouldn’t know where, and she could just live with that until eventually he got to her. So she couldn’t stand it anymore.
Is the Sin City in the title more New York or LA?
Great question! I really appreciate that question, believe me. It started out as New York. If you look at the first Sin City, the Marv story, it looks like New York. But halfway through it, it starts to grow palm trees and terracotta tile rooftops, because I moved to LA. So it turned into LA and it pretty much stayed there. It’s an LA with a big downtown.
You’ve described Marv as your id. Do you think that’s why you kind of make him the antithesis of a noir hero? He’s virtually fearless and cannot be killed.
I started out really thinking of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and just took it further. And then at one point, I jotted down the phrase, “Conan in a trenchcoat,” and that locked him in my mind. He is virtually superhuman. I mean, he goes through something that’s a steel door, that’s Conan [the Barbarian], that’s not noir.
Why do you think you cast yourself opposite Marv in the movie as one of several priests who need to be corrected along the way?
Because my co-director has a sense of humor. He just tossed me in there! [Laughs] You want to die. If you’re in a movie and you’re a bit part, you want to die.
Your legacy is so shrouded in a sense of myth to readers. Do you think it’s a good thing when they put creators or artists so much on a pedestal like that?
I think it’s better to break things down and figure out how it works. I study other artists to this day, and you know now I’ve got a much more educated eye, I can see much more readily how they did what they did. But the choices sometimes are fascinating to look at and go “why make this choice?” And it’s much like studying film. It’s the same way that filmmakers often act like they’re witch doctors. It can all be broken down and figured out. The magic is really knowing which decision to make.
What would you like your legacy to be?
It’s always a tough one for me. I always like to say legacies are for dead people. But I guess the legacy I’d like to have is, “Remember that cool thing when…?” Just for somebody to remember something really cool in one of the books, or a really good ending to a story, or something like that. He told good stories.