The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More (#831)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Frank Miller, regarded as one of the most influential and awarded creators. Frank began his career in comics in the late 1970s, first gaining notoriety as the artist, and later writer, of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. Next, came the science-fiction samurai drama Ronin, followed by the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One with artist David Mazzuchelli.

Following these seminal works, Miller fulfilled a lifelong dream by doing an all-out crime series, Sin City, which spawned two blockbuster films that he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Miller’s multi-award-winning graphic novel 300 was also adapted into a highly successful film by Zack Snyder. His upcoming memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available for pre-order.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Frank. So nice to see you.

Frank Miller: Good to see you.

Tim Ferriss: And just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Robert Rodriguez. I’m sure that name is going to come up again.

Frank Miller: I heard of him, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure that’s going to come up again. And before we even get close to Robert. Thank you, Robert, for the introduction. I want to pick up on something we were chatting about briefly before we started recording. And this is Aristotle.

Frank Miller: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Why did Aristotle come into the conversation?

Frank Miller: Aristotle’s definition of happiness was a devotion of all of one’s energies along the lines of excellence. And I believe that that is a general application that in an ideal life, would apply that every moment you have, but it is a guiding principle to a creative life.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s then take maybe some of my props that we have here. And I’m going to go to my phone because I was reading an early copy of Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling. And I took a lot of highlights and I had to take photographs of my, the PDF of my Kindle to look at some of them, and I wanted to go through a little list. This might seem strange, but I tend to obsess on the specifics. These are some of the tools of your trade. Blackwing graphite pencils, white paint, India black ink, liquid frisket, erasers, and sable brushes. And then it goes through a description of a lot more. Winsor & Newton Series Seven, mostly sizes three to 12, et cetera. A few questions that I want to ask about, including the toothbrush, my trusty spatter maker. What is liquid frisket?

Frank Miller: Liquid frisket is essentially glue, but it was first called that and used by oil painters to create highlights. What the painter would do, he would lay down strokes of this glue across the paint, then paint across it, and then before declaring the painting finished, he or she would then wipe up frisket and you would have this sparkling piece of the underpainting showing through. And so it creates a very dramatic highlight. I like to use it with ink because it creates an element of chaos.

Tim Ferriss: An element of chaos. So you seem to be, in a sense, someone who thrives in chaos or by creating certain types of chaos. And this monster that I’m holding, for those who are listening and not watching, I’m holding something in my lap that feels like it’s 20 to 35 pounds. I was carrying it around, walking through New York City, getting a lot of odd looks because it’s a rectangle about the size of an x-ray plate you would use to take an x-ray of both lungs. It’s gigantic.

Then this is Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Hard Goodbye. And I want to just open this up and I’m going to read something from right inside. This is from Jim Lee, another legend in the space, another hero of mine for another time. I used to have his job at the same college as graphic editor of the Princeton Tiger found some old sketches of his in one of the desks, in fact. But here’s his quote, “Even after 25 years, Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Hard Goodbye showcases the full potential of the comic’s medium. A stark brilliant chiaroscuro. It remains a defiantly timeless, handcrafted love letter of the days of old in an increasingly slick and digital world.”

And I segued from the tools because when I look at some of these pages, and I’ll provide some of these as B-roll and so on, looking at something like this, I’ll just show that to, it is a masterpiece. Any one of these could be on a wall by itself, but this is sequential storytelling. And I have many questions, but one of them is about aliveness and that channeling all of your energies into excellence because, and I think this came up in the documentary about you, as well, American Genius, that you attack the page. There seems to be a real kinetic channeling of energy into the page, which you can see in this particular version, The Curator’s Collection. What did it feel like when you were making this that I’m holding?

Frank Miller: Very physical.

Tim Ferriss: Very physical.

Frank Miller: Yes. It’s Sin City was a real breakthrough that way because it was the first time I decided to work so damned big. The book you’re holding is the actual size of the pages I did.

Tim Ferriss: So what is this size?

Frank Miller: It’s called twice up, it’s four times the size of the published comic book.

Tim Ferriss: It covers my entire body on video.

Frank Miller: Only about half of it, but that is the size that comic books were originally drawn back in the 1940s. And over time, in order to pick up the speed of production and just lower the price of making comics, they made them smaller and smaller and smaller until finally they decided they ought to fit into an 11 by 17 photocopier and made the pages very, very tiny to work on, which was about the time I came in. And when I discovered these old originals from the forties, I went, that’s why they looked so damned good. And I decided with Sin City, I was going to correct the error.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. And toothbrush.

Frank Miller: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I mentioned this at the end of your list. How do you use the toothbrush? Because I feel like this, at least in my mind, is one of the hallmark signatures in the minds of many of some Frank Miller artwork is this particular element. So how do you use the toothbrush?

Frank Miller: Well, what I do is the lid of a bottle of Indian ink has a little squirter thing on it, and I squirt some of that onto the bristles of a toothbrush, run my thumb across a toothbrush, and it splatters across, an effect that could be texture on a wall, texture in the sky, splurting blood, whatever you choose to make it.

Tim Ferriss: Just dragging your thumb across it.

Frank Miller: Yes, spraying it like as a child would.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Frank Miller: What I love is that it gives you that lovely element of chaos across picture. Across time, I would combine or replace that with simply snapping a brush across my wrist, which would create more of an elongated, stretchy — 

Tim Ferriss: Slash?

Frank Miller: Well, it creates, again, something that’s unpredictable but very organic. That’s just playing with the materials.

Tim Ferriss: What was your motto? This is from the book, as well, your senior year of high school. I think it was — 

Frank Miller: Get the hell out of my way.

Tim Ferriss: Get the hell out of my way.

Frank Miller: I was impatient to leave school and get to work.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t know if the impatience ended there. So I say that as someone who’s also a very impatient, it has pros and cons. And I’m wondering the visceral violence that is channeled into creating, say what we see on the page in Sin City, it’s the kinetic aspect of it is so palpable. How do you relate to anger using it, the right dose, if there is a right dose, channeling it versus being controlled by it? How do you think about that fire, maybe, is a better way to put it within?

Frank Miller: No, anger is a good word, too. It’s an important and powerful component. Drama. Drama is, essentially, conflict. And if you go all the way back to the Norse myths — but you could take it all the way from the Norse myths through to Terms of Endearment or whatever else — those are all full of Sturm und Drang.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Frank Miller: And comics are a purely visual medium, and also, not very on the face of it, powerful. That is, there’s no way a comic book can compete with the sheer, spectacular firepower of cinema. That is, you do — cinema completely envelops so many of your senses and it involves images that are perceptively real, and real people expressing these emotions at you. And then when they want to do spectacle, they started proving it way back with D. W. Griffith and sealed the deal with Star Wars. Nobody can touch them. And they can out do anything in stage and in any other form. So comics had to come out with little Jack Kirby swaying in and just showing, okay, we can’t really do that, so we’re going to go even more crazy. And he made up characters who could eat planets. And in the case of what I’ve been after with my comics is to have the drawing itself be so emotional and extreme that I’m trying to make it outact an actor.

Tim Ferriss: Well, what I love about your comics, so first of all, I should just point out to people that don’t know anything about this world, you seem to me to be an outlier on a number of different levels. One of which is that you’re very well known for your art and you are very well known for your writing. How common is that in the US comic world?

Frank Miller: It’s not that common.

Tim Ferriss: In Japan, it’s a little more typical, but in the US, where would you?

Frank Miller: It’s more common than it used to be because it used to be almost not allowed. There were a few exceptions. There was Will Eisner, for instance, who was really outstanding in that he clearly ran the whole show.

Tim Ferriss: For people who have no context whatsoever, why is Eisner such an important figure?

Frank Miller: He’s one of the founding fathers, for one thing, but because he could do the entire thing and other people could, as well, but he decided to keep doing the entire thing rather than just becoming part of a factory. Of course, he ran his own factory, but that’s a whole other story. But ultimately, he settled on doing his one series, The Spirit, which is known as the — Will Eisner’s The Spirit. And even though he employed other people along the way, he always ran the show and supervised it completely. And as he got older, he started doing work that he did inch, top to bottom, by himself. That was a much more personal nature that where he, once again, turned comics in a new direction.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s explore other figures who have helped showcase the potential of this medium through innovating, because I love this terrain — because people listening may not be comic lovers, but there’s some medium that they’re fascinated by.

And whether it’s in the realm of fiction and, let’s just say novels, whether it’s in film, whether it’s in comics, there are things that we might take for granted now that were not at all obvious a decade or two ago. And it seems like a good time to maybe talk about Jack Kirby and how he impacted the world of comics. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I was reading, and this is straight from your book, that for a long time, comics were set panels, in a sense, and you filled in the blanks to the extent that artists would sometimes get pre, I don’t want to say cut, but outlined pages within which to place the cardboard.

Frank Miller: There were a lot of various ways they were restricted, in various ways. And a lot of this happened before I was around, so I don’t know. But I think the reason you bring Kirby up in this respect was he was the guy who came in when comics were — all had either a nine-panel grid or a six-panel grid. They were — all the panels were the same page. And more than anybody, he blasted that to pieces and he was like our D. W. Griffith, he just ripped the camera off the floor and all of a sudden he would use two pages for a single image. For a kid like me, it was mind-expanding. This one guy just kept coming back decade after decade after decade. He started way before I was born. He served in World War two with my parents. It’s not side-by-side. And so when he had several comebacks and each time, he seemed to reinvent the whole megillah.

Tim Ferriss: You have, it seems like, a few different guiding phrases. We have one, of course, from the book title itself, Push the Wall. Another one that comes to mind is defy the code. Can you expand on both of these please? Why these two?

Frank Miller: Well, the pushing the wall, or pushing the walls, is just, colleagues have always been this strangely schizophrenic field where on the one hand, you have artists, cartoonists, writers or such people who want to explore and try new things. The nature of these fantasies is exploratory. But the business has always been very conservative and his comics, people who grew up on comics became themselves very tradition bound. And so they would fret over things like what we call continuity, worrying about if you’re working on issue number 385 of a Spider-Man, you can’t contradict something that was done in issue 14, which is, on the face of it, absurd because the character would be 85. They’ve been around that long. And so you had this hide bound on one side and this enthusiastic experimental field on the other. And I’ve always just wanted to pull more toward the people looking for a future and for trying out new stuff.

Tim Ferriss: How did you — and we’re going to jump around chronologically.

Frank Miller: All right.

Tim Ferriss: But let me see if I can find this particular paragraph from your book. Relates to a name that you will recognize, and that is Neal Adams. So, “Neal was a hard taskmaster, utterly ruthless in his criticism. He was a godsend.” I just want to read another paragraph. So we’ll get into the description of who this is, but you cold called his office, is that right?

Frank Miller: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Cold called his office. This is when no one knows who you are. And then ultimately, I think it was his daughter who answered the phone, she says, “Dad, we got another one.”

Frank Miller: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Somehow you ended up in the office, you show him your work and then, and I’ll quote here, “He told me just how awful my stuff was and didn’t bother with using any sugar-coating, either. ‘Where’d you say you were from? Vermont? Go back to Vermont, pump gas, get married. You’re no good and you never will be.'”

Frank Miller: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: “I gulped,” this is referring to you, and then asked, “Can I fix it and show you again tomorrow?” To which Neal responds, “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re out.” Who is Neal and why did you reach out to him?

Frank Miller: Well, that’s Neal Adams.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, who is he?

Frank Miller: He was the outstanding artist of, he was, in a way, a one-man generation because there was a long period where nobody entered the comics business because it didn’t pay well. And believe me, the common wisdom would be out of business soon. We’d just been through the horrors of the comics code and just the public humiliation and the self-censorship of that time, and been disgraced going from a mass medium and being turned into just a dirty punch line. And there were just a few people keeping the light alive and still doing these old titles like The Flash and so on. But the books were looking pretty crummy. But there were these glimmers, there was these guys, some of the old guys just stayed there and kept doing great stuff — an artist named Gil Kane, for instance.

But there was Neal Adams. He was this new guy who came in young and brought such enthusiasm and a whole new look, he had a whole new take-me-seriously look. It was a much more realistic look. And he dragged the whole generation with him in a lot of ways, but not just with his work. He did it with his speech and with his actions. He opened up a studio in Manhattan called Continuity, which did advertising work, and essentially became a halfway house for comic book artists to come in and get his training, and then where he became the guru at this place. So when I called up, I looked up his number in the phone book, as you said, spoke to his daughter, got to see him that day, and started hanging out there. And I started living on little advertising jobs. Sometimes I’d just color them, and then eventually I get to draw them and so on. And then he lined up my first comic book work, and I was hardly the only one.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m so fascinated by this exchange and his willingness to help for a few different reasons. Number one is I wonder how did this guy muster the bandwidth to do his own work, run a business, and also mentor? Just that question alone. And then I also think about the Sliding Doors moment of what if he had just had a really bad day and he was like, “You’re not coming back tomorrow, kid. Sorry, I’m too busy.” What a different life.

Frank Miller: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve got to blow my own horn.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, blow your own horn.

Frank Miller: I was a pretty determined little bastard, so I would’ve been back anyway. 

Tim Ferriss: You would’ve been back anyway?

Frank Miller: Yeah. I had banged on many doors before his.

Tim Ferriss: Well, okay. So this was actually going to be my next question, which was why do you think he agreed to let you come back after he was like, “Go pump gas, go back to Vermont.” And then you were like, “Let me fix it and come back tomorrow.” And he is like, “Oh, okay, fine.” Right? So what did — 

Frank Miller: Actually no, it was because I asserted that I wanted to fix it.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Frank Miller: It was because I didn’t cry and leave.

Tim Ferriss: How many interactions like that, many different visits showing him work, did it take for him to finally say that your work was not for throwing away?

Frank Miller: It wasn’t all that many, I don’t think. And then I worked on short little jobs for Gold Key Comics, that was an old publisher a long time ago, and so on, where they would let you do, they would hire you for a three-page job where you got $25 a page, that kind of thing, and that was what they called paying your dues.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to hop around a little bit, but people need to read the book, they need to see the doc, but I know a lot of people have covered certain aspects of your bio. You first gained notoriety in the late ’70s for your transformative work on Daredevil. Now I also, and this is pulling from the book, read a bit, and this is, I’m putting a character, you’ll have to explain, but “[Elektra]” in brackets because I’m inserting that, but now I’m quoting you, “was the true genesis of my career in comic books.” Could you speak to that chapter of your life that involved Elektra and what the significance of that was?

Frank Miller: Oh, I think that was because that was, I didn’t come in as the writer on Daredevil, I just simply came in as an artist for hire and realized fairly early on that this was no way to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Why not?

Frank Miller: Because the pictures and the words are one thing. The words were obvious once I drew the pictures and I very quickly took over plotting the stories and so on. And so I felt that Daredevil needed a counterpoint, a femme fatale, really. And I came up with Elektra, but I realized I was going to hold her back until I was writing the book myself. And I did it that way.

Tim Ferriss: I suppose what I’m trying to unpack is, and maybe I’m overstating the importance, but was that introduction of Elektra an important inflection point for you in some way?

Frank Miller: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: In what way was it important?

Frank Miller: Well, if you look at those old comics, that’s when, in a way, I started understanding what a Marvel comic was. A Marvel comic isn’t a story every month. A Marvel comic is an ongoing soap opera that you’re following. And as soon as, with my first issue that I wrote, it was called Elektra, and it was all about them. From then on, the whole thing becomes one sprawling. I mean, sprawling in both good and bad ways, epic, where characters come and characters go, but it’s focused around a pretty small cast. There’s a diabolical Kingpin who runs all the gangs, there’s the deadly enemy, Bullseye, neither of whom I made up. And there’s Daredevil and Elektra, and all of this is like a tortured romance that the hero was in love with a psychotic assassin, so it’s bound to have some trouble.

Tim Ferriss: Bound to have some tears involved at some point.

Frank Miller: It was very adolescent. It came from a very adolescent state of mind. But I’m very proud of it.

Tim Ferriss: I loved Elektra.

Frank Miller: It was really inspired.

Tim Ferriss: I have a lot of comics with Elektra at my childhood home on Long Island. To this day, polybagged with backing and the whole nine.

Frank Miller: Whenever I’m asked to draw her or anything, it’s just great.

Tim Ferriss: So for folks who don’t have any familiarity, and also because I want to better understand it, there are different approaches to making a comic and also crafting a story. So I want to pull up something that I have here, and it’s going to take me a second to read, but I’d love you to walk people through this after I read at least some of it.

All right. “Everything starts with and proceeds from story. Some simple story rules. Number one, start your story as late into the action as possible. End it as early into the action as possible. Two, get your hero into trouble fast. That, or give the hero a pressing problem to solve. I work on the spine of the story.” That’s a phrase that I’d love for you to define. “Work on the spine of the story and figure out how it starts and ends, and then roughly plot the in-between.” And I’ll just read one more sentence and then I’ll let you fill.

“To do this, I make notes and create scenes that will advance the storyline, but allow room for digressions and narrative side streets.”And then you talk about preliminary sketches and so on. Can you expand on this and just maybe give an example of how you would do that, whether it’s with a book like Sin City or any other that comes to mind?

Frank Miller: How I do what?

Tim Ferriss: How you actually start from step one in creating a story, and then proceed through that. It seems like also in the introduction that having a very good idea of where your story ends is a critical piece of that.

Frank Miller: I knew at the beginning of Sin City that Marv was going to die, for instance. It’s very important. Of course, when I started Dark Knight, I thought Batman was going to die. It didn’t work out that way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Frank Miller: But yeah, my methodology has changed over time. It used to be as rigid, more rigid than what you just read. I mean, I used to really believe there was a way and I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction. I believe in trusting the muse more than I used to.

Tim Ferriss: How does that show up then in practice? Do you have, you know the starting point, you know the end of the story, you have characters in a situation, do you draw your way through and then figure out kind of the narrative arc? What is the proper blend for you now of structure and serendipity?

Frank Miller: Commenting on yourself as being the generator of the story, surely, and saying that these are the pieces of clay and this is what I want to do with them. But to realize that the artistic process is not at its best when it’s an egomania, egomaniacal process. And sometimes the characters talk back and sometimes they know more than you do. And always be aware that there will be that just that flash, that thing that happens where all of a sudden you’re in a different story and you realize this is the one, you know. No, this isn’t the one I was looking for, but this is where I want to be. And I don’t know. To me it’s sort of like being a space explorer and being ready for things and knowing that the whole job is trying to figure out what to ignore and what to follow. I like the mystery of storytelling more than the power I used to see in it.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about picking and choosing, and specifically would love to hear — I lived in Japan as an exchange student and learned to read and speak Japanese largely from reading comic books.

Frank Miller: Kozure Ōkami must have kept you busy.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I was busy reading all sorts of comic books with my little electronic dictionary.

Frank Miller: I would love to read Kozure Ōkami in Japanese.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. It’s a different experience, of course.

Frank Miller: I’ll bet.

Tim Ferriss: How did you first get exposed to, for instance, Moebius, Otomo, any others you want to mention? How did you get exposed to those influences and who were, who are they?

Frank Miller: Okay, the two main invasions in American, well, three. There were three actually. The first was the English because DC Comics started publishing Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon and all the rest. But they were the easiest for everybody to see because they were all American comics fans and the language was the same and everything. It started getting a lot wilder when Forbidden Planet Comics opened.

Tim Ferriss: Man — 

Frank Miller: In New York.

Tim Ferriss: Do I love Forbidden Planet.

Frank Miller: Yeah. And when Marvel started publishing Moebius, and then the floodgates opened because it was Europe just knocked everybody’s socks off. It was Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, but there were the other guys too that nobody was paying attention to. And Moebius obviously was a tidal wave that swept through culture. I mean, it’s adult cinema and so on. 

And for me, the other event was I had a girlfriend and her father was a businessman who did a lot of business in Japan. And she tossed me a phone book that was a Japanese comic, and it was Kozure Ōkami, and I opened it and studied it and fell in, and Ronin was born that day. And my storytelling style changed everything. And from that, I helped bring the title over and helped with the Asian invasion. Seeing it all become so much more international has just been fascinating because — and with the Asian stuff, you’ve got just a completely different sense of time and space. I mean, it’s the dead opposite of the European.

Tim Ferriss: When was Moebius at his peak of influence? What would’ve been the timing roughly on that?

Frank Miller: Oh, geez. Geez. I couldn’t name the exact dates. Certainly, certainly — 

Tim Ferriss: This is decades.

Frank Miller: He’s up there with Jack Kirby in terms of being one of those people who, I mean, people will be on, it’s like a realistic Beethoven and Mahler and all that.

Tim Ferriss: Trying to figure out if the timing is such, because I’ve looked at tons of Moebius artwork that Moebius could have — 

Frank Miller: When did Alien come out?

Tim Ferriss: When did — 

Frank Miller: Alien come out.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Alien. Good question. I mean, it would’ve been post-Star Wars. I was just trying to think, because Moebius also, a lot of his artwork makes me think of Tatooine and some of these things in Star Wars, so I’m wondering what the directionality is.

Frank Miller: Well, Moebius’ influence on Star Wars is huge.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, that’s what I was trying to answer for myself because it seems so obvious when you look at it. And to come back to the Japanese, the comic book that I use, it’s not a well-known title, certainly outside of Japan, even within Japan. A lot of Japanese people scratch their head when I tell them what it’s called, Rokudenashi Blues, which is Rokudenashi Blues, which is about high school gangs, which aren’t really a thing, but they pretend like it is. The bad kids wear different types of uniforms called Choran. But it’s hyper-violent. There are a lot of fight scenes in this, which made it a little less intimidating for someone who couldn’t yet really read Japanese. So my translating burden was lower with this comic, and the art was spectacular. 

And what blew my mind, because I had read comics all the way through my childhood up to that point, and I was 15 when I got to Japan, like you said, it was how time and space and speed and motion were depicted so differently, and how they captured, say, the swing of a leg, or created the effective blur was so captivating to me. It was unlike anything I had seen. 

Frank Miller: One of the things I’ve got to say that amazes me about the manga stuff is that they could draw people relaxed so well, that so much of the drawing in Lone Wolf and Cub, people are lazing around and stuff. And even in combat, what they’re capturing is the fluidity and grace of the movement rather than — I mean, it’s the opposite of Kirby where everything is angles and force. And so it’s a very Asian violence. And also in Europe, you’ll often see a very alien, you know — Moebius is violence. When he went really violent, it would be jarring and horrible, but it would still be gorgeous and it would still be — the wrist would be crooked just that much as it slammed into the person’s face and so on. And it’s just the difference of culture is reflected in every aspect of cartooning. It’s fascinating.

Tim Ferriss: How did the European and Japanese styles that would incorporate Lone Wolf and Cub influence, then, how your approach changed after that?

Frank Miller: I was very young. I was in my twenties, and so I sat down and I did a book that imitated them shamelessly in Ronin. I did Kojima with the Samurai scenes, we did Moebius with the science-fiction scenes. Then I discovered Enki Bilal and did him all over the place.

Tim Ferriss: What was that experience like for you in doing that? Did you find it energizing?

Frank Miller: Oh, it was great. It was like — any transition that big is a rebirth.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m going to ask you a lot more about Ronin, which I have in my suitcase back at my hotel. But before we get there, I want to talk about — because I believe I saw this in the book as well. Effectively, if you’re boring yourself or if you’re bored, you’re going to bore your audience and throw it out and start over. When do you know if something is working? And I’ll pull out an example of what seems like something that was working. And what was the name of the colorist? Is it Glynis? Is that how you say her name?

Frank Miller: There was Glynis. Yeah, Glynis Oliver, Glynis Wein.

Tim Ferriss: So during some of the work on Daredevil, would call you up and say how excited she was.

Frank Miller: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Working on it.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That seems like a signature of something working.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How do you tell if something is working or not working?

Frank Miller: Whether you want to get out of bed and do it or not. I mean, it’s not really a problem I have had. So long I can’t remember.

Tim Ferriss: If you look back at what you’ve ended up being happiest with or less happy with with hindsight 20/20, this doesn’t necessarily mean audience response, right? Not talking about market response.

Frank Miller: Right. No, I understand. I understand.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like intrinsic working for you. I suppose what I’m looking for is just any thoughts for folks who have trouble throwing things away because they just have a high default level of excitement? So they get wedded to something and they’re like, “I’m not going to throw this away.” And they have trouble killing their darlings or murdering their darlings, which is another line that you like.

Frank Miller: I love that line.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe some way of backing into this would be, what are some examples of things that you have thrown out? How do you decide when it’s time to cut your losses or get rid of something?

Frank Miller: When I feel like I’m walking down a familiar road or somebody else’s road, you know, I don’t know. It’s like when it doesn’t get me out of bed, it’s that simple.

Tim Ferriss: It’s that simple. All right.

Frank Miller: This is my primary function on Earth. If I’m not enjoying it, then there’s no reason to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Time to switch gears. So this, you know Ronin seemed like such an all in, bold adventure on a lot of levels. And I just — this is lesson six in your book, “The Dark Knight Cometh: Smash Expectations.” But here’s where it starts. And there’s a quote from Rudyard Kipling from If, which is, “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Now, here’s the first part that I wanted to quote, and I won’t do the whole thing, “There’s nothing like a broken nose to clarify the mind. As a creative experience, Ronin was a fascinating, exhilarating exploration.” And it goes on. So why was Ronin a broken nose?

Frank Miller: Oh, because I got excoriated for it. I had an angry audience, people who wanted it to be like Daredevil.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. They wanted more of the same from you.

Frank Miller: And after initial high sales, they dropped. It was not the reception DC wanted. They were playing funeral music and they would go on. And I’d had nothing but a run of successes before, so — 

Tim Ferriss: So how did you feel after that? I mean, I’m not comparing my books to anything you’ve done. These are iconic pieces of work that you’ve produced. But I remember having my first two books succeed, expectations for the third, sky high, initially does really well, and then for whatever reason, just doesn’t meet expectations, and I took it so incredibly personally. I had a really hard time with it. And I’m just wondering — 

Frank Miller: End of the world.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What was it like for you?

Frank Miller: End of the world.

Tim Ferriss: End of the world?

Frank Miller: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How long did it feel like the end of the world?

Frank Miller: I don’t know. It was a while. But the thing is is that it was useful because I started examining it and said, “What didn’t work? You didn’t connect.” It’s like, “You did something.” And it made me go, “Okay, let’s go for broke and put something together and develop the theories, do something that’ll work.” And I ended up doing the most ruthlessly structured thing I’ve ever done in my life, which was Dark Knight, which is — I mean, it’s so structured, it’s ridiculous.

Tim Ferriss: What were — 

Frank Miller: It breaks into 16 page increments across four 48-page books. And each one has a three x structure. So it’s a four x structure with three three X structures. Basically it’s a tetralogy.

Tim Ferriss: And that was a conclusion or a direction you chose after analyzing Ronin or — why didn’t Ronin work? What do you think are some of the reasons it didn’t work?

Frank Miller: I think that it drifted into surrealism, and it was also — I think that it was a fantasy and it was out of its time, without question.

Tim Ferriss: So you lick your wounds, it’s the end of the world for a little while, but then you do a post-mortem.

Frank Miller: Yeah. And you come out of it better [inaudible].

Tim Ferriss: And you come out of it. And then moving into The Dark Knight Returns. How are you thinking about getting back in the ring and working with this? You mentioned the structure as one aspect of it. Anything else that was important for you to keep in mind personally as you moved into working on that particular project?

Frank Miller: I was into it. The complexity of it was something I had never attempted before. There’s so many goddamn characters in that thing, and they’re all moving in 18 directions. But once I was into it, I was into it. I wasn’t thinking about Ronin or anything else.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it’s a hell of an all consuming scope, right? You have to keep your hand on the wheel and pay attention. Am I getting the timeline right that you were working on The Dark Knight Returns at the same time that Alan Moore was working on Watchmen? Or am I getting that timeline — 

Frank Miller: It was a little before, but they overlapped.

Tim Ferriss: They overlapped because — 

Frank Miller: Yeah, they overlapped.

Tim Ferriss: And the reason that that — 

Frank Miller: Because they kind of started affecting each other in subtle ways.

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Frank Miller: I think they started affecting each other in subtle ways.

Tim Ferriss: In what types of ways?

Frank Miller: I don’t know exactly because Alan and I knew each other. We met while we were doing those two books. I had launched Dark Knight and he was boiling over with Watchmen, and his British stuff is all over the place, and it was all part of this whole, you know, sort of the, I don’t know what you can call what we did to the superhero, but it was reconstruction, deconstruction, whatever it was. And so his approach seemed more to really go at the underbelly of it, and mine was to reconstitute. In an uglier world, to reconstitute the — 

Tim Ferriss: The hero.

Frank Miller: Basic, just to the hero.

Tim Ferriss: And I know why this came to mind for me. And to give credit again, where credit’s do, Frank Miller: American Genius, Len Thomas, sitting about 15 feet away.

Frank Miller: Glowering.

Tim Ferriss: Always making amazing — 

Frank Miller: Glowering at us. Making ugly faces.

Tim Ferriss: She’s behaving for the time being. But got some great footage from Alan who basically said he heard these murmurs about what you were working on and that it was amazing, and he was like, “Oh, shit,” Basically, “Better really up my game.”

Frank Miller: That sounds like Alan.

Tim Ferriss: And the reason I wanted to bring this up is that I just find having at least some other player on the field who’s really good forces you — 

Frank Miller: Oh, God, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: To improve.

Frank Miller: Oh, Alan made me so much better at so many things because — when I came back to Daredevil, for instance, all of a sudden it was like, oh, my God, I’m just writing, and there’s Alan Moore out there now. And all of a sudden I was just trying so hard to be a writer. He brought back horror.

Tim Ferriss: He brought back horror.

Frank Miller: Yeah. There hadn’t been horror in comics for a generation.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, what makes Alan interesting to you? Just to take a sidebar on that.

Frank Miller: Okay. He’s the smartest fan there ever was.

Tim Ferriss: The smartest fan.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?

Frank Miller: That he really — he said inside all of that, he’s a guy who grew up on comics, okay? But he’s just so smart that he’s able to take the stuff of his childhood joy and to take it down into places that nobody’s ever dreamt it could go before and transform — anything he’s ever done, he’s transformed, utterly. I mean, the first time he sat down to write Swamp Thing, he changed the entire precept of the character. That’s something a lot of people miss, is that it had always been this guy who, this guy who fell into the muck and got transformed into a swamp guy. And in his very first issue of Swamp Thing, Alan transformed him into a collection of swamp weeds that used this human as a model to construct a new body for itself. There was no human in there at all. And he did it first time at bat, the first time I ever saw his name.

Tim Ferriss: Just completely reinvented the character.

Frank Miller: Scared the crap out of me. Yeah. No, he was something when he shot up.

Tim Ferriss: I promised I would bring back Robert at some point.

Frank Miller: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: And certainly we can — and feel free, if there’s anything you’d like to dive into that I’m bouncing around and not hitting, let me know. But you’ve described Robert as an angel of sorts. Why is that? Robert Rodriguez.

Frank Miller: Well, for one thing is, to be around him, you’re around a man of constant goodwill and generous energy.

Tim Ferriss: He’s very generous. Just a quick — sorry to interrupt, but people might find this funny. When I moved to Austin in 2017, the very first person I had over for dinner at my house, and I was very excited about it, it was Robert, who I’d known for a while. And invited him over, he was on his way and then I realized, wait a second, I have no plates and I have no silverware. So he brought over two plates from his house plus silverware, which I still have to this day. So that’s Robert. That’s Robert. He’s like, “Keep the plates and the silverware. I think you’re going to need it next time.”

Frank Miller: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: So Frank, you were mentioning Robert’s generous spirit. I wanted to underscore something that I only learned after watching the documentary, which is that Rodriguez, as I understand it, quit the Director’s Guild so that you could receive co-director credit. I had no idea. That seems wild.

Frank Miller: I remember the day, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, can you describe what happened on that day?

Frank Miller: No, he just told me, he just did it. He said, “You didn’t have the…” What was the word for it?

Tim Ferriss: What, the credentials?

Frank Miller: It wasn’t credentials, it was something along those lines. He just grinned and he said, “So I quit,” because he didn’t want anything to stand in the way of us just moving ahead. He knew that I needed the authority on the set, because they were his people. And everybody there, they were so loyal to him that he needed to be able to bequeath that to me, for things to really work the way both of us needed them to.

Tim Ferriss: What was it like working on that film with Robert? How did you divide or mesh your duties?

Frank Miller: At one point, somebody in production made this ridiculous poster of the two of us as a two-headed beast, because we were working right on top of each other the whole time. There was another point where we were shooting orders right past each other — although we were almost always saying the same thing. But there was one point where we weren’t saying exactly the same thing, and there was Brittany Murphy in the middle of her scene — 

Tim Ferriss: One of the actors.

Frank Miller: — yeah. There she was as a scantily clad barmaid and she just tossed up her — I think she tossed her tray in the air and says, “There’s two of them.” But generally it was just a dream. After a while, they tended to know which one to go to for which kind of problem.

Tim Ferriss: The actors did?

Frank Miller: Oh, yeah, and so did production.

Tim Ferriss: So what were those different types of problems? I’m so curious.

Frank Miller: Well, certainly anything to do with really the mechanics of making the movie was Robert.

Tim Ferriss: Robert, right.

Frank Miller: But when it came to the internal workings of the characters — 

Tim Ferriss: Motivations of the characters.

Frank Miller: — the histories, or if they wanted to try something out, I could really quickly tell them whether it was in character or not. And then we would often just get together, the two of us, to go over a bunch of stuff. And then there were any number of cases where Robert would come to me and say, “I need a new shot here. I need a new scene here.” I remember one time he said, “I need something new here, Frank. It’s got to be quick, it’s got to be cheap and it’s got to be brilliant.” We just sat down with a sheet of paper. It was some of the most fun I ever had, working so damned fast.

Tim Ferriss: And knowing Robert, having spent a good amount of time with him — we both live in Austin, I can see both of you working together. It’s very easy for me to see. I encourage people to listen to my episodes I’ve done with Robert, start with the first one about his creative process and bio. But he used to draw comics. He drew comics. He’s very unorthodox, he doesn’t feel like he has to follow a fixed set of rules. I don’t know if he did this on set for Sin City, but he’ll often have actors painting. He’ll be playing guitar.

Frank Miller: Oh, no, that was so important. Yeah, he always wanted to keep the creative juices flowing. There was one time when he rented out a hall in Austin and Bruce Willis and his band played.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, really?

Frank Miller: Yeah. So there’s Bruce Willis up there pounding it out, like he’s doing his Springsteen.

Tim Ferriss: He’d keep the creative juices flowing and he really walks the talk. And also — I may be stating the obvious for people, but when I look at, say, Sin City as you created it here, it’s so inherently cinematic and directorial in terms of angles, framing. I’ve always felt that way. Even looking at say storyboards, I’m like, okay, well, they’re not the same certainly, I mean, but there’s a lot that rhymes. So when I’m looking at these innovations, whether it’s back in the day with Jack Kirby or looking at some of the Japanese influences and how they capture motion differently, it makes me think of innovations in film at the same time, where you think of a Kurosawa doing a Rashomon and inserting multiple perspectives. You’re like, okay. I mean, you’re solving a lot of the same problems and exercising seemingly a lot of the same creative muscles.

Frank Miller: Yeah. Well, and that’s the way media works though. That’s the way art forms work, is that — it’s funny because it’s like, so many people strive so hard to act as if they work in a vacuum, and no one does. The influences are constant and inexorable, and that’s kind of the beauty of the beast really. I mean, occasionally this one piercing person will come through, but even Hitchcock came from somewhere. You can even cut back to what he sprung from, or Welles or whatever. And even those two were in pretty tight competition and did a lot of the same tricks. So it’s like, it’s all a big mishmash.

Tim Ferriss: Outside of the films you’ve been involved with, what are some of your favorite films, whether they are scripted, documentary or otherwise?

Frank Miller: Well, I’m a big fan of all black and white, that’s no secret, but that’s not just all the film noir. I can give you chapter and verse on film noir, but that’s all over the book and everywhere else. But occasionally I’ll see an absolute masterpiece. The Caine Mutiny comes to mind.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not familiar with it, what is The Caine Mutiny?

Frank Miller: The Caine Mutiny is a World War II story, featuring an absolutely brilliant Humphrey Bogart playing exactly the opposite of the kind of character you’d expect him to play. He plays an almost Richard Nixonian figure of a World War II destroyer-minesweeper pilot who is completely paranoid. Fred MacMurray plays a character you would never expect him to play. This is not My Three Sons. This is Fred McMurray as a very serious actor playing a military lawyer. It’s a study in paranoia on high seas. 

Tim Ferriss: What appeals to you about the movie, or do you just get swept on it? Is it that these actors are doing what seems diametrically opposed to what people associate them with? Is it something — 

Frank Miller: Well, not particularly. I just love high drama, and I often do love to see an actor like Bogart play a character who you don’t expect. Maltese Falcon typecast him for the rest of his career. Before that he played many, many roles, which were often shifty, nasty little men. He played a paranoid killer once in an adaptation, I believe of a James M. Cain novel. I love to see the actors when they aren’t trapped by the audience’s expectations, the things that Robert Mitchum was capable of. He was pretty extraordinary. But also, I like to see the movies that really were discovering what they could do.

Tim Ferriss: Pushing the edges?

Frank Miller: Well, or finding them.

Tim Ferriss: Finding the edges.

Frank Miller: Finding, if you look at Grapes of Wrath, that movie is haunting for what it is, but it’s doing so in such a compelling way, in such an aching way. I mean, Henry Fonda is extraordinary in that movie. And also, I just like to get in the hands of a great director. That’s why I do keep getting back to Hitchcock. I love falling back into one of his old movies. I could watch Rebecca, I swear, every night.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve never seen it, so that’s got to be on my — 

Frank Miller: Oh, it is so good.

Tim Ferriss: — to watch.

Frank Miller: It is one of the most romantic movies you’ll ever see, and it’s occasionally very spooky. It’s a date movie.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Well, done, thanks for doing my homework for me. What artists or art forms have influenced the work you do, outside of comics themselves?

Frank Miller: Well, movies a lot and beyond that, lots of books.

Tim Ferriss: Lots of books, what types of books?

Frank Miller: Oh, I grew up reading Mickey Spillane novels, and from that all the other crime stuff. And somewhere along the line, I fell in love with ancient history and that’s where I got 300 and all of that.

Tim Ferriss: Probably, right.

Frank Miller: The history is just endless wealth. It’s like, everywhere you turn there’s more and more to get. It’s very breathtaking. When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV but I don’t now.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s come back to 300 and your other adventures in Hollywood. What have you learned — because, I ask this selfishly, when I work on my stuff, I’m a control freak, a complete control freak, and a lot of my friends are control freaks. I’ve just seen a number of different train wrecks when Hollywood and the structures in Hollywood collide with a creative who has a story or something they view as their baby. I’ve just seen a lot of messes, and I’m wondering what you have learned about working in entertainment or Hollywood.

Frank Miller: Oh, boy, I’ve got one overriding thing, which is just, I mean, more important than anything else is the right people. The right people. It’s like, when I’ve worked with the right people, the experiences have been wonderful and the results have been wonderful.

Tim Ferriss: How do you know, for you, who the right people are? Because there are so many slick folks in L.A., no offense to anyone in L.A.

Frank Miller: I know.

Tim Ferriss: But man, do you get told what you want to hear. I’d love to know how you identify, having spent some time in the trenches.

Frank Miller: I don’t know, man. All I can tell you is that I’ve been exceedingly lucky once and I’ve been unspeakably lucky the other time. I was exceedingly lucky with Zack Snyder because in his case, he was taking control. He was going to do it, okay? He did a brilliant job. In the case of Robert Rodriguez, that was Heaven because it was the adventure of, as I said, a lifetime. And when it’s been more distant than that, it’s been bye, bye, baby, that’s been the same thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. More distant, meaning?

Frank Miller: That it just happens.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Frank Miller: But it’s something I did in a Marvelistic comic that gets adapted, that I end up seeing pieces of what I did, mixed in with things that feel like they came out of a Dirty Harry movie, mixed with things that came out of Scooby-Doo. It all gets a little less exciting.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s just say you created a masterpiece in the next 12 months that everyone in Hollywood is fighting over, how do you make some of the important decisions about who to work with? Do you call Robert and you’re like, “Hey, what do you think about these people?” Do you call Zack Snyder and ask him the same question?

Frank Miller: The answer is right across the room. I mean, Silenn Thomas runs my company and she really knows what she’s doing. And before I really hear about anything, she already knows all these people and what they’re doing and everything.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a good hire.

Frank Miller: I wouldn’t even call it a hire, it’s a partnership.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, all roads lead to Silenn. She’s bowing in the background.

Frank Miller: She’s waving us away.

Tim Ferriss: I want to ask about alcohol, what is your relationship to alcohol? What has it done for or against you?

Frank Miller: Oh, that’s, I wouldn’t call it an easy question but it’s a simple enough one, especially the way you phrased it. Okay. Simple answer, against me, a lot. For me, nothing.

Tim Ferriss: Nothing?

Frank Miller: Nothing. It’s taken a long time to come to that conclusion. It’s a big old aspect of my life. Again, it’s a genetic condition that I allowed to get out of control. I would say, I did use it to disinhibit me and probably worked very, very productively because of it, and did stuff that was inspired and occasionally reckless. But the deleterious effects and the ways it’s affected other parts of my life, no, it hasn’t done me a goddamn bit of good.

Tim Ferriss: How did you stop?

Frank Miller: I was coerced to stop. Silenn and others decided I was going to die, and arranged for me to be put in a place and watched. The time had to pass, medicines given and that sort of thing. It takes a while. 

I will tell you this in all sincerity — this is not posturing a bit for either one of you. I’m having the time of my life in that respect. I’m creatively — now I’m going like, okay, now I can get serious. Okay. One thing is, what happens when you get off the sauce — I imagine any addiction is like this, you don’t realize how much anger has been bottled up in it. And how what you thought was fuel — I mean, I thought I was fueled by all this, this kind of fire. Oh, it doesn’t fuel you. It doesn’t fuel you. It’s like saying, “Oh, it’s great to have my stomach feel this way” when you’re constipated. It’s a lot better to be focused and moving. Clarity is quite lovely.

Tim Ferriss: So did the getting off of alcohol in and of itself dissipate the fire or the anger, or did the getting sober allow you to better deal with that in some way?

Frank Miller: It helps you understand when and where it’s appropriate. There’s plenty to be angry about but it’s not this free floating, “Am I mad at myself? I’m mad at the world.”

Tim Ferriss: What advice would you give to a dedicated novice who’s looking to get into comics?

Frank Miller: I thought, well, you could get into drinking.

Tim Ferriss: You get into drinking. Wait, what’s your favorite cocktail? No, comics. They’re a student of the craft, they’re obsessed, they’re dedicated. They have the raw ingredients that maybe Neal saw in you. What advice would you give to them?

Frank Miller: It’s what I said in the book, which is story, story, story. First, think of it as one craft, don’t think of writing and drawing. It’s one thing and it will become clear what it is. But beyond that, cartooning is taking things that are very complicated and making them quite simple. That’s where your mind should be going, more than anywhere else. At this stage, complication is not your friend. Convey information but then learn — I mean, pick up Scott McCloud’s book on understanding comics — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have it.

Frank Miller: — and see how he breaks down how comics work. At the same time, pick up Syd Field’s book on screenplay — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good advice.

Frank Miller: — and get a good sense for a simple approach to three-acts storytelling. You’ll use it for a year or two, and then you won’t be using it anymore but it gets you somewhere. Learn how to draw.

Tim Ferriss: How do you learn how to draw? I think this is in the book, Neal Adams telling you to go out and buy some toy cars so you can learn how to draw cars correctly.

Frank Miller: That was great advice.

Tim Ferriss: Great advice, right? What great advice or what a simple solve, what a simple solution. How does someone — 

Frank Miller: Learn how to draw, like humans? Humans are the big problem and, oh, man, every dirty trick there is. I mean, I can give you some names of some books.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’d be great. Please.

Frank Miller: Okay, let’s see. George Bridgman.

Tim Ferriss: George Bridgman?

Frank Miller: Yeah. There’s no E in it, in Bridgman. There is one in George, but no in Bridgman. It’s The Complete Guide to Drawing from Life. It’s only about the figure.

Tim Ferriss: Why do you like that book? There’s so many books on drawing, why do you like this one?

Frank Miller: Because he’s at heart a cartoonist, because he treats the body like a machine so it’s easier to understand. You do get the gesture, but you’ll have to bring that yourself anyway. Stuff’s completely non-photographic. It’s somewhere between the thinking of Michelangelo and the thinking of a comic book artist.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. So the non-photographic, that seems critical here.

Frank Miller: There is another person people like a lot named Andrew Loomis.

Tim Ferriss: Andrew Loomis?

Frank Miller: Yeah, it’s L-O-O-M-I-S. I favor him less because his work has a sleeker, smoother look. I favor the more mechanical, muscular style. But usually any aspiring comic book artist will have both those books on the shelf.

Tim Ferriss: How did you learn perspective, structures? How did you learn how to work with perspective?

Frank Miller: Okay. The trick to perspective is to realize that it is a trick. It’s a complete lie, perspective does not exist. I mean, it’s an invention by mathematicians, so do keep that in mind when you worry about perspective. It’s a device that you apply to a drawing. But you know that when you look down this room, that lines seem to converge and so on. So what you do is, you rough out the basic shape of what you think something is, and then you converge a couple of those lines. They hit at a point and that becomes the horizontal. You can keep your verticals straight up, or you can give it an upper — 

Tim Ferriss: Tilt.

Frank Miller: — or a lower tilt, and so on. There are books on perspective too, I just don’t know the names.

Tim Ferriss: But how did you develop your abilities with perspective?

Frank Miller: Imitating other comic book artists.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I have to say, and hopefully this doesn’t sound strange, but looking at this gigantic beast here, looking at, for instance — this is one of many, many different pages that I captured just to revisit. But when I look at some of these — this is the one I showed before, I’ll show it again. This one here. So you look at this two-page spread, and I’ll describe it for folks, but these are really stark, very, almost inversed color palettes, but although they’re black and white, of a dancer. And the elegant minimalism and some of the line work in this book makes me think of certain really old school illustrators like Leyendecker. And there’s an archetypal energy to this type of work.

And I remember in the documentary, to invoke Jim Lee’s name again, he said something like — he was talking about, I don’t know if it was Sin City or your work in general or you, but he said, “And then I could try A, B, or C, and then I’m sure that Frank would tell me I’m using too many lines.” It was something like that. And I thought it was — 

Frank Miller: I did not!

Tim Ferriss: It was something like that.

Frank Miller: I can’t do what he does, so I make fun of it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and so I recall collecting — people should check out Jim Lee’s penciling too. Back in the day I collected, when he was working on the X-Men and stuff. Just looking at the anatomical work he did with Colossus and stuff.

Frank Miller: Jesus Christ.

Tim Ferriss: It’s amazing, amazing.

But this seems to access something different. And I’m wondering how you developed the economy of elegant line use and use of negative space like this use of black and white. Because part of the reason I asked about the perspective is I noticed, which is something you can only really notice in something that’s large format and produced this way is all of the perspective lines that have been erased. There’s a million perspective lines that have been erased in this, and — 

Frank Miller: But the thing is that makes you feel the — 

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. And then you have something like this here.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right. And this, if you can see this one I’m hitting with my knee?

Frank Miller: Now I see how he got those arms.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Your mind is creating all the perspective you need to make sense of this as a three-dimensional experience in your brain. But it looks like probably 40, 50, 60 lines of perspective have all been erased. How did you develop this style?

Frank Miller: I remember one time, I was early on in Sin City and I was talking with Dick Giordano. You know who he was?

Tim Ferriss: I know the name.

Frank Miller: Yeah, he was a comic book artist for a long time, mostly known as being an associate of Neal Adams. And he was looking at the early Sin City stuff, and you noticed the early Sin City work has much more line work in it than the later stuff. He was the best teacher in comics. He was a good artist and everything, but he was a great editor.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Frank Miller: And he mentored Klaus Janson for instance, and was a terrific influence over a lot of people. And he said, “Frank,” real New York/Italian, all the way to this guy. He said, “Frank, I’m looking at this Sin City you’re doing.” And he said, “And I’m thinking about some of the old guys. And I’m thinking, there was this old guy,” and he names — I can’t remember right now. And he said, “And he was doing stuff kind of like yours and eventually he just started laying in all the black areas first, put the lines in later. And he found I didn’t need so many lines.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s interesting.

Frank Miller: I went home, and the real look of Sin City was born because once the black was down, I went, “Hey, I’m more than halfway home. I’m there. I’ll just add a few little things here and there.” And I have worked that way ever since on everything.

Tim Ferriss: And at what point did you also, it seems like innovate with a, as I understand it, start to finish, first to last page, batch processing where instead of doing the penciling, the lettering, the inking, and the coloring on a per page basis, you’re basically doing the penciling for the entire book.

Frank Miller: That was Sin City as well.

Tim Ferriss: That was Sin City as well.

Frank Miller: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just so mind-blowing. It seems to me, in retrospect, that it makes so much sense to do it the way that you did it.

Frank Miller: Yeah. I decided I do all the tissue layouts, trace them all off into pencil drawings, then do all the panel borders. You don’t want to be around me on those days. And then lay on all the flat black areas. And what this did was it made it more fun every step of the way, and it sped the whole thing up like crazy.

Tim Ferriss: It must’ve sped it up.

Frank Miller: And it made the work so much better, it was idiotic.

Tim Ferriss: What is the — 

Frank Miller: By the end of it, the line work was so spontaneous.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Frank Miller: Man.

Tim Ferriss: What is that first step that you mentioned with tissue?

Frank Miller: Well, I solved the basic compositional and drawing issues on a separate piece of tissue. And then my drawing — 

Tim Ferriss: Which is just a type of paper with the tissue?

Frank Miller: It’s a vellum. It’s not really a tissue, it’s stronger than that. And it’s a type of drawing paper, but it’s nearly transparent. And I place that marker rough on — and my drawing board is a light table. And I put the actual piece of Bristol board on top of that and traced that off.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Frank Miller: So that I can move things around, I can change the size, I can replace things, and so on.

Tim Ferriss: So that was also done on Sin City. That’s wild. So a lot of innovation happened on Sin City.

Frank Miller: Oh, yes. That was a transformative piece of work.

Tim Ferriss: Why did so much coalesce during Sin City in that way?

Frank Miller: Well, therein lies a tale.

Tim Ferriss: I love tales.

Frank Miller: Well, no, it’s because everything was happening. I had broken away from the major publishers, was working with the then young Dark Horse Comics, and we tested the waters with each other, with the Martha Washington series, and with Hard Boiled. And I decided I was going to take my baby there. And so I just decided, “Okay, it’s time to reinvent the wheel. I’m not going to approach, I’m going to apply. Apply the stuff that I’ve been told.” Because I said to Mike Richardson, I said, “Look, we’ve done two science-fiction series and I know everything is superhero science fiction. I want to do a crime comic and in black and white.” And he didn’t flinch, and so we were rolling with that.

Tim Ferriss: So was it the ability to take that creative leap that seems like had been building inside you for a very long time? Is that the kind of inner creative unlock that then led to these various innovations? Is that the way that you would think about it? Or was it — 

Frank Miller: Well, one thing does lead to another, but most of creative work is problem solving. It’s not, “God is speaking to me.” It’s, “How do I get that nose to look right?” It’s that sort of thing. And in this case it was how to get the look I’m after as efficiently as possible.

Tim Ferriss: I won’t show it again. I can pull it up on the screen as B-roll, but that right-hand page in particular of that female figure and the black, left portion of the torso, which is framed with black lining, and the right side from our perspective, framed with the white. Just the economy, the amount of meaning that is transmitted with such a relatively small amount of ink, I know it’s in some cases a lot of black in the background.

Frank Miller: There’s a lot of ink.

Tim Ferriss: — actually. It’s a lot of ink, I don’t know, but in terms of line work, that is sort of the latticework of the perception, it’s just so incredible.

Frank Miller: And in the early pages in Sin City, there was a lot of line work underneath all that. Towards the end, it was clicking along, just that was what it was going to be from birth.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Also something that comes to mind, at least for me, in the Japanese way of doing things. And there’s a lot of variability, of course, among Japanese artists and so on, but it’s very interesting how they apply detail. You might see a ton of detail in a small portion of a panel and then very little on the rest. You might see — 

Frank Miller: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Or you might see a page — 

Frank Miller: It’s like the [inaudible] approach to it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And then you might have a page where it’s very fast-paced, the line works pretty sparse, and then there’s one panel that has a lot of detail. And the beauty in this comes also up in Understanding Comics with McCloud is how much work the brain does really effortlessly between the panels.

Frank Miller: Well, it’s also to where McCloud was applying behind McLuhan.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Frank Miller: Because there’s a lot of McLuhan thinking in McCloud.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve been loving the book, so thank you for sending me an early copy, Silenn. And I can’t wait until I can actually export all my highlights because there’s so many highlights that I’ve put into it. And what I want to also emphasize for folks, I really believe this, is that if you want to be good at anything, study people who are excellent at something. It does not have to be the same thing you are hoping to pursue.

Like if you study Jiro Dreams of Sushi or something like that, in an effort to become better at X and aim for the top of your field. That seems totally disparate, there’s still so many lessons you can take. And if humans are storymaking machines and that we often create meaning almost always from stories, then studying your work within the realm of comics and film, even if someone is not involved explicitly in comics or film, the lessons can still be applied. And I’ll be very curious and excited to see how people in industries and areas that can’t even be guessed at this point will implement some of the life lessons from the book. I’ll be very curious to see. It’ll be very fun.

I have to also mention, and I’ve wanted you to pronounce this name for me. Well, I’ve never thought I would meet you, but since I was a little kid, the Elektra that you did, that I want to say it was a lot of watercolor artwork, Bill, how do you say his last name?

Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.

Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz?

Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.

Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz.

Frank Miller: No, Sienkiewicz.

Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Okay. Ish.

Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.

Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Exactly.

Frank Miller: Think Russian. Pretend you’re Russian. Pretend you’re Russian.

Tim Ferriss: That is a beautiful piece of work.

Frank Miller: Pretty amazing, pretty amazing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s amazing.

Frank Miller: And it was a berserk experience for both of us.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me, because that was — 

Frank Miller: We had such a time.

Tim Ferriss: You had such a time, a good time.

Frank Miller: Oh, we were like two 12-year-olds just making a crazy comic.

Tim Ferriss: What was the experience like and why did you work well together? Maybe that’s worth digging into.

Frank Miller: Well, first of all, we like each other a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Great starting point.

Frank Miller: And it was one of those times that happened that you live for, in that, comics had been very restrictive for a very long time. And things like Dark Knight had started busting things open, Watchmen was out, and so on. And Bill had gone from being the guy who draws like Neal Adams to being more and more the guy was pulling in Ralph Steadman and doing all this stuff and really becoming his own man. He had just worked with Alan Moore and was looking for a much looser kind of arrangement because Alan’s a very dominating writer.

Tim Ferriss: Dominating in the sense that he has an idea of panel one, panel two…?

Frank Miller: He writes a very tight — he’s a clockmaker when he writes the story. Watchmen plays off that constantly. And Bill is a bucking bronco. So when Bill and I got together, they just opened Epic Comics at Marvel, back when Marvel was actually trying to loosen up a little bit before it became Marvel again.

Tim Ferriss: It’s easy for people to forget. Marvel went through some very hard times before the technology caught up sufficiently to end up with Marvel Studios and so on, but — 

Frank Miller: No, I’m talking about when Marvel was really trying to bring in the European influences and stuff like that. It was quite an exciting time. Archie Goodwin was running a fascinating division there. I came up with a miniseries, supposed to be four issues of Elektra for Marvel Comics. And Marvel, when they saw what it was, the script was, they went, “This can’t be part of Marvel Comics. This is just, like, too goddamn weird.” And so it bumped over to the Epic division and, got to give them credit, they didn’t just say, “We won’t do it.” And then it went from four issues to eight issues. You know, whatever it was, and the whole, it’s like the lid flew off the pot that was on the stove.

Tim Ferriss: How did you give Bill enough rein as a bucking bronco?

Frank Miller: I didn’t.

Tim Ferriss: You didn’t?

Frank Miller: I wrote full scripts. He just drew whatever the fuck he wanted and I had to pull the whole thing back.

Tim Ferriss: Can you explain what full script means in this?

Frank Miller: Well, full script is like a screenplay.

Tim Ferriss: It is, yeah.

Frank Miller: Only a little stricter because he tells you what each panel number is and what exactly what goes in it and what the captions are.

Tim Ferriss: So you would send that to Bill and he’d be like, “Thanks, appreciate the effort, let me just…”

Frank Miller: But just what would come back would be much more abstract and much more daring and — 

Tim Ferriss: It wouldn’t break the clock, it would still work.

Frank Miller: No, I wouldn’t send him an exploding tank and get back a bunch of tomatoes rolling down the street. No, but it required reinterpretation of my script. And I welcomed it though because I saw — 

Tim Ferriss: That sounds fun.

Frank Miller: I saw brilliance was happening and it was fun. And just because of that though, the excitement grew, and I kept expanding the story. There’s all these unexpected elements that he’d throw in. I want to turn them into characters and stuff. And luckily Archie Goodwin was along for the ride. It was an absolute gas. I love that book.

Tim Ferriss: I still have it. I literally still have it on Long Island.

Let me ask you a question. It may go, no. This may be a dead end of a question, but I’m going to ask you anyway, and this is a question I often ask as we start to whine towards landing the plane here. If you had a billboard on which you could put anything non-commercial, metaphorically to get a message or something in front of billions of people, could be a statement, a quote, a word, an image, combination, what might you put on that billboard? Does anything come to mind?

Frank Miller: Whoa.

Tim Ferriss: A motto, a mantra, anything.

Frank Miller: I’m going to get very broad on this.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Frank Miller: Just say “Ask every question.”

Tim Ferriss: Ask every question.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What does that mean to you?

Frank Miller: Just means that we live in a time of silence and that people are leaving things unquestioned and unspoken. It’s not a good line, I can’t come up with a good one it seems.

Tim Ferriss: I think “Ask every question” is pretty good, but we can take a couple bites at the apple if you like.

Frank Miller: Yeah. How about “Just challenge?”

Tim Ferriss: Challenge?

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, what does that mean to you?

Frank Miller: When you are confronted with things that everybody says, “Be ready to challenge,” something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Challenge. Challenge, push the wall, defy the code. If everybody says, “Do X,” if everybody says, “You must do Y.”

Frank Miller: At least say, “Why?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, why?

Frank Miller: “Why” is a pretty good one too. If you want to go with that.

Tim Ferriss: Why is a good one.

Frank Miller: It’s just why.

Tim Ferriss: I guess they go together. Both of them go together.

Frank Miller: Why don’t you go “Why?” with the question mark.

Tim Ferriss: Why? Ask — where’s the camera? There it is.

Frank Miller: Or, “Why’s it got to be that way?” Why’s it got to be that way? Why’s it got to be that way?

Tim Ferriss: And they all converge sort of in the same theme.

Frank Miller: Just trying to go against an age of pathological conformity.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, yes. Often subconscious too. Pathological conformity.

Frank Miller: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Ask why? Why does that have to be this way? Also with your own thinking. It applies everywhere.

Frank Miller: Everywhere.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, everywhere.

Frank, thank you so much. It’s great to see you again.

Frank Miller: Real pleasure, man.Tim Ferriss: And everybody, you can find Frank on Instagram @frankmillerofficial. The website is frankmillerink.com. Where’s the camera? You can now pre-order, so absolutely check out Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling. I’ve been reading it. I’m going to finish it over the next couple of days. Have really been taking a lot of notes, I also took a bunch of notes from this conversation, and we will have links to everything that we talked about in the show notes, as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. Frank Miller will be the only Frank Miller. If you search by name for guest, you will find this episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and ask “Why? Why? Why?” Thanks for tuning in, everybody.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More (#831) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.