Grant Morrison, comics legend and star of the legendary disinfo.con (view clip here), has conquered the world of comics but has yet to crack Hollywood. He’s now writing the screenplay for a live-action independent movie, ‘Sinatoro,’ with director Adam Egypt Mortimer. They tell MTV News‘ Rick Marshall about the project:
MTV NEWS: First off, tell me about the poster image you released for “Sinatoro” during Comic-Con — the one with the astronaut in the middle of the desert and the blackish cloud pouring out his faceplate. Given how little we know about the project, what are you hoping to convey about the film with that image?
GRANT MORRISON: Well, I wanted it to say that we’re dealing with classic material, the American myth, the idea of the road movie and the notion that the road can take you anywhere and adventures can happen. That’s always been at the very basic root of the American imagination. We wanted to show that, and of course it had to be Route 66, which is the daddy of all roads. The idea of the astronaut was to kind of suggest that our character was somewhere that looks familiar, but it’s not really familiar — it’s a place that will be familiar to all of us one day — but he’s kind of an explorer in another land. There’s an actual astronaut in the story, so it kind refers to him a little, but it’s mostly the notion of being an alien on your own planet, and in your own environment.
ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER: Long before the movie comes out, we’re going to put out lots more images and posters like that, and they’re all going to be different. They’re all going to have a different style and content, but they’re all going to seamlessly fit into what the movie is. That’s because what Grant is envisioning with this world is many, many angles of looking at the same complex object.
We were just talking about what our next teaser image is going to be, and I don’t think we’ll reveal anything about it except that it’s a completely different thing, and you’ll look at it and need to rethink everything you thought about this movie.
MTV: When it comes to stories like this with so many different elements that make up the narrative and so many things the main character and the audience must discover along the way, how do you go about pitching the project? Is it even possible to come up with the standard 30-second pitch for something like this?
MORRISON: We started with the notion of doing something along the lines of a Roger Corman movie, because we figured it would be low-budget and we could just work together and do anything crazy that we wanted to do. It started out with that type of ’60s, seeker-on-the-road psychedelic adventure, very free-form like “Let’s just go to the desert and shoot some movies” sort of feeling.
But as we developed it, I suddenly hit on what was a really big, science-fiction high concept that turns the movie into a potential Hollywood success. We suddenly thought we had something bigger on our hands here, something better…
[continues at MTV News]
