YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Millar

lines on the record: 46
first: 2019-08-27
most recent: 2019-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think being poor is a good start, actually. I look at my friends and it's really interesting. Especially the guys I've met in Hollywood and so on, is that the risk for them was more because they maybe had quite a nice potential.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“human being and that's kind of my plan for these five years to try and make where I grew up better than it was when I was a kid.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I just think I'm obsessed with the idea in a very binary world that we're in right now. I'm obsessed with the idea that localism is the way forward. I don't know if anybody else is talking about this, but it's something I've come up with, which is that really, if you put most people in a room, they agree on almost every issue. And you would never think this from the internet or whatever, you know, but or from political debate. But generally, all people want is a job, their kids to be okay and to have a house, we have a roof over their head. People generally have got the same sort of moral codes mostly when you get them together. It's fringe issues they maybe disagree on, but people generally are fine. And I just think I thought about going into politics in some sense, but I sort of see the trap. All it is really is putting you in one camp and having you against other people, you'd probably got on pretty well with. So my philosophy is just look after one patch if you can. It might even just be your own house. It might be your street. It might be your old neighborhood and try and make things a little lighter. That's all you can do is...”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's like, but there's an Abenite for pensioners in December with a free Christmas lunch for all the pensioners who want to come along and, you know.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comic convention we're going to do every year, I think, because we had such a great time with it. I bought a hundred foot inflatable Spider-Man for the schoolyard. So we want to use that again next year. So we got the cars from back to the future, the car from Harry Potter, with the actors from Outlander. We flew in guys from Marvel and DC in 2018 and everything. And we had a convention inside a place with a capacity of only 300 people. So we pitched up a big tent in the school football pitch and everything. And it just became a little mini San Diego. So we're going to do that every year because we had such a great time. We're doing a Christmas experience on November 24th. So what that is, is every year there's going to be in the last week in November, we're going to have a Santa Day in the neighborhood. There's already a Christmas fair at the local church, but we thought we'd a steroid inject it and get reindeer pulling Santa through the housing estate to this place that's going to be done up like a massive grotto and free presents for all the children. So things like that, there's an Abenite for pensioners that we've got going. It's kind of weird that pensioners are now abbots.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we put on a comic con, you know, like San Diego Comic-Con is, like I said, when I was a kid, something like that seemed very far away. So the idea of bringing it to the housing estate was really exciting. And I specifically brought it to my old primary school. And again, I feel this a tremendous indebtedness to old school because it's where I learned how to read and write. All the encouragement that I got that wasn't from my parents was from school. And I liked my time at the school. I had a lovely experience there. And I thought, well, you know what, this is what I do for a living. I kind of owe these guys I should do something for them.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in terms of on the social economic scales, it scores low, but there's an awful lot of good people there, you know, and there's a lot of people, like I say, I've still got connections with. And I thought, wouldn't it be good to try, and I hate to use the word redevelop because it always sounds awful, but the idea of just doing some cool stuff there for five years and actually really devote five years to it and get a team of people, old friends from school, some new friends and volunteers, and actually just try and do something awesome roughly every six or eight weeks.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this notion of doing something for the small community that I grew up in. There's 6,000 people in the housing estate that I grew up in, a thousand houses, two churches, two schools, six shops. It's small enough that if you invested quite a large chunk of money, you could do something really interesting in it. And I literally drew a circle around it, and I'm talking the next street, nothing's happening in. You know, this is all focused on this one area that I grew up in called Town Head in Cote Bridge. And I loved it. And it's a place that I've got a lot of friends still. I've got a lot of family still, quite a lot of my family are there, like cousins, my brothers.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All those comic book movies and television shows you'd think at least one eccentric loner would have stitched themselves a costume. Is everyday life really so exciting? Are schools and offices really so thrilling that I'm the only one who ever fantasized about this? Come on, be honest with yourself. We all plan to be a superhero at some point in our lives.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah, I mean, this is the opening page that Kickass. And Comics is kind of funny to read because usually it's just dialogue, you know, so I try to pick a page that it wasn't just me doing funny voices and American accents and things. So this is an internal monologue of Kickass himself. You know, Dave Luzewski, the lead character. And it's what I always thought as a kid, you know, because I wanted to be a superhero when I was a kid. And when I was a young teenager, my friends and I said, let's actually do this, let's dress up as superheroes and get out and try and do this. We never did it. But Kickass is a sort of alternate reality autobiography of what might have happened if I did. So this opening page here is his monologue where he says, I always wondered why nobody did it before me.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of your newer characters. Well, Kickass was a book that I brought out in 2008, a movie in 2010, and it was very autobiographical. It was about a guy who decided that he was going to try and be a superhero, even though he had no powers, he'd no money, he was just a kid who liked superhero comics, and he was actually going to dress up as one and go out and try and fight crime. And there's another character in the book who's older and doing exactly the same thing, and he's got a kid who he's trained up to be his young sidekick. And I realized I had no real plan to do it this way, but I realized it was very autobiographical. A lot of the lines that I was writing and so on, it was things that I'd said myself. And Big Daddy was based on me as an adult and kick-ass was based on me as a 14-year-old. And I think that's why it resonated so much with people, because it really did come from the heart. It was a very personal thing. It wasn't the way most comic books are just explosions and superpowers and everything that this was about somebody who you could maybe relate to in some level.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just love interesting people. When I was growing up, one of the things that attracted me was Tony Benn is that all the newspapers were against them. Everybody seemed to be against them, and that made me think there must be something alright about this guy.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to the SNP for a little while, but I realized that was kind of going nowhere. They didn't really have anything brilliantly well thought out or anything. So Corbyn Imerging was really exciting and it really energized everybody. I mean, now the Labour Party is the biggest mass membership party in Europe, which is hugely exciting. We're on the cusp potentially of another Labour government”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tony Ben was the father of Jeremy Corbyn, really, you know, and he just made that step that Ben never made in the early 80s. So when Jeremy Corbyn was elected, there was a lot of enthusiasm for Tony Ben in my house. It's a one generation on. It's very exciting to see somebody like Corbyn in there. And it's funny because as a Eurosceptic, one thing that drives me nuts is people online saying, oh, you're a UKer and you're a fan of Nigel Farage and everything. And it's such a lack of intelligence on the part of the people you're talking about because Euroscepticism was the preserve of the left pre-1988. As soon as Jacques Delors came over and criticised Thatcher, it brought a lot of Labour people on side. But, you know, it's kind of nice to actually feel that there's a politician now and a party now that I can get behind because as a left-leaning guy, I didn't really have a party for a long time. I was excited. Like everybody else when Tony Blair was elected in 1997 as Prime Minister here after the Iraq war, everybody became a little bit disenchanted. And for about a decade, I felt it was without a party. And I'd vote Labour book quite unenthusiastically.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if people have noticed this, but nearly all the Marvel characters are based, like I say, they're white males based around the east coast of America, specifically New York. And I mean, that's incredible when you think there's 7 billion people in the planet and all these stories are based around a few miles of the Marvel Office. So it does seem a bit odd that if you're in France or you're in Belgium or you're in New Guinea or something, why is there no stories set in these places? And I think a few years ago Marvel figured this out, and it's something I figured out too, which was make it more global. And from a commercial point of view, it's very smart as well, because your audience is no longer just America. Cinema figured this out 20 years ago and started to mix up the ethnicity of the people who were on their posters. A movie like Fast and the Furious, which doesn't really have any massive stars in it, but it looks global. It looks like you could put that poster up in any city in the world, and there's somebody who looks a little bit like you on that poster. So that feels quite nice, I think, for an audience to actually have some sort of relatable character in there. The way Peter Parker is relatable if you're a kid like that in these cool.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a mother. She's So that sort of heroic figure that you always get in comic books, which is the 30 year old blonde white male. It's kind of been done. It works. It's been great. Some of my favourite characters are white males around Tatar, you know. But I just think from a creative point of view, it's really interesting to mix that up a little bit because the stories are different. If you write a story about a woman who's 40 and she has three children and she's in a sci-fi bad situation and there's somebody coming to kill them, it's a very different story because you're suddenly thinking about the kids and her relationship with the bad guy who's her ex-husband and everything. That story just wrote itself. It's like Kramer versus Kramer in space. Not the pitch.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hadn't actually thought about it, but the responsibility lies entirely with the writer. It's not the studios, it's not the directors, it's the writers. Director is a blank piece of paper. It's a great piece of people.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. A lot of it's subconscious, though, as well, you know, because I think the mistake you can make is when you sit down with a pen and actually think, okay, I think we need to be doing more female characters, you know, that kind of thing. I think it has to be more subtle. I mean, I think our house is, you know, it's an incredibly female house. Like my wife's a woman, the three kids are female. So the house I pick up by osmosis lots of female things and you're unaware of it, so you find that creeping into your work. But there actually was a slight incident as well, which was one of my friends who's an actress out in Los Angeles. She and I were having lunch. Our stage name is Veronica Taylor. And she's got the coolest job. She's the voice of the boy Ash in Pokemon. And she was saying to me, she said, there's just no good parts. When you're in your 40s and you're a woman, there's just nothing. And I was saying, yeah, that's terrible. There should be more. And she said, well, bloody write some, you know.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fear of failure, the fear of I've never been afraid in any situation. And I think it's actually a weakness. I think this is actually a weakness because I know this is how I'm going to get killed or something. I mean, my wife and I were in Italy a few years back and there was a fight in the street and there was like 10 guys fighting each other. And I says to Lucy, I've got to go and sort this out. I weirdly never get scared of anything. She had to sort of hold me back in the police eventually calmed it down. But for some reason, I always think everything will be okay and I can take care of this situation. And it's the same when things were at their absolute worst. I used to always kind of think, well, yeah, it'll be absolutely fine. Of course it'll work out. Why would it not?”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's what actually got me off my backside and really go for it. I think when you're just making enough money to pay your bills and go out for nights out, which I did all the time, I literally went out every single night for my entire 20s. You know, like there wasn't a night I stayed in. I think working from home especially, being a writer, I just thought it was really important to balance my life by drinking every night, you know, just going out and having a good time. And it was great. I mean, I had a brilliant time, but there was just something about hitting 28 and suddenly having a baby and this tiny little person that weighed six pounds who needed you to get milk for them. You know what I mean? This was a big deal. So I completely changed. And I think by 30, I had my first hit. And I think Emily being born actually was the motivator. I don't know, I probably continued as was otherwise, but I just suddenly realized that it's now or never. I have to do something.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And weirdly, I mean, I know this sounds odd. A lot of the listeners will be English and middle class, you know, but if you're from Scotland, especially in the 80s, when everybody smoked and all this kind of thing, that was not that unusual. Quite a lot of people in my neighbourhood died at that age. And when you walk around the cemetery, you see a lot of people dead in their 50s and 60s and so on. But it was just lifestyle, you know, lifestyle. And also genetics, you know, like the west of Scotland does tend to be shorter lifespans. I just find myself suddenly with no money whatsoever. And I remember there was me and a cat that had somehow inherited living in a small flat in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't afford to stay in the town itself. So I was out on the edges of the town living in the countryside in this weird flat that used to be a farmhouse and I would have my dinner one night and the cat would have food the next night. So that sort of desperation was actually an amazing.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technically, the reason is I'd run out of money because I was living on my own at this point, so my parents had both died. My mum had died when I was 14, then dads when I was 18. Of illness? The heart disease, you know, so like dad was 65 and mum was 64, which I realise now is young, but at the time they seemed quite old to me, you know, because they'd been quite old parents when I was born.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As it was then, yeah. And I haven't actually realized that what everybody liked was the gags. So I wrote this really serious speech about the EEC and everything. I remember the room had about 100 people in it because people had said, oh, this kid was pretty good last week. You should come back and see him. So word had got around. And I remember just the room dying, you know, because it's me just talking about industrial policy and things like this. So I realised it was a very important early lesson, which was know your audience and play to the gallery as often as you can.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was pretty pumped up, and I remember the following week pushing myself forward again to be on the next one. And the next one was about should Britain remain in the EEC. And I didn't realise”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one I did was about school dinners. That was the topic that had been given to us should they be banned or something, or should they carry a public health warning? That's what it was. Somebody come up with this. And I remember actually writing this speech that went down really well. And it was the first experience I'd had of public speaking. But I wasn't nervous because I'd been standing in front of 300 people every Sunday as an altar boy holding a candle or doing a reading or something like that. So it was actually fine to be in front of 50 people in a classroom was no big deal really. I remember just this speech went down really well and I remember thinking this is amazing. So I realized the power of words at the end of every sentence you were getting a laugh and I thought this is pretty cool and that was a first year and there was six years laughing and I thought this is amazing.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody knew at that point how bad the Thatcher's were going to be, but there was just an air of sadness in the house, and I remember thinking, that's really sad Jim Callahan seems really nice. I remember writing him a letter saying, I'm really sorry you lost your job and everything. And my mum posted it for me and everything when I was nine. So again, it's the precociousness, I guess. And the politicization, you know, we were always debating in the house. It's five brothers and one sister and we were always, always arguing and shouting. But in a fun way, you know, everybody was just always debating with each other. So then going to school, the fact that there was a debating club at school was kind of exciting. And I was very encouraged by an English teacher who I've never seen again. I've always thought I'd love to bump into him at some point. But he moved away, moved up north. There was a guy called Derek Korr. And he was a fantastic English teacher. One of those real inspirational teachers that just comes along once in a lifetime. And I'd never really thought of myself as being especially good at English at that point. But in first year, he sort of spotted something and would always be very encouraged and of writing.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me what was going on in your life and how political you were. Well, it's funny by childhood was a very political one and it's only in hindsight I realise not everyone's was. You know, I wrote a condolence letter to Jim Callaghan when he lost the 1979 general election. He was the made prime minister who lost.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The Holy Communion was almost ruined by about a week before I got, you would now call a Sharpie, I guess. We used to call it an inky, like a big, thick black pen. And I drew Spider-Man's face across my own, you know, like, I mean, I must have looked at a psychopath, but I was actually just out playing, and I didn't have a Spider-Man costume when I was playing with my pals, so I just drew the webs on and drew the eyes. And then I came in that night and mum was like, what the hell have you done? And I was like, just been playing Spider-Man, we can wash this off. And she was like, that's indelible link. This is never coming off. And a week later, my Holy Communion was a week later. You could still see Spider-Man's face across my face. you”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yahita Watchman, he did Vifa Vendetta from Hell. A lot of things have been turned into terrible movies but actually are based on the greatest comics ever, which I think is why he's quite disenchanted with Hollywood because there was nobody like him. He did the best work and the filmmakers weren't quite as talented as he was. And I met him when I was 13. It was just the beginning of his career. And that was really exciting to me because like I say, I lived a very long way away from Marvel in DC, but this was somebody on this same island that we run who was working transatlantically. And I'd never encountered that before. And actually to meet somebody in the flesh sitting right in front of you who was doing the job that you dreamed of doing, it was very inspirational, you know, the idea that there was a possibility that I could do it too. And it's only in hindsight, I realise about a month after that I started sending my submissions into DC once I realized there was a British guy already there.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alam is the greatest comic writer of all time. There was Stan Lee in the 60s and then Alamur came along in the 80s, and both were equally redefining.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was about five, when I was about five or six, that's the ones I was trying to sell. I would hand draw them. And what I didn't know, actually, was that there was such a thing as photocopiers or printing presses or anything. I thought it was medieval monks and everybody just sort of drew each one individually. So I did this thing called the Miller Monthly. And I used to do this and it was all superhero stories. And I would hand draw the whole thing and letter it and then start over again with the exact same thing and do multiple copies. And my dad said to me, oh, there's something I might.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's true. I mean, you do a lot of the visual side of it that never gets seen, which is you plan out the story and work out how each panel looks. So, for example, you'll start with establishing shot of New York City. There's a figure in the foregrounds. He's got his back to you. So you sit and draw it like that, and then you describe it for the artist to draw. So there's a visual element that really helps if you can draw, you know, because you want the page to look as good as it possibly can. But you just have to work with the best possible artists. Comics is very much a marriage, which is why writers are never described as the so creators. I mean, the artist brings at least as much to it, probably more, I think, because the visual thing is so important. And once I was working with guys who were so good, I felt it raised my game as well. You know, it's a bit like if you put De Niro in a movie that Scarsi's directing, it's a lot more interesting to meet the Fucker. If you have a bunch of people who are really good working together, you get the best results.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe nineteen eighty eight or something when about 1819, maybe so 18 and a half, I think. And it was great, you know, like because suddenly things were twice as easy. I didn't have to spread myself across this massive talent base and just focus on writing. But even then, I mean, it still took me, I'd say, about 10 years to get any good, you know, because you have to write a lot of rubbish before you kind of know your way around the story. It's like being a metal worker or a carpenter or something. You have to bang your thumb a lot before you can get any kind of level of craft.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like being a drummer and a guitarist. You can be pretty good at both potentially, but you're not be really good unless you put all your attention into one thing. And it was actually a commercial decision. I actually thought right now I had no money at all, you know, so I thought all I can afford is paper because my sister can steal it from her work for me and I can go to the local library and I can type up my stories on the typewriter for free. Whereas if I'm an artist, I have to buy A3 boards and I have to buy a portfolio case and I need to buy ink and brushes and pens and all the things I can't actually afford. So it was as simple as that.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the best advice I was ever given. I was about maybe 18 and I remember going down to London to try and sell my stuff. I just got the bus and we'd go down to London and go around all the publishers. In 2000, IPC Fleetway at the time was the best chance of getting any work. And I had this portfolio. And when I look back, it is quite naive. My portfolio was literally my school math shorters with squared paper and I'd have drawings of Spider-Man and things across school jotters like the stuff that would be at the back of your jotter when you were in school. And I was trying to get work this way. And I'd see other people coming with leatherbounds portfolio cases and beautifully inked A3 pages and mine's were all unskilled jotter paper and I thought one I thought I'm pretty young to be doing this everybody else was like 10 years older than me who was trying and I thought I'm not as professional as these guys and another writer a guy called Grant Morrison who was 10 years older he'd been in the business a while he gave me some great advice where he said pick writing or drawing you can't do both he said”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when you do a lot of work, like which comics is, you know, it's not like doing a movie every three years the way filmmakers tend to be, comics are bringing out, I mean, I'm slow and I do 22 a year maybe 2022 a year and some of my friends do 60 a year. You just cover all bases. So some of your heroes are really light and some of your heroes are really dark and some of them are outright bad guys. But it's just to keep it interesting. It would be really boring to be doing the same thing all the time. I remember I was known as the guy who just did the children's stuff, believe it or not, you know, like back in my 20s, I did a run on Superman, but it was the junior Superman books, the ones that were aimed to kind of eight-year-olds or whatever. And I loved doing it. It was actually fantastic to do it. But that's what I was known for. So then when I was given the next book, which was a bit more adult-orientated, they were like, can this guy do this? Because he does the light stuff, you know? So then I did the darkest stuff possible. And then after that, they were like, should we bring him into Marvel? Because he does really dark stuff. So people just...”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was lucky I was the youngest of six children and the others are quite a bit older than me, you know, so there's quite a big gap. My oldest brother is 22 years older than me. So it was kind of like having a lot of indulgent parents. And my mum and dad were very loving and very sort of encouraging of anything I did. So I would sit and draw a comic and they would put it up in the kitchen and they would show it to their friends and so on. And then I had this sense that people liked this stuff and I could make money from this. I was always kind of interested in the commercial side of things. So what I did when I was about maybe six is I started drawing my own comics, lettering them and selling them to members of the family and then neighbours. I would go around neighbours and sell them to neighbours too. And people would buy them. So I always kind of had a sense like, okay, this is working for me. This has gone pretty well. But I never ever countenance the idea of it not. Even in my teens when I had no money at all, like after my parents died and everything, I always thought this will be absolutely fine. So I always had this quite indestructible sort of belief that it was...”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, anything to do with this kind of thing. This was the bush catching fire for Moses. This was like a quasi-religious experience. I knew that I wanted to do something to do with superheroes. Maybe it was putting the costumes on them on a production line for toys or something I didn't know. But I knew I had to do something to do with superheroes and I didn't know what that was going to take. And as I got older, I realized I could make up stories about them. It'd be cool to do films, but Hollywood's so far away. But comics is quite achievable because all you need is a pen and paper.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, do you know what's funny? It was so long in the making. I came up with it when I was six when I was 13 and it got published when I was 33. So it did take a long time to come. But the story stayed kind of intact actually quite a lot of it was already there when I was about, maybe by the time I was about 13, I'd hammered it together into some kind of story.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there was America, and I thought wouldn't be interesting to the Superman study that was set, and that's other ideology. And I couldn't obviously articulate it.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems unfathomable that you could possibly do that as a job. The idea of somebody working in Glasgow was very glamorous to me because it was somebody who got on a train and left our small town and went to Glasgow. So the idea of working in the States at all just seems preposterous in some ways, but I knew I had to do it. And I didn't know what the path was going to be, but I knew that's what my life was going to feel. So the specifics was you knew that you would work in America. I never considered working anywhere except New York and Los Angeles. I mean, at that age, I just knew that's what I wanted to do. And I started sending submissions by the time I was about 13. What sort of submissions? Just stories, you know, like I came up with an idea for a Superman story when I was about six, and it was the idea of Superman's rocket landing in Russia instead of America. I was starting to think of maybe by about six. I knew there was twin ideologies really in the world, that there was capitalism and there was communism. So I was getting to grips with this because my parents were quite political. My dad was a trade union guy and everything. And I just knew there was these guys.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the time school finished when you're having your tea. I remember Superman was on on Wednesday, Batman was on on on Mondays, and I knew these guys through the cartoons, started picking up the comics kind of based on this. And I had a real interest in it, a real excitement. I liked the Marvel stuff as well. Comics was emerging for me. And I kind of learned to read from reading these comics. So I used to look at the pictures and guess the stories. And then eventually I figured out how to read them. And all my reading came from reading comic books. So a superman movie coming out that felt like an upgrade. That's how people feel when a new iPhones out probably. You know, this is the big one. And I remember queuing for it and being so excited, vomiting in the queue. I was like, hey, and my mum was saying, look, we're taking you home, you're not well. And I was like, I'm actually just excited as I was wiping flecks of vomit away from my face. And for me, it was like a religious experience. I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life after I saw it. And if you think about it, if you're in the west of Scotland, a Million Miles from the west of Hollywood.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what year would this have been? In 1878, maybe, you know. So, like, Basil Rathbone, Shelbock, comes on TV, and I was really inspired by that as a kid. The thing that seems to have changed your life around that age was seeing Superman, the film starring Christopher Reeve, which I think came out that year. Why that film and what were the circumstances in which you encountered it? I remember discovering Superman when I was about four or five. There was a cartoon that used to be on roundabout...”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think quite thoughtful, I think. You know, I was a good chameleon. I was actually a very, very good chameleon. I could hang out with the wild kids, but at the same time go home and read Sherlock Holmes books. I used to dress up as Sherlock Holmes and play and things like this. I was really into Basil Rafflin movies when I was like seven or eight. And I try and solve crimes and things. I remember starting a private consulting detective agency when I was seven or eight and I'd made business cards. One of my neighbors, his motorbike, went missing. Somebody had stolen it during the night. And I'd made a little business card that said consulting detective. And I went around to his house and I said, look, give me all the information that you have on this and I'll find it for you. There's kind of madness. And I remember they thought I was playing a game. It was funny. I said, oh yes, Inspector Miller. And I actually closed my little book that I had. I had this little notepad and I said, look, if you're not going to take this case seriously, I'm not going to take it seriously. So I think it was quite precocious. How old were you again? Seven, seven or eight.”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looked tough. Well, can we just say it was dubbed in 2007 quite recently the most dismal place to stay in the whole country? I'm not sure where that's from. Is that a description you recognise you had a happy childhood? I mean, it's funny I've been all over the world, you know, and to me the things that seem so dismal is maybe a Posh neighbourhood where you don't know your next door neighbour, you can live next door to someone for 20 years, but they don't even say hello to you. To me, that seems like a kind of social hell. One of the lovely things about growing up in a working class community is that everybody's a little bit reliant on each other. So you get to know each other very quickly. And poverty is a great leveller. My parents said nothing. My mom was a cleaning lady, my dad was a steel worker. But what they had was a really generous spirit and they knew everybody in the neighbourhood, everybody knew them. And it actually just felt like a large extended family. And what kind of child were you?”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which spawned their own successful films, he set up Miller World and independent media production house and is now its president since selling it to Netflix. Mark Miller is on Twitter as at Mr Mark Miller, and I'm there as at Samira Armoured UK. Welcome, Mark. Hi there. Thanks for having me. You grew up in this very small Scottish town called Cote Bridge near Glasgow. Can you tell me what sort of child you were and what sort of child did you have? I think I was massively indulged and it's funny like the west of Scotland, pretty post-industrial, you know, like everything was kind of run down by the time I came along. People were losing their jobs more than getting jobs. And a lot of ways for you to see a movie about that, it would probably seem kind of bleak. It was fantastic. I had the most brilliant childhood completely surrounded by a family who encouraged me at every step and lovely neighbours and the lovely housing scheme that we grew up in where everybody knew each other. So it's funny there's two ways of looking at it. When you look at the statistics,”
2019-08-27 · Intelligence Squared · How I Found My Voice: Mark Millar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source