Writer-director Frank Miller on the incredibly minimal set of The Spirit, a film based on Will Eisner’s seminal 1940s comic

“I think tone is really important in this film,” says Gabrial Macht, the eponymous hero of The Spirit. “If you are not honest in your approach to the material, it could get slapsticky and it could get schticky, and we didn’t go there, but there is a certain charm that we were able to get, and it is a little bit more extreme.”

When Macht — speaking at a recent press conference in New York, along with co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johanssen and writer-director Frank Miller — says The Spirit is extreme, he’s not using it in the way that most people do when they’re promoting a movie. Although it’s based on a comic, The Spirit never gets into over-the-top violence, like Punisher: War Zone did earlier this month. It doesn’t dwell in darkness, like The Dark Knight (at least not in tone; the visuals are a different story), and even though it’s based on a series by one of comics’ seminal artists (Will Eisner) and written and directed by one of the fathers of the modern graphic novel (Miller), it doesn’t promise the grandiosity of next year’s Watchmen adaptation.

The most extreme thing about the movie is the length that Miller, Macht and the rest of the cast and crew go to in making The Spirit a comic book movie. While The Spirit is certainly not the first film based on a comic series, nor the first to make extensive use of computer-generated effects (Sin City and 300 each used fully computer-generated sets, and both were based on comics by Miller), the movie comes closer than ever to looking and feeling like a comic. Action sequences are designed to look as two-dimensional as possible. Angles are chosen and scenes are edited in the style of a graphic novelist moreso than a cinematographer. Miller may be moving to a different medium, but he’s keeping his sensibility intact.

“I find the truer [comic book adaptations] are to the source material, the better, and would cite Marvel entertainment’s recent Iron Man and The [Incredible] Hulk as wonderful, witty jobs,” Miller says at the same press conference. “I think if they get too presumptuous, comic book movies tend to fall apart.”

He may not have been being presumptuous, but Miller’s not being meek, either. While he insists the film is as close to Eisner’s spirit as he could make it — he considers the late artist both a true legend in the field and a close friend — The Spirit has the director’s stamp all over it. Visually, the film is closely related to Sin City, which Miller co-directed. Unlike that film, it’s not in black-and-white, but the colours are so subdued and the shadows so rich that it may as well be. At least until the palette expands to include The Spirit’s bright red tie, or another similarly vivid touch. It’s the kind of style that would have been incredibly difficult to achieve even a decade ago.

As with the film’s visual style, Miller gave his actors permission to go equally over-the-top with their performances. All of the actors embrace their characters’ comic book origins, but Samuel L. Jackson as the villainous genius The Octopus, who was never actually seen in the original comic, seems to have taken Miller’s approval as a challenge.

“It’s kind of an honour to be able to walk into a situation and put flesh and blood to a character that’s only been a pair of gloves forever, and I thank Frank for that opportunity,” Jackson explains. “He gave me license to pretty much be as demented and as genius and as funny as I wanted to be. I took that as my licence to do all the things I ever wanted to in a film and chew as much scenery as I felt like chewing and not be criticized for it.”

Whether or not it’s above criticism (see the Fast Forward review in next week’s issue), Jackson’s performance is certainly bold — Scarlett Johanssen, who plays the Octopus’s sidekick, compares their characters to Lucy and Ricky from I Love Lucy. Whether all the elements — Miller’s hyper-noir, Eisner’s warmth, Jackson’s classic-sitcom hamminess — can gel remains to be seen, but, as Macht says, The Spirit is a film that isn’t afraid to get a bit extreme.