When I read John Ajvide Lindqvists novel Let The Right One In last summer I knew that I absolutely had to share this story on film. It’s a feeling you only get with one script or novel in a hundred. Most of the time there are parts of the material that grab me, a feeling here, a detail there, and urge to get my greedy hands on it and start rewriting.  This time it was different–Director Tomas Alfredson.

THE SPIRIT brings together two visionaries in the art of graphic storytelling: Frank Miller, the creator of such edgy contemporary classics as “Sin City,” “300,” and “The Dark Knight Returns”; and Will Eisner, a pioneer of the modern American comic book.  Eisner broke the comic book mold when he introduced “The Spirit” in 1940; now Miller achieves a similar feat with THE SPIRIT, a comic book movie that looks like no other before it.   

In the new comedy, “Marley & Me,” on their wedding night, newlyweds John and Jenny Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston) decide to leave behind the harsh winters of Michigan and head south to begin their new lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.  They obtain jobs as journalists at competing local newspapers, buy their first home, and begin to make their way through the challenges of a new marriage, new careers and, possibly, the life-changing decision to start a family. 

“The Times of Harvey Milk” had set the bar pretty high, but I felt a dramatic version would be an important continuation. I knew pretty much about the story at that point I got this script, and there was always a difficulty in telling it because of the many elements of Harvey’s life and the many other intersecting stories at Castro Camera. But Lance Black got it in line and wrote a succinct script that was largely about the politics and less about the day-to-day lives of the characters–Director Gus Van Sant

After watching the Oscar Award-winning 1984 documentary Times of Harvey Milk, writer Black remembered Milk is giving a speech at the end of which he says, “Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio –’ which is where I’m from – ‘there’s a young gay person who might open a paper, and it says ‘Homosexual elected in San Francisco’ and know that there’s hope for a better world, there’s hope for a better tomorrow.”  Black observes:  “I just broke down crying because I was very much that kid and he was giving me hope. He was saying, not only are you okay but you can do great things. This was during a really difficult time for the gay community, with the AIDS crisis. And that’s the moment I thought, we have to get that story back out there, we’ve got to continue the message.”