Watch how the city screams with style in The Spirit. All images © Lionsgate Releasing.

The latest comicbook series to get a big screen adaptation has quite the interesting twist. The Spirit, created in 1940 as a Sunday superhero insert by comicbook legend Will Eisner, has another legend handling its translation from one medium to the other. Frank Miller, the contemporary comicbook legend responsible for Sin City, 300 and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, make his solo directorial debut with The Spirit (opening Christmas Day from Lionsgate).

The noir, crime-fighting comics told the story of young detective Danny Colt's masked alter-ego justice avenger only known as "The Spirit." Presumably killed in the opening book, Colt is actually kept alive in a state of suspended animation which allows Colt to pursue his own form of street justice. Known for his trench coat, fedora and red necktie, The Spirit has since become the inspiration for countless contemporary comicbooks, including Miller's own motley crew of dark characters.

After Miller's success in transforming his Sin City graphic novel to the screen with co-director Robert Rodriguez, The Spirit became his next cinematic passion project. Having used complete greenscreen environments to great effect in creating literal interpretations from page to screen for Sin City, Miller decided on the same technique for The Spirit. He also went back to San Francisco visual effects company The Orphanage, which worked extensively on Sin City, to help him create this new world on screen.

Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage was hired as the overall visual effects supervisor, where he was charged with coordinating the work of 10 other vendors to bring the film together. Reflecting back on the early discussions with Miller about the film, Maschwitz explains that he wasn't just looking for a visual effects service provider but also a collaborator on the filmmaking. "We are that," he asserts. "And that's part of why we have had such a fun relationship with Rodriguez over the years because we are a like-minded film production company as well as a visual effects company."

Director Frank Miller wanted a heightened film noir look for the film. 

"Initially, the conversations we had involved our cinematographer Bill Pope," he continues. "I was brought on board around the same time he was. It was then that I realized that Frank and the producer Deborah Del Prete were really taking this film seriously from a filmmaking standpoint. The decision to bring on Bill Pope was huge. He's known for The Matrix movies and the Spider-Man sequels. But my favorite film that he shot is Bound, with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. It's a modern, noir thriller and had that chiaroscuro lighting. It's a sumptuous and beautiful film. So Bill and I sequestered ourselves for a while and had a lot of conversations about what Frank's visual style does for a viewer. It's obvious to anyone who sees his Sin City artwork, that he's the master of silhouette and telling the story through simple, bold shapes that become iconic. It was something we knew we would want to explore.

"And in addition to being a visual genius, Frank's also a literary genius and is perfectly able to describe his process. He told me about his comicbook drawing process in such a way that my jaw was on the floor," Maschwitz laughs. "He said that he writes so that he can have something to draw and he only wants to draw the cool stuff. He writes stories that allow him to only draw the cool stuff. It's still work so he makes it that he has to draw as little of it as possible. It took me like a month to recover from hearing that because it is so succinct and perfect. It's very humble, but in that humility is a perfect description of what I call Frank's visual minimalism. He tells a huge amount with a very small amount of actual detail.

"It's interesting because it's very different about what Frank observed about Will Eisner," he explains. "And it's also important to remember that there are two legendary comicbook artists we are trying to be faithful to here. Although it's a Frank Miller movie, it's a Will Eisner comicbook. With Eisner, he was able to tell a huge amount about a person or an environment with a small, surgically placed detail. Frank said Eisner could describe the entire nature of a room with a matchbook on the corner of the desk. So those were the two things we were working with: the right, quirky details and Frank's knack for making an image seem larger than life by showing you as little as possible so your imagination is filling in the rest."

Maschwitz says their mandate became about creating the cinematic equivalent of that comicbook style. "I mean that in a way to differentiate that from what came before," he clarifies. "Our movie is a stylized movie that was shot largely on a greenscreen stage. We have the great benefit of looking at 300 and Sin City, which I think are beautiful and terrific movies, to see what they've done so we can stand on their shoulders and do the next thing. To my eye, what I liked about Sin City is that it feels like the comicbook brought to life. In the same way, the 300 movie is those [beautiful] paintings brought to life. With The Spirit, Frank and Bill and I decided that instead of that we would make a movie. We would do a more traditional style of filmmaking and use traditional filmmaking tools, or the appearance of traditional tools, to put The Spirit on the screen.