The Spirit (film)

The Spirit is a 2008 American neo-noir superhero film about a rookie cop who returns from the beyond as The Spirit, a hero whose mission is to fight against the bad forces in Central City.

Written and directed by Frank Miller, based on the newspaper comic strip The Spirit, by Will Eisner.

The Spirit

• My city, I can not deny her. My city screams. She is my mother. She is my lover, and I am her Spirit.

• She provides for me, my city does. She gives me everything I need.

• All the enemy has is gun to knives. I have the entire city as my weapon.

• I'm gonna kill you all kinds of dead.

• Somebody get me a tie! And it sure as Hell better be red!

Ellen Dolan

• You're in love with every woman you meet, Mr. Spirit. You say lovely things to all of us and you mean every word you say.

About The Spirit (film)

• Entertainment Weekly: So, how have you modernized The Spirit?

Frank Miller: Imagine New York from Houston Street to Bank Street or Jane Street. That part of the city is Central City. [The Spirit] rarely leaves that neighborhood. In fact, he’s almost like one of those characters from Mean Streets — he would get lost above Houston. He’s such a neighborhood boy. I believe, as in Sin City, in taking the city I love and picking out whatever looked best from whatever decade I choose. So we’ll see ’53 Cadillacs, and we’ll see cell phones.

Deborah Del Prete: And the costumes are all kind of periods.

Miller: There’s that uncanny hotel scene that looks like it’s from 1900.

Del Prete: It is sort of timeless. That’s what we were going for. This is sort of a neverworld and an everworld. It’s New York City, but not quite. It’s not quite contemporary but not quite the past.

Miller: It’s mythic New York. And that’s what Will drew. He and I really did share two profound loves: One was for New York, and the other was for beautiful women.

• Frank Miller and Deborah Del Prete, "Frank Miller: A 'Spirit'-ed Q&A" Entertainment Weekly, Nisha Goplan, (April 23, 2008).

• One thing we did was, we were talking about how the Spirit is physically very strong and can obviously take care of himself. He finds ways to protect himself and civilians in Central City. He'll use a manhole cover as a shield or something. He hates guns. But there's also the sense of the Spirit being sort of clumsy. He may walk into a wall or whatever. I was talking with Frank once, and he was telling me about how he wanted this punch to look-he was hoping for the Spirit to really look like he knew what he was doing, and this punch was a deadly hit, right? So when he reached back to show me the punch, he actually hit himself in the nose. [laughs] It was hilarious, because it was exactly what the Spirit would have done. It was just a perfect image, a metaphor for who the Spirit is.

• Gabriel Macht, Gabriel Macht Explains Where The Spirit Went Wrong Gizmodo, Meredith Woerner, (September 23, 2008).