Cover Story: Scarlett Johansson & Eva Mendes
Fanboys’ Dream
Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes are all vamped up and starring in a comic book movie. Honestly, does The Spirit even need a plot?
By Bob Strauss
The comic books Frank Miller has written, and sometimes drawn, include such macho works as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and 300.
Eva Mendes as Sand Saref |
Now, in The Spirit, he has adapted and directed the
signature character of another legendary cartoonist, Will Eisner, for
the screen. And sure, the movie is about two strong men — a young
detective named Denny Colt (played by Gabriel Macht) who returns from
presumed death as The Spirit, a masked avenger out to save noirish
Central City from evil genius The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson).
But if you’ve seen the film’s promotional campaign, you might have come to the same conclusion as some of The Spirit's stars: It’s really all about the dames.
“Thank you, thank you!” says Eva Mendes, who plays The Spirit’s
lifelong obsession, a sexy femme fatale named Sand Saref. “That’s what
I see too, and I think Frank Miller’s really cool for that. There’s a
whole bunch of us in there.” |
Scarlett Johansson’s Silken Floss is another.
Johansson explains that her character only appears two or three
times in Eisner’s original comic strips of the 1940s and ’50s, which
allows her a great amount of ambiguity. “I guess, on the bad-good
spectrum, she’s not good but better than bad,” Johansson says. “She’s
kind of on The Spirit’s side; I mean, all of the characters are kind of
grey, and that’s fine.”
The shady ladies allowed Johansson and Mendes to take their
performances way over the top. Mendes, who’s been carefully
constructing a bad-girl image of late, with racy fashion shoots and a
mysterious trip to a rehab retreat, slinks around the movie in
skin-tight leather or, sometimes, wearing nothing at all. Meanwhile
Johansson, who just married Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds and has been
spending a lot of time as Woody Allen’s muse, gets to take her cerebral
persona to fetish fantasy lengths that might make even the Woodman
blush.
Eisner filled his stories, which were distributed as newsprint
supplements in Sunday papers, with vamps and vixens, and the movie is
more than faithful to that motif. Aside from Johansson and Mendes,
Sarah Paulson plays Dr. Ellen Dolan, the police commissioner’s daughter
who is vital to The Spirit’s survival; Miller recruited Sin City
star Jaime King to play the mesmerizing Lorelei Rox; Spain’s Paz Vega
is dangerous French dancer Plaster of Paris; and Canada’s own Stana
Katic shows up as policewoman Morgenstern.
Scarlett Johansson as Silken Floss |
|
Silken is probably the character that has been most transformed from
Eisner’s incarnation — a nuclear physicist, we kid you not, in the
comic, now The Octopus’ secretary in the film.
“You don’t really know anything about her,” Johansson points out.
“She was just this random character that Eisner probably drew after
some woman he liked. I think Frank kind of took that and ran with it
because it was a character that he could develop.... She’s very smart,
very sexy, very savvy. She has a could-take-it-or-leave-it kind of
attitude, too. It’s a great role, and Frank’s lines are real zingers.
When it’s an insult it’s really low.”
There’s a similar mystery surrounding Sand Saref, who, in the
comics, was Denny Colt’s childhood friend and first love who comes back
into The Spirit’s life bearing a load of criminal intent and
mind-messing mixed signals.
|
“How could you not be a Will Eisner fan?” Mendes asks rhetorically.
“He’s one of the greatest. I love the character that he created and I
play…. Talk about a dame, talk about a woman! He wrote her, what, in
the ’40s? Frank really wanted to keep that kind of quality about her.
Which I love, because those women back then were just pretty
outrageous.”
Eisner, who passed away in 2005 at age 87, was not just good at
dreaming up sexy sirens. His strips were rich in innovations — light
and shadow experiments, asymmetrical compositions and jigsaw panel
designs that other artists didn’t pick up on until decades later.
A comic book trendsetter in his own right, Miller shot this movie —
his first solo directing effort — in the same manner as his first film,
Sin City, which was based on his own hard-boiled graphic novel
series and co-directed by Robert Rodriguez. Scenes were played on
minimally dressed soundstages with blank green walls, while cityscapes
and all other backgrounds were digitally added in post-production (Zack
Snyder directed 300 in a similar manner; The Spirit now makes this the official Frank Miller movie style).
The ladies weren’t sure they liked that, especially at first.
“Everything was green screen,” Mendes recalls. “Everything! The
first two days I was miserable. I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ I study
religiously. I study my craft all the time and my acting coach travels
with me. But nothing could prepare me for this. I was like, this is so
bizarre; if a desk wasn’t in the scene, it’s, like, not there.
“But after a few days, I really started enjoying it because I could
apply everything I had used in class. Not that I don’t anyway, but I
could really apply it and it felt more like theatre in a sense. And
then Frank Miller was actually cool enough to let me reshoot my first
days’ scenes. After all, we were in the same location; same green
screen! He said absolutely, and it was like night and day.”
Johansson didn’t need such a big adjustment — but she’s still scratching her head a little.
“I have scenes where I’m driving a big truck thing, and we had that
on the stage,” she says. “There were props, tables with all kinds of
scenery and everything on it. Then just surrounded by a big green
thing; it was so, so weird.”
But wonderful, apparently.
“He’s such a visionary,” Johansson says of her director, “and he led
us on an amazing journey. He sees each scene in his mind almost like a
comic book, in these little boxes, in these little segments.”
Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.
And the prize for most under-the-radar celebrity couple goes to...
Do a Google image search for “Scarlett Johansson + Ryan Reynolds” and
you’ll find only a handful of shots of the beautiful couple together in
the same place at the same time — a few snaps at an airport, one of
Johansson getting onto the back of Reynolds’ motorcycle, one outside an
L.A. hotel in September 2007, seven months after they started dating.
Most stories about the celebrity pair are accompanied by split-screen
images — a pretty picture of her on one side, a handsome shot of him on
the other, and a big line in between.
Never
before have we seen a celebrity couple so adept at eluding the media
and avoiding attention. While it’s true that Reynolds, 31, and
Johansson, 23, have spent much of their relationship working on
separate movie sets thousands of miles apart, we think some credit must
go to Reynolds’ understated Canadian disposition, no?
Their
wedding at a “remote wilderness resort” in British Columbia this past
September may have been the least covered of any movie-star marriage in
memory. And the run-up to the nuptials? Well, there was none. No hints
about expensive champagne being shipped by the carton, no massive tent
set up in the woods, no fellow celebs sneaking into B.C. behind
sunglasses and baseball caps.
So congrats you crazy kids. Your
prize is that your children will have dual citizenship and a chance of
making it to adulthood intact.
—Marni Weisz