FRANK MILLER’S RONIN Has A Director... But Is He The Man For The Job?!

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Y’know, I’m not the sort of person to judge a director harshly based on one film, but I will confess... I am less than impressed with the decision by Warner Bros. to hire Sylvain White as the director of FRANK MILLER’S RONIN. This is no easy adaptation, and it’s certainly not the same sort of commercial property that SIN CITY or 300 are. Those films fall into easily definable genres. SIN CITY is a noir pastiche, and 300 is a balls-to-the-wall action epic. RONIN, though... it’s a complicated, not-entirely-successful blend of Japanese samurai films and heady science-fiction. Darren Aronofsky flirted with the project for a while, and that would have been an interesting match of filmmaker and material. But so far, Sylvain White has directed the direct-to-video-and-oh-so-awful I’LL ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, a film called TROIS 3 that I caught a bit of on cable one night thinking it sounded like a French art film (it’s not), and this year’s STOMP THE YARD. He’s one of those guys who came out of the commercial/music video world, and I’ll admit... I’m not familiar with any of that work. Maybe it’s impossible to judge him from his first few features. Maybe he’s been doing whatever he could in order to get to a place where he could start making passion projects. He wouldn’t be the first. But really... FRANK MILLER’S RONIN? This isn’t an easy adaptation for even the most seasoned genre filmmaker. IESB broke the story that he’d be directing the film, but it’s Blackfilm that has an interview with him already up on their site. He has some decent things to say in the interview, and I think he sounds like his heart and head are in the right place. Look… I’ll cross my fingers and hope that White turns out to be the right guy for the job. I certainly don’t want to root against the film. I just hope they nail the script and that they give him enough money to fully realize the insane world that Miller created. I’m willing to be the performance of 300 will have a lot to do with whether or not this one gets the greenlight. We’ll update on this one whenever we hear more.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles