Luke Skywalker crosses over to the directing side: Mark Hamill to make film version of his comic



Star Wars actor Mark Hamill is aiming to be a force to be reckoned with as a movie director - adapting his debut film from his own comic.

The 58-year-old, who played Luke Skywalker in George Lucas's original trilogy, is to bring his mini-series, The Black Pearl, to life.

He had originally penned the thriller about a mentally troubled, masked vigilante 14 years ago following his failure to land any big acting rolls since Return Of The Jedi in 1983.

Using the force: Mark Hamill in Cannes today (left) and as Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980



He announced the low-budget project, a £5million live-action film, at the Cannes Film Festival today.

‘It's kind of daunting,’ said Hamill, who previously directed a straight-to-video movie but is making his first try at the big screen.

‘The pendulum swings from great confidence to what did I get myself into? But I want to.

Thriller: Mark Hamill's Black Pearl comic, which is to be adapted into a film, is about a masked vigilante

‘This is going to be really a culmination of years and years of wish fulfillment on my part.’

The Black Pearl is one of three movies on the inaugural slate of Berkeley Square Films, a production company for which Hamill is a board member.

The comic book follows an ordinary man named Luther Drake, who saves a woman from abduction then finds himself at the centre of a media frenzy as he steps into the role of costumed crusader for justice.

Johnson said the filmmakers have a short list of actors to play Luther, but the lead has not yet been cast for the film, which Hamill hopes to begin shooting late this year.

‘The person who plays Luther is the movie,’ Hamill said. ‘I have a feeling that we're looking for kismet, for the right guy to understand what we're trying to do and say, `I've got to play this part.'‘

Hamill said he does not intend to appear in the movie himself.

‘That would be distracting to me,’ Hamill said.

‘I don't want people to go, 'Oh, look, there's the gratuitous cameo thing by the egomaniac.' I mean, I might work on it in voiceover, where you don't know it's me, but that would be as a producer, saving some money.’

A comics fan since boyhood, Hamill has done many voice roles for superhero TV cartoons.

While his Star Wars celebrity helped him land parts in such movies as the teen comedy Corvette Summer and the war saga The Big Red One in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hamill generally found himself typecast as Luke, the science-fiction epic's young hero destined to bring down an evil empire and restore his villainous father's honour.

Playful: Mark pretends to use a laser gun like in his Dark Force-fighting days, which ended in 1983



Hamill discussed the project at the Cannes Film Festival, sitting alongside his cousin and writing partner on the comic book, Eric Johnson, and Berkeley Square partner Paul Tamasy, both of whom co-wrote the screenplay with him.

Hamill and Johnson originally wrote Black Pearl as a script, but Dark Horse Comics took an interest and asked them to turn it into a graphic novel.

‘What happened to me, happened to me. I remember reading about the Beatles. They asked George Harrison: “What was it like to be in the Beatles?”

‘He went: “What was it like not to be in the Beatles?”

Main cast: Mark with Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in A New Hope (1977)

‘It happened so quickly, I don't think I had a chance to sort of develop a sense of entitlement, like, I should now be an A-list action star.

‘I wasn't really that interested. I was kind of taking it as it comes.

‘I don't think about that project unless it's pushed in my face, because it's done.



‘It had a beginning, a middle and end, and I don't even think of it in terms of prequels and cartoons and Clone Wars.

‘I'm not involved in it. It doesn't feel like my family any more. It's like asking a Mouseketeer: “What do you think about the Epcot Center?”’



