Grant Morrison on His Psychedelic Western Indie Movie, Sinatoro

Grant Morrison is currently working on a psychedelic indie Western film that was inspired in part by "Red Dead Redemption" and the "Tibetan Book of the Dead." If you, like me, find everything in the preceding sentence to be amazing, then read on.

The "Sinatoro" Facebook page describes the film as a "psychedelic science fiction revenge thriller formed by the no-holds barred tradition of American cult movies." The plot features an amnesiac car crash survivor who "encounters the beautiful daughter of a cult leader, who convinces him to help defeat the forces of evil which have overrun her town. His journey pits him against the world's most dangerous gangster and allies him with a deranged astronaut, a drunken cowboy, and an army of hobos."

io9 spoke with the "All-Star Superman" scribe about the film, which will be directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer of Zdonk Productions, during Comic-Con, and his thoughts were, as always, illuminating. Check the highlights after the jump.Morrison n the plot of "Sinatoro:



"I kind of wanted to do something based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and modernize it. The one experience that we all go through (but no one wants to think much about) is death. We're going to study all the latest information on what happens to consciousness during the process of death. We wanted to look at what's supposed to happen afterward based on all the confessions we can study and understand. But as a story, it's boy meets girl and all that sort of thing. It uses the building blocks of Hollywood."

Morrison on Hollywood:

"Because we have the freedom, we wanted to do a movie that does Hollywood better than Hollywood. It's my version of what the the 21st century American movie looks like. It's all about the Western, the badlands. It's the idea of the endless road, which is usually represented by the old Route 66. We're taking ideas of the Western, the road movie, the crime film Natural Born Killers... If you're working in Hollywood, there's rules, that whole Robert McKee "Story" stuff. Think of video games. I was just playing Red Dead Redemption. It's a subjective experience. There's a story behind it even though it's not a movie. You can ignore the cut scenes but still play it and feel like you've had an experience. We began to think, "Why are we as an audience watching Tom Cruise pretend to be someone else when we can log on and become someone else?" We can be Batman in the Arkham Asylum game. We don't need Christian Bale! He's a great actor, but people can log on and become Batman for hours [within the game]. Hollywood has a tight structure and I think a lot of that storytelling has become outmoded. We want to add the new influences we're getting from games and other media and add it to this film narrative."