His work as a comic-book artist in the '80s helped resuscitate the superhero genre. His Batman: The Dark Knight Returns inspired Tim Burton's "Batman," and his work revived Marvel Comics' character Daredevil - which led, indirectly and through no fault of his, to the "Daredevil" and "Elektra" movies. He wrote the screenplay for "Robocop 2," but again it wasn't his fault how that turned out.

But Miller wouldn't let Hollywood near his most personal work, the seven graphic novels in the Sin City series.

"I had only worked at major studios, the ones that are located in Hollywood," Miller said over the phone this week from his Manhattan home. "Everything was considered raw material, subject to constant revision to the point of absurdity. They would spend the money to buy a creation of somebody, and use the title - and then produce a movie that bore no resemblance to it. And I couldn't let that happen to my sweetest baby."

Miller didn't think Hollywood could handle the film noir tone of his Sin City stories. They might soften his tough-talking antiheroes or tone down the copious violence. Besides, to Miller Sin City is no mere graphic novel.

"I'm in love with Sin City. It's my home. It's where I go when I'm not working on other things," he said.

It took Robert Rodriguez, the maverick director of "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" and the "Spy Kids" trilogy, to convince Miller that there was moviemaking outside Hollywood.

"I use 'Hollywood' as a name for an entire industry, for a medium in fact, when in fact Hollywood is a city and you can make movies elsewhere," Miller said. "I don't think we would have made this movie in Hollywood, but we sure as hell did in Austin, Texas."

The results of their collaboration is an arresting movie, "Sin City," an adaptation of three of Miller's short stories, that opens in theaters nationwide Friday.

Rodriguez pitched a "Sin City" movie to Miller "every which way there was." First Rodriguez had his special-effects crew create a computer-animated cityscape based on the stark black-and-white drawings of Miller's books. "I was duly impressed and I really liked the guy and I said 'no,' " Miller said.

But Rodriguez would not give up. "He invited me to Austin to, at his own expense, produce a 'Sin City' short story that we'd do in what he called a test," Miller continued. "He said he had a couple friends, and we'd shoot this short job in one day. I went in, and the first one of his friends [I met] was Josh Hartnett, and I realized this was anything but a test."

Miller watched Rodriguez's crew work efficiently on green-draped sets (most of the movie was filmed without sets, with backdrops added later by computer). Actress Marley Shelton ("Uptown Girls," "Pleasantville") asked Miller about her character's motivations, and he responded with a detailed backstory.

"The hook was in my mouth," Miller said. "By the end of the 10-hour shoot, I just said to Robert, 'When do we start casting?' "

Casting the movie, Miller said, went fast because many actors signed off on Rodriguez's and Miller's shared vision. They showed the Hartnett-Shelton sequence (which became the movie's prologue) to Bruce Willis, whom they wanted to play the hard-boiled cop John Hartigan. "He looked up afterwards and said, 'I'm in,' " Miller said.

One surprise in casting was meeting Mickey Rourke, whom Rodriguez had pegged for the role of Marv, a hulking ex-con out to avenge a prostitute's murder. "I hadn't seen Mickey Rourke in anything for years on end, and I remembered him as a skinny guy," Miller said. "When I met him in a hotel room, I immediately jotted down 'Met Mickey Rourke - he is Marv.' "

Rourke's performance as Marv is one of the film's highlights, in part because Rourke endured three hours a day in the makeup chair to have a slablike prosthetic applied to his face.

"It started a bit of a landslide," Miller said. "When Benicio Del Toro showed up and saw what Mickey looked like, he insisted on having a prosthetic put on his face to look more like my drawings. . . . Greg Nicotero, who worked all the magic with the prosthetics, said it was the single first time an actor had ever asked for a prosthetic. It's like asking for a root canal."

From day one, Rodriguez and Miller shared the directing role. "We did this thing completely as a team," he said. "Sometimes we'd disagree about a scene, so we'd shoot it two different ways." When Rodriguez screened the first rough-cut, Miller said, "I honestly couldn't remember whose versions of which scenes we used, and neither could he."

In giving Miller co-director credit, though, Rodriguez violated the rules of the Directors Guild of America. "He offered me sole credit, which I turned down," Miller said. "That would be completely unfair, and I couldn't look at myself in the morning - we're co-directing this thing. And he said, 'OK, then I just quit the DGA.' I remember going back to my trailer, shaking my head, and thinking that was as honorable a conversation as I remember having." (Rodriguez's resignation from the DGA cost him work on the $100 million adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" - now being made by "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" director Kerry Conran.)

Miller has more movie projects in the pipeline, and he would love to reteam with Rodriguez to adapt more Sin City stories to film. But don't expect him to hand any of his projects over to other filmmakers.

"Now I've got a taste for directing," he said.

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Got a question about the movies? Send it to movie critic Sean P. Means: The Salt Lake Tribune, 143 S. Main St., second floor, Salt Lake City, UT 84111, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.