I want to tell you about the two primary influences that led to the creation of Mia Raven today: Catherine Banning and Nikita.
Who the hell are these two women, you ask? Well don’t worry, I’m going to tell you. If you’ve seen either of these two films, you’ll get a stroll down memory lane, but if you haven’t, that’s okay, you’ll still get some key insights into my character that, hopefully, will get you interested in her. There’s plenty to be interested in, if you ask me.
So let’s start with Catherine Banning. She’s from the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. I’ve never seen the original from 1968, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. I should, I know, but I love the 1999 version starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo so much that I’ve simply never felt the need.
Pierce Brosnan plays the title character and I guess he’s supposed to be the main character of interest, but to me Catherine Banning seems to be the actual central character. The entire story centers on her figuring out that Thomas Crown is the one who stole the painting, going after him, falling in love, then making arrangements to fly away with him to lalaland and live happily ever after. During the story she navigates not only her relationship with Thomas Crown, but also with Detective Michael McCann, played by Dennis Leary.
From the moment Catherine Banning shows up she is a force to be reckoned with. She is attractive, flirtatious, sharp-witted, and intelligent, which instantly has detective McCann and his partner, Detective Paretti, played by Frankie Faison, off their game. She shoots holes in their theories, notices things they don’t, and very quickly reads their characters, including the fact that detective McCann is recently divorced.
What really jumped out to me, however, was her job. She works for the insurance companies. Her job is to try and recover the stolen painting so the insurance company doesn’t have to write a check for a hundred million dollars to pay out on the policy covering the insured painting. That immediately got my attention. I’d never heard of such a job before.
I have, in the years since, read of other people with similar jobs. I read about a similar group in Wired Magazine, who helps companies salvage inventory from wrecks. They get 50% the value of the rescue, which can be tens of millions per job. Catherine Banning says she’s getting 5% the value of the painting, which at $100,000,000 would be five million dollars! Not bad at all! High risk - you have to recover the stolen item in order to get paid, but if you do, it’s high reward.
I was immediately taken with what she did for a living. I wanted to know more. A lot more. Detectives McCann and Paretti discover that she was a bounty hunter prior to getting into her current line of work, so she’s not afraid of getting down and dirty, apparently. Color me even more intrigued.
On top of all this, she flies in from London with her strange habits (here she’s drinking her grass juice way before it was a common thing everyone could get at Jamba Juice)...
She speaks multiple languages (which Mia does because not only is she from Portugal, but she goes back there and spends several of her teenaged years trotting around Europe), which Catherine uses here to interrogate a prisoner...
Always seems to be dressed is the most interesting of fashions...
Whether it’s zipping around town, showing up at a black tie event, or spying on a suspect while they’re playing on the weekend.
And she has the guts to go right up to her target and tell him he’s her target. Every single thing about this woman is fascinating, from the big picture down to the most minute detail. I wanted to create a character like that for a long, long time, and I finally got my shot.
Mia started as a thief, became a detective (you’ll learn the basics of how), and eventually figured out that there was a better way of doing that job - a way that paid better and didn’t confine her to the limits of the law. So she starts her own company working for higher end clients and insurance companies, but I didn’t just want to make a carbon copy of Catherine Banning, I needed my character to be her own person. She needed her own story, her own background, and her own personality.
For that, we turn to the other character that really informed who Mia Raven is. Nikita, or La Femme Nikita, was released in 1990. Written and directed by Luc Besson, this was my introduction to his work. It was also my introduction to the strong female protagonist. She's not really the ideal character for that icon, but it was my introduction nonetheless, and it really cemented in my head a love for the concept.
Nikita, a gang-banging druggie, goes from this:
To a woman who is given a second chance by her government. She is asked to learn. Learn everything.
So she does. She learns to use computers, firearms, her body - as both a weapon and a lure. She learns about grace and the allure of being a woman, and three years later it all culminates in this: a night out. She is a wholly different woman than the one who entered the program as a nineteen year old punk.
The only catch is that this night out is a test...
It is a test to prove whether or not she can survive as an agent for the French government. Can she think under pressure? React to the unexpected? Survive when the odds are against her? And that led to the sequence that really stuck in my head.
Seeing beauty juxtaposed against violence. And believing it. That was the key element. I’ve seen so many of these types of stories since then that I don’t buy into. You can hire an attractive actress to play a role, but if they’re not tough, if they can’t do a healthy amount of their own stunts, then I’m never going to buy it. I want to see the muscles, the work that goes into getting strong enough to do the things they’re showing us they’re doing. I want to see the grit and determination on their faces as they struggle to get the things done. Like Nikita shoving a garbage crate out of the way with her arms and back exposed so I can see her muscles working, so she can crawl out of it slowly, painfully and make her way out on to the cold Paris streets after barely escaping with her life. But that's not all. I want to see women with complex inner characters. They need to have hopes and desires beyond just what the plot drives them towards; they need to be human. They need to want things normal women want. I want this for all characters in a story, but especially the lead.
Mia isn’t a spy, but she comes from a bad past. She has a bad set of parents who caused her an untold amount of grief as a child. It caused her to get into a lot of trouble that she luckily escaped from. Those troubled times taught her to think for herself though. They taught her to look out for herself, to watch her back, to not be overly trusting, and to rely on no one but herself in life. She has taken the time, effort, and expense to teach herself how to do all the things she might need to do for any given job, and continues to refine and add to those skills all the time. You’ll get to see some of that in her stories.
Unfortunately it didn’t teach her anything about how relationships work. Or how to navigate friendships. Her only real friend in the entire world is her cousin Jacinta, because Jacinta went through much of the same hell that Mia went through. This is, I think, what makes Mia such an interesting character. She’s very successful at her chosen job, but barely functions as a human being most of the time, so how successful is she really? How happy can she actually be? Does money buy happiness? Does job success soothe the inner demons that haunt her? I’ll give you one guess...
So that’s Mia Raven. That’s where the inspiration for her came from. I’m very proud of her and what I have in store for her. She’s a very real person in my mind; a fascinating character study in what I hope will be a series of stories that prove to be exciting, unexpected, wistful, and ultimately satisfying for everyone.
You can read issue 01 of Recovery Incorporated by backing thr Kickstarter campaign, which launches on Thursday, January 21st.