BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOHNNY MNEMONIC

Carrying on from my William Gibson post, featuring a half hour recording of the great man talking to me - which you can listen to here ... I thought I would also present the article that interview turned into.  This was written for the book The Crime Time Filmbook which I editing in (oh, God) 1997.  The movie adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic had not been out long, then, so I reviewed it and used that as my hook on which to hang the text of the interview.  So, now you can compare the text to the original recording and see how many of those beautifully turned quotes I simply made up.

He ISN'T The One, just deal with it ...

            Johnny Mnemonic opens with a slow crawl of text, explaining that the world of multi-national power corps is falling apart because of a cerebral disease called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.  The Holy Grail of the Man/Machine Interface is now a global reality, replacing hardware and software with wetware - wiring that is woven into the tissue of muscle, or replacing selected synaptic matter in the brain.  The NAS disease is the organism’s rejection of the artificial implants.

            It is a world of new flesh, where no one has to be how nature made them, where roles are constantly being re-negotiated.  This is the future, and it doesn’t work.  Welcome to 2021, some eighteen months after the setting of Blade Runner, the original science-fiction noirmare and spiritual father of Cyberpunk culture.  This slow-crawl of information is designed to evoke Blade Runner, the swooping flight over a virtual landscape that follows reminds of the apocalyptic LA skyline of 2019.

            There are several reasons for writer William Gibson and director Robert Longo to evoke Blade Runner, partially, I expect, because comparisons were always going to be inevitable, so why not acknowledge the fact; more significantly, Gibson has never hidden the fact that his seminal creations of The Sprawl and Cyberspace came out of his perceptions of the early eighties, a time when popular culture was swamped with Blade Runner references, from fashion fads (such as the re-birth of the padded shoulder) to the grandiosity of Russell Mulcahy’s Duran Duran videos (particularly Union of the Snake and The Wild Boys).  By return, nineties dance culture and ‘net’ culture have heralded Gibson as some notional messiah, and appended the modifier ‘cyber’ to any number of nouns and verbs:

Those 'wild' boys.  The title might be William Burroughs, but the look is pure William Gibson.

            When asked about this, Gibson is nothing if not philosophical:   “Well, considering the way that I quite consciously appropriated the visual aspect of my work, if you can call it that, from pop culture at large and particularly from rock culture, it seems only appropriate.  It’s the sort of thing that goes around and around - y‘know, I appropriate, they re-appropriate, then the whole thing gets re-comodified and goes around again to sell another batch of magazines, games, bands or whatever.  It‘s the nature of late-stage capitalism, it‘s what we do.  So I can scarcely complain if they do to me what I did to them.”

            Unlike many S.F. writers who seem to write their first bestsellers in their early twenties, promptly going on to win the Hugo and Nebula, and then embark on sickeningly successful careers as research physicists and S.F. novelists, Gibson approached writing more steadily, engaging first in what he likes to refer to as ‘some sort of life’.

             “Of course, the real classic career for a science fiction writer in America is to be a child prodigy, twenty or twenty-one is quite a late start.  A lot of them, especially the last couple of generations, would start in their late teens; but that wasn’t my experience at all.  I forget the actual ages involved, but if you look at Asimov or Robert Silverberg, people like that, they started really  young.  Silverberg put himself through college in high style by writing and selling lots and lots of pulp S.F.

             “Coming at it late just gave me a different kind of aesthetic agenda.  I started writing science-fiction after having been exposed to literature of various kinds, and after having had some adult experiences.  That just made me a different sort of animal as far as writing this stuff goes.”

            Having read a lot of his work, I always imagined him to be a keen science-watcher, with expertise in many areas, but he denies this with, I might add, just as much grace as he deflects compliments:

             “No, no, quite the opposite; it’s just that, in order to do my job, I had to leave that impression!  An important thing to remember when you read science fiction, is that it is the work of a charlatan, possibly a benevolent charlatan, but a charlatan none the less.  No, science fiction writers are not the God-Priests of high-technology they're credited with being, far from it.  We are, by and large, a delightfully shabby lot, particularly intellectually.  We are not necessarily your hot ticket to the future.  If you’re interested in what the future’s really gonna be like, you should temper a little more serious thought.  Go and see what professional futurists are doing, not just the kind who try to write bestselling books.”

            So what was it he saw in the early eighties, bumming around the West coast of his adopted Canada, that led to formation of the great urban cage of The Sprawl, where mutated people are kept in technological bondage by unbelievably vast zhiabatsu corporations?  What led him to explore the conceptual space inside a computer, now universally known by his term ‘cyberspace’?

'Cyberspace' as envisioned in Johnny Mnemonic, one part Tron to two parts 2001.

             “It wasn’t really that I knew about VR before other people did, I still deny that what I did was predictive.  Besides, my real ability in what appears to be a predictive function, is really nothing more than a kind of trend spotter, if you will.   I’d never heard the term ‘Virtual Reality’ then, I’m not even sure it existed, but there were enough bits of nascent VR technology around in 1981 to put it all together.

        “There were things you could look at - such as the rumours floating about, about various pilot/aircraft interfaces the American Airforce was working on.  Fighterplanes to be flown by computers, where the computer would fly the plane, while the pilot interfaced with the computer.  And I’d heard various stories about pilots sitting at the hearts of windowless aircraft, which were covered with television cameras.  The pilot’s head was inside a huge helmet with all these screens inside, so the plane, in effect, became transparent and he was looking through it, except he was looking at television pictures.  So, just from that image, from about 1980, you can infer the kind of VR technology we have today.”

            However, the idea of total immersion experiences (more real than real, to coin a phrase) is hardly a new one, Aldous Huxley called it ‘The Feelies’ in Brave New World, where a combination of drugs and recreational technology kept a whole society docile, functional and at peace.  In the Sprawl, the drugs are digital and flight into the non-dimension inside the computer is the only escape from a cracked and leaking real-life society.  Never the less, Gibson was more likely to take his inspiration from The Scientific American than the literature section.

            Thusly, the ideas of VR and telepresence, had been around in a larval form for quite a while, but never before had their use and popularization afforded their author the chance to influence a technology’s development as it happened.  Most of the ex-hippy scientists we see in documentaries working out on the virtual cutting edge, insist on referring to VR as ‘Cyberspace’.

            “ I’m quite pleased, my hopes for ‘Cyberspace’ are coming true, in so far as it is my baby.  Y’know, when I produced this neologism, it was hollow; it kinda came out of the oven empty.  And since then various people, including myself, have attempted to fill it with meaning.  But my real ambition for it is that it will wind up in the dictionary.  I’ve been watching the updates on the new OED with some interest.

            “ ‘Cyberpunk’ has already appeared in some dictionaries specializing in American contemporary language, but that’s not my word, and I’m not particularly fond of it.  But I would love to contribute a word to the language, that would be a great coup!  I think the only other science-fiction writer who’s done that is Robert Heinlein with the term ‘waldo’ for those remote control robot hands they use for handling isotopes.  I suspect that in laboratories, even now, people are referring to those things as waldos, never knowing where it came from or why they’re calling ‘em that. “

            And so it came to pass.  The Cyberpunk Movement was a product of the early eighties, a metaphor for the cold, dark hole western society was being propelled towards.  Now, in the late eighties, we’re so far down the hole it is hard to see Gibson’s work as fiction.  And now, finally, his vision hits the screen.

            “ Johnny Mnemonic was only the second work of fiction I ever wrote, it would be about 1980, and it was the start of it all for me, got the creative juices flowing, and led right on to Neuromancer.  That’s why I wanted to write the script for the movie-version myself, I wanted to see how well it stands up after all these years, and it stands up pretty well.”

            Gibson’s previous experiences with Hollywood had been abortive: a rejected script for Alien3 ( “I think the only thing of mine that remained in the film was a barcode on the back of someone’s neck”), several futile attempts to hang on to his vision with adaptations of Burning Chrome and New Rose Hotel (both Sprawl stories) which slowly suffocated in development hell.  Consequently the plan for Johnny (originally hatched in 1989) was to do it small - to be filmed in Toronto and directed by Gibson’s very good friend, sculptor and painter Robert Longo.   “This is his first feature after working on things like REM videos, so for Robert and for me, it’s a sort of shot in the dark.  ‘Cos I’ve never had a screenplay produced before, and he’s never directed a film before.

            “Unfortunately, making it small and personal proved difficult:   We weren’t asking for enough money.  We were going to financiers and asking for one million dollars, which is nothing for a movie.  They didn’t take us seriously.  So we re-worked it, made it bigger, more complex, more expansive, then Robert went to Hollywood, took the script and his design sketches and asked for 30 million dollars.  Suddenly they were impressed.”

            The end result book-ends Gibson’s career thus far.  His first Sprawl story, the foundation-stone for so many disparate dystopias (including aspects of the one we all now live in) has become the first grown-up science-fiction movie in a decade, and an amalgam of all his works.  The opening swoop through infospace is taken from Burning Chrome (via Steven Lisberger’s still-cutting-edge Tron).  The law has broken down (or been privatized ... which is pretty much the same thing) leaving life-support to be the task of vigilantes, as in Count Zero.  The tough underbelly of society - the lo-teks - don’t just live in a giant scaffolding web, as in the original story, but have woven their habitat between the high-tension cables of a suspension bridge - as in Virtual Light.

            The obvious way to go would have been for the spastic lighting and ragged editing of Cyberpunk à la MTV, but they deliberately rejected that direction.   “If we’d filmed the story as-is, it would have seemed passé, the ‘cyberpunk look’, if you will,  has been very hip, but for how much longer?  Billy Idol has taken it (with his ‘Cyberpunk’ album) and killed it dead, as far as I’m concerned.  That aesthetic will now forever be identified with a particular movement of the mid-90s, which is already as good as over.  If we’d followed that style, our film would have been born old. 

It's official - the day cyberpunk died!

             “Johnny Mnemonic isn’t about flashy graphics and rock music, although we’ve used ‘em when appropriate, it’s about The Politics Of Information.  It’s about a strange, but consistent world, not quite like our own, but similar.”

            It’s a world swamped with devices, technologies machines that surround us and even penetrate us (the whole plot of the movie concerns the hard-drive Johnny has wired into his brain) yet that technology consistently fails to make the human condition happier.

             “My response to this stuff is one of the deepest ambivalence, I’m inclined to think that that’s the only sane response.  I wouldn’t want to be a luddite, but by the same token, I wouldn’t want to be a technophiliac sucker who’s just waiting for the next new medium to come down the pike, and who believes that science always makes it all better.”

            How do the Americans, who are notorious for their love of a happy ending, take to his Dystopic vision?

            “Well, y’know, I sell more copies overall in the United States, but I think I’ve probably always done better proportionally in the UK.  And certainly  there was recognition early on over here of a certain kind of irony and comic content which is remarkably rare with American critics when they look at my work.  They just don’t see that grimness can co-exist with comedy.  They don’t see that extremes, the very, very, very deadly grim, can co-exist with humour, so, with my work, they just ignore it.

             “It’s like when they were looking at Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, it just baffled them, they said ‘My God, it’s neither fish nor fowl’.  But with my work they don’t even see the humour, so they think, ‘Wow, this guy’s great, he’s deadly serious about this stuff, let's go and build these machines right now'!” 

Fascinating, is it not, that Brazil, one of the core texts of Cyberpunk, also had such a profound influence on the creation of Steampunk ...

            One of my favourite examples of ‘technophiliac suckerdom’ from Mnemonic is the character Ralphie Face, as presented in the original story (he’s different in the film), who has had his face altered through plastic surgery so he is forever a living quote - a representation of his favourite pop-star.  He evokes, for me, images of sad worshippers wandering around Graceland, wearing Elvis’ face.

            “Well, actually, that was kinda predictive for me, because, when I wrote it, I hadn’t spent much time in Hollywood.  I now sometimes think of Ralphie Face sauntering around Melrose looking at these technically very, very beautiful women who have lost any degree of individuality to the knife.  Because something like that is actually happening.  If plastic surgery became something you could get at the 7-11, or your local gas station, people would wind up with these rather unoriginal jobs that were a composite of three or four people; y'know, Sharon Stone and Bridget Fonda and Madonna, and by the time you’ve loaded six on, you’ve got a generic face.  There are a lot of people around who wanna be actresses in Hollywood, who have generic faces, and if enough of them get into movies and become role models, well ...”

            Finally then, accepting that he claims his fiction isn’t predictive, I was curious to know what one of literature’s more celebrated prophets of gloom really expected the future to hold in store.

             “Well, on the whole, I’m as hopeful as I can be.  There’s an American philosopher named Frederic Jameson, who’s the guy who brought the idea of post-modernism to literary criticism, and he said that the characteristic emotion of our era is something he called ‘The Post Modern Sublime’, which consists of an equal admixture of ecstasy and dread.  And I think that comes pretty close to describing what I really feel, when I look at the future!” 

At the time, so soon after Bill and Ted and Point Break, it was difficult to imagine Keanu had anything in his head, let alone 300-odd gig.

            But what of the film?  How does it fare in a market already cluttered with cyber-thrillers from The Net to Hackers?  Well, as you might expect, Gibson digs further into the ramifications of future-tech than any of his competitors - even Cameron and Bigelow’s excellent Strange Days.  He explores how an entire society - and a global society at that - can be affected by technological development.  He shows how scientific progress can become evolution.  Because he is accustomed to working in the future, he isn’t overawed by it, it isn’t a foreign country to him.  Consequently, as with any science fiction story worth its Theramin, Johnny Mnemonic isn’t really about tomorrow, it’s about today, it’s about our Blade Runner Culture, it’s about techno-fascism and what we’ll really find at the end of the information superhighway.

            Johnny is a professional, he is a courier who carries earth’s most valuable remaining resource - information- around in a chip wet-wired into his head.  As the story begins he is about to take on board his largest and most precious cargo.  He plays down what he is about to do - but uploading 320 gigabytes of information (which I am confidently assured is a hell of a lot) a shockingly visceral experience, like taking a stationary roller-coaster and pulling twenty virtual gees.  The synaptic seepage he suffers (because 320 gig is way too much for him) has instantaneous affects and he has to repair to the bathroom to practice a few breathing exercises and re-compose his Zen ... or something.  This just shows how far-Eastern fashion and practice has penetrated into the Western mindset by 2021.

            Whilst Johnny is in there, re-composing, the other side of Eastern society - the Yakuza - arrive, including one soldier who has made the traditional sacrifice of having a finger removed - and has turned it to his advantage by having it replaced with a weapon capable of slicing people in half.  We know this, because he demonstrates on more than one unwilling participant.

            There is a refreshing mix of weaponry on show here, from cutting-edge pistols to bazookas, right down to a mixture of explosives and swords and Dolph Lundgren’s cruciknife.  He plays the Street Preacher, a flamboyant hired killer, wet-ware addict and leader of the (seemingly one-man-operation) Church of the Re-Transfiguration.  As insurance, he is hired by the Yakuza leader Takahashi to get Johnny’s head - with the chip intact - if the Yakuza troops should fail.

This man has a Masters Degree ... Can you tell?

            Takahashi is played with dry humour by Takeshi Kitano, probably better known over here as ‘Beat’ Takeshi, director of such odd-ball wonders as Violent Cop and Sonatine.  His very presence in this film is a quote, his introduction - looking through a venetian blind at a night-bound industrial wasteland - is at once a nudge towards both Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now.

            This film is crammed almost to choking with illusory and literal quotes, mostly from Gibson’s own previous works, and from Blade Runner:  As Johnny is about to beat one of his assailants over the head he tells him  Time to die!   Ralphi Face, Johnny’s agent, holds court in a bar that is half Tech Noir, half Taffy’s.  Finally, just to stretch the point to breaking, Jones, the wetwired dolphin (who eventually sucks the data out of Johnny, if you see what I mean) is a nod to Alien’s Jones The Cat and, of course, since Johnny’s only known name is John Smith, he and the dolphin together become alias Smith and Jones.

             Okay, enough; but, on a more fundamental level, the very story of one man with a finite amount of time to download his data before it pollutes his nervous system and kills him, is taken as much from the computer game Burn Cycle as it is from Rudolph Maté’s 1950 noir D.O.A.  It may well be that Gibson isn’t afraid to quote his peers, but there comes a point when doing so leaves room for little else.

            Where Johnny Mnemonic falls down, it does so because of the self-confessed lack of experience Gibson and Longo have in movies.  Gibson’s script, although messy, is simply in need of tightening up, but that needs a good strong director, which, unfortunately, Robert Longo is not.

            This film pulsates with great ideas and convincing futurology, but the flaccid pace and frankly bizarre casting (particularly Lundgren and Henry Rollins as flesh mechanic ‘Spider’) betray the potential shown.  Keanu Reeves has never been the most charismatic nor convincing of leading men, but Point Break and Speed both showed that he can cut the proverbial mustard when his performance is sculpted from a strong script by a stronger director.  Lacking that, his big soliloquy about the iniquities of life, ending with his bellowed plea "I want room service!" creates great hilarity in all who witness it.  Which, unfortunately, wasn’t the point.

            Johnny Mnemonic is a disappointment, not just because I, along with many, many Gibson fans, have been waiting a long time for him to put his vision on screen, but because the lost potential bleeds out of nearly every scene.  They came so frustratingly close, yet just missed.

Dir: Robert Longo.

Stars: Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano

Dur: 103 mins

Cert: 15

And, if you's like to know more about Mr. Gibson's movies, you can find my review of New Rose Hotel here.

YESTERDAY'S PARTY - a previously unbroadcast 1993 interview with William Gibson

It has been announced, here, that Neuromancer the Movie is finally (probably) going to happen.  If this comes to pass, this is a cause of no small celebration.  It is also the wafer-thin excuse I needed to post this previously unheard audio interview I conducted with Mr. William Gibson back in the mists of 1993:

I hate phone-quality radio.  Phone-ins, phone-pranks, that sort of thing; hate 'em. 

I think part of the reason for this was my BBC training, back in the early 90's, when we were admonished for only having guests on the phone.  The local station I worked at had a network or remote recording booths, mobile outside broadcast units and expensive quarter-inch tape recorders ... There were really no excuses for having a guest on the phone.

Therefore, when the walking legend who is (and was) William Gibson was in the UK - promoting his book Virtual Light, which would become the first of his 'Bridge' trilogy - well, I just had to arrange to interview him in person.  It would have been rude not to.

Looking at this picture might give readers some hint why Mr. Gibson's Twitter handle is @greatdismal

So, I turned up at Andromeda Books with my trusty Uher, where Mr. Gibson was conducting a very civilised signing session and holding court.  I waited patiently in the corner and, after the crowd had died down, was delighted that the equally great and probably as legendary Rog Peyton (whose domain Andromeda Books was) closed the shop for half an hour so I could conduct my interview in peace.

As I remember it, the interview began well.  I was nervous and more than a little star-struck, but I had done my research and prepared my questions.  Then I glanced at my sturdy recording device and noticed that the wheels weren’t turning.  The all-important red light wasn’t on.  The battery had died!

A real dilemma.  Did I carry on with the interview, bluff it out or fess up and look a fool?  Well, I’ve never been afraid of looking a fool – so I came clean.  Apologised profusely, blamed myself for not checking the battery, and threw myself on Mr. Gibson’s mercy.

He was extraordinarily gracious.  I didn’t notice even a momentary flicker of annoyance cross his face and, indeed, he was most concerned for me.  He even told me an anecdote, as we packed up and Rog re-opened, concerning the journalist Mikal Gilmore, from an obscure little rag called Rolling Stone, who had serious microphone problems when he interviewed Bob Dylan.  I guess it can happen to the best of us.

We left on good terms, laughing about the foolishness of the situation and I headed back to the studio, trying to think of convincing excuses.

When I got back, there was a message from the publicist telling me that Mr. Gibson had been concerned that I hadn’t got my interview and did I want to reschedule for the next day?  He would be in London by then, so we would have to do it on the phone, would that be okay?

I was honoured and truly blessed.

So, I hate phone quality radio, but not on this occasion.  On this occasion, he saved my hide and that’s great in any quality!

So here, completely uncut, is that interview.  Never before heard in this form.  You’ll hear my nervous, rambling questions; you’ll hear Mr. Gibson’s warm, witty and immensely good humoured answers.

Oddly, it feels right to hear this ghost from a distant past.  I barely remember that life now, but here it still exists, recorded, archived, digitised and cast broad through a medium which, at that time, only existed in the minds of Mr. Gibson and his contemporaries.  How thoroughly appropriate.

Ladies and gentlemen, a little under half an hour in the company of Mr. William Gibson circa 1993.  Truly, the post-modern sublime!

  Latest tracks by cellulord

The article this interview later turned into, which was also an in-depth review of the movie version of Johnny Mnemonic, is here. 

Furthermore, my review of New Rose Hotel is here.  Happy reading.

THE ANNE RICE CHRONICLE - an unpublished 1992 interview

Egad.  It's almost twenty years.  

I was working at a local radio station, long since closed down, and running a film review show there.  Once in a blue moon I might be fortunate enough to hook a celebrity to be interviewed on my show.  Of course, my idea of 'celebrity' was not necessarily my listeners' ... Which might have contributed to the station shutting down.  Anyway ...

In 1992, Anne Rice was in the country promoting The Tale of the Body Thief, and I was able to talk my way into interviewing her for my show, given the undying popularity of the vampire genre.  

She was very pleasant and indulged my stupid questions with consumate professionalism.  I played the interview on air, and that was that.

Then, about a year later, when she was releasing Lasher (a non-vampire book), I transcribed the interview, wrote it up as a feature article and hocked it around a few magazines, but no one wanted to buy it, even with the anticipation of the upcoming Interview with a Vampire movie.  This was a different time, before the interwebs, when pre-release hype was a relatively rare thing.

So I buried it on a floppy disc and forgot about it.  Over the years since, the popularity of the vampire has transformed: Along came Joss Whedon and Buffy, Charlaine Harris and Sookie then last, and certainly least, Stephanie Meyers and Bella.  As a consequence, vampires have never been sexier.

So, a propos of nothing in particular, I dug my old article up for you to sink your teeth into.

Here 'tis, exactly as written up at the time, warts and all - my previously unpublished 1992 interview with Anne Rice:

            Some fans of Anne Rice’s Lestat books may be terribly disappointed to learn that their favourite author, chronicler of the undead, queen of the damned, doesn’t actually believe in Vampires:

            “I believe in ghosts, I think there’s a lot of evidence for ghosts; but vampires, no; they’re just creations of our imagination, a mythic, literary creation.  Having said that, when I write about them they’re absolutely real to me.  I’m part of their world, I’m one of them;  they’re really all there is for me at that point.  In fact, I believe in them so much when I’m writing that I sometimes think Lestat or Louis could come walking into the room at any time.  Particularly Lestat, he’s my real favourite and I feel his presence all the time!”

            This is an unusual confession for a horror writer, most would rather keep a healthy distance between themselves and their creations, but then Rice is an unusual example of the type.  In a field where female writers are still as much a  conspicuous minority as female horror fans, she has transcended the shackles of stalk-and-slash contrivance and drawn together a cross-over fan-base of both sexes   by feeding so much of herself into her work.  An autobiography would be redundant, as everything has already been written down.

            Firstly there is the religion - old fashioned Catholicism in the sticky heat of New Orleans, with all the mysticism and ritual that implies.  This played a significant part in her upbringing, and it hangs like a shroud over the novels, not in an orthodox, moralising sense, but in an air of mystery, of guilt, in the sure and certain knowledge that something is going on which we can’t fully comprehend.  Then there is her background - a devout though alcoholic mother who died when Anne was a child, her marriage to Stan Rice, a painter and poet whose verses occasionally appear as frontispieces in her books, then the final deciding factor - the untimely death of her daughter.  This had a devastating effect on both parents, leading to years of depression.  Anne even inherited her mother’s  alcoholism.  In synopsis this all sounds rather like the plot of a not-terribly-good melodrama, but it happened, and the Anne Rice, the novelist who sells a book on average every thirty seconds,  is the woman who grew out of this tragedy.

            What drew her out of the cold emptiness of Haight-Ashbury after the Summer of Love had faded into memory, and helped her come to terms with the loss, was the writing of the first novel.  A dense and heartfelt text, it deals with mutability in such a personal way that reading it almost makes one feel like a voyeur into her life - especially regarding the Claudia character, a little girl whom Lestat takes, Vampirises and therefore consigns to un-dead eternity as a cute six year-old.

            Back in 1976 this was eerie and radical writing, made all the more so by the personal connotations for Rice herself, but, eighteen years and several copyists later, it has turned into something of a cliché:

            “They turn up in the movies now with amazing regularity - little girls with large eyes looming towards the camera ...”

            In subsequent volumes the emphasis of the series has changed slightly to allow Lestat to become the enduring character, far more-so than any of his converts; but the point of the project hasn’t changed for Rice, it is still to explore the hypothetical potential of being a Vampire.

            “I wanted to go into that enigmatic figure and have him tell me what it was like to be a vampire.  When I was a child, I read a vampire story that I loved; Richard Matheson’s A Dress of White Silk.  It is also written in the first person, from the point of view of a vampire child, a little girl.  I never forgot that story.”

Dracula - described by Stoker as having: " ... lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking ... " So, Bela Lugosi, then.  Ahem.

            So, what about Dracula?

            “I didn’t actually read Dracula until much later, after I’d written Interview.  I had gotten it out of the library when I was a child and read the beginning, but it so frightened and upset me that I took it back.  The Count had hauled a baby in a bag up for his three concubines to drink the blood of, and it was just too much for me, so I took it back and didn’t make the connection that that actually was Dracula until years later.  So, after Interview had been out a while, I decided I’d better tackle the damn thing ... and there was Jonathan Harker, and there were the three concubines with that baby in the bag, and I thought ‘Oh God, I remember this ...  I have to admit I never did finish the whole book.”

            Almost one hundred years on from Dracula, the interest seems as keen as ever, last year brought us Coppola’s adaptation, next year will bring us the already notorious film version of Interview, and meanwhile a veritable bandwagon of books, other films and comics is constantly gaining momentum.

            “What keeps the genre alive is the fact that the vampire is such a powerful metaphor for the outsider.  He’s such a great heroic character, he’s a wonderful character to deal with, he’s the supernatural monster who can talk to you, he can seduce you with words as well as gestures; and whom you can seduce and reason with.  Y’know, he’s Mephistopheles, and that’s always interesting in literature.  The Vampire is the charmer, the aristocrat of the supernatural pantheon.”

            Which rather brings up the subject of sympathies; the seductive power of a lover with fangs is obvious in Freudian terms, and the more secular attraction of eternal life is something we have all dallied with, but the Lestat books show the life of the undead in such unflinching detail, yet without apparent judgement, that one has to wonder if Ms Rice’s sympathies are with the killer or the victim.  When asked about this she politely lifts the question onto a higher level, explaining that the morals being investigated are far too complex to be dealt with simply through sympathy.

            “I think the dilemma of the books, for me, is the dilemma that exists for the characters - how to live with being bad.  Lestat says at one point ‘I refuse to be bad at being bad, if I’m gonna be bad I’m gonna be good at it!’  And I go over and over that in these books, how do you live when you have a conscience and you know you have to kill to live?  How do you deal with that?  But the reason that is so powerful, so meaningful, is that it’s a metaphor for many things we do in life, for the ruthless decisions we make, that have to do with our preservation of ourselves on every level.

            “Turn on the news today and just watch what’s happening all over the world; you can see how ruthless we all are being just by staying where we are and doing what we’re doing instead of rushing out to help all the people who are sick and suffering and starving and need comfort and shelter.  It’s a powerful, powerful thing, talking about the evil of the vampire, because it’s a metaphor for that human evil, the outcast part of all of us, the predator in all of us, and of the sufferer in all of us.  And for the person who perseveres stylistically and gracefully despite feeling very, very guilty about things.”  Then, with a wry smile:  “It can’t miss.”

            In fact she is convinced that, far from being outdated in this technological age, that vein of superstition which can be found just beneath the skin of most of us is more significant than ever before:

            “Oh this is just the beginning!  For the whole treatment of the supernatural in fiction, it’s just the beginning.  I think there was a foolish perception, for a while, that the Victorians had done everything there was to do, that they’d taken the supernatural novel as far as it could go, and that we would never be able to top them; but we’re learning now that that’s not true at all.  There are all kinds of things that can be done with supernatural fiction, and we’re likely to have hundreds more years of vampire novels and ghost stories and so forth. It’s a very exciting time to be writing!  We’re already seeing more of an investment, spiritually and financially, in horror fiction, it’ll get much more respect now I think.”

            Having recently signed a book deal reported to be worth $17 million, you would expect her to know of whence she speaks.  Fantasy films are rarely if ever off our screens these days (look at this summer’s slew of comic-book adaptations), and Gothicism is rising out of the night-clubs to become a major (if transitory) part of society again.  Are these black-clad, white faced people the only ones who expose themselves to the rich supernatural tapestry of an Anne Rice novel?  Of course not, nor are they the only ones who will queue in the rain this winter to see Kenneth Branagh’s movie version of Frankenstein and eagerly await the eventual arrival of Interview With The Vampire, scripted and directed by Neil Jordan and, far more controversially, starring well-known dental hygiene advert Tom Cruise.

Ironically, Tom Cruise probably will live forever ...

            Rice’s opinion of Cruise’s casting is more than a matter of record, it has already become legend.  Signing sessions in America for the latest novel, Lasher (being a sequel to The Witching Hour and therefore not a Vampire book) have become the settings for public demonstrations by incensed Riceans determined to show solidarity by chanting ‘No Tom Cruise, No Tom Cruise.’  Not much grey area there really, but one cannot help wondering what this demonstrates, apart from the rock-star status Anne Rice enjoys in her native country.

            My opinion is mixed:

          Firstly, and most significantly, I think it shows how deeply involved she is with her work.  Her complaint against the film version has not been the usual one concerning its faithfulness to the source material; in fact, in the years since the film rights were first bought, she has contributed various draft scripts herself, including one which changed the sex of Louis (Interview’s narrator, or interviewee if you will) to female with, apparently, Cher in mind for the rôle.  In a different draft, where Louis was male again, she worked quite hard at reducing the homoerotic content by giving Louis a wife and family.  Despite persistent rumour, this is not something which Jordan is guilty of, in fact the writer and director of The Crying Game has, by all accounts, stuck quite closely to the book. 

            Rice’s complaint must then be against Cruise as an individual.  I doubt that it will be anything as petty as disdain for him as a person but rather because, when she writes with Lestat in the room with her, watching her, he doesn’t look like Tom Cruise, he looks like Daniel Day-Lewis, or John Malkovich.  He isn’t clean and wholesome like Cruise, he has a dark side, a ragged edge of bitter experience and pain.  If this is her concern - a conviction that he simply can’t pull it off, then she should maybe take solace from the fact that, in the days before he was the biggest box-office draw of his age (his contemporaries, in terms of the fees they can demand and grosses they can expect to earn, such as Eastwood, Nicholson and Ford are getting on for twice his age) he showed flashes of exemplary acting ability and could, if sufficiently motivated, do so again.  Who would have believed that Michael Keaton could play Bruce Wayne convincingly and seriously, before it happened?  Who could have predicted that Tom Hanks would win an Oscar in a serious rôle on the evidence of, say, Big?  Surprises do happen occasionally in Hollywood, this may well be one.

            But what if Rice’s misgivings are far deeper than that?  What if she can’t bear to have her personal imaginings, her dream-world visualised in an inappropriate form?  Will it ruin the dream, will it spoil her imaginary world?

            Of the many things Anne Rice is, there is very little evidence to suggest that she is naïve, that she hasn’t considered this eventuality, over the years.  So we come to my second possible explanation of her very public reaction, one that, in some ways, contradicts the first:  Publicity. 

            It has long been held that there is no such thing as bad publicity (take the recent success of The Crow and Cool Runnings, both of which found longevity at the cinema partly through the interest generated by their being respectively Brandon Lee and John Candy’s last performances).  If this is so, then an advance whispering campaign about a film is very, very good news for the box-office.  Audience recognition leads to audience anticipation which leads in turn to big-bucks over the opening weekend.

            A word to the right person at the right time, once blown out of proportion either by accident or design, can produce a very satisfying publicity campaign without a penny being spent.  Open a tabloid newspaper and you can see this process under way any day of the week.  But whether this media coverage is deliberate or not, and whether it has the blessing of Rice herself or of Warner Bros. (who are producing the movie) or neither of them, is a moot point.  The inevitable result of it will be increased interest in the movie, and an increased profile for Anne Rice and her books. 

At the time, Rice told the LA Times: "(Cruise) is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler."  However, after seeing the film, she told Variety: "The charm, the humor and the invincible innocence which I cherish in my beloved hero Lestat are all alive in Tom Cruise's courageous performance".  So that's alright, then.

            Which makes one wonder how late-comers will take to her works.  I asked her how deliberate it was that the books were connected and yet didn’t follow a precise sequence like direct sequels: 

            “Oh, it was always an important part of the concept of The Vampire Chronicles that they should each be independent from the others, that each would be a complete book; and I’m confident that they can be pulled off the shelf that way, in any order.”

            When asked if there will be more volumes in what is, to be fair, a series as potentially endless as its protagonists, she thought for a moment and then affirmed that there will be one more.

            “Just one?”

            “Well, that’s all I see at this point, but that’s all I ever see: the next book ... they take possession of me, you see, and they have to do that one at a time.”  This is partly through the passionate way she writes, and partly through expediency, after-all, millionaire novelists are a rare and popular breed:  “I have to block out various months when I will do nothing except write.  But it really is a bit of a struggle now; I mean, if I accepted all the invitations to speak or to appear and sign, I would have to retire as a writer and just do that.  Writing is almost like eating ice-cream these days, to just be alone with the computer and be able to write is a dream. 

            “But, when I do write, I start every day, no matter how I feel ... and if nothing comes after about an hour and a half, then I give up.  Usually, though, I love to work right through, if I wasn’t interrupted I’d probably go on for twelve hours a day.  Once I get going, I guess the only thing that’ll stop me writing is downright physical illness, if I have a terrible headache then I’ll quit because, if I don’t, everyone in the novel will get a headache!”

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ INTERVIEW

LOS HOOLIGAN

A C(hat) with  Robert Rodriguez

This 3,000 word interview (cut down from one almost twice that length) comes from a different world.  A world before the internet.  A world before viral marketing allowed a movie like The Blair Witch Project to prove you could have a big hit with a cheap film and long before Paranormal Activity came along and did the same again.  Nowadays, literally anyone can make a film and get it seen.  This was not the case before cheap HD video and internet distribution.  Back then, making and releasing El Mariachi was a unique and almost miraculous achievement.

It was 1995.  On the train coming down to London for a press-screening, I finished reading a book called Rebel Without a Crew.  It is a film diary telling of the year in the life of a 23-year-old Texan who made a home movie called El Mariachi for $7,000, then sold it to Columbia Tri-Star for a quarter of a million. 

Rebel Without a Crew is a startlingly honest and inspirational book which leaves the reader with the unshakeable belief that any shmo with a little money, a lot of gullible friends and a determined streak a mile wide can make a movie. It’s certainly a philosophy that has made Rodriguez one of the most interesting and creative film-makers working in (or around) Hollywood.

           

I arrived at Columbia Tri-Star’s preview theatre in London’s West End, sporting my favourite  baseball cap (well, it’s always a good idea to dress up for these formal occasions).  It bore the legend Hard Boiled in bolshy gold letters.  The choice of this hat was a strategic move on my part as I was about to interview Robert Rodriguez, the fore-mentioned Texan one-man film crew, post-Tarantino phenomenon and, not coincidentally, lover of John Woo films.

           

This’ll get his attention! I thought ...

           

First they screened Desperado, the sort-of-sequel-sort-of-remake to El Mariachi then, as the lights rose, in wandered the director, dressed in jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  Oh good, I thought, at least I’m not the only scruffy bugger here!  After our brief introduction I switched on my microphone and set about checking levels on my tape machine, the first words it recorded were:  “Cool hat!  Wow, where do I get one of those?  Damn.”

“Ehm ... who distributed the film?    Metro Tartan, I think.  I got it off them!”

“That’s great!”

[Trying hard to act surprised] “Thank you.  Ehm ... So, has your reputation for making films cheaply helped or hindered you in  Hollywood?”

“Oh, completely helped!  I’ll work forever off Desperado alone, because Hollywood just doesn’t know how to make movies that look big, that can be sold like a big movie, but that cost under ten million.  It’s really funny, ’cos they just can’t see how to do it, and I dunno why.

           

“Desperado cost seven million which is, y’know, a lot for me but it’s nothing for a big action film.    Action movies start at thirty and, if it’s a summer movie, which this one was in the States, they start at fifty.  In fact, there was an article in one of the industry magazines and it showed all the hits and all the disasters - the big bombs that cost a lot and made nothing - and there were only seven films on the list that made it.  Desperado was one of ’em, simply by the ratio of what it cost to what it made.”

“No one in Hollywood really knows what they’re doing, they’re all dependent on somebody else.  The studio guys don’t know how to make movies, they’re all accountants who’re totally dependent on guys like me, who can tell ’em anything.  They don’t know.  They haven’t learned what you need.  They should, then they wouldn’t get shafted so much!  On the other side, creative guys aren’t usually very technical so they’re dependent on technicians and on the crew, who tell ’em it’ll take so long and cost so much to do, so there’s another waste.

           

“Something I learned from my first job in high school was that the last thing a creative person does is learn to be technical, they’re just too lazy to do that.  But, if you’re creative and you become technical, then you’re unstoppable.  That’s what I did, I learned how to make a movie from the ground up, I learned all the camera stuff, I learned how to cut it, all so I wouldn’t be dependent on anybody.”

“And you’ll continue doing it this way?”

“Yeah, ’cos once I’d set the precedent with El Mariachi (and then they made the mistake of letting me do it again with Desperado) that really locked it in.  I was able to persuade them to let me direct and shoot and edit Desperado like that because I was doing it for so little money.  They had nothing to lose, so they let me do it.  Now it’s standard operating procedure.  From now on, when a producer hires me, he knows already that I’m gonna shoot it and edit it and arrange the music myself, he won’t even question it.

           

“It used to be that you either made big movies which everybody had to go see so were really watered down, and had no one person in control or you had to make really small independent movies where you had a lot of freedom, but no one would go see ‘em.  But movies like Pulp Fiction, Desperado. and From Dusk Till Dawn don’t have to appeal to everybody because we make ‘em cheap enough that the investors’ll get back their money back plus a little profit.”

They want me to make movies that make money and don’t cost anything.  True, when they see how cheap I can work, they sweat a little it makes it harder for them to justify such great expense.  But that’s good!  The whole industry has gotten too big, it’s time it was shaken up a little bit.  That’s what young people are supposed to do, shake things up.  Then I’ll be there in a coupla years and some new guys’ll breeze into town and tell me what an idiot I am.  I guess what goes around comes around!  I’m just making the most of it while I can.”

“But a lot of film-makers get on the ladder by calling in favours, getting someone high up to give them a break, and they do on condition that later on you do them favours back ...”

“That’s one way to get in, but I tried not to do that.  There are people who borrow money from their parents to make their first movie, but I tell people “Go sell your body to science for a few months, then you can do it with your own dime.  Put yourself on the line, don’t drag someone else into it.”  That’s what I did, and if it’s your own risk you’re actually more careful with the money.

“Does working so cheaply make the job easier?”

“Well it’s never easy with any budget, but with a bigger budget you’ve just got other kinds of problems.  You’re always gonna have problems, it’s just that you solve ‘em differently when you don’t have a lot of money.  It wasn’t like “Hey, now I’ve got seven million dollars, I can relax”, ’cos I was making something that, by Hollywood standards, would cost much more.  So it was still a struggle, but when you don’t have very much money you end up solving your problems creatively.  What a movie is, is a whole series of creative problems that you have to solve, that’s why big movies get into trouble, ’cos when they get a problem they don’t stop and think about how to fix it creatively and make the movie better, they just wash the problem away with the money hose.  That’s easy and it doesn’t really solve your problem.” 

“So how does seven million dollars get spent?”

“I shot the whole movie, put everything in the can, for $3.1 million.  The rest went on wages for the actors, producers, post-production, the SDDS eight-track sound mix, the release prints, all the post stuff which we didn’t think we needed to spend so much on, but the studio thought we did.  I’ll be controlling more of that from now on!  But to actually make the movie, all the sets, all the explosions and all the stunts came in at 3.1.  That’s nothing.”

“Does more money mean bigger names?”

“On Desperado, Antonio Banderas cost a little bit, not much.  He was on the way up.  The same is true of George Clooney in Dusk.  You can either pay twenty million dollars for these big actors, or you can find new guys and make them into twenty million dollar actors.  We got George Clooney for a song ’cos no one was offering him movie roles when I hired him, now he’s been offered Batman, which is great.  I’d rather make someone a star and then not be able to afford ’em, so have to go find someone else and make them a star instead!  That keeps the budgets down and sparks your creativity.”

“Do you resent the way that you and  Tarantino are grouped together in people’s minds?”

“I think film makers have always worked together,   Spielberg and Lucas worked together for years, and that happens all the time, because Hollywood is a small community where you find that people you relate to are few and far between.  Quentin and I worked together three times in a row [Desperado, Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn]... but on Desperado, he was only there for one day. 

He always wanted to be an actor, he studied acting, and he took it very seriously on Dusk.  After I saw him in Desperado, he seemed like a real natural.  It’s true that he needs a strong director while he’s still learning, especially when he comes up against a guy like George Clooney who’s been in awful stuff for years, but got away with it because no one even paid enough attention to dismiss him.  The critics wouldn’t say “George Clooney was terrible in this movie” because they didn’t even care who George Clooney was.  He had years to get the seasoning that Quentin has to get very quickly and, as you see in Dusk, he got there very fast.

“How do you respond when your films are compared to John Woo’s?”

“That’s great, ’cos that was our major inspiration.  American action movies were getting really stale because, I found out, action is usually shot by second unit, a stunt guy who takes the camera and a whole other crew and shoots the action stuff.  They usually move so slow on a big movie that the director will spend all his time directing the main sequences with the main actors while the difficult stuff is passed on to second and third crews.  We did everything first unit on Desperado, I wanted to shoot everything.  I was horrified when I found out that I was supposed to hand all the fun stuff to somebody else, that’s what I was waiting for the most, I didn’t wanna do the dialogue scenes, I wanted to blow things up.

           

“It was the  John Woo movies that made me realise that the difference between our films and films from other countries is the way they would commit to the action.  I hadn’t been excited about an action movie like The Killer or Hard Boiled since I was a kid watching  James Bond movies, and I thought it was just ’cos I was getting older, but I realise now that it’s just that our movies are getting stale.  Those Hong Kong movies made that  catharsis come back again, they made you wanna be Chinese and do all that neat stuff.”

 “Where do you find your actors?”

“All over the place.  People sometimes have very little acting experience because they don’t get the chances, so I start them sometimes from nowhere.  I saw  Salma Hayek on Spanish television saying how she couldn’t get work in the States ’cos of her accent, even though she is a big soap star in    Mexico.  In Desperado, for instance, since we were shooting in this little town, we couldn’t afford to fly a lot of actors out of Los Angeles, so a lot of the actors, even in bigger parts, are my crew people.  I deliberately hired a Mexican crew, so my first assistant director’s in the movie, my director of photography, my grip, my gaffer, my make-up artist, they’re all in there.

           

“You know that bit where Antonio slides across the bar and the other guy slides up to him and they run out of bullets and they’re shooting empty guns at each other [a sequence ripped whole and bleeding from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, it must be noted!], well that’s my second assistant director.  As soon as we killed him he went back to work.  I just looked at my crew and said “Man, you guys look like movie stars”, so I put ’em all in.  That was fun, every day a different crew guy got to be in the movie, which kept the morale up!”

“Did you get much co-operation from the small town you filmed in?”

“Tons.  We’d shot Mariachi there, but they didn’t notice us when we were there first time because there was no crew, just me with a camera running around shooting one take and then off to the next location, really fast.  That’s how we made it look expensive by filming on the real streets, with real cars rolling by.  Normally you have to pay the city to clear the streets, hire people to rent cars, bring in guys to drive ‘em - it’s all that backwards kind of thinking, the old way is just to let real cars go by and film your actors running between ‘em.  This time we wanted to go back because we wanted to pay back the town.  Everyone got to work on the movie in some capacity, ’cos it’s only a small place.”

“Will there be a third Mariachi movie?”

“We’ll see.  Maybe I’ll call it Once Upon A Time In Mexico. I heard about this small town in Mexico where  all they do is make guitars, so I thought, maybe that’s where he’ll be holed up, building guitars.”

“Obviously you’ve got a reputation for action movies, but in Rebel Without A Crew you talk about starting out with animations -”

“ - And family comedies, yeah, that’s mainly what I do.  I’m the blood and guts guy now, but what I’ve always been is Mr Family Comedy.  I wrote a comic strip for a few years called Los Hooligans, which was based on my family, and that’s what’s coming next.  I mean, From Dusk Till Dawn is by far the capper on all this, I can’t go any further than that, it’s like completely an exploitation, drive-in, horror, action, splatter thriller with Tarantino and me together at our most extreme.  You can’t go beyond that.  So it’s time to go the other way, I’ll probably do a family comedy and after that maybe a biopic on  Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

“Does your drawing lead you to storyboard everything?”

“Not so much these days, ’cos there’s so many shots if I had to draw ‘em all ... If I didn’t operate the camera myself I’d probably do that, but since I’m framing the shot anyway and I’m choosing the lens, I just tell people to move fast and follow me.  You just use a storyboard to tell your crew what you want.  That’s what directing is in Hollywood, it’s more of a power position where you tell people what to do I don’t like to do that.  I don’t wanna be the boss, I wanna be making the film, so rather than telling the crew what to do, I’ll work with them and lead by example, that’s how we can move so quickly and make the movie so cheaply, not because I’m cracking the whip but because I’m leading the way, and I’m moving very, very fast.

           

 “You’re not good at deputising then?”

“No, I don’t deputise.  I can’t imagine who even thought of that.  Editing is the best part of making a movie.  Who thought to give that to someone else?  In fact, they don’t just give someone else the chance to have all the fun, they pay them to have all the fun, that’s ridiculous.  To call yourself a cook when all you do is buy the groceries doesn’t make any sense, y’know.  Too much of this and not enough of that can screw up the whole thing, so editing’s very, very important, the most important part of the job.”

“Rebel Without a Crew almost reads like a manifesto of how you think people should make films ...”

“I’ve had several people tell me that, does it really sound like that?  When people quote me they say “You said ‘You should do this’.” But I never said “You should do -” anything, ’cos I hate it when people tell me that.  All I said was what I did, and I wrote it to show you that it is all completely against everything you’ve ever heard, but it worked for me.  It should make you realise that all that stuff you thought you needed to know, all those people you thought you needed to be in with, you don’t need that at all.

           

“I just wanted to demystify it, make it seem less frightening, because that’s what held me back for so long - just not knowing the nature of the beast I was confronting.  It turns out to be a little rabbit.  So, I thought I’d better tell some people, ’cos no one else wants to let people know or there’ll be too much competition, but I don’t care.  I know what I can do, it’s the other filmmakers who are scared they didn’t want anyone to know how easy it all is, which makes me mad, so I decided I’m not gonna keep the secret, I’m gonna blurt it out.”

And with that, his next appointment arrived.  However, so won over was I by the man’s disarming honesty, by his refusal to be precious about his ‘art’, I felt foolish getting him to autograph my copy of Rebel.  Instead of just acting like a fan-boy, I offered him a trade.  Consequently he went to his next interview happy in a new hat, and I walked to the tube clutching my treasured book and my signed photograph, while the wind whipped around my now hatless head.