The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

The Ninth Revelatory Interview Part Two By Phil & Sarah Stokes, 2nd June 2005 Revelations : "We've gone back to the photo of you in the New York Times and we hadn't noticed before that on the shelf behind you are some folders of drafts with some titles that we don't know about." Clive Barker : "OK - Name then..." Revelations : "Well, one of them has an old name, The Everything, which we haven't heard about for years - is that up and running?" Clive Barker : "Yes, that's still very much there. Part of the thing that Abarat has done in becoming a little bit of an industry for me because it takes huge amounts of work to produce these books, you know just in terms of man-hours to cover the amount of canvas with the paintings are now five and six deep in the painting house and getting to a place where I simply have no more room." Revelations : "And next-door isn't up for sale!" Clive Barker : "Exactly - I should take them out at at gunpoint...! But it's a huge endeavour; I've been painting these pictures for the better part of ten years and there's now five hundred-and-something of them. You've seen the biggest of them - and some of the ones I'm doing now are almost as big - and my ambition for the series is to leave, when I'm done, as complete a record of an invented world in painting and writing and poems as I can leave, because that's one of the pleasures of being able to turn my hand to a couple of things and I can hopefully describe the world in both paint and words and hopefully they complement each other. When we get to the end of it, it will be a half a million words or more and probably 550 paintings - and that's a lot of world." Revelations : "And yet, if I hear you right, you have found the time to finish off something like The Everything in the midst of that?" Clive Barker : "Yeah, well not finished, but certainly continued to put detail on it; I mean, with the things that I do, I feel a bit like one of those guys on a variety show with a bunch of spinning plates on it, and I'm running from one to another, trying to keep all the plates up - it's part of what I do. I'm designing a game called Demonik right now, I'm doing introductions for Visions of Heaven and Hell, which comes out in October, I'm creating the stories to go with a series of what are called 'plushies', characters called The Jump Tribe of which I've designed 240 of them - it's a company called Art Asylum and they produce toys for kids and they call the toys plushies; soft toys, and I had painted 240 characters on five canvases - " Revelations : " - is this The Bestiary?" Clive Barker : "Exactly, this is The Bestiary that I was working on, and the guy came round and said, 'Could we have that?' and I said, 'What would you do with it?' and he said, 'Well, we'd make a world around it, we'll produce plushies for all these characters,' and I said, 'You're on - as long as I can write the stories to go with each of the characters.' So at Comic Con in San Diego this Summer, we will unveil the first four Jump Tribes - Jumpers, as we call them - three good guys and a bad guy and the four stories that go with them and a fine time will be had by all. Revelations : "And will these be branded Abarat?" Clive Barker : "No, no, these will be completely separate from The Abarat." Revelations : "So is The Bestiary no longer in The Abarat?" Clive Barker : "Exactly right, well it actually turned out to be good in a way because - it's curious, even as I was painting The Bestiary I was wondering, 'Why am I doing this?' I do think our fates are sort of pre-ordained in some measure and I couldn't figure out when I was doing this - Why? Why? Why?" Revelations : "You'd told us that you were going to name every single one of them, but that no-one would ever know..." Clive Barker : "And I did actually name them all and of course Adam Unger, the guy who bought them for Art Asylum, said, 'What are their names?' and I sent the names over and he was kind of gobsmacked! It's actually been really fun because the thing about this and the Art Asylum people, they're really nice, fun people, is that this moves at speed. Books move slowly, movies move even more slowly, even my paintings - although they seem to be produced quickly, do not seem to me to be produced quickly - and it's actually fun to make a painting and next see a beautiful sketch of what the toy will be and the next time see a toy! It's really fun and so I've written three of the stories and one to come of those first four. I don't think we'll ever do 240, but we will build a substantial world if people enjoy these characters." Revelations : "And those are aimed at kids?" Clive Barker : "Yes, I think so; the stories are certainly aimed that way, always with a touch of something that hopefully an adult would have fun with. The stories are 1,500 words long, very short, but if they're all added together in a fashion that I've learnt from Tortured Souls, they will make one huge story." Revelations : "Are you also doing some figures with NECA based on characters from Scarlet Gospels?" Clive Barker : "Yes - well, the Scarlet Gospels stuff won't come until I deliver Scarlet Gospels, but they wanted to do one last definitive Hellraiser 'Clive Barker-verified' scene so that you'd have all four of the Cenobites in the scene at the top of the Cottons' house and they've done a really nice job with it so I agreed to be part of that. It irritated me a little that all that stuff was getting done - and getting done very nicely, I thought the NECA stuff was very lovely - and that I couldn't be a part of it. And I guess it was just miscommunication because as soon as I spoke to Randy over at NECA I immediately liked him and we got on famously! I have a few of them to sign for the limited editions and so forth, but yes, that's definitely happening." Revelations : "You mentioned Demonik in passing..." Clive Barker : "I have been having a blast; it's been interesting. I enjoyed my Undying time and I'm enjoying this too. It's not, as you know, my strength; I am not a player and yet that in some ways is fun because I'm learning as I go and it's always nice to learn a new thing. It's a big pool of people, there's a lot of people involved, but I like that too, it's collaboration. My day is spent, as you know, in solitary endeavours so sitting with these guys and solving problems and getting some designs together... It's essentially a revenge motif, it's a demon summoned that you are controlling, summoned to carry out revenges on your behalf and the question is, are you actually going to do it or aren't you going to do it? It carries some moral weight, which is fun. The first thing I did when I sat everybody down was quote Gaugin, who said, 'Life being what it is, one seeks revenge,' and everybody nodded sagely and everybody around the table had to tell me who they would want revenge upon - it was amazing! Wives, old boyfriends, there was no end to it, so that's actually been fun too. Each of these things is fun of itself, it's just that sometimes - for instance, I've just done a polish pass on The Midnight Meat Train, and on those days I was doing four different things during the day and you were saying Sarah before, how do I reorient myself, well the answer is on those days I wasn't; it was definitely muddying my brains to move from film work to novel work to game work to painting work - that's probably one or two things too many in a day. "We are going to be making the movies - Midnight Meat Train is ready to rock and roll, we've a start date for the beginning of July for The Plague and we're casting right now and so that all seems to be working. And the best news of all is that I think Weaveworld is finally going to get made - can you believe that?" Revelations : "Do you want the honest answer?" Clive Barker : "Ha! It seems that finally a wonderful guy called Steve Molton has pulled a draft together that everybody likes - it's a very cool draft, a very smart draft and very respectful of the book. There's great passion at Showtime to make it so I think that we are presently chatting with folks over your side of the water because it takes place in England, it will be shot in England." Revelations : "That's the sort of news we like to hear! At one stage most of the action had been relocated to New York, hadn't it?" Clive Barker : "Yeah - one of the first things we did... there was a huge change of regime at Showtime and when we went in to talk to the new guy at Showtime, Bob, who is a very smart guy - I said, 'You know the thing I really think we should do is just go back to the book and put this back in England where it's set'; it's an English book - and the sweat and effort it's taken to Americanise something that never wanted to be American! So I gave Steve Molton, who has spent some time in England, a huge pile of books - you know, all my AA guides to England, which I used when I was writing Weaveworld because they are wonderful for little out-of-the-way details - they are fantastic as research tools and they seem to be in principle the most unpromising of books but they're actually great. And so I gave all of those to Steve along with several books of photographs; things that I really liked and he came back with just a wonderful, moving draft that really reinstated the bitter-sweet, the yearning qualities that are in the book and it's very satisfying. "Tortured Souls has taken a little bit of a side-step. It's hard to imagine while I'm producing two movies for other directors and producing Demonik and also executive producing Weaveworld how the heck I would be able to do those things respectfully and competently and also go away and do what is essentially a 24 hour-a-day job, which is to direct a movie. It seemed to me that I needed to make a choice and I thought the choices were pretty clear - we've got these movies going, we need them to be wonderful and Joe and Anthony have been amazing and I want to give them as much support as possible. I want Scarlet Gospels to be great and I want the paintings to be great, so it's impossible to say, 'OK, now I'm going to step away from all of this and go do a job which will consume me completely' - but that just doesn't make any sense. I mean it would be lucrative as hell, but that's not the way I look at things or I've ever looked at things and right now I am much more interested in making sure that the next Abarat book is the best it can be and the Scarlet Gospels is the best that it can be." Revelations : "We'd talked a little while ago about you doing a new erotic art exhibition." Clive Barker : "Yes, that's happening. I bumped it from September because they are putting me on tour for Visions in September. I bumped it from September to December and January. Now, some of that work has already been done, work which I've been doing in my spare time for a while, but I've also got a lot of erotic work which nobody has ever seen and I'd like people to see - the erotic alphabet, for instance, which I've been working on for a while which I really want to have framed up and have on other people's walls. So there's a lot of pictures for this exhibition which are already done." Revelations : "An erotic alphabet? That's sounding an awful lot like A Clowns' Sodom!" Clive Barker : "Yeah, it is a return to that idea and in fact some of the letters are almost identical and I love that, though I lost the original artwork, and I wanted to reconfigure it in a way that made it look like proper artwork. I really liked it as an idea and it's really fun and it's funny and it's also weirdly sexy too. So I've done a few letters and the 'Y' is particularly fun - the bottom stroke of the 'Y' is a little bloke looking up blissfully while the two diagonal strokes of the 'Y' are streams of urine coming from the penises which hang at the tops of those strokes - so it's a very neat little watersports 'Y'." Click here for Part Three 2005 Interviews | Interviews Index | Home page This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.