The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

The Ninth Revelatory Interview Part Three By Phil & Sarah Stokes, 2nd June 2005 Revelations : "Just to go back - I know you beautifully deflected my question about the stuff behind you! Can we just clarify some titles of some stuff? Is there something called Lazarus Requiem?" Clive Barker : "Lazarus Requiem was, is my notes for Scarlet Gospels. I kind of liked that, the ridiculous paradox of that title, you know, but it sounded, wierdly, too science-fictional. You'd be surprised how many 'Requiem's there are in science-fiction. So - and I rather like Scarlet Gospels more, so - but I'm actually making reference to the Lazarus Requiem within the text, I'm going to put that in." Revelations : "OK - that sorts that out for me. Carnival? Is there something called Carnival?" Clive Barker : "I haven't got a clue!" Revelations : "Moon Door? ...no? We're going to have to send you this photo!" Clive Barker : "I'm just looking behind me - where am I sitting? Where are these? I'm just looking to see where they were." Revelations : "Bottom left-hand corner by the seat." Clive Barker : "Oh - they're in the corner here - ah-ha - Veritae, Villain, Olio, Bacchus, Defender - would any of those titles make sense to you?" Revelations : "No - but you can talk about them! Keep going!" Clive Barker : "These are not abandoned children, they are just children who wandered away for a while... Well, what have I got? Olio - which is actually The Everything, Olio was my first pass at the title of The Everything. I've got Bacchus - I found the original Bacchus material which is nice. I've got Quiddity, which is Book 3. I've got Berlin - God knows what that is! I don't have a clue what that is - it's a big one too! Then I've got one called Horror, which is just horror ideas, and one called Veritae (I have no clue) and then I've got The Last Thing, which is the notes for Sacrament and then I've got Creation, which is also the notes for Sacrament. So sometimes these are notes of a book that hasn't yet found its definitive title. Sometimes not; sometimes they're things which I - you know I've got a lot of things that I've got maybe 100 pages through and then just lost - lost the thread somewhere, almost always will come back to - and almost always the big books begin that way - they begin as something I didn't like, I mean, I've been trying to write a Book of Hours for twenty years!" Revelations : "And that's still not happened - well, yes and no!" Clive Barker : "No - you're absolutely right. I have notes for a Book of Hours - I'm not telling the truth, not twenty years, it's thirty years! I have notes for the Book of Hours from when I was 22, 23. I bought a book, a facsimile of the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours and just, man, you know this whole idea of being able to encapsulate a physical world in a single statement, or a single series of statements as it were was just - to a world-making ambition - marvellously attractive. And Roz Kaveney, who I respect immensely as a reviewer, I think she's very smart, was very nice in one of her reviews for the first book - she said, she instantly said, 'look this is a book of hours - this is literally a book of hours,' and I had not in speaking to Roz talked about that at all and it was nice that she picked up that connection. And I think that will become much more apparent when all four books are finished and we step back from it all because something will happen penultimately which will give us that sense of a pattern completed, which I think Books of Hours give you - a wonderful sense of satisfaction that there is an entire world looking at you." Revelations : "Yes - and what did we go to see in Dublin that's similar in style? The Book of Kells." Clive Barker : "The incredible thing about The Book of Kells is some fuckhead cut the pages!" Revelations : "Although sometimes they cut them to keep them safe - almost like at the end of Nightbreed, breaking it up an dispersing in bad times and bringing it together afterwards." Clive Barker : "Is that what they did? I thought - my understanding of the story was much grimmer - that they simply chopped it up because it didn't fit! So like they chopped off a bit - you know, maybe that's wrong. Every now and then I see a reproduction of one of the Abarat paintings in one of the foreign editions - I take a deep, deep breath - and they've just chopped off some piece arbitrarily: 'Aaagh - I spent five nights sweating over that piece..!' " Revelations : "It's like the Books of Blood covers." Clive Barker : Oh exactly, exactly." Revelations : "I don't think we've ever talked about it, but two or three years ago when the big Blake exhibition came through here at the Tate, we went to that and it was just completely different for me from having seen all of the plates that I'd ever seen of the illustrated books." Clive Barker : "Right - how so?" Revelations : "Some of them because they were much larger than I anticipated, but for the majority because they were tiny. Just extraordinarily small - to have got that amount of detail into something so small." Clive Barker : "Yeah - without the aid of anything technological to go along with him, I guess - right? Amazing - I saw a relatively small Blake exhibition which didn't have anything particularly small in - what were you seeing?" Revelations : "Oh this was an extraordinary collection that they took through London and on to New York, where they had gathered as much as they could possibly gather of all the extant editions of the books. So you could look at - there are six copies, say, of The Tiger and they'd laid four of the existing copies side by side so you could see the different platework and - " Clive Barker : "Amazing." Revelations : "There was an amazing catalogue - well, not a catalogue , a thumping big four, five hundred page book that went with it, which we've got nestling on a shelf here which is just wonderful." Clive Barker : "Yeah - I've got the complete etchings, like the two-volume set and though you can look at the size and try and imagine it, it's really very hard to make an intelligent assessment of what that really means and what the artist's done, even if you're looking at the details and you comprehend it - it's one of the reasons why it's so fun to bring people up to see the Abarat paintings - particularly if they've read the books and are familiar with the paintings and then they've come up and they're so much bigger than they thought they would be!" Revelations : "It's the physical nature of them - both with the Abarat paintings and with Blake the printing and the paper and how the blocks would wear from one printing to the next - " Clive Barker : "Just going off that - and a particular bête noire of mine is seeing how lazily the Pauline Baynes reproductions are being treated in the new Narnia editions, you know? Worn blocks within an inch of their lives!" Revelations : "I haven't seen that." Clive Barker : "The pictures - I don't know, maybe they can't find the pictures anymore and maybe there's no way of reconstituting them, but they have that weary look of pictures - those are such fresh and beautiful pictures - they have the weary look of pictures that have been reproduced a few too many times - my bête noire..!" Revelations : "Unlike the trailer for the first Narnia film that we saw this week when we went to see Star Wars." Clive Barker : "What do you think?" Revelations : "Phew! It was a bit more exciting than I had expected; it was so much bigger." Clive Barker : "Yes, it is big, isn't it." Revelations : "All this expanse - the grand sweep of The Lord Of The Rings filming in New Zealand has clearly rubbed off on them." Clive Barker : "Right. Was it good? It looked very clean - I don't know whether I like that or I don't. I suppose it looked a bit - the scene in the throne room, particularly, looked very well brushed. I was very aware - in the Star Wars stuff also, maybe this is an effect of digital - that everything is now, looks like, there isn't a piece of litter anywhere. And I guess I came from - and that's what I like about Peter Jackson is that he was willing to make everything look really pretty ragged and aged. But I'm glad you liked the Narnia trailer - I've only seen it on the internet, which - the reduction is - so that's exciting." Revelations : "Yeah, well our two boys - who are eight and five - who've seen the BBC adaptation were just going, 'Is this the same story?' " Clive Barker : "It's a whole different thing." Revelations : "And, 'Can we see it today?' They now can't believe they've got to wait until Christmas." Clive Barker : "Tilda Swinton is going to be amazing. She's the ice-queen and she's one of my favourite actresses - she was the only good thing about Constantine as far as I was concerned. She plays Gabriel, the angel, and she's - ah, she's fantastic - I say the only good thing in it, I actually take that back, here and now, there were some good things in it, but the thing which really struck me about it was, struck me about the picture, was her; I thought she gave a superlative performance - completely edgy and wonderful and ambi-sexual - it was really tremendous." Revelations : "You got a heap of good press around the time of Hellblazer - everything I read said - Oh, he originally wanted to call it Hellraiser but you got there first!" Clive Barker : "Ha - well, that's true, of course!" Revelations : "It was almost like I couldn't read a review of the film without that fact being - " Clive Barker : " - rubbed in their noses! Cool, cool. I never warmed to Keanu Reeves - is my problem - I never found him a particularly convincing presence onscreen and John Constantine's one of my favourite comic-book characters, and to see him being taken from a Cockney wise-guy with the fag hanging hanging out of the side of his mouth, you know, Sting gone-to-seed, to see him replaced by the perfectly chiselled features of Mr Reeves just, I don't know, took the balls out of it." Revelations : "Yeah, we got lots of that sort of review of it in the UK - I don't know whether that was a similar review to the US reviews of the movie?" Clive Barker : "Yes it was - it tended to be - the reviews broke into two parts, the people who had read the comics and the people who hadn't read the comics, right? And those who had read the comics tended to admire the movie more than those who hadn't, curiously, because they knew that many of the things which are in the comic - like the moral ambiguity and the games that are being played between, you know, God, the Devil and John Constantine, are reflected in the movie. I mean very cleverly reflected in the movie, just in the middle you have this non-performance, for me and I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that - just beautiful; beautiful and vacant! " Revelations : "Talking of adaptations, since we last spoke we of course went to see the second part of His Dark Materials at The National Theatre which, as you suspected from reading the text, it flies by, absolutely flies by." Clive Barker : "Is it OK for that?" Revelations : "Yes it was - but it did grate a bit that we lost a whole character, I was sort of wondering, 'What are they going to do next?' and so I was thinking about the structure rather than enjoying it. And the introduction of the Amber Spyglass was just a throwaway single line from one of the witches to replace everything that Mary was there for." Clive Barker : "Yeah, yeah." Revelations : "But then we went to see Philip Pullman and Nicholas Wright at a platform performance. And that was a really interesting evening and one of the first questions was, 'Why on earth did you drop that character?' and the answer was, 'Well, there's an awful lot to get into six hours here,' and interestingly they hinted that it may well be a different decision that's made for the movie." Clive Barker : "I was talking to the guys who are making the movie a few days ago and that's an interesting challenge for those guys over there. There's great difficulties in that book for a large proportion of an American audience; metaphysical difficulties. I mean, the death of The Authority is not something I think we're going to see on screen in the movie adaptation of this book, and yet, how can you not have it? Right?" Revelations : "Which is such a shame because, I mean, England's Christian, mostly, but we seem happier to not share someone's point of view but still accept its possibility and see it as a reasonable challenge to our belief." Clive Barker : "It might be, also, that a theatre audience is actually a smarter audience than a cinema audience and that when you actually have to package this up - I don't know if they're making three movies or one, I suppose they must be making three - package this up for an audience that, you know a cinema audience thinks with its eyes and it really does, I mean more and more movies are just told in pictures and when the words come out of people's mouths they sound pretty wretched! You know, I don't think that George Lucas is actually the best of writers when it comes to actually giving people dialogue, you know?" Revelations : "Whereas I quite like the dialogue; for me there's something about the direction of the people speaking it - although I remember Alec Guinness famously saying that he didn't understand a word of what he was talking about!" Clive Barker : "On the other hand, Ian McDiarmid clearly understands and his lovely speech about, 'There are those who think the dark side, the lessons of the dark side are not entirely natural,' is so, I mean he's not hammy, at all, he's just taking his moment and I enjoyed that immensely - I enjoyed that so much more than the endless chases and fights and, oh yes, just another vista of a new, huge city! Isn't it curious the way CGI has taken some of the glory out of all that? It's all possible now, and given that it's all possible, why would we bother to be impressed?" Revelations : "Well, I come at it from a slightly different way - given that it's all possible, why does the fight on the lava look so bad? I would have dumped the fight on the lava and done it a different way." Clive Barker : "Right - maybe put the actors on real lava! Now that woulda gotta performance!!" Revelations : "Method acting!" Clive Barker : "Right, but when I think back, in 1968, the gates of Rome opening and Cleopatra entering - you're familiar with that scene, right?" Revelations : "Yeah, but that was the most expensive movie of its day, wasn't it." Clive Barker : "A $40 million movie, but man, you knew it was all real and there was a sense of, OK, does it take ten minutes for her to get to Cæsar? Sure it does, but do we care? No, because it's all real. And Anthony Lane in The New Yorker did an hysterically funny piece about Star Wars too, I think I actually have it here, hold on a sec... I love Lane's reviews because he's very funny, very witty, he is very, he just manages to say things and he says he really, really hates Yoda! He says, 'Anakin seems to have problems with his dark side in a way you or I might have tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer: 'Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,' he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time?'" Revelations : "I got a single text message from a guy in LA the night after the premiere where he's just gone to see it and I hadn't spoken to him in a year and a half and I just got a single text message from him that read: 'Good relations with the Wookies have I' and he said he had to do it, it was the greatest line in the whole movie!" Clive Barker : "The one thing he does remark upon - Lane, who is smart - remarks upon how much some of the scenes bring John Martin to mind - the paintings of John Martin, you know? And that's right, that sort of desire for the cataclysmic on some epic scale, you know, it's enough now that I guess you blow up a planet in the first one and build up to a climax, right!" Follow these links across Revelations for more of Clive's thoughts on : Abarat (Books Three and Four) The Scarlet Gospels Tortured Souls movie Midnight Meat Train, Plague - The Films Of Blood Demonik Jump Tribe Weaveworld - TV The Art 3 Visions of Heaven and Hell 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.