interview: Gerald Scarfe

I interviewed Gerald Scarfe at the old Museum of the Moving Image in London in September 1997. The reason was because he had provided design work for Disney's (greatly under-rated) Hercules, and MOMI was showing an exhibition of his work to tie in with the release. He was a lovely guy to interview and just a generally all-round nice bloke. When he saw a little kid pointing at him, he went over and asked if he would like an autograph. I'm posting this here because it's 20 years since Hercules was released.


How did Disney first contact you?
"I was over in Los Angeles doing The Magic Flute with Sir Peter Hall. I’d done the designs and the costumes for that. And one of the Disney artists rang me up and said, ‘Would you like to come round the Disney studios?’ I said yes. His name was Rik Maki, and he said he’d been a fan of my work and that sort of thing and he’d like to show me round. So I had the tour of Disney, which was fascinating, and towards the end he said, ‘Would you be interested in doing anything?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sure.’ He said, ‘Because I think someone might ring you at some point.’ I went back to the opera where Peter Hall was rehearsing and I told him this and he said, ‘Well, you’re alright now then’!

"But then nothing happened. I never heard any more about it for nine months or a year, then suddenly there was a fax or phone call or letter - I can’t remember which one it was now - saying: ‘We are developing a film called Hercules. We would very much like your involvement if you would like to come in as a sort of design consultant. What do you think?’ I thought: ‘Wow!’ They took me on at the beginning on a very sort of impermanent basis. Because at the beginning of all these movies they have designs from anybody just to get ideas flowing and going. I think they asked me for a dozen or so designs but I sent them 40 or 50 - I was so desperate to get the job!

"One of the heads of the studios, Tom Schumacher, came over to my studio where I’d plastered all these drawings on the wall. He was bowled sideways by (a), the size of my drawings, which were about two foot by three foot, and secondly by the colour of them, which was very, very immediate and vibrant. He liked the energy of the drawings and all of that. So he took them back to LA and got the same reaction. I hear all this because I wasn’t there, but apparently they all gathered around and looked at them for hours and said, ‘Wow. Very interesting but we’d never get it into a movie.’ Anyway, the directors, Ron and John...

"Just to go back a little bit, John Musker was growing up in Chicago in the ‘70s - I suppose he was at art school - at the time when I was having exhibitions of my sculptures there. I worked for Time magazine and he’d seen my Time covers and he’d cut those out and kept all my work. He was kind enough to say he’d been a fan over the years. Anyway, Ron and John - John especially, I think - wanted to make it work. So bit by bit they persuaded the artists that this would work. I sent more and more work and actually became very excited myself and more and more involved. It’s difficult for them, who’ve been trained in the Disney method, to step outside that. As John said in one article I read, it’s like suddenly having a tennis coach that tells you the exact opposite of what you’ve been doing for the last 13 years. Your grip’s different, or whatever.

"So they had to relearn. They covered the studio in things saying ‘This is the Scarfe line’, ‘This is how to draw like Scarfe’ - there was someone who was almost like my interpreter who was telling the others how to draw. Some of them adapted to it very quickly, others didn’t. There was some resistance, I read afterwards, but they were all incredibly charming to me. I did about a year’s work over here on my own, going back and forth to LA and showing it to the directors and Peter Schneider who’s the head of the studio. Then after about a year, all these animators came on from other projects - they’d just finished Hunchback and various other things they were working on there - and they took them on holiday with me up to Santa Barbara for about three or four days at the seaside."

That sounds alright.
"Yes, it was alright. Everybody enjoyed that very much, in this very nice Four Seasons hotel. There we had this conference room, where I spread all my work out and explained to them what I was after. How I’d gone back to the Greek vases and looked at the linear quality of those. And how I felt that the keynote of Greek art was its strength and its elegance. I said that I would very much like this to be an elegant film - as well as a funny cartoon. They were very enthusiastic. Then each of my characters that I’d devised - and I designed every one in the film, I didn’t want one to get away because I thought it wouldn’t look like my world. If you had the main characters by me and the other ones by someone else, the two worlds wouldn’t fit together.

"So I designed everything. Each animator takes one character. So I’d be handing over what I thought of as my babies, which I’d been working on for a year, to these animators. One would take Hades, one would take Phil, another would take Hercules. Then they would come to me with their particular problems, like how does Hercules look from the back? Or if Hades hair is going to catch fire, how would this happen? What sort of ears has he got? A million questions about the character. Then they’d put their input in. And if I thought it was getting a bit too Disney or whatever, I would say, ‘Can’t we make those feet a bit smaller?' Or those eyes a bit smaller? Or something, so it wasn’t too ‘cute-y’. I was all the time pressing the directors to just go for it. If you have a bad character or a wicked character, make him truly wicked and carry it through. Don’t say halfway through, ‘Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s a good bloke really.’ If he’s wicked, let’s make him truly wicked. He can still be funny.


"So the first year was me designing alone; the second and third years, after I met them, was really dealing with them. I did a lot of that by fax. Every week they would send me a huge pack of drawings by FedEx and I would select certain ones of those drawings that I thought were indicative of what I wanted to happen and I would go over them with my pencils. Then I’d fax back their drawing and my drawing alongside, so they could see what I’d done. It was mainly making this a bit more elegant, or not quite so obvious, and giving he line a certain look. By this time I was no longer one of the consultants or whatever they call it, I was then production designer. They’d taken me on board completely by then and decided to go with it. To the extent also of not only doing the characters but trying to get the line right, trying to get my look into the movie.  I think there was a breakthrough when some of the animators began to achieve it. Then we projected some of my drawings and they looked very clean and clear and immediate. The images were very clear to see. They weren’t diffused in any way.

"I worked with them for about a year with this FedEx and fax system, so it was in many ways designed by fax, or directed by fax. Then the last year was when the animators had finished their drawings, they then pass them to a department called ‘clean-up’. Whereas an animator might do a rough, fuzzy line, the clean-up people have to do the line which actually appears in the film which has to follow through naturally otherwise it would jump about all over the place. I decided that that was another important spot for me to stand, when it was coming from animators and going to clean-up, it could have gone wrong there. So I stood in the middle and went over a lot of examples of the animators’ drawings for clean-up to follow. That was really the way it was done over those three years."

In creating the characters right at the start, were there descriptions in the script?
"No, there weren’t. There was just a script, like any script. The directors had some ideas. They knew that Phil, for instance, was half-man, half-goat. And he was the only person who we knew was going to play it, so he had to look a bit Danny DeVito-ish. He couldn’t be tall and thin. But there were various things. Like on that, I did loads of drawings and suddenly I realised: if he’s half-goat, why not give him a goatee beard? Well, it’s obvious when you see it, but it isn’t until you think of it. Some of the characters when I was reading the script immediately jumped into my mind, like Zeus and Hera and even the centaur, Nesus. Others, like Hades and Hercules, I had to work on a bit to get them right. Partly because they were the main characters and I knew they’d carry a lot of weight.


"So of course there was some input from the directors, but not a lot. They never ever drew one for me and said, ‘This is what it looks like.’ I sent many, many interpretations. There are about 600 large drawings and literally thousands and thousands of faxes. So there were many interpretations that didn’t get to the screen. For instance in the case of the Hydra, which had to be computerised so they wanted that very early on, I remember I did about 20 drawings of the Hydra, all different, complete variations. So I gave them the choice of what to choose. In Burbank they’d all stand around these drawings and decide. When the Hydra was chosen, it was just one single drawing, ultimately. Then this guy called Kent Melton makes these three-dimensional sculptures of them, and its fed into the computer. You take the points and put it in."

Did the fact that the Hydra was being done by computer affect the way you designed it?
"No, not at all. I didn’t even think of the computer, because I thought that’s their problem. And it was a problem too, because having achieved their computer image, they naturally had to ‘Scarfe it up’ as they called it. They had to make it linear. A computer fist, if it comes forward, it comes forward looking real and not getting that much bigger, but if you draw a punch in cartoon terms, it gets much much bigger until it fills the whole screen, much more than in reality. So you have to cheat the computer to make it do unreality, otherwise the punch would have come forward and it wouldn’t have had the same sort of animated feel."

What was the organisational set-up with the 900 or so animators? Was there a sort of pyramid structure?
"Yes. Peter Schneider is the head of the whole organisation, then there was the the producer, Alice Dewey, then there were Ron and John the directors. Then I worked under those four people, and I would show all my stuff to them. Then it was my job to go to these 15 major animators, highly skilled, top of the field, Disney animators, the guys I met in Santa Barbara. I would talk to one about, say, Hades. He then had a team of, shall we say, ten people working on Hades under him, then they had people under them and so on. So as long as I told the main guy what’s happening, he would hopefully convey it to all the rest. But it’s a bit like Chinese Whispers; the more it goes on, the thinner it gets. It’s very difficult to maintain control over 900 people, but that’s the way it’s done. It’s like the army: you tell the various sergeants what you want and hopefully they tell the privates."


In the exhibition you say that you learnt a lot about your own style from doing this. What did you learn?
"Well, it was these things they kept writing about me on the wall, about the ‘Scarfe curve’ and the ‘Scarfe reverse’. Apparently, when I’m drawing I draw a line and go back on it, or something like that. And there’s the ‘Scarfe scallop’. It’s rather like being psychoanalysed."

Was it like being back at art school?
"No, it wasn’t so much like that. It was just: I didn’t know I did that. It’s like someone saying, ‘You’ve got funny handwriting’: ‘Have I?’ then they say, ‘Yes, look. That’s a funny sort of H.’ And you go, ‘Oh yes, maybe it is.’ A style is something that comes to you naturally."

In terms of the influence of original Greek art on this, did you do a lot of research in museums?
"Yes, I did. I’ve always been a bit of a Grecophile or whatever they call them. I’ve always loved Greek art. It’s a very weird thing, but it’s true: I love Disney, I love Greek art, and I love mythology. All those three elements were in my life early on. Disney very early, and mythology and Greek art around about the age of 15 or 16. I studied on my own, I didn’t go to classes or anything. I bought books on Greek art and just admired its simplicity and shape. At the beginning of this I went to the British museum to look at the Greek vases and studied them and discovered they had this beautiful serpentine line and very, very simple shapes. Which is very close to my style.

"Maybe I’ve been influenced by Greek art way, way back. When I first started drawing in my early days, I used to put every damn thing in: every pimple, every wart, every nostril, every nipple. Every little thing that I could do. Now I tend to go for the overall shape and put the detail in afterwards. It’s rather like some of the Italian painters like Piero de la Francesca. He draws a man in a gown or a cloak, you just get the simple cloak shape, almost like a block. Then he puts all this beautiful Florentine design all over the cloak so it looks extremely complicated, but in actual fact the shape itself is quite simple and straightforward. And all that of course reads very well on film. Because it’s moving fast, the simpler the image is, in a way, the better understood it is. So all that, I think, helped. I really did try to get a Greek influence into the film. But I didn’t go out and slavishly copy across. It was just an assimilation of Greek thoughts and ideas. Artists are sort of like computers themselves: you feed in all this stuff and then it hopefully comes down their arm and out of a pen."

With your experience of caricature, were any of these characters loosely based on real people?
"No, I decided not to. Some of them ultimately swayed towards... Hades for instance. After I’d designed him as a mercurial figure, James Woods, who’s quite a mercurial actor, came in, and the animator Nick and I changed the eyes to look a bit more like James Woods. We changed the lips: James Woods has rather fleshy lips. Little adjustments like that, but only in the case of James Woods and Danny DeVito, a slight leaning towards who they are. But the rest of them, no. I did try a couple of real people, but they didn’t look right. They’ve got to come out of your imagination, really. There’s an artist in the film that everybody’s convinced is me, and probably subconsciously it is me. It’s a painter who’s painting Hercules when he’s extremely famous."

Were you consciously trying to draw stuff that wasn’t Disney style?
"No, I was just trying to draw my stuff, the way I draw. And I must say there was absolutely no effort on their part to say, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit much’ or, ‘Can we make it a bit more rounded and Disney-ish?’ If anything, they encouraged me to go for it and the more extreme my drawings, the more they seemed to like it. Because it was a thrill for them to see something so much outside their style. I kept saying to the animators, ‘Please don’t think that I don’t respect your work. You are the top of your field. You are Disney animators. Don’t feel that I am saying my way to draw is the best way to draw. I’m simply saying that my way to draw is the way the directors would like this film to look. I’m here to help you achieve that if you want to.’ So I was trying to be diplomatic and respectful to them.

"So every effort was made to draw like me. However, in the interpretation, some achieved it better than others, and in some areas it has naturally slipped back to Disney. It’s a strange mixture, Scarfe and Disney, I can see that. In the book, they’ve written that they were after - what’s it called? - ‘Disney-Scarfian-Greco style’. But I think they really tried, I really do. There was definitely no effort to say, ‘Oh, he’s a bit on the dodgy side’ or, ‘That’s a bit much’. Never. Which I expected. I thought, as soon as I went into this project, that I was going to be extremely disappointed at the end. Because Disney is a very, very strong influence, and to arm-wrestle Disney, you don’t have a lot of hope. But I’m quite pleased with the amount I’ve won in this ‘battle’, which it was to a certain extent."

Do you remember when we met at the exhibition launch, there was that woman from the Sunday Times, who wanted to do a piece on you provided you had something bad to say about Hollywood?
"Oh yes! Well, that’s newspaper, isn’t it? It’s crazy. I said to her, ‘Well, if you want a story that isn’t a cliche, this is something that really worked well.’ That’s all they want to hear about Hollywood: it’s a bloody awful place. Which it is, I know. Perhaps I’m lucky. As I said to her, perhaps I’m the only happy person to come out of Hollywood."

Were you drawing turn-around sheets or single drawings?
"I was drawing single drawings initially. Then if they liked that, I did other views. But I never did a model sheet - side, back - they did that. And some of them, Ken Melton did models of - so you could turn that model and look at it. The major characters are done in three-dimensional model form so that the animator can just turn them and see what happens at the back. Some of them are a bit tricky from the back, or from above or from down below. I had to answer some questions. For instance, the guy who drew Zeus, I remember him coming to me and saying, ‘I’ve got his face right’ - I showed him how to draw the face - ‘But I’ve got this real problem. Because Zeus is so big I’m looking up under his chin. What does his beard look like underneath? How does it join his neck?’ So then I had to think about that myself, because it’s not an angle you normally see. But once a character is created, I would know what goes on. It’s like people who are writing books say, once they’ve invented a character, ‘Oh he wouldn’t do that. That’s not possible for this character.’ And I would know, once I’ve invented or designed these characters, what is possible under there. He wouldn’t have a thin neck - he’s Zeus - but I would know how it joins and so on."


Did you design the colours for the characters as well?
"To a certain extent. All my work is coloured and the palette we went for was influenced by the land of Greece itself: the olives and browns and rust-colours of that country. So I had a couple of sessions on the computer colouring things with the art director, and influenced it. I said, for instance, ‘These are gods. They haven’t got to be pink-faced.’ They’d done Pegasus in a sort of dull colour. It didn’t look like I’d imagined it. So I immediately made him white with a blue mane, which made him look something unusual. So yes, I did have an interest. But partly because I wasn’t there all the time, a lot of stuff had to go on without me, naturally. They sent as much as they could to check, but it’s just a huge locomotive once it gets moving. You know how many drawings there are and how much work goes into it. It just gets steaming down the track in the last year and it’s very difficult to turn certain things round."

Can any figure that’s drawn be animated?
"Well, I think anything can be animated but that’s because it comes from my imagination. I think my drawing of my imagination was sometimes very difficult for them to realise because I draw in a very graphic way. When I do a couple of lines, I imagine those lines enclosing a volume. Rather like Matisse, towards the end of his life, he could draw a naked woman with a line that side and a line that side. That contained the volume of that woman’s body, her full fleshiness. And I tried to do that with my drawings, but I think in the interpretation some people found it difficult to see what I mean, graphically. But I can see what I mean. The Hydra, for example, when it turns, is like a lot of snakes, so that was difficult, but that was on computer so that’s how you sort that out I suppose."

Is there any difference between designing human, non-human and semi-human characters?
"Very much so, yes. Especially for me. Most easy I found the monsters and the wicked characters. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s just me."


They’re the most fun to play.
"Maybe that. The most difficult ones were the human beings. Hercules and Meg were difficult for me because not only were they human beings, but they were the lead characters. He had to be hunky and handsome, she had to be pretty and attractive. They had to be all these things, and yet still fit into the world we’d created of these mythological beasts. I had difficulty I must say, with Hercules. At one time we thought he should be like the young Paul Newman, or even the young Elvis. That kind of Greek look: the straight nose, the wide-spaced eyes, the strong jaw, the thick neck. But the animator who came onto that, Andreas, is very, very experienced. He’s the guy who did Scar in The Lion King. I think this is the first time he’s done a hero - he’s usually done the villain. And he helped tremendously with that. With the human beings I was a bit at sea. I was fine with the wicked characters and the monsters."

Was it because Hercules and Meg are sympathetic characters and your drawings tend towards the grotesque?
"Yes, caricature is a grotesque art, and one couldn’t really caricature Hercules and Meg too much because once you caricature a good-looking person, all you can say about a good-looking person is not so much that they are not good-looking but that they are vain, they are stupid, they are empty-minded. You can say those things about them but you can’t really distort their nose right out there because they don’t have a nose right out there. You couldn’t do that and still make it look like them. So they had to look reasonably human.

"Yes, I’m known for tending towards the grotesque, but there’s acres and acres of my work which is not generally known. I think I’m mostly recognised for my political caricature in which I deal with politicians and those in power. I don’t like politicians so I really go for them. But if I’m designing an opera or a theatre piece - or indeed the Disney piece - it’s a complete world. They’re not all wicked: there are goodies and there are baddies. So if I’m designing a whole world, I have to design reasonable people as well as bad people. So I’m quite used to doing that, but that’s not what I’m generally known for. For instance in The Magic Flute, the one that I did with Sir Peter Hall, all the goodies looked quite nice. They’re not going around all distorted with club feet."

So was designing this similar to designing for an opera?
"Yes, I suppose it is. I think I approach everything exactly the same. When I was given my first opera, which was Orpheus in the Underworld - the ENO gave me that - I thought, ‘Ooh, hello: opera. This is smart, this is intellectual.’ And I started looking rather stupidly at opera design. It seemed to be huge drapes and great big black girders, lots and lots of monotone. I did a series of designs influenced by that, and David Powteney of the ENO looked at them and it was a very difficult moment. I was trying to do something else, and suddenly I got it. What they wanted from me was what I do anyway. They had come to me for what I do, not for what somebody else does.

"And so, having learnt that lesson, 25 years ago or whenever it was, I now know that if people come to me, they come to me for what I do. When I worked with the Pink Floyd, when they first sent me their tapes I tried to do something that was ‘from the cosmos’, that was out there and unknown. In actual fact, I realised much later that what they wanted was what I do all the time: fat grotesque businessmen or whatever. So I’m not influenced by the job. I do try and find a way of varying it, not making it always look the same."

How different was this from working on the animated sections of The Wall?
"Well, the animated sections of The Wall I had much more control over because I was directing. I designed it and wrote it really, and directed it - the animated bits. Whereas on this I was just a production designer and in charge of the animators. The Wall was very much smaller, a much smaller crew. I should think, tops, that was about 40 people. I had probably five main artists I had to work with. And I managed to convince them that you don’t have to draw like Tom and Jerry, you don’t have to draw like Disney. There is another way for animation to go.

"Not that I’m against Tom and Jerry and Disney, but I wanted to make them relearn. It’s very difficult to make people relearn. They think, ‘Why should I?’ All of us, when we’re in trouble, we fall back on what we know, we don’t really want to try something new. I think everybody’s tempted by something new - ‘That would be fun. It’s a real challenge.’ - but whether they can achieve it is another matter. Then if they can’t achieve it, they fall back on the way they’ve always done it because that’s comfortable and they know where they’re going."

Was the experience of animation useful in knowing how these characters were going to be treated?
"Oh yes. I really learnt from The Wall. First of all, back in the ‘70s I went to Los Angeles and did a film called Long Drawn Out Trip which I drew the whole thing myself on 70mm film."


Good lord!
"It was supposed to be for BBC television, they were the ones who sent me to use a sort of computerised system. And to my horror when I got there it was not computerised at all. What I’d heard was that you drew one frame and then another frame and then the computer would fill in, say, three to four frames in the middle. I thought, ‘That’s not possible. How’s it going to do that?’ Of course you can now. But when I went there I discovered it was really a system of dissolves. They would dissolve between this image and that image, so it was really a series of melting images, one coming and one going all the time.

"When I discovered that I got very despondent and thought about coming home. But I thought No, I’ve come all this way. I’ll really try and make a go of it.’ So I drew every frame myself, and I started making them closer together, because I realised with this dissolve system you couldn’t make them too far apart otherwise it jumped. So I stayed there and I drew this stream of consciousness about America at the time. What was happening in the '70s was black power, Coca Cola, Playboy magazine, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse... I did Mickey Mouse on drugs, which I showed to the Disney people. There was then a hushed silence."

You’re probably one of the few people to have got away with something like that.
"Yes, and the BBC showed it too, so they’ll probably come steaming in for a huge commission now. So I haven’t really much done animation myself, but I’m not a professional animator. I couldn’t animate like the Disney guys do. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have that patience to be able to sit there hour after hour doing that. I discovered when I was directing The Wall that animators must go at their own pace. Because I used to think, ‘We’re not getting enough footage in. Can’t we speed up? Can’t we do this?’ I would go in and give them this pep talk about getting more done and pushing on, and it would just upset them all. They’d all get jangled nerves, and at the end of the week I’d find I’d achieved less than I normally would, by upsetting them. So eventually I thought ,‘Well, they’ve got to sit there with their ear-pieces listening to Radio One or Radio Four or whatever it is, and doing it at their speed.’"

Do you have any influence on the spin-off TV series or any of the merchandise?
"No, I haven’t had any influence on that. They tell me that they’re going back to my drawings to take other characters from those. There’s a whole mass of characters that didn’t appear in the movie. People who were planned. And there are those I did quite elaborate drawings of, like Medusa, who’s in the exhibition: she’s in the movie about two seconds. You’ve got to be very quick to spot her. She doesn’t look much like that. But I’ve done something on the website. I’ve taken part in as many things as I can, but I haven’t had anything to do with the spin-offs or the TV series."

If they offered you another film like this, would you take it?
"Yes, I think I would. Partly because I’ve enjoyed it so much and everybody was so incredibly kind to me. And I did think (a) they would alter my work tremendously, and (b) I’d heard so many horrible stories about Hollywood. But they were all extremely nice. They were all very laid back and very Californian, walking round in jeans and T-shirts all the time. There was no feeling of hierarchy over there. Just a feeling of trying to achieve the best art possible. I don’t feel any cynicism there - going for this or going for that for any particular reason. But then I suppose to a certain extent I’ve benefited from being in England. I didn’t get too much caught up in the system. Every time I went over there with a new batch of drawings, I was welcomed because I brought new stuff. Maybe if I’d been on the spot all the time it might have got little more tired."


Are you completely happy with the way the film’s turned out?
"Yes. But having said that, I’m never completely happy with anything that I do, even if I’ve got complete control over it myself. It’s just part of being an artist - or anybody of a creative nature. You just always see the worst bits, when you look at something. I’ve done it many times. Sometimes I can look at a drawing of mine and there’s just one line out of place, but that one line jumps out at me. It looks like a California tree trunk rather than a tiny line. You always tend to be self-critical. If you’re going to push on and try things, you are self-critical. But I’m incredibly flattered that they asked me. It’s the first time they’ve ever asked an outside designer in, and the first time the designer’s been allowed to stay around for the whole movie and have that much influence, and altered the look of the movie. So I’ve achieved a lot more than I though I would achieve."

website: www.geraldscarfe.com

interview: Warren Dudley

In June 2017, Warren Dudley kindly answered some questions about his film Cage.


What are the practical pros and cons of shooting a film with one actor on one set?
"I have to say the best thing about working in one location and with one actor on screen is that you can shoot the whole movie in order. You NEVER get to do this usually. It makes telling the story so much easier because you can see it happening right in front of you. The downside I suppose is that you can all get a bit stir crazy after ten 12-hour days in a damp warehouse with just a cage in it -  so you need to really get on with your crew... this was put to the test a few times!"

I’m assuming you wrote this with Lucy-Jane Quinlan in mind. What did she bring to the role and the film? 
"I worked with Lucy on The Cutting Room and thought she was massively talented... and almost as importantly a right laugh. I didn’t audition anyone else for the role which probably goes against all the rules a bit but it just seemed right. Luckily for me her performance was incredible. To bring so much emotion to the part whilst also pulling off an immaculate US accent is quite an achievement. In short - Lucy-Jane Quinlan should be famous and it confuses me as to why she isn’t yet."

What did you learn on The Cutting Room that you were able to use when making Cage?
"Write to your budget. The budgets on both films were similar (about £20K) but with TCR we had multiple locations and a big cast so it gets spread a bit thin. Saying that I am still really proud of it – it still gets some nice reviews around the internet. With Cage I wanted to put all the money on screen. So between Lucas (DOP), Lucy, the talented crew and myself I think we succeeded in making something that looks like it has a bigger budget.


"One Amazon viewer, attempting to be rude, said – ‘If this is all that Hollywood can come up with we’re in trouble’... I took this as a massive compliment! Little did they know it was shot in rainy Newhaven in an old warehouse."

There are two endings on the DVD. Why did you decide on the ending you chose? (I will spoiler-protect your answer!)
"Lucas and I talked and debated for hours on which ending to use and went with the one we did just because we both felt the film may lose some of its impact if you suddenly introduced lots of other characters at the end. I think of all the people who have mentioned the endings it’s about 50/50 so I still don’t know if I made the right decision!"

What aspect of the film are you most proud of? What would you change if you could?
"I like to think that it stands up as a legitimate piece of film-making and not a well-meaning low budget effort. The twist at the start of the third act is something I am pleased with but has really split the audience – some thinking it’s a stroke of genius others informing me that it’s incredibly offensive... often in not such polite terms. I think it’s the former obviously!

"What would I change? I think if I could I would have gone for a metal cage. Once again, we toyed with it for ages but decided that the wood would be so much more beautiful on film... and it is. A lot of people (yourself included) have mentioned that she could have tried to escape with a bit more vigour so in hindsight I would have added a couple of scenes early on with Gracie attacking the cage..."


What are you working on now? 
"I wrote a screenplay called The Bromley Boys which was made last year and stars Alan Davies and Martine McCutcheon. It’s about a young lad in the early '70s who supports the world’s worst football team. I’ve seen the film and it’s amazing – I really hope the footballing public agrees. I think they are hoping for a cinema release late in the year... very exciting.

"Personally, my next one will be another low budget horror called Prankz starring Betsy-Blue English – a film about a pair of YouTube pranksters who get in to all sorts of horror film trouble. We start filming in late August."

website: www.sixty6media.co.uk

interview: Mark J Howard

I reviewed Mark J Howard's debut feature Lock In, a tale of corporate coulrophobia, in 2014. Three years later, the film was released on DVD on  both sides of the Atlantic as Clown Kill, so I took the opportunity to ask Mark for an interview and he provided these great, detailed answers.


What was the original inspiration for Lock In? How well do you think you achieved what you set out to do?
"We’d been renting a huge business suite in a modern office block at the foot of Pendle Hill (home of the infamous Pendle Witches in the 17th Century), to serve as production office and edit booths while we were working on a series of TV ads and other advertising films, and it was a bit creepy at night, to say the least. Pipes would expand and contract, floors creaked, dodgy electrics made the lights flicker and go out and the regular winds barrelling down Pendle Hill would howl around the corners of the building, which kind of puts you on edge when you’re in the building on your own. When you’ve been working at the office for 48 hours straight to meet a deadline, your mind doesn’t always  think straight. Then, on the way out, the lift got stuck, and I hate lifts, almost as much as I dislike clowns, so the seeds were already starting to grow.

"The story developed over the next few months as we workshopped ideas with the already-cast actors. I think we achieved our goal by introducing a creepy new clown, and I was happy with the comedic chemistry with the security guards, but we dropped a major bollock and didn’t notice until we were in the edit. In the original script the clown breaks the fourth wall as he regularly addresses the audience between kills, which makes more sense once you’ve seen the end scene and know where the character of Jenny is at, but in the edit it suddenly looked like we were trying to rip off Funny Man, and not doing it very well. So, at the last minute I brought in my long-term collaborator, actor and comedian Peter Slater, we sat down at the editor and chopped things away, reduced or removed all of Charlie Boy’s one-liners and pieces to camera, heavily toned down Jenny’s drunken pub attack scene, and added more security guards stuff for balance. The end result is one huge compromise.

"During filming one of the leads had serious personal issues going on, and she became difficult to nail down, so that brought a whole slew of new problems that had to be addressed during the shoot. We’d only budgeted for a 21 day shoot, and we managed to shoot it in exactly 21 days, but it was one nightmare after another. I’m happy with the finished film, but if luck and circumstance had been on our side on the day, it could have been so much better."

What aspect of the film do you think works best, and what aspect would you change if you could?
"The personality clashes between shop-steward Gobby Karen and John the Boss are my favourite performances in the film,  Rachel was an absolute revelation, her sense of timing is better than any comedian I’ve ever worked with. She hit every beat, delivered every time, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before. If I could change anything I’d have found a way to reinstate some of the excised clown footage, Roy’s amazing in the role, and some of my favourite scenes are the ones we had to cut out. That’s usually the way though."

How did you assemble your cast, and what effect has Jessica Cunningham’s subsequent reality TV career had on awareness of your film?
"Apart from Rachel (who plays Gobby Karen) and Holly (Sally), the script was written personally for the actual actors who starred in the film. Rachel and Holly were late additions to the repertory company I’ve been building over the last 20 years; so I knew who would be playing what character as  I wrote the script. We’d just come off a series of TV commercials with Jessica, and I’d had a big public row with her in a Costa, and I knew I’d found my feisty office worker that day.


"Two hours after Jessica was confirmed as an Apprentice contestant, my phone went absolutely crazy, as the press bombarded me with questions. All of the major tabloids had found out about her 'clown rape' past and wanted to know more. It was actually my very significant birthday that day and I was pissed up. My wife banned me from speaking to the press in case I got carried away or said something I might later regret, so I had to let Roy (Basnett) do the talking, and as a result we got some great sensationalist headlines in the national tabloids. I imagine some of her fans might be curious enough about the film to watch it, but other than that I doubt her rapid rise up the greasy celebrity pole would benefit the film.

"She’s been really busy these last few months with her fashion brand and new-found fame, so we haven’t managed to catch up on things, but before she hit the limelight we had a chat and she did agree to do the sequel. We had two huge fans of Jessica, who are also top-flight footballers from a famous northern club, make an offer to finance a sequel under the Enterprise Investment Scheme, but a week later the Inland Revenue started cracking down on footballers investing in fake films to offset their taxes, and they got cold feet. Got a great script out of it, though, featuring Charlie Boy’s Undead Army of Clowns. If this first film is well received, and if there’s a market there, the sequel might just happen."

What are your favourite slashers and/or clown horror movies?
"I was never a fan of the Halloween films (though I’m a big fan of the third one), but I loved the first couple of Friday the 13th’s. I abandoned that franchise when I went to see Part 3 in 3D on its initial release, and the projectionist got the lens assembly on wrong and completely ruined the presentation. Huge fan of European slashers, especially love Stage Fright and Amsterdamned, but don’t watch clown films. Like I say, clowns and lifts, not my bag. I don’t think I was abused by a clown as a child, but I think something must have happened to fuel my unease about them. The new adaptation of It looks fun, though, but Tim Curry’s a hard act to follow."


What have you been working on since finishing Lock In?
"Adverts and pop promos have been the bread and butter that keeps the wolf at bay, We’ve shot a big zombie film set in Liverpool, about a terrorist attack on Ellesmere Port petro-chemical plant, just at the moment they are destroying an experimental battlefield biological weapon developed by the Russians and seized in Syria. The resulting gas cloud threatens an extinction-level event as it slowly creeps across the UK in real time, turning the victims into blood-crazed zombies. The film is called Undead Air and will hopefully be ready by the end of the year. It’s quite heavy on visual fx, but I’ve a great team doing some amazing work.

"At the moment we’re  just prepping our new docu-drama American Psychopath – the Ripper of Whitechapel, which is a period piece bringing a post-modern, fresh perspective on the Jack the Ripper case. We’re shooting this in 4K and Super 16, with the murders being covered by raw and grainy Super 8 on my trusty old Beaulieu, filming begins second week of May for three weeks. Because we’re still having to work on promo films for clients, our more narrative films tend to take forever to complete, but we’ve a delivery deadline for the Ripper film so it’s all hands on deck. Both films will feature the same cast and crew, with a few additions, that made Lock In."

Finally, can you tell me a bit about the super 8 films you used to make with Tony Luke?
"I miss Tony so much, and it doesn’t feel like fifteen months since we lost him. We got to know each other in the very early '80s. We were the same age, both at secondary school, both making animated super 8 monster movies,  and we both contributed to Junior Filmworld, a magazine/newsletter for wannabe junior super 8 Spielbergs. Tony lived in the North East and I lived in Manchester, so hundreds of miles apart, but he used to ring regularly and we’d post our only prints of our latest films to evaluate each others work. We’d swap ideas, script notes, designs and special fx techniques we’d discovered, and generally encourage each other.

"He found a supplier in the States who could provide T rex latex skins, all ready for you to insert an armature into, and he was off. His films always had more pazzaz than mine, my always came back with the note 'Sorry, your splices didn’t go through the projector too well'. Tony was my first animation collaborator, albeit long-distance, and somewhere I’ve got a box of photos of his animation creations, including his first Satannus puppet. I need to find it and pass it on to his sister Fran for the archive.

"When we premiered Lock In I spoke to Tony, he asked me if I’d be interested in directing a project he had in mind. I was busy, I said if he could postpone a few months I’d be able to discuss it further and commit. It never happened. A few months later Tony started with his back and neck pain, and he had to focus on getting better. I was sure he’d beat it again, he was a real fighter. It’s a weird thing when someone you’ve known since you were kids dies, makes you put things into perspective. Facebook hasn’t been the same since he left."

website: www.clownkill.com

interview: Grant McPhee

After I reviewed arty Scottish vampire chiller Night Kaleidoscope, director/producer Grant McPhee very kindly answered a few questions by email.


In what way do you consider Night Kaleidoscope to be ‘punk rock cinema’?
"It's more an attitude. We took the  'don't need permission' and DIY approach from punk, rather than the spikey haired three-chord version. And I think that's an attitude that every indie filmmaker should take. Just get out there and do it.

"Additionally, it was a pretty rocky production. I had fantastic production support. I like controlled chaos, so there is always a strong semblance of structure - just with an ability to improvise within that. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong went wrong and it became very much an adapt-to-survive approach. All very seat of your pants. There was no script as such. I was shooting a feature for a friend that finished on the Saturday, we filmed on the Monday and I went onto another feature the following Monday. Just picking up a camera and making it up - which you can tell in a fair few places! It's more an attitude of production - as the film is really a bit prog rock! You can achieve special things working this way, but it does not always work out and what you gain in places you lose in others."

Why has it taken three years to be released?
“Due to the shear amount of other work I had on, the film just sat on the shelf. I just had no time to look at it, or even think about it until I could squeeze in one day in 2015 for a pickup. My day job was taking about 15 hours a day and I had a documentary to finish - we had a TV and large festival slot for that but had not actually finished the film, so every second was taken up. A few days without sleep.

"Without knowing what we had in the can we managed another pickup at the end of 2016, for what we assumed was needed. It was edited fairly sporadically from mid 2016 as our editor had to work on it in between jobs. This was the first time we really saw it, and realised we needed an extra couple of scenes. Again it went a bit 'fly by the seat of your pants' and I ended up covering my hotel room in tinfoil, getting Patrick, Jason and Kitty around and throwing blood all over the place. Not sure what the other guests made of that, but we had no complaints. So, although it was started a long time ago it was only put together very quickly towards the end.

"There was actually very little post production work done. Nearly all the images were made in camera. I just held a couple of pieces of glass at angles in front of the camera. One with food dye on it and the other to reflect or project images onto it. The only real bit of post was a shot of eyes turning white."

How satisfied are you with the way that the film turned out?
“In some respects it's amazing there is a film there. But really nobody outside of your friends or other filmmakers care how little time a film took to make, or how small the budget was. Films only stand on how good they are.


"The film is what I wanted to make; in that respect I'm happy. Overall I just wanted to try something different whether it was a failure or not. Some of it worked and some, well not as much. Mainly not having a story! I think you're certainly right about the repetition, though I was very keen on a visual art film with poetic flourishes. I just maybe put a bit too many in! But I'd rather have a film that got one star where we'd tried something that was different than three stars for something that's like every other film.

"I just have no interest to try and copy anyone, a style or a current genre. And if that means some people hate a film, I'm fine with that! I can see where the flaws are, but that's also something I'm happy with. it's a bit more human. People these days are not allowed to make mistakes and learn. Things are too neat and shiny. Rough edges can be good. I'm most satisfied with what I've learned. That's the way to progress. I'm not afraid of failure, what you learn from it is important to your next movie."

What exactly is a ‘Digital Imaging Technician’?
"Ha, a Digital Imaging Technician - also known as a DIT is a geeky guy who sits next to a DoP at a monitor and manipulates the image to suit the DP's intended look."

What is Tartan Features?
"Tartan Features is part of Year Zero Filmmaking. It's a bit like an indie record label where a collective of film-makers make micro budget feature films that share a certain vision. We've made about 13 so far - it's open to anyone in the world. It just happens to have started in Scotland but you don't have to be from there. We've had a few good successes. One film allowed the director to go on to have a well-funded next feature. At its heart it's just people who get up from their seats and make a film, help grow an industry and learn. Here's a link (click on the pictures for more info on each film) - www.yearzerofilmmaking.com/tartanfeatures"


What’s next for you?
"I'm a week away from shooting a new feature. This time something very different  It has a story for starters. People do and say things without 15 minutes of trippy visuals (only five). We're taking two weeks to make it, the budget is more, we're paying everyone. We've got a great cast, script and crew, and I'm very excited. It's a little like Blood on Satan's Claw, Picnic at Hanging Rock and less Night Kaleidoscope. You'll definitely know it's one of my films though. I'll tell you all about it soon!"

interview: Sir Ian McKellen

When I posted four questions to 100 Big Names in January 2017 to celebrate my website's 15th anniversary, my wife doubted that I would hear back from anyone. Well, she didn't take into account what a top bloke Sir Ian McKellen is. I received these answers in a hand-signed letter dated 2nd February.


Which technological or social development during your career has changed cinema the most?
"The advance of television outlets so that the old rivalry between small and large screen has been transformed and most of us now see films at home rather than in a movie theatre."

Which deceased film-maker or actor do you wish you could have worked with?
"Orson Welles."

What is the one question you’re fed up with answering in interviews?
"Why did you play this part?"

What would you rather be asked instead?
"Would you like me to stop asking you questions?"

website: www.mckellen.com

interview: Nigel Kneale

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the one thousandth item posted onto my site. I wanted to post something special so I had a look through my interview archive and found this massive interview with the legendary creator of Quatermass. This was conducted at Nigel Kneale’s home in April 1996. An edited version was published in SFX; here’s the full transcript.


You started writing short stories. When was your first professional sale?
“Oh, a long, long time ago. I should think it must have been around 1942 or something. A lot of my stuff was published in short story magazines which no longer exist. They did then, including American ones which were very good, and they took quite a bit of my stuff. But it wasn't science fiction.”

Some of your stories like 'Minuke' have a horror element.
“Yes, some of them did, but some did not at all. I was really, I suppose, trying to find out what I could do, and trying every kind of story.”

For Tomato Cain and Other Stories, you won the Somerset Maugham prize. Did that affect your career at all?
“Well, I suppose any kind of literary prize is a plus. And it certainly did help me to get into the BBC a year or two later. You say to them ‘Look, I've won a prize.’ and it makes them feel a bit more enthusiastic about you. Mind you, the result of it was very little because there was no posting at that time for writers. They didn't believe in them. They didn't even commission new material much. They tended to use stage plays: dress them up and simplify them for television, and that was it. The idea of writing new material as fiction was very limited. They did a certain number of documentaries but very few pure stories, and that's what I wanted to do.

“So mostly I found myself doing scissors-and-paste jobs, cleaning up stage plays, simplifying things that looked like insuperable problems: an actor might have to appear on two sets more or less instantly, one after the other. Now you'd just cut, but in those days the actor had to physically get across from one side of the set to the other side. So obviously some allowance had to be made for this. There were various ways of doing it. Very primitive, because the whole system was primitive. It was really a matter of dodging.”


As I understand it, The Quatermass Experiment was written to fill a gap.
“It was, yes. I think they had some serials. That was about the only live thing that went on in the drama department. This form of ‘six half-hour parts’ thriller. And actually it was a very good form, because you could do quite a lot with it. You'd got time to play with; you've got time to develop characters and stories and so on. At the same time, you're not lumbered with long stretches: one-hour or two-hour things. You can move the story more rapidly, and that was quite important. It was the only real invention in the drama style, and it was still a very valid one. Because now the budget and everything is so different, it probably isn't as useful, but it was then, and I felt very happy with that.”

Why did you go for a science fiction story?
“It really wasn't a science fiction story. It was a story for a general audience who really didn't care tuppence for science fiction - any more than I did - but would be interested in a thriller, which moved very fast for those days and presented that kind of awful dilemma that had grown out of an attempt to do what was on the edge of the possible, it seemed to me, which was to go into space. But what grew out of that - because that was all over in the first quarter of an hour - the rest of the story was about the awful thing that might happen. It was a version really of ‘Could something terrible come back from space?’ because nobody knows. Might it all be a horrendous mistake? What might come back? It was a quest story with a horrid result. And it was on something that was just beginning to be talked about in sensible, serious newspapers.”


Was there a feeling at that time that Britain could have a viable space programme?
“Yes, I think there was just beginning to be. You see, no rockets had been seriously invented since the V2, by the Germans, and that was a military rocket, nothing else. But the old V2s, such as could be grabbed by the Americans and the Russians were being taken away and experimented with, to see if they could develop a real intercontinental rocket and kill each other. So there was a big race on there, but of course it was all secret. At the same time it was obvious that this would be the next kind of move - into space. Everybody I suppose guessed that this would happen fairly shortly, and it did. It wasn't very long before the Russians launched their Sputnik. That was 1957, and that was only four years after The Quatermass Experiment.”

Were you aware when you wrote it that it was the first science fictional series on British television?
“I do remember that it was necessary to explain what the story was at the beginning. You couldn't just have a rocket and say there were men in this rocket, because it wouldn't have been credible. We had to explain what a rocket was, really. And also the problem was that a rocket had stages. That was a real pill because nobody could grasp that. A rocket would be a thing like a V2 that had no stages, just a pointy end and blunt end. But once you began to think about a serious rocket - particularly that included what was then a nuclear-propelled stage - then you had a rocket that would come apart and each bit would fire on the next bit. That was a totally wild idea; nobody had ever seen one. And the audience had largely never heard of it, so you had to explain what it was that poor old Quatermass was trying to do, that he had this machine that he'd invented. Then you could go from there and tell the story.”

There were six episodes of this, and the BBC's only got two.
“That's right. They were going to record the whole thing. They did record the first two episodes, and they decided in their wisdom not to do any more. They were, I suppose, a little bit expensive, because there was no tape or anything. They had to be filmed off a tube which meant a half-hour's film, at 35mm, had to be devoted to this, because it was canned, and they didn't want the expense.”

Do you think it's possible that there could be some private off-air recordings? I know some of the early Doctor Whos have survived because somebody stuck an 8mm camera in front of the television. The quality's terrible, but it's better than nothing.
“Not much better, but I doubt if at that time anybody even knew the technique. The idea of putting a camera in front of a tube was so extraordinary that most of the population would never have heard of it. You very rarely see recordings, because the crudity was unimaginable at that time. I remember some drama I had to do with, and a character had to come in and produce an egg, and simply say, ‘Look at this.’ I forget what significance it had. But you couldn't tell what it was! The image was so fuzzy and ill-defined, I had to give him the line: ‘…this egg.’ You had that all the time. Things were not clear, and had to be made clear very simply for the audience who couldn't guess what was on their nine-inch screens. That didn't help either.”

Had you seen any of Hammer's earlier films before they made The Quatermass Xperiment?
“No, I hadn't. I'd never heard of them. They'd done a whole lot of stuff. They tended to pick up radio series and film them. Sometimes they got some downmarket ex-Hollywood star who had fallen on hard times, been hit for tax or something, and was glad of the cash. But they were really terrible films, made on an infinitely low budget. And funny times: 27 minutes long or 53 minutes. You wondered what they did with them.”

There were a few films afterwards that were fairly unashamed rip-offs of The Quatermass Xperiment, such as First Man into Space. Have you ever seen any of those?
“No. I've got something better to do. It only makes you cross if you suspect a rip-off. You go and see it and it isn't at all, it gives you the horrors of what you did.”

Do you think that, if you had scripted the first film, you could have produced a better screenplay?
“I'm sure I could have done better than what they had. It was just bad in many ways. Not entirely. It tripped along at a fair speed, but there were so many things wrong with it I couldn't begin to list them. This sort of thing, just to pick one at random. We had, in the story, a policeman - Detective Inspector or something from Scotland Yard - and he was played by a rather elegant actor and he gave a very subtle performance in the TV serial and it helped a great deal to bind the thing together, the whole story. And we had a very good actor called Reggie Tate, and he was absolutely excellent. He was troubled and bothered and anxious and very energetic at the same time; absolutely super.

“In the Hammer version, what had you got? Brian Donlevy who was permanently drunk. There's no other way to describe it. He only got the job because they wanted to have an American star and he was going cheap, so they got him. And our clever policeman was replaced by Jack Warner. He was a trundling common cop who had somehow risen through the ranks. It downgraded the whole thing into a sort of dizzy nonsense, because these weren't characters, they were just stuffed things.

“As for Donlevy - unbelievable. He just shouted. He had no idea what the story was supposed to be about, he just barked his way through it. He was quite terrible. They would do that, they would take dictation from the American distributors: 'If you don't have him and her - goodbye. It doesn't matter about the story; just have those two, and then we'll book it.' They just wanted the poster in; it didn't matter about the script.”


When you wrote Quatermass 2, why did you go for a continuation of that character, rather than just writing a stand-alone serial?
“There was no reason to. I knew him by that time. I knew him and his set-up, so we used it again. Otherwise you have to start from scratch, explaining how the rockets work.”

Was it your idea to do a sequel, or was it the BBC's?
“No, I think I thought of it. There must have been a certain pressure to write another one, but that didn't commit you to anything. The producer was quite keen on another one, and it just naturally happened.”

As far as I can tell it was the first ever sequel which is just a name with a number after it. You used to get Son of... and Return of... and now you just get So and So Part 8.
“(Laughs) Oh yes.”

Was there ever any intention to give it a different title?
“No, it was just Quatermass 2 and I thought: 'That'll do'. Then I rationalise it, that that was the name they had given the rocket.”

Yes, it's seen on a blackboard behind him at one point.
“That explained it. The rocket had been given his name. Strange, isn't it? Because there was quite a crop of lazy titles after that.”


You also did a very, very good adaptation of 1984.
“Yes, that happened between the first two series. That was more of a technical exercise than anything, of just being able to cope with an extremely complex story in the live studio. It was a fairly hairy-raising experience and it took a lot of dodging to make it possible in live terms. It had been on the boil as an idea for several years, but somehow nobody ever seemed to crack it. So I wrote the script and Rudy Cartier the producer said, 'Yes, I can do that. We can make it work, given the right people.'

“They got the right people. Peter Cushing, in the days before he was Van Helsing and all that nonsense, when he was really acting. He was one of the first real television actors. He loved doing it. He felt: 'Here we've got an audience of x million; let's show what I can do.' He was quite excellent, as was Yvonne Mitchell, who again was devoted to television. And Donald Pleasance - it was one of the first things Donald did. It was an absolutely first class cast, which made all the difference, and always will. We've had duff casts, and this is what happened ten, twelve years later when the same production was mounted with a much weaker cast. It nosedived.”

Was it your script?
“The same script, just slightly updated. Christopher Monaghan produced it and directed it. Possibly people felt, 'Oh yes, I remember this one...' but I don't think it was the reason. I think it was a cast that was nowhere near as good. The original also had Andre Morrell who was wonderful. In the second version they had Joseph O'Connell who was also wonderful, but he was the only good one. They didn't have a Donald Pleasance or a Peter Cushing or an Yvonne Mitchell.”

Do you think Rudolph Cartier's input was very important to these productions?
“Yes because he was a very bold director. Of course Monaghan was a very bold director too. I think in the case of those two I wouldn't choose between them. But Rudy was doing his ten, twelve years earlier, and the equipment he had to use was much cruder. So considering that he had to beat that, he did wonders. The whole story of 1984 is that somebody stole a key prop.”

Ah, the paperweight story.
“The paperweight story. It was the worst thing that could happen because it was live. Peter Cushing had to come into a scene that was supposedly a junk shop that was actually sponsored by the State Police, and he picks up a paperweight and admires it: 'What wonderful things we used to have in the old world.' Somebody stole it just before transmission. The show had to go on, so they blacked the studio out: 'Will the person who has taken that prop please put it back.' 'No, I've got it and I'm going to give it to the wife.' So the assistant stage manager had to go home by bus where her little sister had one of these things. It was nothing like as good as the one we had, but it was something for Peter to pick up.”

Wasn't it Mickey Mouse?
“Mickey Mouse, with snowflakes.”

But then that gives it a whole different twist.
“It does rather, but it was the only one so that's how we had to do it. They always did the show twice, live, in a week, and I think by the second version - they wouldn't have got the original - but they'd got something that looked like it. But that was a hazard, a horrendous thing. Because you have to think very quickly. What do you do? Either stop the show and say, 'We can't proceed because a key prop has gone.' or do what we did.”


Is it true, this story about the bloke who swept up the snow while you were filming The Creature?
“Oh yes! Twice! They got him afterwards and Rudy said, 'Bring him to me. Why did you do that?' He said, 'Well, I wanted to go home early.' 'Why should you go home early when everybody else has to stay?' 'Well, I thought I would.' The snow of course was sawdust because anything brighter than sawdust would have burned out the tube. And so it had to be that. So Rudy said, 'When we do the second version, tell that man to take the day off.' But he was loyal to the BBC and he was there. It didn't show quite as much because the mouth of the cave where Peter Cushing and Stanley Baker were standing arguing was partially screened, so all you could see was this little face. I think the more forgiving people thought he was an abominable snowman on the loose: 'Oh, you could see it. They didn't see it but he was there.'“

Is there much difference between the original TV version of The Creature and the Hammer film of The Abominable Snowman?
“There wasn't all that much because a lot of the same people were in it. We had Peter Cushing as the anchor man, which is very important, and there were some other actors who had been involved. One or two new faces were in. Forrest Tucker was in it instead of Stanley Baker and he was fine - a good actor and a nice man. And so it came out looking very much the same only more expensive, obviously.”

When you were revamping the second and third Quatermasses from three-hour serials into ninety-minute features, did you start with the TV scripts and whittle them down, or did you start with the story and build it up again from scratch?
“Probably both, I should think. Because you couldn't do it by just cutting, you had to do quite a bit of rethinking. For instance, in the third one, we had a magnificent set - 'The Pit' - which was all shot down at Ealing Studios which the BBC had just bought. The designer was a very bright chap and he had a very ingenious idea. It was supposed to be that they were digging the pit deeper and deeper, so he made a surrounding wall of timber and built it higher and higher. There was a thing that supposed to be a constructor's hut that was on ground level and it gradually rose to about thirty feet up. So obviously the pit had got deeper.

“The floor was mud and they'd brought about 40 tons of mud into the studio. It had to be real mud. That was one that needed rethinking, because when we came to do the Hammer version, they didn't want the pit in that form, with open sky. They said 'There must be another way of doing it.' So you do it in an Underground Station. And it wasn't very good, but it worked. That was just another way of doing the same thing.”

How closely involved were you with the production of the TV series and films? Were you always on the set?
“Yes, pretty well. Except when I was writing the next one. I was heavily involved because the things were so hairy to do that it was just a matter of being there. 'What does this man mean when he says that? What exactly?'“

When you wrote the film versions of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, was that a conscious decision to try and get away from the science fiction?
“Oh no. I was just asked to do them because I'd worked with Tony Richardson at the BBC. He just rang up and said would I do it. I think what had happened was that John Osborne had written a script for Look Back in Anger and couldn't get finance for it. So Tony rang me and said would I do it.”

I've got some titles which I've come across in various articles. Can you fill me in on these? Apparently you did a production of Wuthering Heights in 1953.
“Yes, I did. Another horror! It was done very hastily. Richard Todd was very much a film star, and he had a gap in his very busy life and had always had a fancy to do Wuthering Heights. It attracts actors - like Cliff Richard! - it's a part that they can see themselves in. Anyway, he was determined to play this, and Rudy said, 'Right, okay! We'll do it. But we have no script.' All hands...! I remember I wrote it in about a week. So we did it. I remember Yvonne Mitchell who did 1984 and was very big in television at that time, and had a great figure - she did Kathy. Now she was a very tall lady, and Richard was not a very tall man, so we had to work that one out!

“Again, there's always some horror attached to these things. The grooming of the horse! It was idiotic, I should never have done it. There's a scene where Kathy encounters Heathcliffe who is then in the beginning of his career, working as a stable boy, as he's reported to be. Of course there's no point in having a horse in a live studio; too many things can happen. But in the Props Department, which you always had to ransack, there was the hind part of a horse. This thing was dragged into the studio. It was an old one and its skin was hanging down in wrinkles. But you never saw that; you had to keep the camera up. And the director said, 'Keep the camera off the bit where there's no more horse!' But Richard had to curry-comb it, and when he'd curry-combed it he gave it a reassuring slap. And clouds of dust...! But that's the way it was. You had to hope: 'Well maybe the clouds of dust won't resolve on our home screens...'“

A thing you did in the early '60s called The Road which sounds very interesting. All about ghostly noises.
“Yes, I liked that. I kept meeting film directors later who said, 'Oh, I saw something on the telly that had a total effect on my career.' and they'd tell me the story of this thing. That didn't have any big stars in it. Rodney Bewes was in it, I remember.”

Was it a success?
“I should think it was. It didn't call for a sequel or anything because by the nature of the thing there couldn't be one.”

What was The Crunch?
“The Crunch was a very sharp number. It was simply the idea - ahead of its time - of an atom bomb ransom. The embassy of some little ex-colony had imported a very clumsy nuclear device - it was stored on their premises - and then said, 'If you don't give us x million pounds we'll explode it.' We had all sorts of people: Harry Andrews as the Prime Minister. We had tanks and God knows what else, because they surrounded the embassy. But the pretense was that everything was normal so none of this stuff really showed.

“I remember we had a lady who had to cycle down the street, right in front of this building that was full of thermo-nuclear stuff, pretending that she was just a lady cycling down the street. There was a milkman who delivered milk, but his milk bottles were all full of recording apparatus. It then became a battle of wills. The army came round and they were installed in next-door houses and things, waiting for any opportunity to shoot the lot. It finally worked out that the man in the embassy was not subject to reason, he was a kind of fanatic - very much the sort of situation that you see around now; an Islamic militant - who was determined in any event to set it off.

“We had Peter Bowles in it as a young officer who behaved outrageously foolishly. But Harry Andrews was the big star who gradually uncovered the horror, who had to go in there and surrender. And he did. He had to go in there and say, 'I'll give you anything. We'll arrange the instant transferral of however many millions you want through a Swiss bank. If you don't press the button, it's yours.’ Then he realised that they didn't want the money - they were going to blow us all.

“Then inside the embassy, the fanatic was faced by the ambassador. He had been totally taken in. He was a decent man who thought it was an honest, if desperate, demand, and having been told he could have the money said, 'Right, let's call it off.' And then found of course this man was a fanatic, so had had to go in and overpower him. This was done through Eastern practices that they both subscribed to. So the man was able to nerve himself sufficiently to go in and secure it while being shot at with a machine gun. So that was the original nuclear blackmail story.”


In 1968, you did a thing with Leonard Rossiter in it called The Year of the Sex Olympics.
“That was a very nice show. It was at a time when they had just started with Oh Calcutta and things like that, with soft porn being a terribly good thing. So it doesn't argue that soft porn isn't a good thing. This posited a world audience who are all couch potatoes, because there was no work to do, and they would be fed automatically. So all they had to do was have a very short life, just long enough for some, at least, to breed, and then die at the age of about thirty. And that's the world. But a few creatures want to opt out. The world in general won't listen; the world had become the audience, all the inhabitants. Except for the people who put the show on - they were still having fun.

“It was absolutely influenced by television; the people having fun are the people making the shows. The audience aren't. So really it was a comment on television. So then a small family group said, 'Look, we don't want this anymore. We want to go away and live on a desert island and suffer if need be.' Just one small nuclear family, like they used to have. They want to go out there, so they're sent to some terrible place. Not a desert island with palm trees but a sort of terrible bleak place somewhere up in the Orkneys. They settle down to their lonely life, but the whole place has been bugged. They are a television show. And then it gets really nasty. Brian Cox was in it, he was the most horrible person. It was the first TV show he'd ever done, and he was wonderful in it.”

A couple of years later, there was something called Wine of India.
“That was junk. That was about the assumption that everybody was given spare parts - heart and lungs and so on - so that they could define your life. You're given a life contract - 120 years or something - and they guarantee to keep you not just going but in perfect health for that time. But when the contract day arrives you must go. So the scene is a funeral, but all the people are alive. The pair of people who are to die are there as host and hostess, and most of the people who are there are their relations. At the end of the show they distribute what of their valuables they wish to present as mementoes. Everything goes.

“And then they themselves have to walk through a curtain exactly like the thing in a crematorium, except that these people are alive. And the whole thing is a show. You have a producer and an assistant producer, exactly like in a television gallery, putting the show on. And the ‘wine of India’ was; at that time they didn't have any Indian fizzing wine, so it was meant to be something that didn't really exist. They were given slightly drugged drinks for the party, and that was the wine of India.”


You did The Stone Tape in 1973.
“Yes, that was quite a good one. It was a ghost story. Chris Morahan suggested it and I wrote it. It was copied from the BBC's research establishment in Surrey. It was simply that a large commercial firm take over an old house like that as a research establishment, then they discover it's haunted. This is useless, it's holding up production. But what can the ghost be? There's no doubt that there is a ghost. They use all these electronics to track it. It still gets shown at the National Film Theatre from time to time.”

What was Mrs Wickens in the Fall?
“That was quite a nice one. It was quite different altogether. It was just about an American retired couple who get stuck in a small French town, and they find all sorts of goings-on in the hotel they're in. There's a greatly despised child who was the child of a German soldier and a French girl. Of course he was being given a hard time, so the Americans had to adopt him, and take him back to a happy life.”

And Ladies' Night?
“That was just a horrible gentlemen's club where they don't want any women, as they usually don't. They're allowed to come one night a week. This is a particular ladies' night, and one man who has been bullied by his wife, behaves disgracefully by shouting at them and accusing them of being what they are - a lot of bullies. And the husband gets so horrendously overcome that when they retire for the night he hits her over the head with an ornament and kills her. This meets with the entire approval of everybody else in the club! The only question is disposing of the body.”

You adapted a couple of novels into film scripts for Hammer: The First Men in the Moon and The Devil's Own. Were you happy with these?
“Not too bad. That was this thing about witches and witchcraft. It was quite decently done until the last moment. These days, people who believe in witches are ridiculous. It shows. Do you know the film The Wicker Man? They got away with it. It had Christopher Lee in it. It was the best thing I think he's done. Wonderful, superb performance, terribly frightening, much better than Dracula. It showed what he could really do. There was quite a lot in that witch thing, it wasn't bad. It needed Christopher Lee.”

Why was there such a gap between the TV version of Quatermass and the Pit and the film version?
“Somebody asked me that, and I don't have the correspondence. They wanted to make it more spectacular but they didn't want to pay for it. So it was always next year, then they didn't do it. It kept getting put off, year by year, it's as simple as that.”

When Quatermass IV came along, was that going to be a Hammer/BBC co-production?
“No, Hammer were never involved. It was going to a BBC production; it nearly was. But then they thought it was too big a spread, too expensive, and they went cold on it. I thought it would never show again, but then it drifted into the orbit of Euston Films who - rightly or wrongly - made it, very lavishly indeed. They spent an enormous amount of money on it, but they didn't get the casting right, and that's what killed it for me anyway.”

Who was miscast?
“Several people.”

Who would you have liked to have seen in it?
“Different people. They were very hard-working people and it wasn't their fault, they should just not have been in it, which does happen. If more attention had been paid to the casting - it wasn't a matter of expense - but something was wrong there. Maybe the idea was too esoteric or something; it didn't have a conventional monster.”

It's a very dystopian future.
“It was long after the old Quatermass stories of the 1950s, and I thought well, so much has changed that we've got to take account of that. We can't just do another one and say, 'This is a follow-up.' It had to account for the gap. Also, in that time, long after having persuaded people it's possible to have a rocket, Apollo rockets were being fired at the Moon. Things had changed completely, so the thing from outer space had to change too. It wasn't a chap in a rubber suit any more. It had to be something more unaccountable and quite different. Maybe that was asking too much. It needed something but I don't know what.

“There were so many things wrong. I think partly we were hampered by one of the conditions, and that was that they wanted to sell it in two directions. They wanted it to be a TV serial in four pieces, and also a viable movie that wouldn't go much over two hours. The only way was to write various scenes which were not exactly padding but could be taken out. It was a terrible thing to do, but we did it. There were scenes earmarked from the beginning never to be shown except on television, which is a rather desperate arrangement, but it was the only way they could finance it. It was a mad thing to do; I don't think anybody's tried it since. Probably the horror story of that was enough. They thought they would be able to show it - in America certainly - and I think the thing was then too disjointed to be viable.”

The American releases of the first three films were rather exploitative. What were your feelings towards the American ballyhoo over those films?
“I had nothing to do with them, I just didn't want to know. I could guess all too well the sort of horrors: the screaming blonde on the poster, with the people ogling, distraught, as things fell over. Posters for horror films, they'd actually been quite intelligent at one stage, but reduced to screaming blondes. It was not what I ever set out to do. It was very sad. I did a series for ATV called Beasts and one of those was in fact about the making of a horror film. I liked those very much. It was just meant to be funny, which of course the making of a horror film is. It was very briefly about a horror film, but the usual awful thing: they'd hired a real actor, a senior actor, but only for three days, so they could stick his name on. Calamity occurs - he says, 'Right, I'm going.' - and if they take his name off there'll be no film.

“The man who plays the monster, inside the rubber suit, who has been having a terribly hard time having a nervous breakdown, has been rescued to play this part. And he finds that his rival, who's run off with his wife is right there on the set as the Captain of the Guard. He has a complete nervous breakdown on the spot, and comes onto set in this terrible rubber suit with steel hands and things, and kills the man, quite genuinely. the man he's supposed to be strangling, this time he really does it, because he's gone over the edge, he's become quite insane. They clear the set, and there he is, breaking up the set and making monster noises, still in the rubber suit and completely bonkers.

“They get his wife who's deserted him to talk him round through a megaphone. She appears to have won, so they say, 'Right, she can go in and talk to him face to face.' except that he's covered in rubber. But he attacks her, and then we get the classic thing of the monster holding the blonde! She escapes by the skin of her teeth, and the Captain of the Guard, her new love, decides to finish it by killing the monster, but the other man is no longer in the rubber suit. He's out and in his vest, and kills the Captain of the Guard. It went very well.”

I know you had a lot of hassle over Halloween III. How did your original script for that differ?
“Oh, totally. Well, mine was funny and quite lavish. There was a tremendous amount in it. They just said, 'Oh we can't do it because I'm afraid it's too big.' And they shrunk it right down and put all sorts of things in like people's heads being drilled. Crappy, awful stuff like that!”

Did you like the first two Halloweens?
“No, not much.”

So why did you agree to write the third one?
“I was actually over there to do something on The Creature from the Black Lagoon which was quite fun. It was a nice story. In conference with John Landis and Jack Arnold and Carpenter came up and said, 'Can you think of a sequel to Halloween?' So I saw the two that he made - I didn't like either very much - and I said, 'Well, if I have a free hand to write an entirely new story that owes nothing to these, and you put the word Halloween on it, but put some more words so it's clearly not the same brand, I'll do one.' So I did. It took a month from beginning to final script. It was a good script; I've still got it. When I was shown the travesty they'd made out of that I said, 'Take my name off.'“

Have you ever thought of maybe trying to get your original version published?
“No. Nobody wants to publish scripts. Anyway, I’m sure it wouldn't be technically possible. I'm sure they own it, or they'd claim they own it.”

You were going to make a version of Lord of the Flies at one point.
“Yes, that was very, very good. Ken Tynan and I had met a few times, and he rang up. He had actually become the script editor for Ealing Films in its last stage in about 1956. Ken was busy at Elstree; they were under the wing of MGM at that time because they had no money. So: 'Lord of the Flies, yes, good.' I wrote the script. He thought very highly of it. 'When will we go?' 'We'll go immediately.' He had actors and directors all lined up. And then they just went bankrupt. But it was a quite sophisticated script. And then Peter Brook picked it up and made a mess of it. Because he couldn't write dialogue at all. He tried to get round it by ad-libbing, but it didn't work at all. He couldn't make films. A shame we couldn't do that, because we would have done it rather well.”

Recently you resurrected Quatermass for a Radio 3 series. What persuaded you to do this?
“It was just that the producer rang up a year ago with this suggestion. I thought about it and we just used old archive material and bits of the old series. It was quite amusing. There was no financial inducement: God knows, it was Radio 3! So we did it.”

Had you done any radio before that?
“I think there were a couple of radio things in about 1970.”

I find that odd given your dissatisfaction with the way your scripts are presented. Radio is one of the purest media.
“Certainly. The first thing I ever wrote for radio was in about 1950 and it was about a mine disaster. A documentary, really, and about as far away as possible from anything I've done since. It did very well, and it's still alright. I'd probably write it in the same way now.”

There's talk of remaking the Quatermass films...
(Pulls face) "I think it's just talk. But also I find I have remake rights. They can't move without my specific permission and that will be very hard-won. It's not a question of the cash, it's a question of who. They were very high at one time on doing Quatermass and the Pit. And they got Dan O'Bannon, who wrote a script, and he sent me a copy, and it's very good. The dialogue's terrific. But of course they made a fuss and said, 'We don't like this script, it's too good.' It was a first draft, but he didn't trust them. He said, 'I doubt if they'll do it.' and he was quite right, they didn't.”

Have you seen any of the other scripts?
“I have seen one attempt. It was like something written by a feeble-minded child. Incredibly, without any rights. O'Bannon was paid properly under a contract when a set-up appeared to exist. This other thing was a clown doing it on his own back, saying, 'I'd like to do this' without any sort of deal or anything. They were very stupid not to have done O'Bannon's version, because it was a very intelligent updating to America. The Quatermass character was a descendant of Quatermass, and it was quite funny in legitimate ways, not tongue in cheek, but very bright, very good. They didn't like it.”

Was that the one that Hammer wanted to do?
“Yes. They wouldn't have even then been free to make it.”


One of your most notorious productions was a sitcom called Kinvig.
“It was terribly, terribly simple: all the flying saucers and everything were materialisations of the things in this poor creature's mind. For instance, he had a little shop, and in this shop he sold all sorts of junk - it was actually modeled on a real shop. In fact I met with somebody who said she knew the shop: 'I saw the show and I know where it was. And there's that terrible little man in it.’ I said, 'Yes, yes it was him.' So the flying saucer is a replica of the lampshade that he could never shift. But we didn't get that. What we got was a stainless steel flying saucer that cost a fortune, because the designer thought it looked good.

“Now that kills it. Unless you see that this awful flying saucer was imagined out of the lampshade, there's no joke. You put a real flying saucer in there, made of stainless steel, you've killed the joke. They didn't see that. It was very sad. But we had a wonderful cast, and lovely people. Colin Jeavons was the simpleton who believed in flying saucers. With a twisted logic: 'Ah, but it only seemed like that. The truth behind it was...' And I have actually had this, somebody saying, 'That story was true, wasn't it?' I said, 'No, I made it up.' He said, 'Ah, you only think you made it up.' You can't beat that one.”

If somebody's sufficiently paranoid, then they can explain anything.
“It is a purely paranoid performance.”

In a similar vein, there are people who are determined that they can analyse work and determine what you're really trying to say.
“It's very similar.”


There's a book about Hammer which is convinced that the scene in The Quatermass Xperiment where Victor Caroon, with his cactus arm, goes into the chemist, is a metaphore for the evils of masturbation.
(Collapses in giggles.) "That's a new one! Oh, I love that. Very clever. A more realistic version of that is: when we did it, the actor who played the character on television, Duncan Lamont, was very good. My wife and I were doing the special effects, such as they were. We had to convert his hand, so we had lots of twigs and bit of stuff and we stuck it on him - with Bostick! Bostick was kind of new then, and Duncan couldn't get it off for a week! He soaked it off somehow in the end, with liberal use of petrol. Terrible stuff. We should never have done it.”

Could you not just have slipped a glove on him?
“They were afraid about it peeling off under the heat, I suppose. It didn't peel off, that's one thing you could say, it didn't peel off.”

Have you seen much current TV science fiction?
“No. It doesn't look very interesting. They're mostly very trivial things, aren't they? That Blake's 7 thing. I remember seeing one or two episodes, because there was a girl in it that we knew, and being appalled that she should have been reduced to the circumstances where she took the job! Unbelievably terrible - all these wooden faces arguing with each other. They tend to do that, because they can't think of any real character, so they just think, 'Shout at each other. That represents conflict in the crew.'“

What about if you had been approached to write an episode of something like that? Would you have turned it into something better?
“You can't. A thing like that is dead in the water. I wouldn't touch it. And the same with Star Trek - terrible, terrible. I've seen odd ones of that, but again, the wooden actors. And my God, they're wooden! And the awful premise that whatever they encounter will be other chaps with rubber heads. It's so crude, that I wouldn't want to go anywhere near it.”

It's had some very fine writers, like Richard Matheson.
“Well, they must have been very hard up or the taxman was after them or something. There must have been a reason. Because I could think of better ideas in my sleep. Things like The X-Files; I'm happy to say I've only seen one episode of these two non-actors struggling with their lines. I despair! There must be somebody somewhere struggling to write something that's any good.”

But The X-Files is a huge hit so all the TV companies are looking for ‘a new X-Files.’
“I know. Terrible, terrible.”

More recently, you've written some stuff for Sharpe. Was that more fun to do?
“That was great fun to do. Because the book that I was offered, they'd used practically all of it. The heroine had been not only used but killed. All that was left was you had to blow up an entire city - 'Yes ... I'll have to think about that' - and there wasn't anything else. They'd used it in dribbles, it was the second book. So I said, 'Let me think of a story, and if you like it, we'll do it.' So I came up with a completely new story, using only the first part of the book. I gave the Duke of Wellington some horrendous female relatives, which was fun. Cornwell's stuff is very well researched, competently written. He's a good writer. He knows his stuff militarily, he knows his Peninsula War. His plotting is a bit overdone, and in too many places unbelievable, so I'm not a great fan. But it was fun to break away from some of that, and play with the box of toys. I'm now busy writing a Kavanagh QC.”

What's that like to write for?
“That's presenting some horrendous problems with the story.”

Were you approached to write these things?
“Yes. So I said yes to the story, and my hair stood on end. It's nothing to do with science fiction, believe me. I brought it on myself. But that won't appear for a year.”

Finally, despite all this other stuff that you've written, you're still known as 'Nigel Kneale, the bloke who wrote Quatermass.' Has that been a help or a hindrance?
“Hard to say. I suppose it's a help in probably the wrong way. Because what it tends to bring me is people who say, 'Can we do another Quatermass?' or something like that. Also, you get typed. You have a successful career up to a certain point, then you say, 'I want to break away and do something different.' But they go, 'No, do what you've done before. We can sell that, we know we can sell it.' It takes a lot of determination to fight that off.


“My brother retired last year from the Royal College of Art and he's made many changes, from sculptor to painter, back to drawing, which is where he began. But each time he's had to battle, as people say. 'Oh dear, what are you doing now? Why can't we have another one of those?' It's not so much that you can't do that, but you feel that if you do, you've got to go. You really want to be new every time. Unless you've got a very receptive fellow saying, 'Oh yes, that'll be great if you write something entirely new and quite different from your previous work.' But they tend not to say that. It's a funny old world.”

[Nigel Kneale, eh? Lovely old geezer and completely outspoken. A wonderful interview to do 20 years ago, and a delight to revisit it now. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read of the first thousand posts on my site, Here’s to the next thousand… - MJS]