interview: Joe Bangay

I interviewed photographer Joe Bangay about his work on Queen Kong in January 2003. This interview, during which Joe read from some of the production notes he wrote back in 1976, originally appeared on my old Queen Kong Lives fansite (archive.org link). Joe passed away in 2017, robbing the world of so many outrageous anecdotes. I'm glad I was able to preserve a few.


It sounds like you’ve got more memories of Queen Kong than most of the cast.
"It was one of the most amusing times, as a photographer, that I’ve spent. With an Egyptian director, a producer who was always running out of money, and the most beautiful girls you could get in Britain."

How did you get involved?
"There was a producer called Keith Cavele and he used to call me in to do photographs for him, special work. We didn’t bother about doing stills of the whole film. My technique is: I read the script and pick out the vital times when I should be there. Because he’s incredibly mean with money so he’d pay me for the time I spent there. And I made sure I got all of those pictures."

What sort of films had you done before?
"I was John Huston’s photographer. I’ve done the big ones: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Big Sleep, The Winner, The Quiet American. I did about five Bonds. I was a film photographer in the seventies when films were fashionable. As you know, films went bust in 1979/80. That thing of Lew Grade’s - Sink the something or other? - Raise the Titanic! It broke him and it broke right the way down the business. Because it was pretty fraught, to make a living, at that time. So I’ve not done many films since.

"But I was one of the leading guys in the field. People like Terry O’Neill and I were doing major films all over the world. I did a Sophia Loren film, a couple with David Niven. I was never a stills photographer, I was a specials photographer. In those days it was a trade where you were friends with the producers. You’d say, ‘I’m looking for pictures,’ and they’d say, ‘Well, a good week to come in is in a couple of weeks.’ I spent three weeks on The Man Who Would Be King with Huston and Connery."

My favourite film of all time!
"It is a great film. It should have done so well. Yes, I did the specials on that. Shakira Caine played a part in it, and Michael’s there. His dad died in the middle of filming and John Huston sat in a chair and smoked cigars and did bugger all whilst Bert Batt directed the battle scenes. They used to like me on the set there because both Caine and Connery were mad about HP Sauce and I used to take six bottles out with me! Queen Kong was quite different. It was a place for nutters."

If you were working on these big budget films, why did you take a job on this little movie?
"Well, I did quite well financially frankly. If you own your photography and control the set - nobody else was allowed on - you’re going to make money, aren’t you? Nobody got on set except me. At that time Robin Askwith was quite a name. Rula Lenska had just done her big series on television about rock chicks so she was quite a big name. There were so many funny things on the film.

"I had done two films with Keith before. One had been a very sexy film called Golden Lady which all went wrong. It was easy to make money on because Prince Charles had a fling with the leading lady at the time - which gave you two pages in the News of the World. I know a lot about films, I know all the big actors. Tony Quinn - I did Caravans and one or two other films with him. I’d sit and play chess with him in the morning after breakfast for an hour. And let him win otherwise he’d be bad-tempered all day. We had the Queen of Persia on the set in purdah, in secret, because she put money into the film.

"I’ve had lots of adventures on films. I worked with this chap called Don Short. He was Showbusiness Editor of the Mirror and he walked out because they double crossed him. He told Richard Harris he wouldn’t print something and the bloody Mirror did so he walked out of the Mirror. We went into a partnership and we went round the world together. We did Jane Seymour’s first film, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. For ten years I was on every big film, British-inspired usually."


Then you ended up on Queen Kong.
"It was the last film I did, I think, probably. I wrote a lot of stuff. I’ve written books as well, so I wrote a lot of the copy for it as well. Keith got a good bargain from me. He paid me money but he got a bargain. He got his biogs written for him and he got the cream of the pictures. Bastard though, what he did is he borrowed the stills from me when he was going to try to sell the film and he never bloody returned them. The wife he worked with was a great friend of mine. We went to Cannes - to sell Queen Kong or something - and we went down the hotel and Keith was in bed with the leading lady of his next film!

"It was very different then to how it is now. I was a great friend of Bob Mitchum, I did a lot of his films. He liked me, we were quite friends. He was honorary godfather to my youngest daughter. I have this lovely house on the river bank at Marlow, near the studio. It’s very private and people used to come here. I always used to go to Cannes, I went to Cannes for 13 years nonstop. So there you go - you’ve got a bit of the background. I’ve got a huge library of these people. Queen Kong was different though."

Can you remember what you thought about it at the time?
"It was a laugh. My children - I had five daughters - were always coming on set for the fun of it. I thought it was a great idea. the last film I’d done with Keith, I’d done quite well. Frankly we all found that we could trust Keith. Queen Kong ended in a legal mishmash and the artists being called under the Shepperton Tree. Have you heard about the Shepperton Tree? It’s a big oak that stood outside Shepperton offices. It’s now gone. But all big decisions on films were always announced under the tree. So this raggle-taggle bunch of page 3 girls, B-grade actresses, B-grade actors and a really hard-bitten crew were all called together and told:(a) we’ve lost the legal rights, and (b) we’ve run out of money anyway. Then six weeks later Keith got some money together from somewhere, called us back and we finished it off. Obviously he’s made his money again, he’s sold it on."

Frank Agrama is the guy who’s selling it.
"He was the director, wasn’t he? He brought his Egyptian wife and his son over. He hadn’t got a clue, I thought, he was the worst director I’ve ever seen."

He was used to the Italian film industry.
"He brought some money in - that’s why he got the job. A charming but slightly devious Egyptian gentleman; I hope I’m not libelling him. He had a charming Egyptian wife who was always on set. We had fun - I’ve never had so much fun on a film in all my life. You might find something funny in the Express today. I talked to Vicki about it and she said her first job after leaving drama school was running around with a tiny loin cloth, carrying a spear in Shepperton woods.

"All sorts of things happened. For example, we had a big tug-cum-steamer - we shot a lot of stuff at sea. We used to berth at Newhaven, where we all stayed, and went out, up and down the Channel, near the French coast. We were pursued by playboys in speedboats who were tossing their phone numbers to the young English actresses. It was quite funny. We had a girl called Barbara Allen, who was one of the page 3 girls, and she mesmerised the French by water-skiing topless behind the steamer whilst filming. Valerie Leon could tell you about that - she shot some of her scenes on the boat.

"We landed at Newhaven. Keith had got us in quite a good hotel, believe it or not, and the partying was fantastic. We had 30 beautiful girls on this trip, all partying in this hotel. One famous writer - I won’t name any names - was crazy about one of these girls. And we all said, ‘Right, we’ll fix you up.’ We got her to say okay, then he was so nervous, he got so drunk, we delivered him to the bedroom door and he collapsed to the floor and passed out!

"The monkey we made looked terrible, but we finished the film off after Keith got extra money, went down to Bournemouth and that village down there. We had this guy in a monkey suit climbing all over it while we filmed it. Then we had a big monkey’s hand on the end of one of those things you do lights with down the motorway. It was quite a laugh. We had a big stage built in the air in Shepperton, a giant picnic table. My children all felt like film stars when they walked on this set. For crowd scenes, anybody who happened to be going past the studio was pulled in to make up the crowds. But I haven’t got stills, I’ve only got memories now, which is a pity.

"Valerie Leon is very upset because one of the critics on the internet is saying she had her tits taped up. She said, ‘My bosom never needed taping up.’ Rula Lenska was in the first stages of her divorce from Brian Deacon so that was a bit atmospheric. Rula was not happy about the role once she’d got it. She wanted the film to be scripted properly. Robin Askwith was always on time and always knew his lines, a bit like Olly Reed.

"I worked a lot with Olly, we were quite close friends. I had a fight with him in the middle of a Japanese dining room. He threw me so bad, I whizzed down the table and cleared all the food off it onto the laps of the geisha girls. I finished up in jail with Olly the next day because we got drunk at his hotel and he threw a television set out of the window which landed on a police car. So we got busted but let off by the station sergeant. We went fishing in the afternoon to one of those indoor trout-fishing lakes, but Olly was still drunk from the night before. He jumps in the lake, wades towards the fish and then pisses in the lake, so we get pulled in by the police to the same station and the same sergeant says, ‘Oh, not you two again...’

"That’s all by the way. Who else was in Queen Kong? I’ve actually got a call sheet for the film. Every film I’ve done I’ve kept a file on. Ah, here it is, next to ‘Pantos.’ There was a girl killed herself later, Trudi Van Doorne. Mireille Allonville, she was French and she had the most enormous tits and a sexy walk. Felicity Devonshire - she was the top topless model in the country. She was a bit stand-off-ish but very, very grand. Mandy Perryment, she was a top page 3 girl. Paul Cowan, the assistant producer, is doing major films now - he was a lovely man. There’s a lot of well known names there. Jeannette Charles played the Queen in it."

This was made at the same time as the Dino de Laurentiis King Kong and was obviously designed to take advantage of it.
"It was a rip-off, yes."

Do you recall that being discussed much?
"Oh yes, I was there during all those discussions."

Were cast and crew thinking ‘surely we’ll get sued over this’?
"No, nobody thought it. It was so unlike it and it was so bad that no-one would take it seriously. Keith Cavele by the way was doing pop music with EMI before he got into films, and his first film was called Exposé, Tony Richmond’s film. Ah, former Baby Doll star Linda Hayden, who is now married to Paul Elliott. The film had a cast of seven men and 47 girls. 'When some of the French money for the production failed to arrive on time, the cast and crew held a strike meeting under a palm tree. Queen Kong took the opportunity to quit the film to return to her philosophy.' She was a philosophy student.

"Caron Gardner played a prostitute - she’s still a kept woman and she was in those days. Carol Drinkwater was in it - very weird girl, she  was. Used to do all sorts of weird things. Annette Lynton was in it, she’s married to one of the Pink Floyd boys, possibly the drummer. She was a classy bird, married into money. Anna Bergman was in it - that’s Ingmar Bergman’s daughter. Maria Pavlou played Queen Kong; she was a philosophy student at the time and Keith was having a bit on the side I think. She was a classical dancer and a pupil of Marcel Marceau. She also published Britain’s leading Buddhist magazine and held conversion classes amongst the crew.

"We were doing Queen Kong down in Bournemouth, wrecking the model village. She wrecked an oil installation and her coat caught fire. They got another gorilla suit. She used to compose herself by going into the corner to read Goethe. ‘Robin Askwith said, “Being held 30 feet off the ground was no kid glove stuff. I always do my own stunts, but it was a bit hairy.” The film was always designed as a spoof send-up of King Kong and takes a dig at women’s lib. To produce the early footage about the jungle search for Queen Kong, a harbour tug at Newhaven was converted into a search ship called the Liberated Lady with an all-girl crew. This boat-load of scantily dressed models from the page 3 agencies of London had a sprinkling of cool, organised actresses to shepherd the dumb blondes.'"

Did the people making this film seem to know what they were doing?
"Well, everyubody who was in it knew what it was all about. It was a very sociable film - everybody had dinner together. People were aware what we were doing."

Did people think, ‘God this is awful but it’s not taking long and it’s paying the rent?’
"That’s what Rula was saying: ‘I hope to God it doesn’t come out.’"

When the legal action from RKO and De Laurentiis started, what was the reaction of the cast and crew?
"Well, they were disappointed because they would have liked to have seen themselvs on screen. I’ve found another funny bit: ‘In one sequence, a High Priestess played by Hai Karate ad girl Valerie Leon leaps aboard from a native canoe to kidnap the sleeping hero. In the first take, Miss Leon got caught up by her bra on a deck spike and was stripped of her costume. In the second take the lady pirates on board were swept away and had to be rescued by the rescue boat. On another day, associate producer Italian Virgilio DeBlasi, in the face of a refusal to work in the sea because of its roughness, jumped in to prove its safety. He nearly drowned and had to be rescued.’"

Were you following the legal side?
"I knew Keith was going white, and Frank Agrama was, because they had money riding on it. Keith, although he was stopped from selling the film, I notice he got the money together afterwards to finish it, so he had a completed film. Which Frank obviously had a copy of. ‘After shooting, the cast went fishing in the rescue boats. Mackerels, well-cooked, washed down with champagne kept cold by immersion in the sea. The sight of so many bikini- and loincloth-clas girls dancing about the boat was too much for the passing fish trade. At times the ship, the Liberated Lady, looked like the flotilla leader of a naval revue as pleasure boats and fishing boats clustered around. The director Frank Agrama fell overboard into the sea and had to be rescued, taking the main camera crew and cameras with him.’ You know now why we did Queen Kong, don’t you? It was a bloody laugh, wasn’t it? Legally I can’t help you. You’ll have to talk to Caroline Cavelle. She’s a barrister."

Do you recall the dance/dream sequence?
"Recall it? Yes. It wasn;t anything special."

Any idea why it was dropped?
"It wasn’t very good."


Do you remember anything about the band?
"That was shot in the open, the band playing on the open stage in Shepperton. It was a big set, you know. I didn’t realise how funny it had been, until I read these notes."

Did everyone get paid on it?
"Eventually. I didn't get paid until I wouldn’t give him the stills, then I got my final payments. The actresses got paid weekly, I know that. Maybe they lost their last week’s pay. I got paid weekly but I didn’t get paid the last week because he didn’t have to pay me, did he, to get me the next week."

What do you remember about Virgilio de Blasi? The finished credits are Keith Cavele as Executive Producer and de Blasi as producer.
"He brought money in. That’s why he was in it it. He was an old boy who came for the crumpet. I think there was an arrangement whereby he had access to the crumpet."

The co-producer was Andre de Genovese.
"He was an Italian money man, Virgilio’s money man. Charlie Simmons built the sets - good sets. Casting director was Miriam Brickman - she’s around still."

And there we must leave it. RIP Joe Bangay 1930-2017

interview: John Carl Buechler

I'm not sure of the exact date of this phone interview with FX legend John Carl Buechler, about Tarzan: The Epic Adventures. It was published in the July 1997 issue of SFX so must have been conducted a couple of months earlier. Buechler was an absolute joy to talk with and sent over loads of stills and designs from the show. The second, unpublished part of this interview covered his broader FX/directing career - I'll save that for another time.

I dug this out in March 2019 when I heard that John Carl Buechler had passed away, aged 66, after a short battle with cancer. We never met in person but it was a privilege to interview him and I offer this here as a tribute.


How did you get involved with Tarzan?
“Honestly, I found out about the show by virtue of a small article in one of the local trades. So I called the executive producer. Actually, I didn't find out about this show - I found out about Conan that the executive producer is also doing. I called him up and said, 'Hey, I gotta do Conan.' And he says, 'Hey, I know you. Yes, I know you'd love to do Conan but it ain't ready to go yet. How about Tarzan?' 'Okay, fine! Let's do Tarzan.' So I met with everybody - I understand there was a lot of people in the running - and they liked my work. I went ahead and got the show.”

Are you a big fan of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books?
“Oh, huge, yes. I think probably the first book I ever read for pure entertainment was A Princess of Mars, which was the first book in the series of John Carter adventures. And after I went through that series, I wanted more Burroughs and I started reading the Tarzan books. Yes, I'm a huge fan.”

Was this a dream for you?
“Absolutely! I love Tarzan, I love Conan, I love all those characters who were created for the pulp magazines between, say, 1914 and 1936 or so. They're really larger than life and full of adventure.”

Is Tarzan screening in the US yet?
“Yes, I think we're into the second season. We did twenty episodes in South Africa. I think in syndication that translates to roughly ten episodes per season. And they're showing the second season right now.”

Are there any more beyond those 20 episodes?
“Yes, they're gearing up right now.”

Are you going to be directing any more?
“They really liked the stuff that I did. It's the concern for me. I do not want to compromise on one job for the sake of the other. But I think we have a system now where I can do a little bit more directing. Initially, Max Keller, the executive producer of the series had wanted me to do six or seven episodes, plus do all the creature and make-up effects. I didn't think that was feasible, with regard to: how am I going to do this?... there's no system yet... we've got to start things up... I've got to figure out how. Because essentially we build everything in the United States and ship it. There's never enough time between when a script is developed to do the essential construction on the average television schedule. If you keep in mind that you have to ship and get through customs and all that nonsense.”

It must be tough trying to get giant spiders through customs.
“Right, but I think we arranged a system that works.”

How tight is your schedule on an episode?
“Six days. We've got to shoot the whole thing in six days.”

How much advance warning do you get of creature effects?
“I try to get five weeks advance notice of every major creature effect that's in the series. What that means is that at the beginning, in pre-production, I do a tremendous amount of design work and sketches. And ultimately it comes to the point where they pick the basic characters that they're going to use in the shows, and then it's a process of me to go ahead and begin to construct.”

How many of the characters you create are from the ERB books, and how many are original?
“Some of them. The Oparians certainly are. There are some new inventions - the Lysarians which are a reptile people. And the particular episode that I directed, I tried to stay as close to Burroughs as possible; I love the material. So I created the Shagoths of Pelucidar, I created actually two species of Mahar, and we threw in Rokoff who came from Tarzan Returns. And the Iron Mole! Which tunnelled to Pelucidar in actually At the Earth's Core. So we borrowed from all the books in my episode and tried to put them into one big cluster of something interesting.”

Burroughs is wonderful, imaginative, pulp fiction stuff.
“I find that the John Carter series just being really larger than life, is something every teenage kid should read because it's fantastic stuff.”

Are they republishing the books to tie in with the series?
“Yes, they are. I've seen more Burroughs on the shelves now than I have in quite a while, thank goodness.”

Are you having to liaise with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate?
“I understand that the production company is in close contact. I have yet to meet them, but I really want to; I'm a huge fan.”

What sort of reaction is the series getting?
“Actually, in New York it's number one in its time slot. I think that people who are new to the concept of Tarzan in fantastic worlds are taken a little aback until they realise that this is what Burroughs initially intended. And now they're looking at it not so much as a rip-off of Hercules but as a translation of Burroughs' vision. In that regard, we're satisfying a lot of folks. I believe that there probably are some die-hard Edgar Rice Burroughs fans who will find problems with some of the execution of the material. I think probably everybody will.

"You cannot please absolutely everybody, so the best that you can possible do is attempt to remain true to what your vision of the material is. I certainly tried to do that with my episode. I guess that it's good that I'm an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, and I actually got to do the design and direction of one of these shows, so maybe the Burroughs purists will respond kindly to mine. I don't know; I hope so. I hope I got it right.”

Roughly how many creatures have you made for the series so far?
“Oh, golly. At least 20, not including all the different appliances and prosthetics. There's quite a few - at least one per episode.”

Do you have to mould the suits to the particular actors who play them?
“Essentially, what we do is: there are generic body types that we can start with. I've been in the business a number of years and I have a number of full-body castings of people. Sometimes when I design a big guy, we have to find a big guy to portray the creature. But by and large I brought into this project an acquaintance of mine, and we've since become good friends. His name is Don McCleod, and he is one of the most versatile, talented actor-mimes in the world. He has played in 90% of the creatures, and many of the creatures are based on his body proportions. He plays Bulgani the ape - he essentially plays all the apes! Sometimes there's somebody else in the suit, but he's very good and he does a lot to sell, in terms of performance, the reality of the costume. That, combined with a certain amount of attention to detail and sophisticated animatronics; I think we've come up with some very wonderful fantasy pieces.”

Are you doing all effects in camera, or are you using computers?
“What we're doing is that the computer comes in when we, say, digitally composite a large character into a scene. An example would be the Mahars. There are many flying sequences, and I shot all of my people in their costumes in front of blue screens. Then we digitally composited those characters into the matte that I had shot. Then they digitally animated the shadow of the creature on the ground as it was flying across. We also did a giant spider, where we created a full animatronic spider plus a miniature which was digitally composited into the frame and a shadow was made beneath him. We've also done a sea serpent type of creature that was digitally composited into the background. So there's a lot of interplay between the two media.”

Was the sea serpent a puppet?
“It was a puppet with a radio-controlled head.”

Was it tricky doing something with as many legs as the spider?
“Well, it is and it isn't. It's a matter of planning out. I think we had eight puppeteers on the miniature spider, so it wasn't that complex. It was just a matter of co-ordinating the movements. If everyone has a monitor in front of them, in a few hours they can get it down in terms of exactly what they're doing. then it becomes a process of choreographing the camera movement and co-ordinating it with the plates.”

Are you finding that some monsters are popular enough that they might come back for other episodes?
“Well, they keep hinting at that, yes. At first, when they wanted an ape in the show, Bulgani: well, everyone is afraid of using any sort of animatronic character for television, because nobody believes you can do it well in the amount of time. So they said, 'We're going to use an ape in one of the first episodes, and it's going to be something where he's in the shadows, you're not going to see that much, so it doesn't have to be that good.' Then they saw the ape suit that I'd provided, out there in broad daylight in every episode!

"So Bulgani has become a major character in the series, and is utilised a lot, which makes me really happy. I also think we're going to be using the Mahars again, because they're very popular characters anyway. There's something we've created called the Mangalor, which we'll probably see again. Obviously we're going to see the Oparians. We're going to see a lot of recurring characters. Perhaps we're going to get into some characters that we haven't even drawn from the Burroughs universe yet.”


There's a long history of bad ape suits. How have you got round the problem of apes' and humans' different proportions?
“I think you hit it right on the head. The fact of the matter is that we have been doing this for a very long time, and as we've been doing this, we've been seeing bad examples of ape-suits get better and better looking as time wears on. By the time we got to Greystoke and all the wonderful things that Rick Baker did, there are people that will look at those photographs and say, 'Hey, this is a real monkey.' You learn quite a bit as you build these things. In my case, Congo had just been made, and that is an achievement certainly in realistic looking ape proportions and creature effects. So you build on what has already been done. You don't have to start from scratch. You look at how everything has been done that preceded you.

"I think the only modification that I really made in terms of what had been done before was that I insisted on doing mechanical eyes in the animatronic heads of the apes. Because I think when people wear contact lenses, they have a tendency to look like people wearing contact lenses. So we created a broader neck crest on the body suit under the hair, which essentially gorillas have. They have this large crest on their skull and these mammoth neck muscles that go into their trapezius. They also have by proportions very short legs and a very long torso and very, very long arms.

"First of all, a talented mime who doesn't walk around like a human being but who has studied ape movement, is essential in getting it to be real, to begin with. Then you play with the proportions: you build the shoulders up higher; you extend the neck up almost beyond the head - in this case, our actor looked out through the nostril, just to make it work; we gave him arm extensions that he could walk on, or gloved hands so he could articulate, depending on what the shots were. There's been wonderful breakthroughs in different synthetic fabrics and lightweight urethane that you can make the muscle suits out of. All in all, it's not a trial and error process any more. You see what has not worked in the past, you try to discard it, then you go for what has worked and try to improve on it.”

Do the suits get knocked about a lot and need repairing?
“Oh heck, yeah. But I think you'll find that even with people who wear normal costumes in movies and television. They'll rip a sleeve or crumple a shirt collar. The same is true of these things. I would say that some of the materials we use are reinforced in areas that are going to go through more stress. Areas which obviously need more movement need to be more flexible and therefore are perhaps less durable, and those elements will have to be replaced from time to time.”

Did you enjoy directing an episode?
“Oh, I loved it. My best time in South Africa was directing an episode. It's kind of neat really. I got to do a lot of things in my show that I wanted to happen in the series anyway. And being essentially one portion of the creative entity that had nothing to do with story or direction previous to that, I had to pretty much keep my mouth shut. But getting an opportunity to do it, I put a little bit of the old goshwow into it. I wanted to see a Jules Verne-looking device tunnel through the Earth; I wanted to see winged Mahars flying around; I wanted to see the temples of Mahars filled with Shagoths and cages filled with people screaming; I wanted to see beautiful women transform into hideous creatures. I think that a show like Tarzan should have lots of fantasy and lots of adventure and lots of action, and it was an opportunity to really put my stamp on it. I enjoyed it a lot.”

It must have been nice going out to South Africa.
“I was in South Africa anyway. I was going back and forth from the States, getting designs approved, working with the creature effects unit, coming back, starting up new designs, packing the finished ones, throwing them in a box, jumping on a plane, getting off the plane, getting through customs and getting them on set.”


Are the writers over- or under-estimating what you can do?
“I think by and large, on a show like this you will find people who are not used to doing high-concept visual fantasy, so they have a tendency to think in terms of cop shows or westerns. When you deal with fantasy characters, they need a logic and a sense about them, and you shouldn't be afraid to show them, because that's what the show should be about, really. I think sometimes there's a tendency to poo-poo the magic area and just go for people talking. I think story is essential, and part of the story, particularly in high-concept fantasy, are the magic characters that are there. We've created some wonderful stuff that has hardly been seen.”

RIP JCB, 1952-2019

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

Here’s why I won’t be reviewing films any more

This isn’t a fit of pique and I’m not upset about anything. I love writing reviews on my website and I would love to carry on writing them. It’s just that I want to do something else. I want to write something else.

When the original version of my website was launched in January 2002, the web was still in its first decade. YouTube wouldn’t be invented for another three years, Twitter a year after that. There were only four Harry Potter books. It was less than a year since Douglas Adams passed away. The BBC had no plans to revive Doctor Who.

Since then, lots of other movie review websites have come and gone.  To the best of my knowledge, no single author film site has lasted as long as mine.

Since 2002 I have written 709 reviews and posted 321 interviews. Total wordcount: 1,655,073. That’s an average of 105,000 words every year. Or one book. If I had been working in print instead of on the web, I could potentially have 18 books with my name on instead of three. Or maybe 16 books and a couple of movie scripts.

This, my friends, is why I’m regretfully packing in the film reviewing. I will be 50 next February, and while I am incredibly proud of my three published volumes, it irks me that I haven’t written more. I have several in various states of completion, not least the long gestating biography of Elsa Lanchester, which I would love to get finished in time for the 2019 remake of Bride of Frankenstein.

I'm also working on a massive catalogue of all 21st century British horror films (so I’m still writing reviews, but in 200 words not 4,000). I also have several non-film-related books I want to write.

What irks me even more than my lack of literary production is that, as I approach my half century, I don’t have a feature film writing credit. Ever since I was at primary school, I have written scripts. Back in 2002 I was finishing off my Masters Degree in TV Scriptwriting – but in those pre-Who days there was no market for sci-fi, fantasy or adventure.

My scriptwriting ‘career’ has been one of near misses: an episode of Urban Gothic (promptly cancelled); an unmade episode of the Captain Scarlet remake (stories about Gerry Anderson turned out to be true, though I did at least squeeze some money out of him); a version of Xtro 4 for a guy who claimed he owned the rights but didn’t; an adaptation of The Beetle which Variety claimed I had sold to Hammer (I hadn’t); and so on. The only script of mine that ever got made was Waiting for Gorgo, a 17-minute film that spent two years in post and then wasn't submitted to any genre festivals. Sigh.

I have spent 15 years analysing what does and doesn’t work in films, particularly low-budget independent British horror films. Theoretically, I should be the go-to guy for screenplays. But not once has anyone come to me and said, “Mike, I need you to write a script for me.” (Actually a couple of people did, but neither worked out and they joined the near-miss pile.)

I know some people who want to write meaningful, artistic works, or aspire to one day write the next Hollywood blockbuster. I don’t. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write some silly microbudget monster movie that people will complain about on Amazon. That’s what I love watching, that’s what I want to write, instead of writing about.

And if you’re thinking: go out there and make the films yourself. I appreciate the sentiment, but I have no desire to direct, and have neither the business skills to produce nor the technical skills to do anything else. All I do is write. I pick the right words and put them in the right order. It’s all I’ve ever done, all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve been told I’m quite good at it. It’s paid the rent, in one way or another, for 22 years.

But it seems to me that what has stopped me from writing the books and screenplays I want to write is spending all my spare time (outside my writing day job at Leicester University) writing my website. While I’ve been reviewing Zombiesaurus and its ilk, I’ve not been finishing Elsa Lanchester: Bride of the Hunchback or My Big Fat Zombie Wedding.

This website will stay live, and I’ve got a handful of reviews I’ve promised people that I’ll get up over the summer, but as of now I’m not accepting any more review copies. If you care to send me a screener, I’ll certainly appreciate it and will tweet about it enthusiastically. But there will be no more reviews. Sorry.

I’m also knocking my British Horror Revival blog on the head. Hardly anyone ever looks at it anyway. I’ll keep both Twitter accounts going. I’ll also keep writing my column for Scream.

It’s been a great 15 and a half years. Coincidentally that’s exactly how long I’ve got to retirement (if I make it that far..., cough cough) so now seems a perfect time to change direction.

Finally, I want to thank absolutely everyone who has helped me: people who sent me screeners, or invited me to screenings, or agreed to interviews, or commented, or tweeted or contributed in any way. Cheers, folks!

interview: John Williams

In January 2017 I sent four questions to 100 movie legends. Composer John Williams responded in June, sending me a print-out of questions he often gets asked. I thought fair enough, at least he was kind enough to respond. Three months later, I was puzzled to receive another envelope marked 'Boston Pops', containing the same printed FAQ. Then I noticed that some of the answers were highlighted in biro - and realised that John Williams had updated his FAQ by adding my four questions! So here's my interview with the man who has received more Oscar nominations than anyone ever (except Walt Disney):


Which technological or social development during your career has changed cinema the most?
"The use of synthesizers and of layered pre-recordings in film scores is now prevalent, but I'm still writing for orchestra. Technology has had very little influence on me. However, thanks to the computerization of post-production work such as editing, it goes much more quickly now."

Which deceased film-maker or actor do you wish you could have worked with?
"Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn."

What is the one question you’re fed up with answering in interviews?
"What was it like to succeed Arthur Fiedler?"

What would you rather be asked instead?
"It depends who's asking!"