A disgraced, but noble journalist. A serial killer with ties to high society. A young, beautiful computer hacker with a punk attitude and theories about the case. A lost little girl. A dark secret stretching back to WWII. It’s easy to see why Stieg Larsson’s pulp Millennium trilogy (The Girl With... more

A disgraced, but noble journalist. A serial killer with ties to high society. A young, beautiful computer hacker with a punk attitude and theories about the case. A lost little girl. A dark secret stretching back to WWII. It’s easy to see why Stieg Larsson’s pulp Millennium trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire , and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest ) has become a runaway beach book phenomenon, selling more copies in Europe than almost any other books in the past decade, and why three feature-length Swedish films based on the trilogy were rushed into production in 2008, even as the novels were still smashing sales records. The frenzy of interest in the books (and the first film, which won the Swedish Oscar) was only heightened by the sudden death of the author prior to the trilogy’s release and the ensuing controversy surrounding his estate and suspicions about his untimely end (as recently reported on by Vanity Fair), as well as what some observers have been calling the discovery of the decade – Swedish ingénue Noomi Rapace.
As the sullen computer genius/chess master/amateur detective/motorcycle punk Lisbeth Salander, Rapace has already earned enough fans worldwide to mark her as one of Europe’s most promising new actresses; in addition to being practically unable to walk down Swedish streets unmolested, she’s been the subject of more than a few fawning profiles in the British press as well as incessant speculation about when she’ll make a decisive foray into English language cinema (though you shouldn’t expect her to reprise the Lisbeth character in Sony Pictures’ forthcoming Hollywood remake of Dragon Tattoo – George Clooney and Kristen Stewart are the names being whispered for the main roles). With her sculpted cheekbones, dark almond eyes and slightly tomboyish posture, the half-Spanish Rapace is like a hybrid of Angelina Jolie and a young Mia Farrow – danger and gravitas delivered with a throaty Scandinavian accent. While recently in the states to kick off the domestic release of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rapace called up SuicideGirls to talk.


Ryan Stewart: There’s a scene in the film where the giant tattoo on Lisbeth’s back is shown off for the camera – was there a special day where you had to sit and have that applied with makeup?
Noomi Rapace: No. It was a kid’s tattoo. [laughs] Like you put on with warm water, it was pretty similar to that. The makeup designer ordered them from Los Angeles, from this company that does all the tattoos for shows like Prison Break and I think they also did that film with Viggo Mortensen, the one where he plays a Russian? Anyway, they’ve done a lot of tattoos for films, and they’re really good at it. It’s a very expensive, but also very childish way of doing the tattoos. But I did want to transform myself, and I did do a lot of preparation. I put myself on a diet, because I wanted to be more skinny, in a way, though not anorexic. So, I trained and I exercised a lot, and we were practicing Thai boxing and kickboxing with this crazy Serbian guy five days a week for seven months. I also took motorcycle driving lessons and then I cut my hair and I did all of those piercings, and as I did that Lisbeth slowly grew inside of me. It was like my body and my mind and everything was slowly getting into changing into her, in a way.
RS: She’s outwardly emotionless to the point of autism, she’s aggressively sexual, she’s casually bisexual, she has breast implants -- do you think Stieg Larsson was writing his fantasy woman?
NR: Yes. [laughs] Maybe so, but it’s sometimes hard to get a clear picture of who she really is from the book. She has a lot of contradictions. She’s sometimes described as very ugly, with “pig eyes” like she’s really ugly, but in the next scene or even the next page she’s really sexy because the men are very attracted to her. So it is sometimes difficult to get a very clear picture of her, and also she’s sometimes a bit cartoonish in the book – she can do things that are not really realistic and I wanted to humanize her, in a way. I wanted the audience to be able to believe in her fully, and I wanted each scene to be credible. It was always important for me that the action scenes and the fight scenes be as realistic as possible. I didn’t want a stunt woman to come in and do these fantastic Lara Croft stunts and so on -- I wanted to keep it pretty realistic and down to Earth.
RS: I know you’ve already filmed parts two and three of the trilogy – did you shoot them all simultaneously, as one big project?
NR: Yeah, we did them back to back. I think we started in February of 2008 and I was finished at the end of December, so it was like that. I was also preparing for maybe seven months before that, so it was like one and a half years that I was working with Lisbeth on the trilogy. For me, it fit me pretty good to do it all in one burst of energy, you know? It was like I went down into Lisbeth and it became possible for me to be her, and to let her live in me for a long time, and I didn’t have to go out of it and back into it that much. So, yeah, it fit me good, and it was a slow thing -- while we were shooting the second one I started to not even think so much at all that I was playing someone else. I had already been working with her such a long time by that point, so it was a good [process] for me.
RS: Even though parts two and three haven’t been released here in the U.S. yet, I did watch the Swedish trailer for part three. Nice Mohawk – was that your idea?
NR: Yeah, pretty much. Those decisions were my decisions, all the way, what her look was and also how she would behave in a scene. I worked pretty closely with Niels [Oplev, the director] on the script also, and I think they listened to me, pretty much. She’s described the way she is in the book, but it was my decision to do the Mohawk, for example. In the second film she gets shot in her head and at the beginning of the third film she’s actually in hospital and they’ve shaved one of the sides of my head, so it was my decision to shave the other side also. In the first book she’s described with many details, as far as how she looks, but in the second one and the third one it’s a bit more open to your imagination, in a way.
RS:I’ve read that you were sort of a troubled teenager – is that what you drew on? Did you get into trouble with the law like Lisbeth?
NR: Well, nah. I was a disaster when I was fourteen or fifteen, and I went to demonstrations and I was drunk every day, and so on. But I made a decision when I was fifteen and changed my life, in a way. I moved from the south of Sweden to Stockholm and I went to this drama high school and I got sober. I made the decision that I wanted to live, and that I wanted to be an actress for sure. I wasn’t in big trouble, but I didn’t believe in life when I was a teenager. I was very skeptical of everything and I felt like everyone around me was very unhappy and I couldn’t even see any reason why you should be a grownup. Everybody was married and unhappy and it was so depressing, everywhere. As a society, the Swedes can be really depressing sometimes. They can be stoic and repressed and they’re emotionally very cold sometimes and they keep everything inside, you know? My temperament never really fit in with the Swedes, so I always felt like an outsider. But Lisbeth is much more extreme [than I was]. I was still a loved kid and I had a wonderful mother, so not exactly the same, but I do think that I could feel some kind of connection with her and I could kind of understand the way she handles things. I think she pretends to be strong even when she’s sometimes very scared. I also think she’s very vulnerable and sensitive inside, but she’s built this hard shell. It’s like she’s wearing a uniform and she’s always expecting everybody to be against her. She’s waiting for somebody to come and stab her in the back all the time. She doesn’t really trust anyone, and I think I can understand that about her, but she’s pretty far away from me in many senses.
RS: I understand you and Niels mixed it up on set a few times? You had some memorable creative arguments?
NR: Yeah, and I love him, and we’re both very passionate about our work, but we’re also both pretty stubborn. There was this one scene, actually, near the end of the first film – do you remember the scene where Lisbeth is in the guest house, smoking, after [a bad guy character] has died in a car accident? Mikael [the noble journalist, her partner on the case] comes back and says to Lisbeth “We have to forgive him. It was his father that taught him to kill and to rape, so it wasn’t his fault. He’s a victim.” And she says “No, no, no! Everybody has a choice, he raped and killed because he wanted to, and if it’s his choice then he can’t be a victim!” I felt that Lisbeth had built her whole life on the notion that you do have a choice, and you’re not a victim of circumstance because you can always make your own decisions, and you are your own boss, in a way. I think she has survived by thinking that way. But in the first script that I read there was this long scene there where she says to Mikael everything that she has gone through. She really opens up. There was this long monologue where she told him about her childhood and about what her father had done to her mother and why she was in a mental hospital – she told him everything. And it was so totally out of character and I just flipped out when we came to that page. [laughs] I said to the director “What is this? I can’t do this, it’s impossible.” And he actually didn’t like the scene either, he wasn’t satisfied with it, but he wanted a scene there. He said to me “The audience for the film will include a lot of people who haven’t read the book and they aren’t going to see the second one and the third one, but they’ll want to know what happened to her and why she is the way she is and why she’s so angry.”
RS: He wanted to make sure the film was its own complete story, and not just a chapter?
NR: Yeah, he also said that he wanted the journey with Mikael to have changed Lisbeth in a way, and I could agree on that point. I also wanted the meeting with Mikael to have done something to her, something deep, but I couldn’t do it that way. And he said “If we don’t do the scene, we don’t have a film!” And I said “You can call the producers and tell them, but I won’t do this scene!” And he got very upset and very angry with me, but I was also very upset. It was this very hard and emotional moment. We liked each other, but I couldn’t do the scene and he still wanted me to do it. So, he said “Okay, we have to calm down and I have to think about this.” He ended up coming to me about two weeks later and he said “I think I have it – what if Mikael is the one who does the talking and he says ‘I don’t have to know what happened to you, I can tell that you’ve gone through hard things, but you don’t have to tell me and I don’t have to know, I’m just happy that you’re here with me.’” Remember the scene where they are laying on the bed, and Lisbeth says “Thank you?” That’s her big opening. I don’t think that Lisbeth had ever said thank you to anybody before, so that’s the thing. Her whole journey with Mikael has actually made it possible for her to open up a bit, with him at least. So that was the big thing that came out of this conflict, but I do like Niels very much and he said to me later on that he was happy that I was so stubborn and I had stood up for Lisbeth in a way.
RS: What was your contribution to the scene where Lisbeth is raped by her legal guardian? Did you sort of set the guidelines for how that would be filmed?
NR: Well, we talked through it a lot, but we didn’t rehearse the scene. I was sure that we absolutely needed those scenes – the rape scene and also the scene where Lisbeth comes back [and exacts a shocking revenge on her rapist] -- even though it’s a side story. The scenes with her legal guardian, they’re not really necessary to the main plot and we could have taken it out, but I really wanted that relationship between Lisbeth and Bjurman [the guardian] to be in the film, because it’s an important way to let you see important little pieces of Lisbeth’s past and why she feels the way she does about [the bad guy mentioned earlier] later on. So, I knew in my heart that I had to go in and do this scene, so we came to some agreements and we talked it through in terms of how far it would really go and where the limits would be and what we wanted out of the scene. In those kinds of situations, I think it’s extremely important that you be able to trust the director, in addition to sharing some kind of vision. It’s all about ‘what do we want and how shall we get there?’ Myself and Niels and Peter -- the other actor -- wanted the scene to be as credible as possible and also for it to be as realistic as we could make it. For me, I had to just let go of control, in a way. I also had to put away my vanity and just jump into the scene and accept being there.
RS: Lisbeth and Mikael eventually uncover a conspiracy with some nasty right-wing elements. Do you see these films as having anything serious to say about that aspect of Swedish society?
NR: I do, yes. Both in Sweden and in Denmark and in many countries of Europe, it’s frightening, actually. It’s growing. There are many racists in Sweden, and I think it’s awful and terrifying. We’re still struggling with those problems, even today. Stieg Larsson was working very seriously on this with a strong will toward changing things in Sweden and opening up people’s eyes. He had a price on his head from Nazis, you know? I think he was a very brave man because he kept going there and he kept writing those articles about these problems. When we did this film, I wanted for us also to put a light on those problems, in a way, because I think it’s always very dangerous to not talk about things. We have to force people to admit things about “perfect Sweden.” We love to show this picture of Sweden that is very nice and very equal and neutral and diplomatic – and that is one side of it – but we also have these darker things going on in Sweden and I think it’s extremely important that we dare to start talking about them.
RS: On the brighter side, Sweden seems to be having a minor film renaissance these days. We just saw Let the Right One In break through last year, now this.
NR: Yeah, I think so. I think that both the Millennium films and Let the Right One Inhave paved the way for more and bigger films, and films that are made for a more international public. Swedish filmmakers are now more willing to send their work out into the world, in a way. Before, we were making films for Swedes only, and that’s very boring. And I’m not a big fan of Swedish films, but I think now it’s changing and I think we have many interesting filmmakers coming up, you know? In the future I think there will be more good films coming out of Sweden.
RS: What do you think about the rumor that Stieg Larsson left behind a finished fourth Millennium book, which hasn’t been made public yet?
NR: [laughs] It’s only a rumor. Nobody actually knows. I think it’s Eva, Stieg’s girlfriend, who says that the book is in a computer somewhere. No one really knows, but there are many, many rumors about this. But I do think I’m done with it, with Lisbeth. I don’t like to just stick to things and hold onto them. I always like to move on and look toward the future. I’m not so sentimental.


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in select cities on March 19, 2010.

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable. Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's... more

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.

Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.

Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.

SuicideGirls spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Camille Rose Garcia: I'm in Northern California. I lived in LA forever but we moved up here a few years ago, and I live in the middle of the woods.

NP: In your own Wonderland.

CRG: Yes, in my own Wonderland. We're almost to Oregon, seven hours north of San Francisco.

NP: What made you want to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland?

CRG: Actually, the editor from Harper Collins, Liz [Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan], gave me a call. It was kind of her idea. It was already in my head from a couple of years ago, I'd been talking with Disney about doing something with Alice In Wonderland. So it made it a lot easier since I already had an idea of the characters I wanted to do. When she called me I thought that's perfect timing to do the book. I had some other projects lined up but I was like, I can swing it. I can do it. I can pull some late nights.

NP: What do you personally see down the rabbit hole in Carroll's story? And what wasn't fulfilled for you by the original illustrations?

CRG: Well the original illustrations by [John] Tenniel have always been some of my favorites. I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations. Because you got a little bit of a hint of the stuff that was going on, but not really [a sense] of the extent of it. There's a lot of drug references as well, so I wanted this one to be psychedelic referencing that.

NP: Talk about some of the visual vocabulary used in the illustrations.

CRG: Well I did want to reference '60s psychedelia. I'm not sure where that comes from, although it's probably the mushrooms.

NP: There are mushrooms in virtually all of your images.

CRG: Yeah. I think a lot of bands and things in the '60s seemed to reference Alice In Wonderland -- I guess Jefferson Airplane, the famous song "White Rabbit." There seemed to be a lot of '60s crossover with the psychedelic imagery, so the colors were very bright, kind of really happy, a lot of purples and pinks and yellows.

I was listening to T-Rex and David Bowie. They're more '70s, but to me I think of the '70s Bowie as very psychedelic. I wanted those colors, but then the characters themselves are a little darker, a little meaner, a little more severe. You have this contrast of the really super bright drug references with this more gothic element.

NP: The way you depict Alice, she could be a kid or she could be a 35-year old. I'm looking at the frame for the opening poem "All In A Golden Afternoon." You've got Alice looking beyond drowsy, almost like she's suffering the aftereffects of a party the night before, and she's surrounded by love hearts and you've drawn a bottle near her, nestled in the grass, that looks suspiciously like booze.

CRG: Yeah, she's definitely a substance abuser. But that was something I found interesting from the original illustrations, you can't really figure out how old she is, and in a lot of different illustrations of Alice over the years they've made her a little girl, they've made her older. In the animated Disney version she is more like 18, she's a lot older. I was kind of playing with that. In one version I had her older and a little more tarted up, a little sexier. But I didn't want to get into those issues.

NP: Sexualizing a children's story.

CRG: Yeah. I do have a lot of child fans. I thought there's going to be a lot of 7-year olds looking at this. I wanted to keep the drug and alcohol references in there because I thought it was important, but not [go] totally over-the-top. I made her kind of 12, on the verge of being an older person, but it comes down to 'Do you give her boobs or not?'

NP: She's got quite a puffy top on her dress so you can't really tell.

CRG: Yeah, 'cause when I was drawing that I thought, 'Would she have cleavage?' Not really. That was the ultimate problem; would she have boobs or not? But she's definitely drinking, so I guess she's like a 12-year old boozer.

NP: It is the interesting dichotomy with Carroll's story. On the surface it's a fairytale for children, but it works on another level as a drug-fueled nightmare for adults. And the perception of the story changes as you grow. Do you remember the time when you saw it through more innocent eyes? And how did your perception change?

CRG: I do remember. I remember reading the story and looking at the original illustrations, and it was one perception, like, "This is weird." I loved the rabbit from a very child-like perspective. Then being a teenager and listening to a lot of music and taking mushrooms and doing all this stuff, and also going to Disneyland, they have a whole Alice in Wonderland ride, there's all these layered references from my druggy teen years. Also realizing how many bands and other people are referencing the darker stuff.

But only upon when I took this project on, and re-read this story again, very intimately, trying to find more visual clues, [did I] realize really how dark it is. It's like a really bad trip. The Queen threatens to behead her at one pint, and they're drugging her, really there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So from an adult perspective it kind of reminds me more of the old Germanic folk tales where the kids were always getting killed or ran off into the forest or actual bad things happened to them.

NP: In America, we tend to want to wrap our kids up in petal pink and powder blue and tell them fluffy fairy tales, but in reality children's own tastes are far more macabre, which I think is part of the appeal of Alice. The reality of Alice's Wonderland is quite nightmarish, but kids will happily giggle as the queen shouts, "Off with their heads." But you never get to see the consequences. I always wondered about the resulting pile of decapitated bodies.

CRG: I feel like American culture in general is very much afraid to show children anything outside of a puppy/marshmallow SpongeBob world. But in the fairytales throughout history it was very important to teach people consequences. Oftentimes kids would die at the end or they'd get shoved in the oven, or they'd be beheaded or turned into a frog. There were always these much darker things happening and I feel like in the American versions of a lot of children's stories, that element is sanitized out.

And I think the time we're living in now, it's really important for kids to be aware of [the fact that] there a bad things in the world happening. There are things to be scared of, but that's how you grow and mature. You have to face your fears, so I wanted to keep some of that darkness in there...People underestimate kids a lot in terms of what they can handle. I know there are things that are appropriate and not, but I think American culture in particular is very sterilized when it comes to children's literature.

NP: But we also mollycoddle our adults. Take for example the gulf war and the policy of hiding the dead and the wounded from us. We don't see the consequences, the bodies of those we've killed. Nor do we see the bodies of our own troops.

CRG: I think again with American culture we're really infantilized. We're like an infantile culture that has an inability to deal with bad news, and that is prevalent across the board in America. Even talking about anything real, or showing somebody an image of something real that's happening in the world, people don't want to deal with it. They don't want to see it, they don't want to talk about it, and I think it's really kind of psychotic to not address everything that's actually happening in the world, to not even want to know about it.

NP: Yeah, I was watching a clip today of the cast of Jersey Shore being interviewed on a so-called news show.

CRG: Oooh, I was just looking at that and I was thinking I can't believe that this guy is somebody that has to be in my consciousness...

NP: That's all a part of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry in general being this Wonderland for the world that distracts us from the dark stuff that's going on that we should actually be paying attention to.

CRG: It seems too that the darker the world gets the more people really do have a need for that distraction. I mean Michael Jackson's death went on for three or four months on CNN to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. And that's just not very balanced.

NP: I know you grew up not far from Disneyland, which itself has many parallels to Carroll's story. On the surface it's this world famous wonderland, but the flipside is, if you grew up near it, it just became this place for bored local kids to go and get fucked up on drugs.

CRG: It was really the best place to take acid. And the contrast here I think is this idea of suburbia as the safest place, the happiest place. That's the thing to achieve in Western culture, Disneyland being at the pinnacle, the cherry on top of the happiest, best, safest place to be. When, in reality, to have a world that is paved over in concrete with all indigenous plants and animals removed and replaced by fake plants and animals, that's not something the world should strive towards as a collective goal. So there definitely are two sides to that.

NP: Throughout your various books, collections and exhibitions (The Saddest Place On Earth, Tragic Kingdom, etc.), your work has very much been influenced by growing up in the shadow of Disneyland. And it seems to have had a profound effect on a whole generation of kids from Orange County. How did the OC, this perfect vision of 1950's suburbia, become such a Tragic Kingdom?

CRG: For a longtime I had real strong ideas about relationships between suburbia and fascism, having this über perfect goal to be cleansed of anything strange or different. There's a real xenophobia in Orange County that's very dark.

NP: But then you look at Disney movies, it's taken until 2010 for them to release a movie starring a black princess.

CRG: The image of perfection in fantasy and fairytales is it completely removed of multicultural things. In the '70s we had Sesame Street that was trying to introduce that, but I think for the most part, especially in Disney and Southern California and the white middle class, their idea of perfection didn't involve any other cultures. Disney did travel to other cultures, but you can see how we sort of worship Germanic castles and all these European influences.

NP: And if you look at most of the set-in-suburbia dramas and soap operas on TV, they set up very unreal expectations. For example in Desperate Housewives, Mike Delfino is a plumber yet he lives in this gorgeous, million dollar plus suburban home. Kids have grown up with this promise of what suburban life should afford that they have no way of attaining for themselves.

CRG: Yes, and it's already crumbling because their parents are now in foreclosure and can't afford those houses. It's kind of like the collective fantasy of suburbia. It's not real. It's not working. This façade is falling apart. These kids that have grown up in those cultures aren't prepared at all for what's coming, for fighting over resources globally and global economic collapse. They're just not prepared at all for any of that.

NP: Talking of the American fairytale that's come crashing down, I was reading an interview you did that was first published on Sept 16, 2006 on a website called Crown Dozen where you very specifically predicted the global economic crash:

CRG: Well I had a lot of other people I was reading that were talking about it long before it happened. All these bankers, now the big lie is "Oh, we didn't know." They knew. It was written about extensively. They knew exactly what was happening and they knew how they were going to get their money out. It just becomes part of the collective lie. That's the thing, I think American culture is just a series of collective lies presented to us.

NP: I agree. When people were signing these mortgages that they never had any prospect of being able to afford, they were signing on the back of a fairytale. They were sold a fairytale.

CRG: Yeah, and along with the mortgage you get the anti-depressant drugs. It kind of reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick stories where the characters, they're taking these drugs because they're living on Mars and they want to pretend they're living on earth. It's like you need the drug to continue the fantasy of the lie. You can't have the lie without the anti-depressants.

NP: I guess that's what you explored in your 2008 Ambien Somnambulants show.

CRG: Yeah, exactly. The sleepwalking. Interestingly, going back to Alice, I found it actually really amazing when I thought about it, why there are so few female heroes in literature and children's literature - especially of that time period. Here was this young girl that had an opinion, had her ideas about things, and wasn't being railroaded over by adults or anyone in the story. I hadn't really though about that before. And that's really an interesting perspective. I bet it didn't come out of that period very often. Young girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, and not have opinions.

NP: That's part of Alice's charm, she doesn't say what's she expected to say. The big end is that she stands up to the kangaroo court and tells her elders and those in authority that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards."

CRG: Yeah, and flips them over, creates anarchy and runs off.

NP: The saddest thing about that ending for me is that that play on words is lost because most people today don't realize that "card" back then was another word for "joker" or "fool."

CRG: Yes, the puns are very specific, and a lot of them are English specific. Like I didn't know what "whiting" was, that it was also a fish. Certain things are very English and from the Victorian era. Upon re-reading it closer it was like, "Oh, OK! I never got that part." Re-reading it very closely was a joy, to think about it on a deeper level, of all those other themes going on.

NP: Children are taught to blindly respect authority, and the great thing about Alice is that she doesn't. We need to encourage that more. Going back to your Ambien Somnambulants idea that many of us sleepwalk through life, I always consider apathy to be the greatest facilitator of evil.

CRG: Wow, yeah. Just doing nothing.

NP: But then kids are taught that as long as something is presented by someone in authority, you're not really supposed to challenge it.

CRG: Yeah. That's the thing, again going back to her challenging and being so opinionated, it kind of ties into the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s. All that, all of the bra-burning and now we're at this point where young people, they don't have a lot of role models still. Even if you're great singer you still have to be half naked. You have to have that thing too to be famous. That is the message.

NP: I guess if Mattel made Alice she would have impossibly large breasts.

CRG: She's have huge boobs, but she'd be 12. [laughs] It's like, non-threatening but hot. She would never be a '50s buxom kind of [female]. That's the other thing, thinking of the females of the '50s that were powerful but bigger, now there's this cult of petite, harmless females. It becomes very confusing when drawing boobs or not drawing boobs, 'cause the size of the boob in relation to the rest of the body is like an indicator of power.

NP: But is that indicative of physical power over mental power?

CRG: I don't know. I was just thinking about anytime I'm confronted with having to draw boobs or no boobs. It determines how old I'm making a character. It's always a very confusing issue because I don't want to make them too big, because that plays into this weird like Japanese manga fetishization of the boob. But then you make them too small and she's 10 or 12, and it gets into the weird pedophile grey area. So I never know what to do with the boobs when I'm drawing them.

NP: It's kind of sad that that was your biggest issue when drawing Alice.

CRG: Yeah, because it's like, should she be older? But then it's totally wrong to have her too sexy. It was distracting. Her character in the story is mentally powerful and mentally challenging. I mean, I wanted to make her interesting, but sexy is sort of a one-note thing.

NP: But then that plays into the stereotype that you can't be blonde with big boobs and have intellectually powerful arguments.

CRG: Yeah, that you can't have both. It's a conundrum right? But then she can't be ugly right? You can't have an ugly little girl, that's totally not allowed. It's funny, just drawing these things and amending them, and thinking about all these visual clues.

NP: Obviously LA and the OC has provided a massive amount of inspiration for your work, but now you live in the middle of the woods not far from Oregon. What effects have your new surroundings had on your work?

CRG: I was born and raised in LA, and I don't it's a great idea to live all your life in one place. I think it's good to scare yourself, and, if you have the means, to try out new situations. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to live in nature - like really in it - and not be surrounded by convenience all the time.

The area we live in, it's really beautiful. It's within the boundaries of National Forest and National Park, so it is a preserved area. That's really inspiring because there's intact eco-systems and giant redwood trees, all these things that just seem other-worldly. In a way it makes me sad because I feel that there's not many of these places left anymore. We've destroyed a lot of them...I don't know how much longer we're going to last here in society, and I want to be able to live in this before it gets destroyed.


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. An exhibition of original art from the book will be held at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens on March 6th with a special book release party. Garcia will subsequently embark on a West Coast book signing tour. Go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/ for further details.

Joe Hill seemed to come out nowhere in 2007 when his first novel "Heart-Shaped Box" was released and became a bestseller and one of the best debut horror novels in years. Like all overnight success stories, it was a long time coming, the thirty-something writer having published one short story... more

Joe Hill seemed to come out nowhere in 2007 when his first novel "Heart-Shaped Box" was released and became a bestseller and one of the best debut horror novels in years. Like all overnight success stories, it was a long time coming, the thirty-something writer having published one short story collection previously and won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy, and the Bram Stoker Award for his short fiction.

Since then, Joe Hill, a pen name he adopted to avoid comparisons with his father, Stephen King, has established his own name and reputation. He launched "Locke and Key," a comicbook series with artist Gabriel Rodriguez from IDW Publishing. Hill is currently on tour promoting his just-released novel "Horns," the story of Ig Parrish, who wakes one morning to find horns growing from his forehead and discovers that he has the power of the devil. The story twists and turns, is sad and nasty, uncomfortable and sometimes even beautiful. In short, what a good horror novel should be.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really liked Horns and I’m curious where the novel began for you. Was it this idea of character who wakes one morning with horns or where did it start?

JOE HILL: On one level, I had written a book of short stories about ghosts and I wrote a novel about a ghost and I thought, well what can I do now? Part of my game plan has always been to write about dark characters, but see if I can’t fool the reader into rooting for them anyway. You really can’t get much darker than the devil.

On another level, before Heart-Shaped Box there were four other books that I was never able to sell. One was this big nine hundred page epic fantasy novel that I worked on for three years and it was turned down everywhere. One of the elements in it was a character who had a psychic gift, whenever he met someone, he knew their ugliest secret. I couldn’t quite leave that idea alone. Later I wrote several hundred pages of another book called The Surrealist Glass that employed a similar concept. With Horns I think the reason it gelled was because I brought the devil into the story.

AD: There was a great line in the book that really struck me and I think sums up how you approach the character of the devil. “It was perhaps the devil’s oldest precept that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill.”

JH: I think that’s true. We have this story about a person who wakes up one morning and finds he’s growing a pair of horns. He goes out to see a doctor, see a priest, see his parents. No one can help him with his condition and all people want to do is confess their most terrible secrets. If you knew the worst about the people you loved, could you still forgive them and could you still love them? Ig is forced to face a lot of darkness over the course of the book. Ultimately I think he does come to feel that you can know what’s worst in a person, but that’s not the whole picture, and the people worth knowing are still worth knowing even when you’ve seen the ugliest parts of them.

AD: And almost everyone in the book that Ig meets think that he brutally murdered his girlfriend and so everyone believes that they know Ig’s most terrible secret.

JH: In the small town of Gideon, New Hampshire, where the story takes place, everyone has thought of Ig as the devil for a good year before he actually becomes the devil. He’s viewed as this sex murderer who escaped unpunished. Of course he’s innocent, but the perception in town is that he’s this terrible figure.

AD: There’s usually a point in horror or fantasy books where either events become smaller and more personal or they become bigger. Horns becomes more intimate.

JH: It goes inward. It goes through the first hundred pages plays like a paranoid fantasy, kind of a Hitchcock thing. Back in the day, Hitchcock was thought of as a horror director. He was the master of creating these wronged man scenarios where you have a person who is isolated. All the people he thought he could trust, he can’t trust, and all the people he thought were on his side are actually his enemies.

I wanted the beginning to play like that, but I also didn’t think that that would be enough. It was important to see how these characters first met. It was important to see the characters at their worst, but for it to have meaning, you have to know who these people were at their best. So we have this long extended flashback to Ig’s youth and we get to see him falling in love. I think that’s a satisfying arc, when we get to see a character move from innocence to experience. Maybe that’s also traditional to all stories of sin and the devil. You have to have this fall from grace.

AD: There are a lot of musical references in your books and stories. Do you listen to music while you write?

JH: Every story I’ve worked on has developed its own playlist. A short story will maybe gather two or three songs, and a novel will often have fifteen or sixteen songs that I listen to repetitively, even obsessively. I have to turn the music off when I’m writing dialogue so I can hear the voices in my head more clearly. The best thing about being a writer is you can tell people that you spend hours listening to the voices in your head and everyone smiles and goes, oh that’s so creative. If your investment banker told you that, you’d definitely find someone else to invest with.

AD: It also helps to be a published writer. Being an unpublished writer just means you’re a guy who spends time alone listening to his voices, which fits an FBI profile.

JH: (laughs) I’m laughing, but you raise a serious point. The act of sitting alone every day is intimidating, especially if you’re just starting out and you have another job and you’re writing on the side. You’re thinking to yourself, I could be out with my friends, I could be with my family. I’m not really accomplishing anything. It just feels like a crazy person thing to do, just sit there and play pretend day after day after day with no reason to really expect that there’s going to be a reward.

AD: You published the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts before Heart-Shaped Box, and you’ve continued writing a lot of short fiction. Do you know when you’re writing a short story vs when you’re writing a novel?

JH: Lately I’ve known when I’m working on a novel, but Heart-Shaped Box began as a short story. Heart-Shaped Box is the story of this burned out heavy metal musician who has a collection of disturbing artifacts, a witch’s confession and cartoons drawn by John Wayne Gacy and he hears about a woman selling a haunted suit online. He buys it and when it shows up at his house, it turns out that there is a very real and very dangerous ghost attached to it. I thought when I was writing the story that he would discover that the ghost was real too late and the thing would eat him for breakfast, but Judas refused to die on my schedule. It got to be kind of fun to see how long he could last.

AD: Did you know story behind the suit and the backstory of everything?

JH: Not really. I hung in there to see how long he could keep going. It turned out that he could keep going for about 325 pages. I don’t outline or plan stories out. Sometimes I think my life would be easier if I did. Not planning things out makes the first drafts very, very messy. I throw out anywhere from a third to half of my first draft.

AD: When you were writing Horns did know in advance how it would be structured or at least what ground the novel would cover?

JH: No. The first draft was really rancid. When the first draft was done I showed it to a handful of people, and while people liked some of the scenes, I think I was maybe the only one who felt there was a good story there. Over half of that first draft was abandoned in the process, but it’s not about whether it was easy or hard. All that maters is how the reader feels when the reader was reading it. Horns was a very hard book to write. There were a lot of setbacks. Inevitably whenever I was faced with a creative choice, I would make the wrong one, and have to go back three days later and delete fifteen pages and start again. In some ways I’m more proud of this book than of anything else I’ve ever written, just because it was difficult.

AD: Was part of difficulty the much talked about sophomore effort?

JH: Absolutely. There was another book I worked on that I got several hundred pages of that I abandoned, basically because it wasn’t any good. That was this book that I mentioned earlier, The Surrealist Glass. In some ways that was a very crude rough draft of Horns. I got into that second book mindset where I put more pressure on myself than I really needed to. It took about a year and a half to unwind and finally settle in. It was like digging a grave in the rain. The deeper you get the more the sides fall in around you. But eventually the rain stopped and it dried out and I got the hole dug. Am I going for the right metaphor here? I don’t know if I really want to make a grave the metaphor for my book.

AD: It’s the kind of metaphor a horror writer would make. On that subject, you’re labelled a horror writer but how do you think of your own work and how do you think of the genre that you work in?

JH: I think when horror fails, it’s because the people behind the movie or book forgot the most basic rule. There’s a difference between horror and just scaring people. To me, all horror is rooted in sympathy. Before you can have truly effective horror, you have to give readers a character that they give a shit about. You have to introduce them to characters that they can identify with and love and root for who have complex and authentic emotional inner lives who have regrets and made some mistakes. I always approach horror from the point of view of getting a character to write first and then introducing the awful situation.

AD: That’s interesting because what scares us or unnerves us is very different from what startles us, which is what a lot of horror attempts to do.

JH: Exactly. I think most of the torture porn stuff is just a fad. I think once you’ve watched a certain amount of horror and read a certain amount of horror, those scenes really fail to produce an effective response. You laugh at them instead of flinch. There are not separate rules for horror fiction. The same rules that apply to mainstream literature apply to horror fiction or fantasy or science fiction or whatever. There has to be a character in a situation that explores some interesting questions that mean something to people on a larger level. I think one of the reasons people turn to fiction is to explore questions that are difficult to face and explore in everyday life. Questions that would upset us and worry us and so we look at them through fiction in the same way you would handle radioactive material through a pair of lead-lined gloves.

AD: Beyond having a new novel out which is a very big deal, there’s a new issue of your comic Locke and Key coming out and you have a short story in the new zombie anthology, The New Dead.

JH: I’m pretty proud of the short story. A lot of social networking has left me cold. I’m the world’s most indifferent blogger. I like twitter because twitter is a chance to play with that underrated literary form, the one-liner. I think that Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain would have loved twitter. I wanted to see if I couldn’t do a story about it, so I did this story, "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" for Chris Golden’s anthology The New Dead. The story is about this internet obsessed teenage girl and her crunchy granola mom. The two of them are on a roadtrip together and over the course of this trip they clash with each other and they open up to one another and they share their vulnerabilities and they reach a couple emotional epiphanies together. It’s just like one of those Traveling Pants books. Then they arrive at the Circus of the Dead and zombies start eating people. (laughs)

AD: If that description doesn’t sell a few copies, I don’t know what will. As far as Locke and Key goes, we’re in the third story arc of the series, "Crown of Shadows."

JH: One of the great pleasures in my life has been to collaborate on this thing with Gabriel Rodriguez who is the artist.

AD: Who also drew the devil’s face that appears throughout Horns.

JH: Yes. I’m always sucking my friends into side projects. He stepped up with a great devil face. At one reading someone asked me if I could be anyone else for a day who would I be. I said I would want to be Gabriel Rodriguez because it would be so exciting to be able to draw like him even if only for a day.

There are two things I think writers never should have given up. Before Hemingway, every story was an illustrated story. Twain, Dickens, Doyle, Hardy, all these books when they first came out were illustrated. Post-Hemingway a feeling developed that illustration was strictly for kids books. There’s no reason that the story can’t have illustrations. When we think about for example Sherlock Holmes, part of the reason we love the character is the ingenuity of the stories but I think that part of the reason he’s an icon was Sidney Paget’s illustrations which fixed the look of the character in the public’s mind. The other thing writers never should have given up is writing episodically. These things were abandoned in modern publishing and the only place you can still find them is in comicbooks.

AD: With Locke and Key you do have an ending you’re writing towards. Is it all plotted out in your head?

JH: I think I have an end point, but I’m not writing it any differently than anything else I’ve ever written. It’s always possible it will surprise me and either end more abruptly than I expect or go on a little bit longer, but I project about 36 issues total. Right we’re up to issue 15. We’ve still got a ways. I’ve scripted ahead of where Gabe is illustrating so I’ve written twenty issues total.

AD: Anything you’d like to spill about what you have planned?

JH: I’m definitely not one to spoil anything. I haven’t titled the next arc but it might wind up being called "Six Stories." Those six issues will each be stand alones. This is something I’ve wanted to do with the series for a while.

I was a big X-Files fan, but like everyone, I thought that eventually the mythology got too big. You began to feel there would never be a satisfying answer to any of the mysteries. One of the things I’ve intentionally done with Locke and Key is never to raise a mystery

Jamie Delano didn’t invent the character John Constantine, but the writer who launched the ongoing series Hellblazer took the Alan Moore created character and gave the trenchcoat wearing British magician his background and really defined the character in a way that every writer of the character in comics... more

Jamie Delano didn’t invent the character John Constantine, but the writer who launched the ongoing series Hellblazer took the Alan Moore created character and gave the trenchcoat wearing British magician his background and really defined the character in a way that every writer of the character in comics and film has since been building from.

Delano has gone on to write a number of other projects for Vertigo, miniseries (“Ghostdancing,” “2020 Visions”), ongoing series (“Outlaw Nation”) and one shots (the brilliant “Hell Eternal”) in addition to recent work from publishers like Avatar Press (the science fiction thriller “Narcopolis,” and the pirate adventure “Rawbone”).

Delano’s new project is a return to John Constantine with the graphic novel “Hellblazer: Pandemonium.” Illustrated by British artist Jock (“The Losers”) the book was originally written for the twentieth anniversary of Vertigo, but instead comes out this year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Constantine’s first appearance as a supporting character in "The Saga of the Swamp Thing," created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben. Delano was kind enough to talk with us via e-mail about the new graphic novel and what it is that keeps him returning to write the character John Constantine.


ALEX DUEBEN: What was it that made you interested in working on Hellblazer in the first place so many years ago?

JAMIE DELANO: I guess I'd have to say that it was primarily the desire to stop driving taxis and become a professional writer. Lucky for me, DC Comics' coincidental desire to develop Moore's intriguing character, John Constantine, by featuring him in an ongoing series made this possible. I probably would have accepted an offer to write anything back then, but it is hard to imagine that I could have "connected" so satisfactorily with any other established character. Writing Hellblazer allowed me to engage with the contemporary social and political trends that absorbed me, wearing the trench coat of a smart-mouthed, hard-boiled British "occult detective" through the medium of genre fiction. I kind of enjoyed that voice.

AD: One thing I've always wondered, where did the title Hellblazer come from? It doesn’t seem to mean or relate to anything.

JD: I've wondered that from time to time, too. It's a while ago, but as I recall my first suggestion was Hellraiser -- but Clive Barker beat us to it. Ultimately, the nascent series was DCs' baby to name, Hellblazer their editorial pick. What it means, I have no idea -- but I guess it fit.

AD: The series later became much more interested in Christianity, heaven and hell, but you were interested in a broad range of magic and mythologies, which you've also utilized in other works like Ghostdancing and Shadowman. Does the idea of the devil and hell just seem dull compared with the other possibilities or what is it that drives this?

JD: Gods, demons, angels, devils, power-beings-all are imaginary avatars for the dramatisation of human emotion in the world of J. Delano. But in the reality of John Constantine -- as I animate it -- these entities are real and potent. It is their simplistic supernatural contest -- Good versus Evil, Heaven versus Hell -- that Constantine struggles perpetually to finesse to the relief or advantage of us, the humans-in-the-street whose status as mere "collateral damage" in these "eternal wars" he refuses to accept.

AD: When you wrote the book it was more about horror and it was more political and internal in a way that made it unique among comics and even compared to other Hellblazer writers. Were there other books or writers that inspired this approach?

JD: I have always enjoyed the best of the tradition that uses the accessibility of genre fiction -- detective, horror, sci-fi, fantasy -- to explore the reality and potential of the human condition by visiting its imaginary extremes while resisting "literary pretension". My inspiration is thus manifold: William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard to Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson to pick an arbitrary range.

AD: Now that you're run has been collected into trades, have you gone back and looked at them? How do you think they hold up?

JD: I haven't re-read all the old stories comprehensively--just dipped in here and there. But when I have overcome my reluctance to revisit the past I'll admit I've been reassured that, although there are many awkward moments, immaturities of craft, etcetera, overall the work is generally less embarrassing than I might have feared--though I usually can't remember writing a word of it.

AD: So what is Hellblazer: Pandemonium?

JD: Hellblazer: Pandemonium is a graphic novel originally commissioned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of issue one of the continuing DC Vertigo series in which I initiated the development of John Constantine - Alan Moore's flippant working-class British magician introduced in The Saga of the Swamp Thing -- into the more psychologically complex and layered character animated and further revealed by many fine writers since. Exigencies of the publishing process have resulted in Hellblazer: Pandemonium marking the 25th anniversary of Moore's original creation, instead--but the story remains the same.

Casting around for a theme that might juxtapose a little of Constantine's "then" and "now", it occurred to me that one of his early, and enduring, antagonists was a "demon" named Nergal, whose original inspiration I had pillaged from the ancient Assyrian pantheon. Assyria... Mesopotamia... Iraq: the link from past to present was unavoidable. Like it or not (and he doesn't), it became inevitable that Constantine was going have to go to Iraq, wrestle -- in his own insouciant, cynical fashion -- with  some of the moral ambiguities and their brutal, bloody consequences that characterise the "war on terror".

In traditional slippery fashion, Constantine (just about) avoids being engulfed by the quagmire of horror while indulging a dubious passion for an Iraqi double-agent and enjoying a recklessly crazed game of "poker" with some denizens of the Assyrian Underworld-before making it home by the skin of his teeth with his integrity only slightly tainted.

Despite its context, I hope that -- viewed through Constantine's uniquely skewed perspective -- the story treats with a reality of devastating human tragedy with some sincerity and compassion, while keeping an essential (albeit pretty black) sense of humour about it. Others may judge the success, or otherwise, of that endeavour.

AD: How did you end up working with Jock and what did you enjoy abut the collaboration?

JD: Our marriage was editorially arranged. Although I had met Jock, coincidentally, a few months earlier, I was (shamefully) unfamiliar with his work when Pandemonium was suggested-but as soon as the first pages began to appear it was apparent the match was well-made. Jock obviously "got" both Constantine and the story we were involving him in. His deft and economical, subtly but evocatively coloured -- almost expressionistic -- style was not necessarily the imagery that was running in my head as I wrote the script, but when I saw it, I was more than confident that the book would not just be words and pictures but a synergy, greater than the sum of its parts-which is what a good comic collaboration should be.

AD: As you mentioned the book has been in the works for a few years. Do you think the timing will affect how people read the book?

JD: I don't see that it should. The media/political focus may have moved to other theatres of despair--but the "issues" with which the story engages remain pretty raw and current.

AD: You've revisited Constantine before, such as The Horrorist miniseries that you did with David Lloyd. What brought you back this time and what do you find so fascinating about the character?

JD: As many who have shrugged on that old trench coat to take a squint at the world through the "laughing magician's" jaundiced eye would probably attest, John Constantine is a dangerous addiction. While a permanent alliance with Constantine's bleak struggles might prove terminally corrosive to an aging writer, the occasional desire for the weird passions of youth may be sporadically indulged with only minor risk to body or soul-and it's good to stay in touch with old friends...

AD: In your work there's really a sense of just how thin the veneer of civilization is and how tenuous it is. How much of that is your own worldview and how much is simply exploiting an idea for the purposes of a good story?

JD: On a bad day I might suggest that Humanity perpetually skates the thin ice of "civilisation", while cold things with teeth writhe in the dark deep below. The ice constantly cracks and re-freezes: we're lucky when we're not amongst those who go down -- but it's only a matter of time. On a good day I might suggest something else -- but good days are in short supply.

AD: Fair enough. I wanted to talk about another series you did, Outlaw Nation, which in some ways felt in like a sequel to a Vertigo miniseries you did in the 1990s, Ghostdancing in that it's set in the Southwest, builds on myths and stories and it's as much about the mythology and the idea of the United States as it is about the characters. Was any of that what you were actually thinking at the time?

JD: Yeah, kinda, I guess. We all have our pre-occupations, and the US was one of mine for a while-but Outlaw Nation cured me of that folly.

AD: One of the central themes in Outlaw Nation is about the Johnson family, this group of honorable thieves and criminals, and the William Burroughs line about how everybody is either a Johnson or a shit. I get the sense from your work that you’re sympathetic to that idea but it makes you nervous because you think that's too simplistic.

JD: Johnson or Shit is a seductive idea--but when it boils down it's a kind of pragmatic, lazy "cop" philosophy that, disregarding the mitigating possibilities of individual redemption, resorts to arbitrary judgment. As such it leaves me uneasy. Most of us are mostly Johnsons most of the time--but we're all Shits, now and then.

AD: What were your plans for Outlaw Nation if you had a chance to write it for a years rather than rush to wrap it up in a few issues?

JD: Oh...it was going to ramble self-indulgently around visiting various outlaw archetypes -- fictional or real -- while its protagonist haplessly attempted to reconcile the myth and reality of America and catch up with its furiously evolving 21st century culture... with an evaluation of the potential for good or ill of interfering scribblers of pulp fiction-or something. A preposterous ambition, clearly doomed-but still a lot of fun to attempt.

AD: Any plans to do more with it or collaborate again with artist Goran Sudzuka?

JD: There are themes still in there that interest me, but I doubt any return to Outlaw Nation is viable. I'd certainly work with Goran again though, if the opportunity arose.

AD: Do you prefer short works like say Hell Eternal or longer runs on books where you're juggling a lot over a long period of time?

JD: Both have their attractions, but overall I'd say I prefer the discipline of the shorter, self-contained work. I'm inevitably frustrated by the necessity to conform to a rigid page-count when often it feels as if three or four more would ease the story beneficially, but the focus on story-telling thus demanded is definitely advantageous. With an ongoing series it can be easy to succumb to laziness, extend scenes unnecessarily, put off resolving an awkward plot-thread for another month, etcetera...

AD: What's in store for the future. I know you’re working a few different comics companies, besides Vertigo there’s Desperado and Avatar. And I don't think I've ever actually asked a comics writer this before, but will we ever see a prose novel from you?

JD: It is my enduring ambition to write a prose "novel" and I will-as soon as I can define for myself what form such a thing might take. I continue to fool around with the odd film-oriented project, waste time if not money playing low-stakes poker online, generally subsiding into late middle-age, dragged down by the relentless multiplication of grandchildren. On the comics front, there are signs my largely fallow period is ending, with a new idea recently germinating-but it's way too frail a creature to give a name to yet.

A disgraced, but noble journalist. A serial killer with ties to high society. A young, beautiful computer hacker with a punk attitude and theories about the case. A lost little girl. A dark secret stretching back to WWII. It’s easy to see why Stieg Larsson’s pulp Millennium trilogy (The Girl With... more

A disgraced, but noble journalist. A serial killer with ties to high society. A young, beautiful computer hacker with a punk attitude and theories about the case. A lost little girl. A dark secret stretching back to WWII. It’s easy to see why Stieg Larsson’s pulp Millennium trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire , and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest ) has become a runaway beach book phenomenon, selling more copies in Europe than almost any other books in the past decade, and why three feature-length Swedish films based on the trilogy were rushed into production in 2008, even as the novels were still smashing sales records. The frenzy of interest in the books (and the first film, which won the Swedish Oscar) was only heightened by the sudden death of the author prior to the trilogy’s release and the ensuing controversy surrounding his estate and suspicions about his untimely end (as recently reported on by Vanity Fair), as well as what some observers have been calling the discovery of the decade – Swedish ingénue Noomi Rapace.
As the sullen computer genius/chess master/amateur detective/motorcycle punk Lisbeth Salander, Rapace has already earned enough fans worldwide to mark her as one of Europe’s most promising new actresses; in addition to being practically unable to walk down Swedish streets unmolested, she’s been the subject of more than a few fawning profiles in the British press as well as incessant speculation about when she’ll make a decisive foray into English language cinema (though you shouldn’t expect her to reprise the Lisbeth character in Sony Pictures’ forthcoming Hollywood remake of Dragon Tattoo – George Clooney and Kristen Stewart are the names being whispered for the main roles). With her sculpted cheekbones, dark almond eyes and slightly tomboyish posture, the half-Spanish Rapace is like a hybrid of Angelina Jolie and a young Mia Farrow – danger and gravitas delivered with a throaty Scandinavian accent. While recently in the states to kick off the domestic release of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rapace called up SuicideGirls to talk.


Ryan Stewart: There’s a scene in the film where the giant tattoo on Lisbeth’s back is shown off for the camera – was there a special day where you had to sit and have that applied with makeup?
Noomi Rapace: No. It was a kid’s tattoo. [laughs] Like you put on with warm water, it was pretty similar to that. The makeup designer ordered them from Los Angeles, from this company that does all the tattoos for shows like Prison Break and I think they also did that film with Viggo Mortensen, the one where he plays a Russian? Anyway, they’ve done a lot of tattoos for films, and they’re really good at it. It’s a very expensive, but also very childish way of doing the tattoos. But I did want to transform myself, and I did do a lot of preparation. I put myself on a diet, because I wanted to be more skinny, in a way, though not anorexic. So, I trained and I exercised a lot, and we were practicing Thai boxing and kickboxing with this crazy Serbian guy five days a week for seven months. I also took motorcycle driving lessons and then I cut my hair and I did all of those piercings, and as I did that Lisbeth slowly grew inside of me. It was like my body and my mind and everything was slowly getting into changing into her, in a way.
RS: She’s outwardly emotionless to the point of autism, she’s aggressively sexual, she’s casually bisexual, she has breast implants -- do you think Stieg Larsson was writing his fantasy woman?
NR: Yes. [laughs] Maybe so, but it’s sometimes hard to get a clear picture of who she really is from the book. She has a lot of contradictions. She’s sometimes described as very ugly, with “pig eyes” like she’s really ugly, but in the next scene or even the next page she’s really sexy because the men are very attracted to her. So it is sometimes difficult to get a very clear picture of her, and also she’s sometimes a bit cartoonish in the book – she can do things that are not really realistic and I wanted to humanize her, in a way. I wanted the audience to be able to believe in her fully, and I wanted each scene to be credible. It was always important for me that the action scenes and the fight scenes be as realistic as possible. I didn’t want a stunt woman to come in and do these fantastic Lara Croft stunts and so on -- I wanted to keep it pretty realistic and down to Earth.
RS: I know you’ve already filmed parts two and three of the trilogy – did you shoot them all simultaneously, as one big project?
NR: Yeah, we did them back to back. I think we started in February of 2008 and I was finished at the end of December, so it was like that. I was also preparing for maybe seven months before that, so it was like one and a half years that I was working with Lisbeth on the trilogy. For me, it fit me pretty good to do it all in one burst of energy, you know? It was like I went down into Lisbeth and it became possible for me to be her, and to let her live in me for a long time, and I didn’t have to go out of it and back into it that much. So, yeah, it fit me good, and it was a slow thing -- while we were shooting the second one I started to not even think so much at all that I was playing someone else. I had already been working with her such a long time by that point, so it was a good [process] for me.
RS: Even though parts two and three haven’t been released here in the U.S. yet, I did watch the Swedish trailer for part three. Nice Mohawk – was that your idea?
NR: Yeah, pretty much. Those decisions were my decisions, all the way, what her look was and also how she would behave in a scene. I worked pretty closely with Niels [Oplev, the director] on the script also, and I think they listened to me, pretty much. She’s described the way she is in the book, but it was my decision to do the Mohawk, for example. In the second film she gets shot in her head and at the beginning of the third film she’s actually in hospital and they’ve shaved one of the sides of my head, so it was my decision to shave the other side also. In the first book she’s described with many details, as far as how she looks, but in the second one and the third one it’s a bit more open to your imagination, in a way.
RS:I’ve read that you were sort of a troubled teenager – is that what you drew on? Did you get into trouble with the law like Lisbeth?
NR: Well, nah. I was a disaster when I was fourteen or fifteen, and I went to demonstrations and I was drunk every day, and so on. But I made a decision when I was fifteen and changed my life, in a way. I moved from the south of Sweden to Stockholm and I went to this drama high school and I got sober. I made the decision that I wanted to live, and that I wanted to be an actress for sure. I wasn’t in big trouble, but I didn’t believe in life when I was a teenager. I was very skeptical of everything and I felt like everyone around me was very unhappy and I couldn’t even see any reason why you should be a grownup. Everybody was married and unhappy and it was so depressing, everywhere. As a society, the Swedes can be really depressing sometimes. They can be stoic and repressed and they’re emotionally very cold sometimes and they keep everything inside, you know? My temperament never really fit in with the Swedes, so I always felt like an outsider. But Lisbeth is much more extreme [than I was]. I was still a loved kid and I had a wonderful mother, so not exactly the same, but I do think that I could feel some kind of connection with her and I could kind of understand the way she handles things. I think she pretends to be strong even when she’s sometimes very scared. I also think she’s very vulnerable and sensitive inside, but she’s built this hard shell. It’s like she’s wearing a uniform and she’s always expecting everybody to be against her. She’s waiting for somebody to come and stab her in the back all the time. She doesn’t really trust anyone, and I think I can understand that about her, but she’s pretty far away from me in many senses.
RS: I understand you and Niels mixed it up on set a few times? You had some memorable creative arguments?
NR: Yeah, and I love him, and we’re both very passionate about our work, but we’re also both pretty stubborn. There was this one scene, actually, near the end of the first film – do you remember the scene where Lisbeth is in the guest house, smoking, after [a bad guy character] has died in a car accident? Mikael [the noble journalist, her partner on the case] comes back and says to Lisbeth “We have to forgive him. It was his father that taught him to kill and to rape, so it wasn’t his fault. He’s a victim.” And she says “No, no, no! Everybody has a choice, he raped and killed because he wanted to, and if it’s his choice then he can’t be a victim!” I felt that Lisbeth had built her whole life on the notion that you do have a choice, and you’re not a victim of circumstance because you can always make your own decisions, and you are your own boss, in a way. I think she has survived by thinking that way. But in the first script that I read there was this long scene there where she says to Mikael everything that she has gone through. She really opens up. There was this long monologue where she told him about her childhood and about what her father had done to her mother and why she was in a mental hospital – she told him everything. And it was so totally out of character and I just flipped out when we came to that page. [laughs] I said to the director “What is this? I can’t do this, it’s impossible.” And he actually didn’t like the scene either, he wasn’t satisfied with it, but he wanted a scene there. He said to me “The audience for the film will include a lot of people who haven’t read the book and they aren’t going to see the second one and the third one, but they’ll want to know what happened to her and why she is the way she is and why she’s so angry.”
RS: He wanted to make sure the film was its own complete story, and not just a chapter?
NR: Yeah, he also said that he wanted the journey with Mikael to have changed Lisbeth in a way, and I could agree on that point. I also wanted the meeting with Mikael to have done something to her, something deep, but I couldn’t do it that way. And he said “If we don’t do the scene, we don’t have a film!” And I said “You can call the producers and tell them, but I won’t do this scene!” And he got very upset and very angry with me, but I was also very upset. It was this very hard and emotional moment. We liked each other, but I couldn’t do the scene and he still wanted me to do it. So, he said “Okay, we have to calm down and I have to think about this.” He ended up coming to me about two weeks later and he said “I think I have it – what if Mikael is the one who does the talking and he says ‘I don’t have to know what happened to you, I can tell that you’ve gone through hard things, but you don’t have to tell me and I don’t have to know, I’m just happy that you’re here with me.’” Remember the scene where they are laying on the bed, and Lisbeth says “Thank you?” That’s her big opening. I don’t think that Lisbeth had ever said thank you to anybody before, so that’s the thing. Her whole journey with Mikael has actually made it possible for her to open up a bit, with him at least. So that was the big thing that came out of this conflict, but I do like Niels very much and he said to me later on that he was happy that I was so stubborn and I had stood up for Lisbeth in a way.
RS: What was your contribution to the scene where Lisbeth is raped by her legal guardian? Did you sort of set the guidelines for how that would be filmed?
NR: Well, we talked through it a lot, but we didn’t rehearse the scene. I was sure that we absolutely needed those scenes – the rape scene and also the scene where Lisbeth comes back [and exacts a shocking revenge on her rapist] -- even though it’s a side story. The scenes with her legal guardian, they’re not really necessary to the main plot and we could have taken it out, but I really wanted that relationship between Lisbeth and Bjurman [the guardian] to be in the film, because it’s an important way to let you see important little pieces of Lisbeth’s past and why she feels the way she does about [the bad guy mentioned earlier] later on. So, I knew in my heart that I had to go in and do this scene, so we came to some agreements and we talked it through in terms of how far it would really go and where the limits would be and what we wanted out of the scene. In those kinds of situations, I think it’s extremely important that you be able to trust the director, in addition to sharing some kind of vision. It’s all about ‘what do we want and how shall we get there?’ Myself and Niels and Peter -- the other actor -- wanted the scene to be as credible as possible and also for it to be as realistic as we could make it. For me, I had to just let go of control, in a way. I also had to put away my vanity and just jump into the scene and accept being there.
RS: Lisbeth and Mikael eventually uncover a conspiracy with some nasty right-wing elements. Do you see these films as having anything serious to say about that aspect of Swedish society?
NR: I do, yes. Both in Sweden and in Denmark and in many countries of Europe, it’s frightening, actually. It’s growing. There are many racists in Sweden, and I think it’s awful and terrifying. We’re still struggling with those problems, even today. Stieg Larsson was working very seriously on this with a strong will toward changing things in Sweden and opening up people’s eyes. He had a price on his head from Nazis, you know? I think he was a very brave man because he kept going there and he kept writing those articles about these problems. When we did this film, I wanted for us also to put a light on those problems, in a way, because I think it’s always very dangerous to not talk about things. We have to force people to admit things about “perfect Sweden.” We love to show this picture of Sweden that is very nice and very equal and neutral and diplomatic – and that is one side of it – but we also have these darker things going on in Sweden and I think it’s extremely important that we dare to start talking about them.
RS: On the brighter side, Sweden seems to be having a minor film renaissance these days. We just saw Let the Right One In break through last year, now this.
NR: Yeah, I think so. I think that both the Millennium films and Let the Right One Inhave paved the way for more and bigger films, and films that are made for a more international public. Swedish filmmakers are now more willing to send their work out into the world, in a way. Before, we were making films for Swedes only, and that’s very boring. And I’m not a big fan of Swedish films, but I think now it’s changing and I think we have many interesting filmmakers coming up, you know? In the future I think there will be more good films coming out of Sweden.
RS: What do you think about the rumor that Stieg Larsson left behind a finished fourth Millennium book, which hasn’t been made public yet?
NR: [laughs] It’s only a rumor. Nobody actually knows. I think it’s Eva, Stieg’s girlfriend, who says that the book is in a computer somewhere. No one really knows, but there are many, many rumors about this. But I do think I’m done with it, with Lisbeth. I don’t like to just stick to things and hold onto them. I always like to move on and look toward the future. I’m not so sentimental.


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in select cities on March 19, 2010.

Hello everyone ! So I'm back from my short trip to Burbank. I had such a fantastic time ! Not only did I get to spend time with a super gorgeous Radeo but I had a great shoot with Sean. They were very sweet and treated me wonderfully. Radeo even took me out to see Hollywood to do a little shopping. more

Hello everyone !

So I'm back from my short trip to Burbank. I had such a fantastic time ! Not only did I get to spend time with a super gorgeous Radeo but I had a great shoot with Sean. They were very sweet and treated me wonderfully. Radeo even took me out to see Hollywood to do a little shopping. ^3^
The shoot turned out quite well, I think. I was a little nervous at first but I think Sean and I created something really good. Hopefully this set gets bought and I finally go Pink. /fingers crossed.
now i wait impatiently to see the finished set. ^3^

Destin Pfaff came into the business of love reluctantly. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in the power of attraction, or the institution of marriage. (For the record he’s engaged, and the happy couple have a 7 month-old son.) It’s just that a career in sales didn't appeal, and it never really... more

Destin Pfaff came into the business of love reluctantly. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in the power of attraction, or the institution of marriage. (For the record he’s engaged, and the happy couple have a 7 month-old son.) It’s just that a career in sales didn't appeal, and it never really occurred to him that one could make a living -- and a good one at that -- selling access to something that most people hope to find for free, namely a soul mate.

Pfaff had actually set his heart on a screenwriting career, with horror being his first love. He had some early success in that direction, making it to the semi-finals of Screamfest LA in 2003 with a script he penned called Ripp. However fate, or more accurately Patti Stanger, intervened and his professional life took a rather unexpected turn.

Stanger is the founder of the Millionaire's Club, a Beverly Hills-based dating service for well-heeled clients who’ve yet to get lucky in love. It’s her job to see the potential in people, and she saw lots of that when she came across Pfaff. Despite his initial disinclination to commit to Stanger’s high-end matchmaking service, Pfaff turned out to be a natural in the art of pairing people off.

Pfaff’s skills in the romance department can currently be seen on Bravo’s reality series "The Millionaire Matchmaker." Now in its third season, the show follows Stanger, Pfaff and their Millionaire's Club cohorts as they set up their clients.

SuicideGirls caught up with Pfaff to find out what it takes to be a matchmaking professional, and to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on the on camera love action.

SuicideGirls: Where did you grow up?

Destin Pfaff: I was born in Santa Barbara and I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. I lived there for 13 years. Then, I came back to Santa Barbara for high school and college. It was just a lot of fun. I completely enjoyed it. I DJ’d there and I had a really good time. Then, by about 24, 25, I figured I had to get my act together and moved to LA to become a writer.

SG: Oh, that's what you moved to LA for?

DP: Yeah. I came to LA to be a horror movie writer. I found my muse a little bit and I started writing. I did exactly what I needed to do.

SG: Where in LA did you move to?

DP: I moved to Hollywood -- right in the heart of Hollywood.

SG: What year was this?

DP: Eight years ago, so it would be 2002. Ball park. Guessing. The first script that I wrote, the boys over at Fangoria Magazine and [its editor] Tony Timpone, gave me a really nice boost and did a little shopping for me. [They] wrote a nice little article about it and they bought it.

Then, Alex Wright, who's been an early supporter of mine, who did a couple of Wishmaster movies as well as Styx and a few other films, helped me write my next script and gave me notes, taught me the proper structure of everything. All the while, I was working...I ran this small business in Westwood that was a unique job place. If you were an actor or a writer or a director or model, and you just needed some cash, you'd come to us. We'd throw you out there, we'd get you costume character work. We'd get you burlesque show jobs, strip-o-grams, catering jobs, bartending jobs...

SG: Odd jobs for creative people, who aren't looking for a career but who need to make some money.

DP: Basically, they have to pay rent.

SG: Did you start that business?

DP: No, I worked for a guy by the name of Michael Weiss. He was leaving for Florida, to go become a chef somewhere. And, [he asked me to] take care of [his] business. I met him, and the next day, he said, Good luck!” I said, “That's a lot of trust buddy, but all right.” It was cool. No, you know, he was great. The job was great. Really enjoyed that.

SG: Sounds like a good business.

DP: We got very busy, and it started kind of taking over my life a little bit. I was adamant that I didn't want to get stuck in a corporate environment. I was good at running people's businesses and I didn't want to do that, so I quit and I went to Tower.

SG: Tower Records?

DP: Tower Video actually, across the street from Tower Records. Got a day job. I was like, "OK, work the day job, write at night." Wrote a few screen plays, then, Tower was getting ready to go out of business...

[Then] Patty, from Millionaire's Club, she found me online on Craig's List. [She] called me up, asked me to help her get her shit together. This was supposed to be like a two-week gig just to get some things situated. Then, I was done. Then, she tried to convince me to stay. I said no, then she convinced me, and then I said yes. And years and years have passed.

SG: When was it that you first went to go work for her?

DP: About four and a half years ago. Right when the show was getting ready for pilot.

SG: She had a business before the show?

DP: Yeah, the Millionaire's Club has been in existence for almost 10 years now.

SG: Gotcha. So she was running the business, and when they decided to do the pilot she needed some extra help.

DP: It's a boutique company, and there was so much room for her to expand it a little bit more and get a further reach. Re-do her website. Her website was straight up 1992, Republican era. She was very unorganized, everything was just a mess...She had bad people helping her, and she went through a bad slough of people. I came in there to help out and she ended up teaching me how to do what she does. I just didn't know I had a knack for it, but I guess I did -- weirdest thing in the world.

SG: Tell me about your first couple of weeks working there.

DP: Well, coming from retail was a different sort of situation, but I had worked for larger personalities before...When I met her, I went and interviewed at her house, I was like, "I don't really need a job. "

SG: But, it must have seemed interesting...

DP: No.

SG: Really? You're saying that you didn't have any initial inkling that it might be an interesting business?

DP: Not even a little bit. Couldn't care less. Completely, honestly couldn't care less. It was a paycheck. When I talked to her on the phone, she did a quick five-minute phone interview with me. She was so fast, very East Coast, and just very Patty. She's right to the point.

I interviewed at her house. I didn't interview at her office. That was kind of weird. She was in a bathrobe, and, I was like, "This is just not me.” She was yelling at her assistant. I'm like, "You're yelling at somebody." Then, she offered me money and I said OK. And then a week into it...

SG: So you went to the office the next day?

DP: Yeah. Immediately. Next day I went back to her house. I actually worked out of her house with her.

SG: Gotcha. What was the first problem to tackle?

DP: It was everything. Her assistant wasn't doing things right, paperwork wasn't in order, clients weren't being serviced, the website was in disarray, her emails weren't working, her networking system was down -- everything was wrong.

SG: So you took responsibility for all of it.

DP: Yeah, the best I could. Everything that needed to get done, it was [snaps] just like that. I mean, it was a week or two's worth of work. Then she asked me to stay on as an Executive Assistant for her...She's actually a sweet pussycat, once you get past that tough exterior, and she showed that to me. She's literally my best friend. We've been best friends for four years now. I mean, we do almost everything together.

SG: So you initially had no inclination towards wanting to work in that area. Tell me about how it grew on you and how you discovered you were good at it.

DP: I was an artist guy. I was a writer, I like horror movies, that's all I really wanted to do. I was so against getting sidetracked. And, she sidetracked me -- magically! But she did it in a way that didn't take away from the writing. She gave me all the time off I needed. She wasn't overly demanding of me.

SG: If you had to go to a pitch in the middle of the day, you could go.

DP: Exactly. I had complete freedom, which was great.

SG: That is great, to have a paycheck and the ability to go do your own thing.

DP: Yeah. And then she forced me to learn what she knew. Because I was like, "I will run the business stuff, I'll help you with the website, but I don't want to deal with the clients. I don't want to deal with the girls, that's too much work." It probably took about a year...

SG: So, the whole first year, you had nothing to do with that element of the business?

DP: Nope. I was Operations Manager. That's all I was doing. I could be the figurehead, the fake lawyer so to speak, lead the basic meetings that our lawyer didn't need to do. If somebody was having a hard time with something, I would step in and figure out what the problem was.

SG: That's starting to interface with the people who you would eventually work with.

DP: I didn't mind interfacing with the clients. I just didn't want to be sucked into their lives....It was not my thing. I did sales years ago and part of this whole business, it's love, but it's the business of love. Which means, if you're in [the] business, you're in sales. In order to have a client, sell to a client, they become a part of your company so you can service them for their love needs. I didn't want to do sales. I didn't want to sell anybody anything. I was completely against it.

Essentially you’re working with them for a year. And what did I know about setting people up? I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Again, I was so hard-headed, I didn't want to learn. Then, what happened, a nameless producer friend of mine needed help finding love. I went to Patty and said, “I've got a referral. Go ahead and take care of it." She said, "You take care of him. I'm making you take care of him. I'm going to help you and you're going to learn how to do this." And that was that.

SG: Walk me through what you do for a client. Tell me how it works.

DP: Once you're an active client of the company, our goal is to find you a match. We have a 99% success rate. Most of them find love within 3-5 dates, 3-5 girls. We're very good at what we do. It's a lot of comparison shopping, it's a lot of gut instinct. It's about knowing people's personality or kicks, watching everything that they do very carefully in the initial interview. We don't just accept any male client, or any female client into our club. We're not an escort service, and if you are coming to us like you're ordering a pizza and you want this, this, this, this, this...then, you know what, there's a reason that you're alone and you're probably going to be alone for the rest of your life. If you come with an open mind, let us do our job, we will be successful.

It's this bizarre science that's not a science. You either can do it, or you can't. There's not many people that can do it that are really good at it. Patty is really good at it. I'm really good at it. Chelsea is really good at it, and she's a completely different type of person than I am, and Rachel who works for the company as well, is very good at it. I've seen other people come and go...they just don't have it. You have to be a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a therapist, a counselor, all wrapped into one.

SG: When you take on a client, you're not just setting them up with people, you're answering questions for them, you're talking to them on the phone.

DP: Oh, absolutely, it's a whole process. We're not a dating service. We're not Match.com. We're a matchmaking company. You're paying for our personal time and attention. And once you're in a relationship our job doesn't stop. We're actually going through the whole process with you, from the beginning, making sure that you don't screw it up half way through, you don't leave the girl, or cheat on the girl, make sure the girl doesn't blow it. It's a long tiring, yet very, very rewarding process.

SG: Got it. So the men pay to be a part of the service.

DP: We are 100% free to women. Women join free. Men do have to pay, however, we do have a non-millionaire men application a person would fill out. Women can pay if they want personal attention, otherwise we kind of throw [their info] in our database until we're ready for them.

SG: How do you find the women?

DP: When Patty started this 10 years ago, she used to work at Great Expectations. She started going out and recruiting more girls. Then word kind of got out. She got more clients and then she started getting press. Magazines started calling. She was in Marie Claire, she was in Elle. Then [women] started submitting their stuff. We didn't have to do as many recruiting sessions. Then TV started picking it up, NBC, CBS, CNBC, she was interviewed on 20/20, 60 Minutes, all these different places. So now we have complete awareness for our Millionaire's Club brand. Then the TV show just legitimized everything. We've never been sued. We have this TV show, we have a radio show, we have a huge web presence. Everyone gives us press now. We don't have to do that at all...The television show is a one hour commercial for our business...and it works better than advertising because people think that they're learning about it as opposed to being sold.

We get 100s of girls a week [when] we're not airing live, and thousands when we are. Rachel, my fiancé and our Director of Registration, she's the gatekeeper. She's in charge, but she's one person. We are very selective on who we bring in. Will we take most of the applicants in? Absolutely, but the pool of people that we would actively use is a completely different thing.

SG: So TV you feel has really changed the business, made it a lot more dynamic.

DP: TV has been a huge, huge plus for us. It's had its drawbacks, the TV show it brought out the crazies. That's a little tiring. It's actually made our jobs harder...A lot of them are fame whores. They just want to be on the television show, and it's like, you shouldn't be contacting us.

SG: Clients come to you saying, I want to do your service but only if you make sure that I'm on the show?

DP: Yes, or the conversation always comes back to the TV show. Like, "I saw this guy on the TV show that did this, and that girl on the TV show did this and I think I should be on the TV show." [I'll say,] "OK, let's not talk about that, let's focus on you right now," and then the conversation ends up right back there. The TV show is great. We're not scripted, but at the same time a more significant part of our database of clients are guys that are a lot more sincere and a lot more genuine then you see on the TV show.

SG: Right, you've got to show the most extreme cases to make it most entertaining.

DP: Of course. And, the same thing goes with the women. If you look at the girls who are on the show, porn stars and models and actresses, crazy nut jobs and everything else, if you saw our real girls, it's just not as exciting.

SG: How has being on TV changed your life outside from work?

DP: Literally daily, I get recognized, someone comes up to me, which is bizarre. Because, coming from a place where the focus of energy was behind the camera, suddenly [to] find myself in front of the camera has been neat. I love it.

SG: You like it?

DP: Yeah, it doesn't bother me at all...I appreciate the people that watch the show. I appreciate bringing a certain amount of entertainment. It's awesome. I love it.


Catch The Billionaire Matchmaker on Bravo TV. For further info go to BravoTV.com/The-Millionaire-Matchmaker.

At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and... more

At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and for free - it's easy to assume it's a good thing. Josh Harris is a man who made a similar assumption.

Described as "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," Harris carved a high profile career out of being an instinctive World Wide Web visionary. Before the web was very worldly or wide, he founded Jupiter Research, a company which sold technology trend and impact information to corporations that barely understood what a website was. Harris then rolled the dot.com fortune he made there into Pseudo.com, a New York based Internet TV station that went live when most of America was still on dial up.

Serving as both business manager and creative director at Pseudo, which webcast multiple channels of original content, Harris reinvented himself in the frame of a digital performance artist during his tenure at the too-far-ahead of its time company. As the millennium loomed, Harris was forced out of Pseudo, and he subsequently invested a large amount of his considerable fortune ($80 million at its peak) in a series of two very controversial digital media social experiments.

The first was called Quiet, though it was anything but. For the project which was intended to mark the turn of the millennium, Harris built an ambitious - and expensive - fully wired environment, which housed 100 guests / experiment subjects 24/7 for a period of 30 days. The claustrophobic underground bunker featured pod bunks for sleeping, communal toilet and bathing facilities, a dining area, and a poorly insulated gun range where residents could blow off steam. There was also an onsite interrogation room.

Potential residents had to sell their pixilated souls in order to gain entry to Quiet. There was an intense intake program that involved an intrusive questionnaire, those that passed this initial test had to agree to subject themselves to random interrogations, among other dehumanizing things. All activity in the bunker was caught on camera and microphone, and relayed for the entertainment of Quiet's residents to their in-Pod TVs. Privacy was non-existent, and individuals were reduced to being "channels" for the entertainment of others - suffice to say the sate-or-the art society Harris had created was far from utopian.

For his next experiment / performance art piece Josh took things a step further, and took on the roles of both puppet and puppet master. He installed 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 high sensitivity microphones in a New York loft, and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin (who had previously worked with Harris as a presenter at Pseudo). The pair were the first couple to broadcast their everyday home lives live on the Internet, and viewers could post their comments in real time via the project's associated chat rooms. The stunt garnered much mainstream attention, and fed Harris' growing need for 15 minutes of fame - per day. But as life in public unfolded, and not in the way either of them had planned, Harris and Corrin realized a little too late that perhaps the most valuable thing online might be privacy. It's a lesson we all may want to take note of.

To this end, renowned film director Ondi Timoner set about assembling and editing footage she'd shot of Harris over a 10-year period. The resulting film, We Live In Public, which Timoner describes as "a cautionary tale," is both thought provoking and shocking, having a profound effect on all who open themselves up to it. The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2009, making Timoner, whose previous film Dig! was also a winner at the festival (in 2004), the only director ever to be given the honor twice.

SuicideGirls caught up with Timoner ahead of We Live In Public's March 1st DVD and VOD release. Here she gives us an exclusive retrospective tour of the Quiet bunker, and an insight into the mind of its maniacal master.

Nicole Powers: How did you first bump into Josh?

Ondi Timoner: I actually worked on Tanya, Josh's girlfriend's [Psuedo.com] show Cherry Bomb. I would shoot and edit for it. I picked up some really good cash and I was really blown away by this place. I'd never heard of anything called an Internet television network -- I mean for god's sake there wasn't even broadband, you know? I met Josh there and went to some Pseudo parties and so forth, but he doesn't really remember me from that.

NP: How did that lead to your involvement in documenting the Quiet project?

OT: When 1999 rolls around, I'm back in Los Angeles, and he called me. I picked up the phone and he says, "Hi Ondi! This is Josh Harris. I'm wondering if you're interested in documenting cultural history."

I happened to be in New York shooting a pilot for a series I was creating on music's effect of people's lives called Sound Affects for VH1. I went down [to Quiet's headquarters] in early December and they were moving scaffolding into the building right there on Broadway between Franklin and Leonard, a matter of blocks from the courthouse right near the World Trade Center.

I said, "What are you moving this metal in for?" And they said, "To build the pods." I saw another guy hanging surveillance cameras, and I said, "What are you doing?" And he said, "I'm hanging 110 surveillance cameras through the space." I thought, "I still don't know what's going on but I'm in. Somebody's got to film this thing whatever it's going to be."

NP: At any point did Josh elucidate any further about what the project was supposed to be about?

OT: I think that his intention was to push everybody's boundaries to the limit to see what they would do. I don't know that he necessarily was trying to test what would happen when the Internet had broadband. I sort of attributed that vision to him in the film. I think it was more his haphazard genius, just seeing what would happen, and seeing just how much people would give up for their opportunity of fame.

NP: When you were filming Quiet, were you actually living there?

OT: I had a pod, and I was there 20 hours of the day. Josh thought it was important for me to have a hotel room, to not lose perspective entirely. I'm not the type who would ever have checked in to the bunker in the first place. By that I mean I'm not one hundred percent a no boundaries exhibitionist. I would leave and come [back]. I was one of the few people that could do that. I always had someone there - always. There was never not a documentary camera on site, but I pretty much spent most of my waking hours there.

NP: Were you there every day for the full 30 days?

OT: Yes. Absolutely. It got to me too. It was not a pleasant place to be. I know that I have a positive moment in the film where I'm standing at the cereal bar and I'm talking about how I've been reborn, but that was very much about the cereal bar.

NP: What kind of people did subject themselves to this? Was there a common thread?

OT: Josh says it's fame, but I think it's actually our desire not to feel alone. That is important to everybody. I think that fame has been held up as this cure all. Like, if I can be famous then according to what I've seen I'll be happy. I'll be surrounded always and not alone.

In terms of the bunker, it was the "having your lives matter" moment, not being alone, not being somewhere where it wasn't the center of the universe on the millennium.

I'll answer 500 hundred questions, I'll get fingerprinted, I'll put on the uniform, I'll shower in public, I'll shit in public and do whatever else you say just to be [a part of] that in New York City. Then, whatever boundaries one may have had personally fell away under the pressure of everyone else doing it. Boundaries slipped away much like they do on the Internet. You may think that it's weird posting this private picture, and the next thing you know, a year later, you're posting all your pictures, you know?

NP: At the beginning it was all fun and games, and then life in the bunker devolved Lord of the Flies style. Was there any one incident that prompted that change?

OT: No. People just got overwhelmed. It wasn't like it got worse and worse, or that more people were pulled in for interrogations, it was just people piled on top of each other. And the noise! It was called "Quiet: We Live In Public" but it was anything but that. The noise, and light, and everybody piled on top of each other, and everybody in each other's business.

NP: I would imagine the sleep deprivation alone would send people crazy.

OT: Yeah, the sleep deprivation was freaking people out - that's true too.

NP: The buttons Joshua pushed with people, in the interrogations, it did seem that he wanted to get to the point where people would lose control.

OT: Yeah, I think he did. I think he wanted to push them to the absolute limit. He had been consulting with a CIA psychiatrist saying, "What can we do to break them."

NP: What were the worst interrogation incidents that you witnessed?

OT: I think that the girl, Elisa, who's interrogated to the point of having to go through a suicide attempt. It was actually pretty startling, very troubling in terms of the ethics behind that. She was losing it.

NP: That's where the CIA guy asks her to demonstrate the speed of the knife as it went through her flesh during her suicide attempt.

OT: Yeah, that's a little bit crazy. So is the African American dude, Chouaibou, who is interrogated about his Communist party and drug past. I mean there's stuff there could get somebody in trouble, where it's no longer really fun and games. They could hurt themselves or be arrested. You never know where that stuff's going to end up. I think at that point it's questionable how much mental control people have.

But that said, people are choosing to be there, so I understand Josh's perspective as well. So I'm not judging the ethics behind it necessarily. I don't think Josh Harris would have really cared terribly much if anything really bad happened to anybody because that's the thing that makes Josh a walking cautionary tale. Everything's a game to him, and everybody is a player in his game. He doesn't feel like it's his responsibility to look out for them.

NP: Did you question his ethics at the time? Or did you feel your job as a documentarian was just to observe and allow events to unfold?

OT: That's how I do it. I'm not a total fly on the wall because I don't think it's the best way to do it. Interloper Films is my company; I think that "interloper" means you're observing, but you're also in the group, you're in the group but taking notes...So, no, I'm not one to meddle and really push things to go where they wouldn't naturally go, but I also won't stand there when someone falls on the floor. I'll film them falling on the floor, and then I'll put the camera down and help them up. That's just how I roll.

But I've got to say with Josh, I think one of the most important moments in We Live In Public is the desensitization, the observation of how desensitized everybody became regarding what was going on there. Like that shower scene; everybody was just kind of sitting around - even I, filming it. I didn't know what was really going on, whether it was rape or not. I know the guy who was in the shower and I really don't think that that's where he is as a human - he's a very gentle human being actually - but there was just a fevered pitch to the whole thing, with the spectator sport of it.

The woman in the shower, I feel like she felt the pressure of all the eyes on her and things kind of spiraled a bit. Josh, when he says to the camera, "It's 6 in the morning and there's two people having sex in the shower and we're all sitting here watching and it's kind of like [makes a noise indicating nothing]" - that's a very important line in the film I think because that's what's going on. Things that used to be exciting and have some kind of glamour to them, or be taboo, or be shocking, or be off-limits, or violent, or whatever, they don't have the same impact anymore because there's so many images out there. We're all desensitized. I think that's an important metaphor that the bunker makes for life today online.

NP: I guess that's what people deal with when they have porn addiction issues. Because pictures and video of naked people fucking is so readily available that one can get to the point where such images no longer have any power - or the desired effect. If people subject themselves to hours of porn a day, it can cease to do the trick. Then they have to find something else that works for them - the next high.

OT: Yeah, what's the next high? It can get really crazy. But then again, we can talk about this and it's interesting to be aware of, but at the end of the day, like Josh says, what's the point of judging it? There really is no way out. It's not like we're going back. It's an evolutionary process. You just have to figure out whether or not you're going to watch the sex that's online. You've got to determine whether you're going to post that photo. You've got to determine whether you're going to be on your virtual box as you're walking down the street. That's your choice. And that's fine.

Half the time I'm walking down the street I'm typing into my Blackberry, and I probably have a very, very arguable reason to do that. But I am missing something. I'm not going to deny it...I'm somewhat sacrificing an interaction with the world around me to be inside my virtual box.

NP: Yeah. I have a couple of friends that when you're with them will spend more time staring into their Blackberry than interacting with you. They don't mean to be rude or anything, but they've lost their ability to be fully in the now with the people they're with. And I don't want to be that person, so I've actually made a deliberate choice not to have a Blackberry.

OT: Wow! Pretty impressive dude. I don't know that I wouldn't be able to function without it at this point, and I hate that. That's what I love about the movie though, that you're looking at a bunker that's 10 years ago now - exactly. You can't believe how far we've come, how much that vision has come true in terms of the Internet and our mainlining addiction to it. It only begs the question, where are we going to be in 5 years?

NP: One of the thoughts that came to me as I watched the film is how our perception of history has sped up. I mean, in the movie, the people you interview in the present that are talking about the past, they're talking about 1990 as if it were 1890. The speed of progress has really changed our perception of history. Same with the speed of social evolution. You look at the way kids interact with technology compared to the way people of our generation do, and it's very different. You talk about how you saw barriers being broken down during the Quiet experiment, but kids who have grown up with social media don't have those barriers in the first place.

OT: Yeah, the kids today, the ones that were born after the Internet existed already, those guys, they have never experienced a life offline...For them there is no definition of public and private.

NP: Going back to the film, right after the Quiet project ended, you actually cut together what you call the Bunker Cut of the movie right?

OT: Yes. We're actually going to do a new Bunker Cut for the Collector's Edition DVD. In 2000 Josh asked me if I would come to New York and do a cut of the bunker. He put me up right in the heart of Manhattan so I could breathe the same energy that I had when I was filming the bunker. I shipped all my stuff over there and moved over there. I arrived and he said change of plans, I'm sending you to an apple farm.

But anyway, I convinced him to move back to Manhattan towards the end of the cut, to finish it up, work with a music supervisor, etc. So in January I moved to a loft in Manhattan. I flew out to Sundance to raise money for Dig!, and I had given Josh a rough cut in the meanwhile. I get back a week later and I open the door to my loft and it looks really, really spacious, and I realize that Josh has absconded with all of the masters and the Avid. So I call him and I say, "Josh what's going on?" And he says, "I didn't like the way I looked." I said, "That's what a rough cut's for. We talk about that and make whatever adjustments." And he said, "No. Change of plan, it's off right now. It's just not the right time."

I knew that he was living in public with Tanya but I thought things were going well. Little did I realize, she had just left him and he was at the absolute nadir of his self-image, his mental state as you can see in the movie. He was down and out and ready to flee Manhattan, and running out of money fast. He stiffed me like twenty grand, and he left Manhattan, and I left. I went off to Africa to make a movie about a dam and was grateful to feel the dirt under my fingernails, and work on real people issues, real problems, like a dam threatening the oldest civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. You can't get more of a contrast than that from the bunker, which was like a cyber narcissistic gun range.

I just forgot about Josh, and put as much distance [between us]. I went back to LA and finished Dig!. It took years to edit, and a few years later, in 2004 Dig! won Sundance. I got an email from Josh: "Any interest in finishing the film?" I said, "No," because I thought he was a charlatan, and less relevant than ever. He wrote me back and said, "I'll give you fifty percent ownership of the film, full creative control, and send you all the masters right away." So that's how the film was returned to me.

But I still didn't finish it. I went off and made my movie Join Us. I just didn't know how the story of Josh Harris applied still - until Facebook status updates. In 2007 I saw the first status update. It was: "I'm driving west on the freeway." I couldn't believe that someone was putting something that mundane up as a public posting. Then everybody was doing it, and suddenly I realized that the bunker was coming true for all of us. That's when I raced to finish the film. We had to go through about 5,000 hours of footage in about 8 months to get it done in time to premiere at Sundance. Since then it has been so gratifying to see just how relevant the film is to people's lives.

NP: Backing up, following the bunker experiment, the next chapter in Josh's life was him living on camera, live on the Internet with his girlfriend Tanya.

OT: To me that's a really important part of the film.

NP: That's where he gets his comeuppance. I mean there were no real consequences for Josh during the Quiet period.

OT: Exactly. He climbs into the TV set and he becomes the rat in his own experiment at this point, and the results don't turn out very well for him. He really takes the only relationship that he's ever had that was close and intimate and beaches it on 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 invasive microphones. I mean his girlfriend who signed on to it thinking it would be fun and cool, and that they were living a fast and crazy Internet life, she ended up leaving him. She just couldn't be intimate in public. And I think that's an important lesson; the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it.

Also the dot.com stock market crash happens during that time. Josh loses all his money while living in public. His contemporaries got to figure out what they were going to do next privately, whereas Josh is living right there on camera, losing his girlfriend, losing his money, losing basically his pride and his identity. He really had ruled Manhattan and suddenly he was kind of the laughing stock. Not to mention that fact that there was this bunch of chatter saying, "Look at this boring guy! Who does he think he is?"

NP: It was interesting to see what happened within Tanya's relationship. They stopped arguing to resolve issues, and were motivated instead by winning in the eyes of those who were observing them, who would immediately post their thoughts in the chat rooms.

OT: Exactly. It becomes about the votes of the audience, it's more of a political race. It's not about resolving the issues between them and that's really I guess ultimately what destroys the relationship.

NP: You see so much of that behavior in our reality TV stars today. They're not interested in resolving any of their issues, they're just interested in having them as means of gaining attention, and to get more people on their side. They'll play up their victimhood rather than their skills as problem solvers.

OT: Well reality TV is a whole 'nother topic, but it's not, it's related to this too. I mean the bunker doesn't just pre-figure the Internet, it really does pre-figure reality TV as well, and the way that people react and act, and it's not a pretty sight.

There are lots of really super positive results from social networking. You probably find on SuicideGirls that people of similar interests can find each other, and niche groups can self-organize, and revolutions can happen this way. This is a wonderful thing in so, so many ways. I've been discovered or contacted by people through Facebook that have become a very valuable part of not only my team at Interloper, but really dear friends. So there are all sorts of great, great, great things to come from it.

NP: Right, there's immense potential to do good, one only has to look at what happened on Twitter with Haiti. But what Josh chose to do with the technology and money at his disposal was not exactly good. Rather than choosing to create a digital utopia, he chose to create a totalitarian, militarized dystopian society.

OT: Yes. Josh Harris, he's not trying to do anything good. I like the guy but he's sort of like the Darth Vader. I joke that I'm the Luke Skywalker in regards to this film. I wanted to make the film to fire a warning shot, just to let people know to think a little deeper right at this crucial moment. We're at this tipping point where the virtual world is taking over. He would rather figure out a way that he can sell you your life back and exploit you. That's why he makes a very compelling subject, and also why the film wasn't maybe nominated for an Oscar. People hate him. Some people absolutely loathe and detest the guy. But I think he makes an incredible subject because of that.

NP: I guess it was brave that he gave you complete creative control at the point where he'd lost everything. I mean he was never going to come out smelling like roses in this movie.

OT: It certainly took a lot of guts, and to be honest with you, and to be realistic, it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't reached a point of desperation. He just wanted to make sure all the work that he had done, and all the money he'd spent to create these incredible experiences, the experiment and everything, actually came to something.

NP: So it goes back to that fundamental need we all have to matter.

OT: Yeah. He did all this and really blew his fortune on it - and his mind. If it wasn't going to come to something then that was it. I became his only hope, or his greatest hope. He even said that in Ethiopia in 2008. The cameraman said to him, "What's your plan to get out of Ethiopia?" And he just pointed at me.

NP: You filmed the afterward of the movie in Ethiopia where Josh retreated after he sold his only remaining liquid asset, his apple farm. He seemed to have very similar instincts to you when after the bunker you went off to Africa to film people with real problems and to smell the dirt under your feet.

OT: I think it was more to escape American Express. I think his reasons were: get out of Dodge, escape Amex, reinvent himself. He told Tanya something that I think is probably important, he said something to her like, "You should leave the public eye sometimes. Don't be afraid to leave the public eye because you can always come back, and come back different."

And I think he knew that his dollar would go a lot further there and that he didn't have many left. He had lived in Ethiopia when he was a child for a year with his father, his whole family. His father was in the CIA and had been based there for a year, and apparently it was the happiest year of Josh's life.

NP: Interesting, because your movie explores Josh's relationship with his mother, whom he overtly blames for much of his emotional baggage in the film, but I guess the whole cold war, CIA psychology that he implemented in the bunker came from his dad.

OT: Yeah. I think that's probably what it is. That's why he did the CIA thing, and I think that's [the reason for] his obsession with guns too. His dad used to carry a bunch of guns on him.

NP: Because there was no real reason to have a shooting range in the bunker. That seemed one of the most peculiar and bizarre things. A room for video games maybe - but a room for guns? This was supposed to be an experiment in the future and guns are part of our past.

OT: Exactly.

NP: So you rushed to get the documentary ready for Sundance. What were your expectations and what was the reaction there?

OT: I knew that we had sort of a silver bullet on our hands. I submitted the film to Sundance on Halloween of 2008, and heard within a week. I was pretty aware that they were super excited about putting it in competition, which meant it was going to be spotlighted as one of the top sixteen films of the festival...I knew that were we striking a chord and that this movie was really right on time or just ahead of it. And that's how it was. We were just swept away. We didn't have many interviews lined up going to Sundance, and by day three I was losing my voice.

But it was a depressed year in the economy, and Obama was being inaugurated literally the morning after our premiere, which was cool, but it meant that a lot of execs weren't there and no sales happened for docs at Sundance that year. So we were kind of holding the bag afterwards...We put it out ourselves in 15 theaters across the America, and different cities across the world.

Now for the DVD/VOD launch we're doing six simultaneous screenings in six different cities. Eliza Dushku [Dollhouse] is going to host in LA and Adrian Grenier [Entourage] is going to host in New York, and we're going to link the six cities together into a national conversation about living in public. During the movie Josh Harris and I are going to host a show of clips from the film and extras, and I'm going to banter with him lying on a bed in Chicago. I highly recommend watching that because I'm going to ask Josh some hard questions.

Then at 7.30 PST all the screenings will stop and all the cities will link together, and Josh and I will do a Q&A based on Twitter questions. All the venue information is going to be on WeLiveInPublicTheMovie.com or you can follow me, @OndiTimoner, on Twitter. I'll be tweeting my ass off in the next week and a half. I keep my private life pretty private but needless to say I'm not going to be retreating into obscurity this week.

NP: And it's no coincidence that Eliza Dushku is hosting the LA event, because you're actually working on your next project with her aren't you?

OT: Yeah, we're doing the story of Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith just came out with a book called Just kids about her relationship with Mapplethorpe. It was a very interesting dynamic that they had in their youth. He was a very vital artist and a cultural lightening rod that really pushed the limits.

I think that's actually very appropriate to talk about on the SuicideGirls site because the Suicide Girls push the limits of how women are perceived and what pinup art is, and what is sexy, and have effectively redefined it. Mapplethorpe obviously did that in a really "push it into the fine art world" [way]. Everything from S&M photography to some really edgy stuff that he found beautiful, he made beautiful side by side with flowers...There's I think a lot of people that wouldn't do what they're doing if it wasn't for Mapplethorpe. There were laws changed and court cases and all that kind of stuff as a result of the stir around Mapplethorpe. It's pretty interesting stuff, and that will be my first narrative film, which is pretty exciting.

NP: That's a departure for you.

OT: From documentaries, well not a complete departure because if you look at all my films they unfold over time. They're all narrative films. They're all suspense filled, that's what I like to do. That's why I started doing documentaries the way I started doing them. Nobody was really doing that at the time. I guess Hoop Dreams was just going to come out and that film followed a story over time, but essentially that was the only one. But otherwise, the films were all retrospective, like eating spinach or eating history books, too educational to be entertaining. That's why people weren't watching docs and that's why I got into documentary.

That's why I filmed Dig! over many years, and that why I filmed Join Us over years, and that's why We Live In Public I sat on because the biggest reason people go to the movies is to be entertained. If you're going to get people to really think about things, get them to feel them, you know? And the way you get them to feel them is to get them to lose themselves, to really feel what it is that they're watching. That's what I set out to do. So for me it's not really that much of a departure to do a scripted film. I was a theater studies major at Yale and worked with actors. It's just the next step in my own evolution as an artist.



To celebrate the VOD & DVD release of We Live In Public on March 1st, the documentary will be screened simultaneously in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Adrian Grenier (Entourage) will host the New York event, while Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) hosts the screening at the Egyptian in Los Angeles. The webcast starts at 5:30 PM PST on WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com, with screenings starting at 6 PM in Los Angeles, 7 PM in Denver, 8 PM in Chicago, and 9 PM in New York and Atlanta. During these screenings, Ondi and Josh will show exclusive clips and banter wildly from a wired. Chicago pod while fielding questions via Twitter live (use the #wlip tag to send questions). Post-screening, Ondi and Josh will link up with Adrian and Eliza and all the audiences nationwide in theaters and online to have a live interactive conversation about living in public. For further details go to: WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com.