In Wonderful World, Matthew Broderick's character Ben Singer may think he's fighting "the man," the soulless god of faceless corporations, but in reality he's his own worst enemy. With his folk music career behind him, having lost his family and his copywriting job, he may be... more

In Wonderful World, Matthew Broderick's character Ben Singer may think he's fighting "the man," the soulless god of faceless corporations, but in reality he's his own worst enemy. With his folk music career behind him, having lost his family and his copywriting job, he may be down on his luck, but it's his inability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even when it's shining right in his eyes, that renders him impotent and leaves him without hope.

Written and directed by Broderick's longtime friend Josh Goldin, Wonderful World is a low budget film on very limited release. Its small price tag however belies its true value. With fully realized characters, a quietly powerful plot, and a solid ensemble cast, the full-of-heart film features one of Broderick's most nuanced performances to date.

SuicdeGirls met up with Broderick in a non-descript room at West Hollywood's Standard Hotel, which had been converted into an ad hoc press suite for the day, to talk about this very special movie.

Nicole Powers: You've been doing a lot of press to support the film. I know Josh Goldin is your friend, but your keenness to talk about this film seems to go way beyond that.

Matthew Broderick: I really do like it. Also, because these movies have very little budget for actual advertising, I think it falls on us more to promote them. But I really like the movie, and Josh, we've been friends for 20 years., so it's my pleasure to promote it. It's nice to promote something that you like.

NP: The movie really captures the hopelessness and lack of power that people are feeling right now. Everyone who works for "the man" is expected to give absolute loyalty, but these days there's no expectation that it will be reciprocated. In all the years I've been in America, I've never sensed such a colossal cloud of melancholy hanging over the nation. And with your character, more than "the man," it's that overwhelming sense of melancholy that he's fighting to overcome.

MB: Yeah, I think he is fighting his own melancholy basically. Although he's right about things, he doesn't like positive thinking, which I can sympathize with. But he's also had a lot of things happen that have put him in this mood. He's just been through a divorce, his daughter's at an age when she's separating from him I guess, he's low on money, and his album didn't do very well, so he's had a few blows as the movie begins. I guess in a way it's about him getting his life going again.

NP: In the press notes Josh Goldin talks about how he "wanted to create a movie about a man who saw only the negative side of things." Ben Singer is not a bad man, he's a nice guy whose life is adversely affected by his negative outlook. Much of what you get back from the world is so often based on what you project into it. Obviously you have quite an abundant life, which bodes well for what you're consciously or unconsciously projecting, but did exploring the character of Ben Singer have an affect on how you view your own demeanor?

MB: I don't know. I've thought about that. I'm not so sure how much you can control how you see things. I almost have a feeling that's a genetic thing, whether you see glasses as half empty or half full, or however you want to put it. I try to see things as accurately if possible. I don't want to pretend things are better than they are just because I think that'll make things better. I've never really believed that. But that said, I guess, if you're just hopeless that's very unattractive in a way, and probably will bring hopeless things to you.

I thought of it more when I was doing it as just the story of what's happening between those people. I didn't think about these big themes. I guess I am aware. I try to be positive. I know when I'm working I always try to look at the bright side of things because as soon as you work with people who think everything is doom and gloom it can bring the whole group down. So I definitely try not to be one of those.

NP: It only takes one negatron in the mix to sap everyone's energy.

MB: Well I try not to be a negatron. But, at the same time, if you get so worried about that you might avoid problems or not identify things that need fixing. So I don't want to just always think I've got to like everything because then you'd be in danger of being a crazy person I suppose.

NP: This movie is unusually subtle. There are no Hollywood devices, heavy symbolism or cheesy emotional cues that tell you what you should be thinking. It's actually quite a refreshing mental process, to discover how you feel about something rather than to have your emotion buttons pushed on cue. Did that quality immediately jump off the page when you first read the script? Or was it something that became apparent over the course of production?

MB: Both. It's always difficult to read something and know how it's going to feel when it's done. Knowing Josh so well, it feels like him. That's kind of how he is. He's kind of quiet, but also very, very funny. I think it's funny too. I don't think it's a dismal movie. It's oddly hopeful, at least by the end. The quietness, that's Josh's personality, and his humor. He doesn't hit you over the head with things. It's his style.

NP: So when he tells jokes they creep up on you, and you'll catch them few beats later.

MB: Yes, exactly, or as you're walking home.

NP: And continuing with the gentle tone of the film, in the end nothing dramatic happens, but we see how a slight shift in your character's outlook has a beneficial effect on his life - and those around him. So many movies champion impractical grand gestures, but in this movie, we see how even a small shift, something we can all do, has a beneficial effect.

MB: Yeah. That's well put. I agree with you. That's nice.

Josh has also written millions of screenplays, big studio things. He's rewritten them, so he's constantly having to make things work out better than he thinks the story [should]. He always has to manufacture things. I don't want to spoil it but

NP: The movie deals with the issue of immigration, again in a very subtle way. Ben, who is essentially a nice guy, throws the issue of immigration in his girlfriend Khadi's face. But its another example of how Ben's negative attitude ultimately hurts himself far more than it hurts anyone else. To extrapolate that, do you think perhaps America's increasingly negative attitude towards immigrants is ultimately having an adverse affect on its own citizens?

MB: Probably, yeah. That seems to have been pushed off a bit. I remember last year [it was more of an issue]. We seem to have other problems now that we're obsessing over on the news.

I'm not an expert on the issue, but the idea of building some kind of wall along the border with Mexico, I just think it's such as awful symbol in a way. It sounds like Berlin or something. My grandparents were immigrants and as a New Yorker, I guess, immigration is just all around, and always good.

NP: In the movie Ben feels powerless and, with a failed music career., inconsequential. One of the basic reasons people seek fame, is to be someone that "matters." You came from a theatrical family, and I know you're very much in love with your craft, but having experienced both the extreme positive and extreme negative aspects of fame, what would you say about our culture of fame, and those that crave it without any respect for the process?

MB: They're just a different group than what I was a part of. I mean I suppose everybody sort of wants to be famous. I wouldn't deny that. But really, I loved acting from a pretty young age. Fame is more of a side effect. I mean there are a lot of good things about it, good tables and money and things. But it also can be really lousy.

Also, there was no reality TV when I started. Now there are people who get famous just for being odd - and really famous, like super famous. And I watch those show too.

NP: Which ones?

MB: I mean, I watch some of them. I watch Top Chef. I guess that's not so bad because at least they're cooking something. And my wife [Sarah Jessica Parker] will watch anything to do with buying or selling a house or remodeling a house. It hypnotizes her, so those are on a lot.

NP: Have you had to remodel you wife's closet to pimp it out Sex And The City style to compete with her on screen one?

MB: No, no. We don't have room. We have a pretty big house but we don't have that much closet space.

NP: 'Cause people must have big closet expectations walking into your house after seeing the SATC movie.

MB: For my wife, they do. But all of her professional life is separate. Those clothes are kept under a mountain in Yucca, or something. I don't know where they go. But her closet at home is pretty small actually, for what you would think.

NP: Like Ferris Bueller, Wonderful World is a real feel-good, life-affirming movie. What movies and music give you that feeling?

MB: I just saw Christmas in July, a Preston Sturges movie that I love. It makes me so happy. Louis Armstrong makes me happy. I can't think of anything else.

NP: Wonderful World is a rare film, it's as much a bromance as it is a chick flick, since it explores not only Ben's relationship with Khadi but also his relationship with her brother Ibu. I know in my house we kind of keep score. If I drag my hubby to a chick flick that means he's owed a man movie. Do you have any similar system for ensuring domestic bliss where choice of movies and TV is concerned?

MB: We don't go to the movies that much to tell you the truth. We watch them at home. But, yeah, we do have that. We have that battle over space on the TiVo. Like all the real estate shows, and then there's sports shows of mine, and I'm constantly taping old movies. So you watch which one is about to be deleted because of space, and how much space each member of the couple gets on the DVR. That's our battle.

NP: So your domestic situation would be improved by a bigger hard drive.

MB: Yes it would. [laughs]

This week at CES Unveiled, a company called Power Mat technologies created a lot of buzz around a product designed to charge mobile devices "wirelessly." The company remains mum on the tech behind this innovation, calling it proprietary information. We can assume that it, like many new devices... more

This week at CES Unveiled, a company called Power Mat technologies created a lot of buzz around a product designed to charge mobile devices "wirelessly." The company remains mum on the tech behind this innovation, calling it proprietary information. We can assume that it, like many new devices hitting the market, functions through magnetic induction.

Power Mat's product is, befittingly, a mat with three charging pads, enabling to charge three devices (cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and so on) at the same time. Currently you need to attach a sleeve to the device to enable charging. The product appeared to function as advertised, with interested media handing over their phones (I even saw a sweet new Nexus One) to be placed on the charging mat, with a cheerful tone greeting the delighted onlookers.



Ok, so this isn't the most amazing, futuristic product out there. I mean I've been charging my toothbrush that way for a couple of years now. Why should you care about it, then?

Up until recently, cell phone (and other mobile device) companies have refused to standardize on how to charge their products. USB was a great thing for consumers to hit the market, and greatly simplified things, but we still have a number of different connectors. Mini USB, Micro USB, USB A, USB B...the list goes on.

Not to mention the few companies who stick to proprietary connectors/dongles (*cough*Kodak*cough*) even though it really is a pain for their customers. One can only assume that the reason for this has to do with money, with squeezing out a few extra dollars, to eek out a tiny extension of those slim profit margins (or huge, if you're Apple).



Soon, though, consumers are going to have another option, and this option is going to be a game changer. How you charge your mobile devices may not be a very glamourous topic, and most consumers don't really give it a second thought...until they're caught without their charger and are stuck paying more than $30 for a new one at their local Best Buy. Or $20 for a simple cable that has the right connector on it. Imagine if your car, your home, and even public places simply had little pads that functioned to charge every small device you owned. Anywhere. No matter who manufactured it, and no matter how tightly they control hardware design.

I think this is going to be one of those technologies that people shrug their shoulders and say "meh" about...until one day, they suddenly think to themselves, "How in the world did I ever live without this?"

Hot girls kicking butt is not all it takes for an awesome movie, but it's a good start. Bitch Slap offers three scantily clad babes - Hel (Erin Cummings), Camaro (America Olivo) and Trixie (Julia Voth) - in the sweltering desert, battling gangsters and each other for a stash of diamonds. Catfights,... more

Hot girls kicking butt is not all it takes for an awesome movie, but it's a good start. Bitch Slap offers three scantily clad babes - Hel (Erin Cummings), Camaro (America Olivo) and Trixie (Julia Voth) - in the sweltering desert, battling gangsters and each other for a stash of diamonds.

Catfights, wet shirts and girl on girl makeout scenes are all inspired by the exploitation movies of the '50s, '60s and '70s. Think Russ Meyer. Screenwriters Eric Greundemann and Rick Jacobson, with Jacobsen directing, crafted an unapologetic display of sleaze.

Gruendemann and Jacobson combine the location shoot in the desert with green screen scenes as flashback cutaways. That way, they fit motorcycles, avalanches and underground clubs into their low budget epic. The duo come from the TV world, with Hercules, Xena and Cleopatra 2525. They are also working with producers Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert on the upcoming Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

To give a sense of the fun these guys are having, they began the interview entertaining complaints about the recent studio film Invictus, joking about how important it thought it was. It definitely didn't have enough cleavage or boob punches. Also, the guys didn't care if their voices got mixed up in a double interview, but to be accurate, we still wrote down who said what.

SuicideGirls: Is this what Grindhouse should have been?

Erik Greundemann: That's funny you should say that.

Rick Jacobson: That is funny you say that because whenever we first started getting on the radar with people and they'd go, "What is it?" We used to always say, "This is what Grindhouse should have been." That's not really meant as a dig, obviously, to those guys because obviously they've got ridiculous skills. But like when we first heard about Grindhouse, our first thing was, "Oh shit." But then once we saw it, one, it's just a completely different film in the sense they went to really recreate the grindhouse thing. For us, we were just taking more exploitation themes and situations and doing a modern spin. But we both saw it and kind of left going, "Ah, that kind of really missed the mark."

EG: We went very excited about it, like, "Wow, great, someone else is doing this." We of course love both of those guys, but we came away from it going, "Wow, for us it missed the mark,"

RJ: What happened? Yeah, it missed the mark. That last 10 minutes of Rodriguez's episode when she gets the gun on her leg, that's when I was like, "Fuck, this is what I came for." Unfortunately, that was only 10 minutes of the first episode.

EG: And the trailers in it, the trailers the other directors did, absolutely wonderful. There's wonderful things about it.

SG: But is it the difference between they're doing an homage to exploitation and you're actually doing the genre?

EG: Yes.

RJ: We'd like to think, we kind of hope that was the case and at the same time, kind of do a 21st century version of the classic exploitation flicks. Like I said, taking the themes and situations found in those things yet updating it for the postmodern audience.

EG: And a very different world we live in right now and that's why we thought, "Isn't it funny to actually try to take the sensibilities of an exploitation film from the '50s and '70s and ram them down the throat of 2009, morality and everything else, and see where it goes. A lot of what we found fun and fascinating about the story as it came about was doing just that.

SG: What would have been crossing the line and not right for the genre?

EG: I think one of the main things for us was that we weren't setting out to make a parody. We were making a loving homage to it and we certainly have tongue firmly planted in cheek, but we never wanted to be Epic Movie or Naked Gun. For the comedic aspects of the film, having tongue firmly planted in cheek, making sure it was all played completely straight but making sure the outrageousness of the dialogue and the situations was what brought the humor. We joke about the Alps scene with the guy in Lederhosen. At one point we were talking about maybe he's running around the Alps with an accordion that shoots. That clearly crossed the line. Even the scene that exists now probably crosses the line anyway.

RJ: Walking the tightrope very, very thin.

EG: In terms of taboos and other things, there's not very much at all that we would go, "Oh, I don't want to go there."

SG: What were the different types of female beauty you wanted to capture?

RJ: I've just always been very attracted to the strong female lead. The ones that don't need that helping hand. The ones that just drive the story. The other thing too is I love tough women. There's just something cool.

EG: We're both married to tough women.

RJ: We're married to tough women and there's just something so much more interesting to me and to Erik with women that are capable of handling themselves. Not only that but just dealing just a world of punishment, and yet being feminine, beautiful and sexy all at the same time. That's kind of really what the foundation of this thing was. It was obviously built on three beautiful women in an outrageous situation that continually spirals out of control. I think the poster speaks for itself. Who doesn't want to see that movie.

SG: I like them too. Where can I actually meet tough women?

EG: Good question.

RJ: New Zealand's a good place. That's a good place to smart.

SG: But you each found one.

EG: Well, he found his in New Zealand, his wife Rachel. My wife is a tough New Yorker. I met her here in Los Angeles on a blind date. We've been married 20 years now. Yeah, definitely tough New York broad who doesn't take any shit from anybody.

RJ: And they have their own voices, their own opinions.

EG: And tell us, often.

RJ: Well, both of them were just great sounding boards when developing and writing this script. They certainly knew what we were trying to go for and they rolled their eyes a lot at stuff, but at the same time, we always did kind of seek their approval for where we were going with these characters and they were always kind of like, "Yeah, wow, that's great."

EG: For my wife, for instance, this kind of movie is not her taste in films but she's the first one to say, "Hey, even if I somehow happened upon this film watching it at night or whatever, and I didn't know that you or Rick were involved in it, I'd actually think it was still pretty cool because it is strong, independent women kicking ass, saving the day and not taking shit from anybody, including men, and not relying on men and not victimized and not what you see in 90-95% of the situation.

SG: Where I was going with the different kinds of beauty question is that you have a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. There's an Asian girl who pops up.

RJ: Well, funny enough we don't have a blonde. Trixie was originally supposed to be a blonde. She was written as a blonde.

SG: I thought you had America go blonde.

RJ: Well, she lightened up. I certainly wouldn't look at the film and consider her a blonde.

EG: But yeah, we definitely strived to not have three dark haired very fair complexioned girls. There's no question we wanted to provide something for everyone, if you will. We actually knew that we did a pretty good job at it because 2/3 of the way through shooting, I took a poll of every crew member. Whether it was their physicality or whether it was their characters and what appealed to them, both men and women, I went around the entire crew and said, "Okay, who's your favorite?" Right down the light, 33%. Some said Trixie, some said Hel, some said Camaro. And then there was like 10% that went, "Yeah, that's all great but I really like Kinky." So we knew that we probably got the balance fairly well.

SG: There's a balance there, but did you ever think of taking it further into alternative types, like Suicide Girls types?

EG: Yes, we did.

RJ: Well, sure.

EG: We did absolutely, and in fact we're exploring that much more. We're just starting to kick the tires on the sequel and we're starting to explore lots of those kind of characters in the sequel.

RJ: Actually, even to the point where again to that kind of desire to give tastes for everybody, Hel for the longest time we wanted to be an African-American. We sought out a few and the only reason it really never happened was because we just never found that right actor for it. Erin just did such a great job that wowed us right from the get go that she started as a white girl and then went black and it kind of came back. So yeah, we definitely were trying to cover our bases and give a little bit of something for everybody.

SG: Considering the genre, was there ever going to be nudity?

RJ: No. No, we talked about it all for maybe about two minutes.

EG: If you're talking about conventional nudity, like topless, bottomless kind of nudity, we've always thought that it actually is sexier to keep a bit of mystery, the peekaboo-ish stuff. You know, "Oh look, my T-shirt got wet." We always thought that's more in the tone of what we were trying to do and also sexier for us than "Look at me, I'm topless." There's only two topless shots in there and they're not even our three. They're random girls.

RJ: Another big drive for that, outside of we just simply think it's sexier, when you add nudity, and especially when you add nudity in the level of what we're doing, the talent pool falls off a cliff. We already had a massive challenge on our hands of finding beautiful women who could act and who can do all this stuff that needed to be done. When all of a sudden you say, "Oh, and by the way, you've got to pop your top or do full nudity," you're going to just get killed in your casting process. We would not have the film today if we didn't have these three girls.

SG: I was thinking that too. If I wanted to see them naked, they wouldn't be able to do any of this other cool stuff.

RJ: They wouldn't be able to do this and then all of a sudden, the film loses so much. So much of the success of this film is based on those three girls and the performances they gave. If you all of a sudden pull that out and you get some girl who has no problem taking her top off but she's a horrible actress, delivering the lines we had written, it's a train wreck.

SG: It's interesting to me that a low budget exploitation movie now has green screen.

RJ: Well, that's the introduction into the 21st century. That was just a creative decision early on. It was actually originally budget driven. When we first started doing it, we were attacking it practically. We were going to go shoot in an alley, we were going to shoot in a beach, we were going shoot in a prison. But once the realities of the schedule and the time it was going to take to do these things, it just kind of became like oh, man. Then we started thinking, "Let's go green screen," not only for a budgetary reason and schedule reason, but also for a stylistic reason.

SG: I understand that. It just made me think 20 years ago green screen was what huge budget movies did because they could afford to. Now it's what you do to save money.

RJ: Well, you do it to save money but on top of that, because it's certainly not cheap to do it, especially with the amount that we did it. But, it allowed the film to kind of go further than if we had just shot it all practically. It gave it a stylish look and it gave it just a little something to the B story which I think kind of helps propel that B story, give it its own unique kind of feel.

SG: You talk about thinking about a sequel. Could you see keeping this style going with other titles?

RJ: Oh sure. In fact, that's being discussed.

EG: Yes, it's funny you should mention that because we've been approached by a consortium of people who wants to actually fund a bunch of movies in this vein, approached with the same sort of level of tongue in cheek, exploitation fun if you will. Rick and I say this all the time. This is one of those movies that literally could have only been made at this budget range and everything else in the last couple of years. We were one of the first people to adopt the RED camera. Literally, we were probably the second or third movie to be shooting on RED camera. While it provided us a lot of problems, the fact that we were able to shoot this movie digitally in such a way that made it look like a filmic process and everything else.

SG: Is there a hole to be filled with movies that are just fun and not trying to have some important message?

RJ: Absolutely and that's what this movie was made for. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're not trying to get some big message [across]. We've always thought of this film as just a pure popcorn movie. It's just come on, just watch this wild and wacky adventure and hopefully have a really good time, hopefully not see the twists and turns coming and just have fun. That's what we think is good, fun entertainment.

SG: What's in the extended version: more action? More hotness?

EG: Yeah, the extended version is about half and hour longer. It's quite a bit. We've always called this movie internally the little epic. The DVD will have some of the deleted scenes. There were six green screen scenes, complete scenes that are much more character and spinning the story even further out, that just had to go for time reasons. Then our EEE version, or our epic extended edition is another 28 minutes or something like that. It's more character and story stuff than anything else. Yes, the fight is a little longer. Yes, the sex scene is a little longer. In fact, there is one big additional fight in a prison shower.

RJ: But there's really not a scene in the film that didn't get some form of a hack at it, because we were just, I mean, a half hour. That's a massive amount.

SG: What kind of shower scene and shower fight did you do without nudity?

RJ: Very creatively. Hel fights completely nude.

EG: Hel and Camaro. It is where they first meet. Camaro is sort of the grand damme of the prison. She's the queen bea. Hel is the newcomer so she and her girls are going to go in there and rough her up. Very quickly, Hel's towel is ripped away from her so Hel has to fight completely nude while they're bashing each other in this digitally created shower that actually was the prison shower that Nelson Mandela had to use for 20 years, because our South African visual effects company actually did that scene for us. We of course have added a bit more graffiti that I'm guessing is not in Invictus.

RJ: There are surprisingly quite a few of the deleted scenes in the trailer that's out there floating around. So people will kind of be, "What happened to that scene out in the alley?" That'll just whet the appetite for hopefully our extended version.

SG: At what point did you get involved with Sam Raimi on Spartacus: Blood and Sand?

RJ: Spartacus came about last year at this time and that was just I had worked with Sam and Rob before on Xena and Hercules which is where I met Erik. They were just starting up this new series. Thankfully, they thought of me when it came time to do the pilot. We were right smack dab in the middle of sound editing and doing the sound mix and still dealing with all the visual effects and stuff. It was just a situation that it was too good of an opportunity for me to pass up. Thank God for technology and video chatting and being able to send files back and forth. Erik and I had many an iChat.

EG: At strange hours of the night.

SG: If you did the pilot, you really establish the style they'll use for the whole series.

RJ: Yeah, which is again one of the reasons why it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. As a director, feature films is always the best because you create and set the style. In television, the best thing you can get is a pilot. I've done a lot of shows where you come in and the show's established and the actors know what they're doing and the look is established and you're just a traffic cop. That was always the thing that was kind of unique about Xena and Herc and Cleopatra 2525, which Erik and I did together. And I did the pilot for that. It's a great opportunity. If you're going to work in television and be a director, a pilot's the best thing to get. So I was very grateful to those guys for thinking of me to do that because it's a cool show.

SG: What sort of bloody action and hot sexuality can we expect in that?

EG: A lot of each.

RJ: The beauty of it is because it's for Starz and it's obviously cable, we didn't have the network restrictions. So the violence is hardcore, the sex is full on. There's full nudity, both male and female so it's very true to the day. It has its own unique kind of look and style about it which was kind of the big challenge because obviously with 300 being so popular and us embracing the graphic novel side as well, it was trying to come up with some visual style and pallet that hopefully when people look at it, they don't just see 300: The Series, they say, "Oh, that's a nice little hat tip to 300, yet this has got its own unique signature."

SG: This may be on Starz' end, but it does look like 300: The Series because they're probably trying to make that the image.

RJ: Sure, with the trailer, and that's definitely with the trailer because they're splashing all the real cool sexy and hardcore images on it but I think when you actually see the story itself play out, you kind of find that it's much more story driven and character driven. I actually found myself referencing Gladiator more than 300.

SG: So does he rise up at the end of the pilot and that's where the series goes?

RJ: It's a 13 episode series. The first episode is kind of almost like Spartacus' origins, how he ends up in Capua and ends up a slave to the Lentulus Batiatus and how he goes to the gladiatorial camp. It certainly follows the Spartacus legend but obviously takes film liberties and stuff. The last episode in the 13 is Spartacus leading the revolt out of the prison.

SG: I figured they want more seasons.

RJ: That's the plan but we'll see how this season gets accepted.

Bitch Slap opens in theaters and VOD January 8. Spartacus premieres January 22 on Starz.

Transforming a beloved book into a film is always a huge risk. Alice Sebold's tale of tragedy, loss, and renewal is such a novel and Peter Jackson is the brave filmmaker who volunteered for the job. The task was even more challenging since the book doesn't conform to any standard structure. more

Transforming a beloved book into a film is always a huge risk. Alice Sebold's tale of tragedy, loss, and renewal is such a novel and Peter Jackson is the brave filmmaker who volunteered for the job.

The task was even more challenging since the book doesn't conform to any standard structure. The story is told from the point of view of Susie Salmon, a teenage girl who is brutally raped and murdered at the outset. Despite coming to such a violent and ugly end, as Susie watches her family from a place beyond death, she sees beauty in the connections and new beginnings the demise of her earthly body creates. It's this juxtaposition, that Sebold somehow made work on paper, which created such a strong reaction in readers. Many took great comfort in the author's vision of the afterlife, though Sebold wrote it from an agnostic perspective, which caused the devout to complain about her seemingly godless (and judgment-less) heaven. Others rejoiced in her ability to subvert the darkness of humanity, and in her capacity for finding light where there should be nothing but night.

There was therefore a difficult balancing act that was intrinsic to the success of the movie. The book was criticized by some for being too saccharin, yet if Jackson departed too far from its strangely uplifting tone he risked alienating its large and loyal following. Conversely, graphically depicting the rape and murder of a teen could easily be perceived as being gratuitous on screen, yet acknowledging that such a cruel and tragic event had happened was essential to the core of the piece.

Jackson worked on the screenplay with Lord of The Rings collaborators Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh (who's also his partner in life). Though the psychedelic dream/afterlife sequences allowed the team to draw on their familiar fantasy filmmaking background, the gritty, true-to-life segments, set in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the 1970s, have overtones from Jackson's earlier work - namely Heavenly Creatures (a period movie released in '94 that Jackson co-wrote with Walsh, which explored the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder).

Thus the movie will not necessarily appeal to Jackson's Lord of The Rings film fans, nor will it sit well with all who loved Sebold's book. Jackson is prepared for a mixed reaction however. Here he talks about The Lovely Bones' journey to the big screen, and his reasons for making the choices he did.

Question: What were the challenges adapting the book for the film?

Peter Jackson: In my mind there's no such thing as a perfect adaptation of a book. The master work is the book. Alice Sebold's novel is The Lovely Bones. That is the work that has got everything in it, every character, every sub-plot, and that's the way that you should experience the story in its most pure form.

A film adaptation of any book - especially The Lovely Bones in this example - is only ever going to be a souvenir. It's going to be an impression of aspects of the book. To me, to adapt a book is not a question of producing a carbon copy of the book - it's impossible. To include everything the film would be five or six hours long. It's a personal impression.

Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself - the three of us wrote the screenplay. We read the book, we responded to aspects of the book, especially the emotional themes and the comforting value of the book, and things it had to say about the afterlife, that aspect of it, which is very personal to anybody...Our adaptation is very much elements of the book restructured following our instincts and our taste. So, to me, no adaptation can ever be perfect. It's impossible. You don't make a movie for the fans of the book. You just can't do that.

Q: One of the major changes you made from the book is that the book featured a rape and murder. I'm sure you had artistic reasons for choosing to eliminate the rape. Could you share your thought process?

PJ: They're artistic, they're moral reasons, they're practical reasons. There's a variety of reasons which I should talk about. The film is about a teenager and her experiences of what happens; she's murdered, she goes into an afterlife experience, or in-between. We wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch. Fran and I have a daughter who's very similar to Susie's age, and we wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There's a lot of positive aspects to this film and it's not something I wanted to shield our daughter from, and so it was important for us to not go into R-rated territory at all.

Also, I never regarded the movie as being a film about a murder, and yet, if we shot any aspect of that particular sequence in anyway it would stigmatize the film. Movies are such a powerful medium...and to show a 14-year old girl being murdered in any way, no matter how briefly, it would completely swing the balance. And it would frankly make it a film that I wouldn't want to watch. I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film. I would not want to see the film, and every movie that I make is a film I want to see.

I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema, and it would not be one of them. So the movie that we did make, we wanted it to become something that was almost like a mystery, a crime mystery of what happens when you're in this world of the subconscious, the world of the afterlife. Susie has to deal with the mystery of what happened to her and there's a positive aspect to it in the sense that she's immortal. It's saying that there is no such thing as death. All of those aspects and themes were what interested us, not the murder.

I've shot some pretty extreme things in my time with Bad Taste, and Meet the Feebles, and Braindead, and there's a certain style and a sense of humor that I believe you can do to get away with it. But to do anything that depicted violence towards especially a young person in a way that was serious, to me, I would have no interest in filming it at all. It would be repulsive. So there was a variety of reasons, but we felt very determined from the beginning that the film should be PG-13 because it was important.

Q: Yes, actually showing the rape and murder would be completely superfluous to the story as you've told it.

PJ: I mean how much murder and killing do you need to see to be satisfied? How much to make somebody happy?

One of the things we did which is different to the novel in the way we restructured the screenplay is we have her fleeing from her murder. We really liked that aspect of the way the story was told. At the point where her spirit becomes disconnected from her body, she's running. She's running across that field, she's running into the street, she's running home, and Susie doesn't know what has happened to her.

She's literally confused and now she finds this out in the in-between, which is essentially the world of dreams, of subconscious, of this confused state, and she has to start to put the pieces together like a mystery. So that really dictated very strongly that, even for all the other reasons, seeing any sort of murder was not something we wanted to do because of the way we restructured the story, so that she herself is confused and has to put the pieces of the puzzle together as the story goes on.

Q: After doing four of the most epic fantasy films probably ever pulled off, what drew you to The Lovely Bones. You have a lot of digital effects in this film, which you utilize in your depiction of the supernatural, but it's a really intimate story. What appealed to you about this?

PJ: The only thing as a filmmaker that I am scared of, or fear, is repetition. I have no interest at all in doing the same thing over and over again. That's not to say that I wouldn't do another fantasy film or I wouldn't do another splatter film one day, or another film with puppets, but it would be different.

Certainly it's great to have a break, and it's great to turn you mind to something different, and The Lovely Bones is a challenge...Things are immediately much more interesting and enjoyable if they're difficult. It you're attempting to do something, or if you decide you're going to take on a project for the next year or two years, if it's easy and familiar - I shouldn't say easy actually, that's the wrong word - but if it's familiar and it's treading the same ground that you've gone before it's immediately going to be less interesting than taking on something that has new demands and a fresh challenge.

The Lovely Bones is a wonderful puzzle. It's a terrific book that affects you emotionally. The book doesn't have a structure that immediately makes the film obvious. In your mind the book affects you on an emotional level not on a story level as such. You delve into it, and as a filmmaker you figure out a way in which you can tell the story on film. As I said at the very beginning, it's not necessarily the perfect way or the way that other people would do it. You take 20 different filmmakers and give them a book like this - any book really - and you'll have 20 completely different films, which is interesting. So the idea of certainly doing something that was a challenging new topic was absolutely of great interest to us.

Q: Brian Eno did the score. What qualities from him did you want to augment what you were doing on screen?

PJ: Brian Eno was a wonderful surprise for us, a delightful surprise that happened. Interestingly enough, we had made a decision earlier on that we would possibly have no soundtrack composer on the movie. We thought that it would be interesting to do what Martin Scorsese does...have a soundtrack that was composed of songs of that period, and choose songs especially that would be suitable for particular sequences in the film. When we were compiling a list of songs as we were writing the script, we would write them into the screenplay. We'd actually identify the names of songs in the script that we thought would be appropriate. There was two or three of Brian Eno's existing tracks that made it onto our list. "Baby's On Fire" was one that we always thought would be great to accompany the scene where Mark goes into the cornfield with the baseball bat. There was an instrumental that he did called "The Big Ship" which was another beautiful piece of music that we had planned on using, in addition to a lot of other pieces by other composers.

So we got to the point, pretty much at the beginning of postproduction, where we had to start to ask permission to use these tracks. We contacted Brian and explained what we were doing and could we use these couple of songs of his, and he asked us about the film. He rushed out and grabbed the book to read it, he was curious, and he said to us, "Have you got a composer to do the soundtrack?" We said, "Well, no, not really. We think maybe we might not use one." And he said he would be really interested in doing it if we wanted to go that way. He sort of volunteered, which was amazing because to us, we never even thought to ask him because he's done a couple of movies, but it's not something that he really devotes much of his time to.

He was great to work with and [it was] an incredibly different experience because we're used to working with composers who take a final edit of the movie and they compose music to exactly the cut of the film that you give them. To the final actual seconds and frames, it's all perfectly lined up. Brian didn't want to see the rough cut of the film. He didn't want to read the script. He wanted to see conceptual art, he wanted to see imagery, he wanted to be inspired by emotion, he wanted to see photographs of the set, and then he started to compose. We were just communicating with him over iChat. We were in New Zealand and he was in the U.K., and he started to send us these long pieces of music. Beautiful, instrumental, emotional sort of pieces which might be seven or eight minutes long and would have all sorts of interesting shapes to them. He just basically said that we should edit these pieces of music as we saw fit, and combine them and blend them, and that's how he worked. It was a completely different way to how we've ever worked with a composer before, but for this particular movie, both the sound and the style of working really ended up suiting the film.

Q: Can you talk about how justice was carried out in the film, and how the film's message affected the ending - particularly Susie's decision between the boy and the box.

PJ: Ahh. Well that was one of things that we loved about the climax. The fact that she has this moment through the use of Ruth, who is a girl with genuine psychic ability. Susie finds that she has a few seconds back on earth again, a few seconds when she's inhabiting a body rather than being this sort of free spirit as it were. And in those few seconds she could decide to say, "Call the police. That guy out the window is the man who murdered me. You'll find my body inside that safe. Quickly, get to a phone and call the cops."

In terms of the very end, what I like about what happens to Mr. Harvey is that it confirms I think a hope that we all have that even if the police or the legal authorities don't ultimately do their work that there's a form of natural justice that happens. That was very much the concept behind what happens to Mr. Harvey.

Q: Susie's limbo world, how did you find the right look and texture for it on screen.

PJ: Well, the key thing to us was just the concept that it wasn't a physical place. We were not saying that when you die, you're going to go into this afterlife, and in this movie we're going to show you what that afterlife is like. That's not what we attempted to do. We wanted to base it on Susie's subconscious. So at the point that she is no longer anchored to earth through her body...her mind is in the world of dreams. At night she dreams, as we all do, but now that she no longer has a living body, she's permanently in this world of the subconscious, which is essentially a dream world. And so a lot of the imagery that we used - everything's a metaphor in a dream world. Everything means something else. But it's not a literal thing. So we used image systems that the audience are not really supposed to obviously understand...but as scriptwriters we put it into our screenplay, and the overall impression that it creates hopefully gives the audience the idea of what is happening.

People say when you dream about a house, that a house really represents a person, when you analyze dreams. So the house that she imagines that she sees in that empty field with the lighthouse sticking out of it, that house represents Mr. Harvey. She's using the metaphor of the house to represent the killer. And, as we said earlier, she flees from her own murder so she doesn't know where her body is and the only person that does is Mr. Harvey. Mr. Harvey himself keeps a souvenir, a charm bracelet. He throws most of the charm bracelet away because of the evidence, but he rips off one charm, which happens to be the house, and that house is Susie, using the same image system. So he's now keeping control of Susie. It's her fear of Mr. Harvey that he still has over her that prevents her from leaving this world of the in-between. I mean, she's trying to get to heaven but she's stuck. So the concept of her finding out the answers to these questions of where her body is, she has to confront the man who killed her, and she does that symbolically by going through the door of that house. And in doing so, she enters his subconscious. So I love the idea that she goes in there, she sees his previous victims, which are images that only he has in his mind, so now her subconscious is entering Harvey's subconscious.

And we used things like the flower, the blooming flower. That flower is really Susie and her life force. It's withered and it's dead as far as her father sees, this flower, but then it blooms in his hand when she's trying to communicate with him...He imagines in his mind's eye that flower blooming.

The gazebo was representing unfulfilled love. That first date that she was going to have with Ray, he said, "Meet me in the shopping mall by the gazebo." So that gazebo represents the date that she never had. She sees him in the distance in the in-between and she tries to run there but she can't run because the ground turns to water and mush, which is a very common dream image that we all have, that we're trying to get to a place and the ground is turning to syrup or glue and we can't make it there.

So everything that we did in that in-between world, and again this is all working on the basis of the subconscious, it's not supposed to be particularly clear, but it was designed as a way of working within the metaphor and image system of dreams. We liked the idea that in those sequences we were inside Susie's subconscious and it wasn't a physical place that we were showing.

Q: Despite your explanation about the subconscious, I think most people's observation is that it's Susie looking on at her family from the afterlife. As a non-believer I've always considered the afterlife a copout, a religious concoction to get people to behave in a certain way for some reward. I'm wondering in terms of putting the script together and trying to understand how people interpret this, what did you discover about the need that people have to believe in the idea of souls living on.

PJ: Well, it's an interesting question and it's one that I think everyone has obviously their own points of view about it...Certainly what we felt very strongly with the movie is that we didn't want to make a film that cast judgment on people's religious beliefs because that wasn't at all the motivation for making the movie. We didn't create the in-between being Susie's subconscious for that reason. To us it wasn't about her existing in a world that had some form of religious control around it. It was literally, she is disconnected from her body for that period and she is in this weird hallucinogenic state.

What we do in the movie is...there's that scene in the end with the field...There's a golden light there, which is supposed to be wide heaven, as Susie calls it, and as Alice Sebold called it, and that's a golden light. I shot that in a deliberately clichéd recognizable way that people get the idea that heaven is there. That is indeed the goal, which Susie has, to get out of this weird, trapped place that she is [in] and to actually move on; That golden light represents where she and everyone else moves on to. The idea is that you can put whatever you choose into that golden light and if you are religious, then obviously that's what you put in there. If you're not religious, you can imagine something else. And if you don't believe there's anything there at all, then probably it's not the movie you should go see.

I personally think that, all religious things to one side, which is a completely different topic, I do think that there is some energy that we have inside us. I have experienced a couple of people that have been very close to me dying and I have been there, and I've held their hand. There is a feeling that when somebody passes on, that they leave. There's a sense of departure that's very, very strong. It's so strong that it has made me believe in the fact that there is a form of energy inside us that continues to survive after death. Science, physics, tells us that energy cannot be destroyed so it has to go somewhere. It doesn't evaporate.

The Lovely Bones opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday Jan 15.

In Wonderful World, Matthew Broderick's character Ben Singer may think he's fighting "the man," the soulless god of faceless corporations, but in reality he's his own worst enemy. With his folk music career behind him, having lost his family and his copywriting job, he may be... more

In Wonderful World, Matthew Broderick's character Ben Singer may think he's fighting "the man," the soulless god of faceless corporations, but in reality he's his own worst enemy. With his folk music career behind him, having lost his family and his copywriting job, he may be down on his luck, but it's his inability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even when it's shining right in his eyes, that renders him impotent and leaves him without hope.

Written and directed by Broderick's longtime friend Josh Goldin, Wonderful World is a low budget film on very limited release. Its small price tag however belies its true value. With fully realized characters, a quietly powerful plot, and a solid ensemble cast, the full-of-heart film features one of Broderick's most nuanced performances to date.

SuicdeGirls met up with Broderick in a non-descript room at West Hollywood's Standard Hotel, which had been converted into an ad hoc press suite for the day, to talk about this very special movie.

Nicole Powers: You've been doing a lot of press to support the film. I know Josh Goldin is your friend, but your keenness to talk about this film seems to go way beyond that.

Matthew Broderick: I really do like it. Also, because these movies have very little budget for actual advertising, I think it falls on us more to promote them. But I really like the movie, and Josh, we've been friends for 20 years., so it's my pleasure to promote it. It's nice to promote something that you like.

NP: The movie really captures the hopelessness and lack of power that people are feeling right now. Everyone who works for "the man" is expected to give absolute loyalty, but these days there's no expectation that it will be reciprocated. In all the years I've been in America, I've never sensed such a colossal cloud of melancholy hanging over the nation. And with your character, more than "the man," it's that overwhelming sense of melancholy that he's fighting to overcome.

MB: Yeah, I think he is fighting his own melancholy basically. Although he's right about things, he doesn't like positive thinking, which I can sympathize with. But he's also had a lot of things happen that have put him in this mood. He's just been through a divorce, his daughter's at an age when she's separating from him I guess, he's low on money, and his album didn't do very well, so he's had a few blows as the movie begins. I guess in a way it's about him getting his life going again.

NP: In the press notes Josh Goldin talks about how he "wanted to create a movie about a man who saw only the negative side of things." Ben Singer is not a bad man, he's a nice guy whose life is adversely affected by his negative outlook. Much of what you get back from the world is so often based on what you project into it. Obviously you have quite an abundant life, which bodes well for what you're consciously or unconsciously projecting, but did exploring the character of Ben Singer have an affect on how you view your own demeanor?

MB: I don't know. I've thought about that. I'm not so sure how much you can control how you see things. I almost have a feeling that's a genetic thing, whether you see glasses as half empty or half full, or however you want to put it. I try to see things as accurately if possible. I don't want to pretend things are better than they are just because I think that'll make things better. I've never really believed that. But that said, I guess, if you're just hopeless that's very unattractive in a way, and probably will bring hopeless things to you.

I thought of it more when I was doing it as just the story of what's happening between those people. I didn't think about these big themes. I guess I am aware. I try to be positive. I know when I'm working I always try to look at the bright side of things because as soon as you work with people who think everything is doom and gloom it can bring the whole group down. So I definitely try not to be one of those.

NP: It only takes one negatron in the mix to sap everyone's energy.

MB: Well I try not to be a negatron. But, at the same time, if you get so worried about that you might avoid problems or not identify things that need fixing. So I don't want to just always think I've got to like everything because then you'd be in danger of being a crazy person I suppose.

NP: This movie is unusually subtle. There are no Hollywood devices, heavy symbolism or cheesy emotional cues that tell you what you should be thinking. It's actually quite a refreshing mental process, to discover how you feel about something rather than to have your emotion buttons pushed on cue. Did that quality immediately jump off the page when you first read the script? Or was it something that became apparent over the course of production?

MB: Both. It's always difficult to read something and know how it's going to feel when it's done. Knowing Josh so well, it feels like him. That's kind of how he is. He's kind of quiet, but also very, very funny. I think it's funny too. I don't think it's a dismal movie. It's oddly hopeful, at least by the end. The quietness, that's Josh's personality, and his humor. He doesn't hit you over the head with things. It's his style.

NP: So when he tells jokes they creep up on you, and you'll catch them few beats later.

MB: Yes, exactly, or as you're walking home.

NP: And continuing with the gentle tone of the film, in the end nothing dramatic happens, but we see how a slight shift in your character's outlook has a beneficial effect on his life - and those around him. So many movies champion impractical grand gestures, but in this movie, we see how even a small shift, something we can all do, has a beneficial effect.

MB: Yeah. That's well put. I agree with you. That's nice.

Josh has also written millions of screenplays, big studio things. He's rewritten them, so he's constantly having to make things work out better than he thinks the story [should]. He always has to manufacture things. I don't want to spoil it but

NP: The movie deals with the issue of immigration, again in a very subtle way. Ben, who is essentially a nice guy, throws the issue of immigration in his girlfriend Kh'di's face. But its another example of how Ben's negative attitude ultimately hurts himself far more than it hurts anyone else. To extrapolate that, do you think perhaps America's increasingly negative attitude towards immigrants is ultimately having an adverse affect on its own citizens?

MB: Probably, yeah. That seems to have been pushed off a bit. I remember last year [it was more of an issue]. We seem to have other problems now that we're obsessing over on the news.

I'm not an expert on the issue, but the idea of building some kind of wall along the border with Mexico, I just think it's such as awful symbol in a way. It sounds like Berlin or something. My grandparents were immigrants and as a New Yorker, I guess, immigration is just all around, and always good.

NP: In the movie Ben feels powerless and, with a failed music career., inconsequential. One of the basic reasons people seek fame, is to be someone that "matters." You came from a theatrical family, and I know you're very much in love with your craft, but having experienced both the extreme positive and extreme negative aspects of fame, what would you say about our culture of fame, and those that crave it without any respect for the process?

MB: They're just a different group than what I was a part of. I mean I suppose everybody sort of wants to be famous. I wouldn't deny that. But really, I loved acting from a pretty young age. Fame is more of a side effect. I mean there are a lot of good things about it, good tables and money and things. But it also can be really lousy.

Also, there was no reality TV when I started. Now there are people who get famous just for being odd - and really famous, like super famous. And I watch those show too.

NP: Which ones?

MB: I mean, I watch some of them. I watch Top Chef. I guess that's not so bad because at least they're cooking something. And my wife [Sarah Jessica Parker] will watch anything to do with buying or selling a house or remodeling a house. It hypnotizes her, so those are on a lot.

NP: Have you had to remodel you wife's closet to pimp it out Sex And The City style to compete with her on screen one?

MB: No, no. We don't have room. We have a pretty big house but we don't have that much closet space.

NP: 'Cause people must have big closet expectations walking into your house after seeing the SATC movie.

MB: For my wife, they do. But all of her professional life is separate. Those clothes are kept under a mountain in Yucca, or something. I don't know where they go. But her closet at home is pretty small actually, for what you would think.

NP: Like Ferris Bueller, Wonderful World is a real feel-good, life-affirming movie. What movies and music give you that feeling?

MB: I just saw Christmas in July, a Preston Sturges movie that I love. It makes me so happy. Louis Armstrong makes me happy. I can't think of anything else.

NP: Wonderful World is a rare film it's as much a bromance as it is a chick flick, since it explores not only Ben's relationship with Khadi but also his relationship with her broth Ibu. I know in my house we kind of keep score. If I drag my hubby to a chick flick that means he's owed an man movie. Do you have any similar system for ensuring domestic bliss where choice of movies and TV is concerned?

MB: We don't go to the movies that much to tell you the truth. We watch them at home. But, yeah, we do have that. We have that battle over space on the TiVo. Like all the real estate shows, and then there's sports shows of mine, and I'm constantly taping old movies. So you watch which one is about to be deleted because of space, and how much space each member of the couple gets on the DVR. That's our battle.

NP: So your domestic situation would be improved by a bigger hard drive.

MB: Yes it would. [laughs]

happy new year, i went from working at worcester's top tattoo shop to my town's local convenience store. fuck. my. life.

I am so super duper happy and bubbly today, well I was ill for starters but ho hum. I have now in the past day sketched over 15 people :-) and the sketches look fabby. I have also been scanning over the lyrics for the album I am recording next weekend, making final tweaks to them, I cant wait. I am working... more

I am so super duper happy and bubbly today, well I was ill for starters but ho hum. I have now in the past day sketched over 15 people :-) and the sketches look fabby. I have also been scanning over the lyrics for the album I am recording next weekend, making final tweaks to them, I cant wait. I am working with two top producers on it in a top secret location and it is going to be absolutely mind blowing!

I turn 20 on wednesday, I was going to be out partying with my mates, but as I now have only a month to get this album done I have decided to save my celebrations until I am back in Germany. :-) And then hopefully we can set up a few shows, test the water with a few unplugged gigs and see what people think of the tunes we have come up with :-). It wont disappoint, the lyrics have taken me a long time to write, some are personal about people who I love passing away and some are the good old feel good tunes that just make people want to sing along.

I have never felt so confident about anything before in my life. 2010 is definatly going to be the year for me. I have changed so much. I am done with stupid people telling me I am ugly and putting me down, I dont care. What makes me a better person is not going at you back.

My buddha necklace should arrive tomorrow as well, I can't carry my statue around with me sadly, even though if I could I would because it's pink, but I can now carry the Buddha with me everyday, to give me luck and calmness.

I also found my old mobile phone while sorting out the kitchen, its really cute as it is covered in Hello Kitty, I love it :-).

The next few weeks are going to be proper manic. Firstly recording at my good friends studio, then recording at the producers studio, writing more lyrics for the next album, and going back to Germany! I love it, right now as life is more hectic for me I am really enjoying it, plus the people I have met along the way I know are going to be beside me for a very long time. They really are the best bunch of people ever! No cattiness no bitching, nothing.

On the parts of my music magazine, the date has now been changed, however we are still online! Just due to this schedule starting up the publication will not be released until later on in the year when things have calmed down a bit. :-)

I hope everyone else can say that 2010 is the year for them as well. Screw following a band around on tour, make your own, go on tour yourself. Trust me, the feeling of stepping on to a stage with a crowd of people waiting to see you...well NOTHING beats it :-)

Cya in a few days people :-) I am off to play around on the guitar and do some more melodies.

xoxox

Among many of their hardcore fans, The Alkaline Trio logo ranks above "mom" as the tattoo of choice, and it's easy to see why. Unlike many of their punk rock peers, who pontificate on grand issues, The Trio's lyrics reflect the politics of personal experience: cops, booze, and relationships. more

Among many of their hardcore fans, The Alkaline Trio logo ranks above "mom" as the tattoo of choice, and it's easy to see why. Unlike many of their punk rock peers, who pontificate on grand issues, The Trio's lyrics reflect the politics of personal experience: cops, booze, and relationships. Since their near-perfect debut Goddamnit in 1998, they've kept their fan base stoked with constant touring and the release of an album or EP every year. The Trio: guitarist Matt Skiba, bassist Dan Andriano, along with new member Derek Grant on the drums, make pop-punk that doesn't suck. With all this in mind, I sat down to talk to Matt about skateboarding, growing up, and Katie's marriage proposal:


Keith Daniels:
I've got some member questions here. Do you know the suicidegirl Katie?

Matt Skiba: Well... I've been to the site a whole bunch of times... what about her?

KD: Her question is: "Mr. Matt Skiba, will you marry me?"

MS: I can't really say no, but maybe we should meet first.

KD: And also she asks: "Is it better to have loved and lost, or never loved at all?"

MS: I would say that it's probably better to have loved and lost. Never loving at all, that could get kindof boring. Even if it makes you wish that you hadn't met that person before, it's probably more interesting than not. It's probably better to have loved than not.

KD: A lot of the band's lyrics are about personal politics, instead of say, world issues. Is that just the way they turn out, or a conscious decision?

MS: It's just the way it turned out, really. We just write what comes naturally to us, and I don't know how comfortable we would be trying to teach anybody any world lessons, or any lessons for that matter. We just write what we know.

KD: Another member question: "Why does your music make me want to drink insane amounts of liquor and shoot myself in the face, in a good way?"

MS: [laughs] In a good way. I don't know, I guess some of the songs have a "drink a lot of liquor and shoot yourself in the face" kindof theme, but hopefully nobody does that. In a good way, I hope that means he'll never actually do that. I'm not sure why we give someone that feeling, but if it's in a good way I guess that's a good thing.

KD: Now a lot of your songs reference drugs and alcohol. Is that something that you guys have had any problems with?

MS: Yeah, I don't know how much it's been so much of a problem. It's just something that I think we've all grown up with. Just growing up, and even now we like a drink now and again. It's definitely been a pretty big part of our lives as far as, y'know, the growing up process. We've all done our share of partying. So naturally, it'll influence things I think.

KD: You're what, 27 now?

MS: Yeah.

KD: Do you find that, getting older, you slow down a little bit as far as the partying goes?

MS: Absolutely. I mean... I think I'm doing alright. I definitely, the older I get, can't go the way that I used to. That's for sure. My body can't handle a lot of things liked it used to be able to, like falling on my skateboard hurts a lot more than it used to. So naturally, drinking too much hurts a lot more than it used to.

KD: How good of a skateboarder are you?

MS: I wouldn't say that I'm very good. I've been doing it for a long time. I just do it for fun. I wouldn't enter any competition; I'd probably lose.

KD: How old were you when you started skating?

MS: I was like 10, or 11, I think.

KD: Do you follow professional skating at all? Are you a big fan?

MS: Yeah. One of my best friends, my neighbor Wally, is the first one to have whatever new video comes out. Magazines, like Thrash, if I'm at the airport or something I'll buy it. I don't follow it as closely as, say, my buddy Wally does, but I stay current through him I guess.

KD: Your last album, From Here To Infirmary, was more, I dunno, "produced". Is that something that you would've done at an earlier point if you'd just had enough money?

MS: I think it just came through experience. We had more time and more money to work on the last record. It just sounded a bit better, but we didn't intentionally make a more produced record. We didn't ever intentionally make a more unproduced record. I think it was just kindof the natural progression of things. Hopefully it was seen or heard as an improvement.

KD: Several bands that you've toured with have achieved massive popularity. Do you think a band can still be punk while they're selling a million records?

MS: I guess everybody has their own definition of what punk is. To me it's representative of individuality, and being your own God and making your own decisions. I think that somebody could still do that and sell a million records. I dunno, what's punk to somebody might be the most un-punk thing in the world to somebody else. It's hard to generalize, but punk to me is more in your heart than in your hairstyle, or how many records you sell.

KD: It's a philosophy.

MS: Yeah, it's a philosophy, not a fashion statement. That means, in my opinion, no matter how many records you sell you can still be punk.

KD: The Ramones have sold a shitload of records.

MS: Exactly.

KD: There were a lot of fans that were very possessive of you when you switched labels. Does that purist segment of the audience frustrate you at all?

MS: Not necessarily. I think, if anything, if somebody cares about us it's really flattering. Whether or not they agree with what we do isn't really frustrating to me. I think we run our band the way that we see fit, and we make our decisions for a reason. We think everything through really thoroughly. So someone that doesn't agree with what we decide to do as a band doesn't really bother me. This is our decision and our band. It's there for other people to share, but not to make the decisions for.

KD: From everything I've read, it seems like you made the move for your fans, to help them find the records.

MS: You can't make everybody happy. When we were on Asian Man a lot of people were saying "Oh this sucks, we can't find the records anywhere. We have to order 'em or go searching for 'em." and I think a lot of the same people were calling us "sellouts" when we went to a bigger, more available, place where our records would be more available. I mean, we make our decisions with our fans in mind and we want to keep everybody happy, but it's just impossible. We basically have to make ourselves happy, and hopefully everyone will understand. If they don't, too bad.

KD: You've always been fairly prolific in your releases: an album or a seven-inch every year. How many songs would you say you've written in your life?

MS: I wouldn't say hundreds, I'd say somewhere around a hundred would be a good estimate.

KD: How long does it usually take you to write a song?

MS: Well, me or Dan will come up with an idea. On this record, our newest record, Derek, our drummer, and I, collaborated on some ideas. Usually an idea for a song, like a verse and a chorus, will come out pretty quickly, in less than a day. As far as working with it with the band, sometimes it'll take weeks, months. We've had songs that we've had for months that we recorded on this new record that we've changed like five times. So, it's not really that cut and dry. It varies.

KD: The new record is called Good Mourning. Was that title just a play on words, or was there a significance to it?

MS: Yeah, it's a play on words, but it's also a title that makes sense with the theme of a lot of the songs on the record. There's an undertone of death. The artwork and everything also kindof goes together. So, y'know, it's a play on words, but we didn't decide on that title just because of that. I think it follows the theme of the record.

KD: There's a lot of death going on in the world right now.

MS: There sure is.

KD: What do you think of the war in Iraq? Is it something that troubled you?

MS: I think anything that's out of your hands and that out of control is something that would be troublesome to anyone. What's going on with the Bush administration... they're like Nazis. They will not listen to reason. They won't listen to anyone. They've decided what they think is right and they're gonna do it. Y'know, they're talking about locating Saddam Hussein, and when they recently started this "campaign" they were talking about bring [him] down. Now they don't even care if he's dead or alive. They're just blowing things up and killing people for the benefit of the Bush family and the oil industry. It's fucking terrible. Obviously, the voting process is now out of our hands as well as the current situation.

KD: I've heard the oil argument myself, but I was thinking that if they were just doing it for the oil it would've been a lot cheaper to make a deal with Saddam.

MS: Well his father also has a lot of money wrapped up in war companies. They're manufacturing all these weapons they're using, and obviously, Bush isn't buying them for himself. They have to buy 'em off his father's companies to make this war happen. So, y'know, for them it's like win/win. I think it's just some old bad blood that his daddy's still mad about. I guess for the same reason that we don't write political songs, I can't go into this huge thing like I know what I'm talking about, because I only know what I hear. How much of that is true? I don't really know. You never really know what's going on with these people. I don't find it that acceptable that he's looking out for the benefit of the Iraqi people. I don't think that's entirely true, if at all. What can you say about it? It's disgraceful.

KD: Have you had any problems touring outside the United States recently?

MS: We haven't really been on the road for the past few months. We haven't been traveling around here, or abroad, so no. I don't think this has anything to do with what's going on now, but after September 11th there was definitely a pause in plans. We had overseas stuff booked, and some of it we went. Other bands were canceling left and right, so tours that we were a part of got cancelled. If we had shows booked now we would go do 'em.

KD: Getting off of politics, who among your genre do you think should get more attention than they're getting? Who's the most under-rated?

MS: I dunno, I think there are a lot of bands that have gotten really popular. There are a lot of bands that aren't popular, compared to Blink 182 or Green Day. I guess we wouldn't fit in to that category. Most of the bands that I know of and dig are pretty appreciated by the people that know about 'em and I don't know how much they would want to be rated any higher, or become any more popular than they are. So I don't really have an answer to that question.

KD: You don't want to wish that on somebody that...

MS: ...maybe doesn't want it. [laughs]

KD: You said you've been to the suicidegirls site several times. How did you hear about it?

MS: Just from friends. My computer geek friends. I remember when the site first came about he was talking about it, so I checked it out for my own curiosity. I'm a regular visitor.

KD: You know I sent your manager a free membership for you guys to the site?

MS: No I didn't know about that!

KD: He probably tried to steal it! [laughs]

MS: He probably did! [laughs] I'm gonna call him afterwards "I want my membership."

KD: What is it that you like about alternative porn, and suicidegirls in particular?

MS: The women on that site are the kind of women that I find attractive. So I guess, it's just definitely easy on the eyes. Beyond that, it's just interesting to hear about people that are into, for lack of a better term, "alternative" culture and alternative lifestyles, and that have similar interests as myself as far as music and whatever they do with their friends. Different fetishes and whatever people have, it's just interesting and exciting to read about.

KD: Well when you get on there, the girl that wanted you to marry her is Katie. She used to be called Chloe.

MS: Oh I know who you're talking about it. I'll get back to her about the marriage thing.

The Alkaline Trio's new record, Good Mourning, drops on May 13th. For more information on The Alkaline Trio, visit alkalinetrio.com

So its a funny world. Is all I can say. I keep having love affairs with my body. Its an interesting twist. Our fighting and need to prove to the other that I own this has become so... Interesting. The outcome of that. Me, tragically falling in love with my scars, scratches, nicks and so on and so forth. more

So its a funny world. Is all I can say.

I keep having love affairs with my body. Its an interesting twist. Our fighting and need to prove to the other that I own this has become so... Interesting. The outcome of that. Me, tragically falling in love with my scars, scratches, nicks and so on and so forth. But when I wake up every morning, feeling different then the last it makes the need to do things with such little thought, practical. What am I rambling on and on about....?

I took pictures of myself for an imaginary lover at 7 in the morning. The outcome...

Next on the list.... I'm torn. Being bi sexual I feel like I constantly bitch about this sort of dilemma I put myself in. I honestly wish I could just pick a team. But now I just feel greedy. A lot more greedy then I should. I want things to happen but I'm also being rational. Well trying. Doesn't stop my thoughts from wandering and such.

Since New Year's I have developed a simple yet greedy crush upon CookiePuss. Which is foreign for me. I usually never have lasting feelings for girls and when they do... They are unavailable to me. Its so odd. Makes me feel like I'm not truly bi, but I just hold the girls I may desire on a much higher pedestal. But I love getting texts from her. If I could notice myself blush I'm sure I do when my phone dings and it is her, replying back. *Le sigh*
Next is my affair with boys. I still have so much of my feelings bottled up for Josh. I know at some point I will pop because of them. I need it to happen. Let that go. I'm not sure what I can do to get him... Do I shout it from fucking rooftops. Ones that he's currently under or what...? I feel like a seriously lost soul blinded and afraid, and for some reason I feel like/know that he's the only one that can truly save me from this... However did I get to this...?
But now their is this guy... Like entering the scene and he wants in. Like now. Not that I don't like him and such. Oh no I do. Just.. this is strange for me... Having someone like me is just... That never happens. And he's very like sexual. I'm not ready for that. I'm too innocent.That's my story and I'm sticking to it. He's got somethings I don't really approve of but... I'm trying to look past it for now.... at least
His name is Christian... I like it.

Yah... I like his hair and his gauges and junk. And his tattoos. That's fun.

I made some kick ass sugar cookies for my sorta friend Nate who is like a little celebrity. His youtube name and such is Naughty Nate. He amuses me. I sorta crush on him, but that's gonna fade. It should anyway. It was his birthday a few days ago so I made a shit ton of sugar cookies cause those are his favorite and yah. I miss being in her chatrooms. Hope he has one tonight... and I'm home.


That is all.
Love, peace and chicken grease. Gotta go get some stuff for my dreads.
And maybe hangout with Christian...

Chuck Palahniuk is now a best selling author. I never thought those words would ever come together in that way. But with the release of the David Fincher film Fight Club based on Chuck's novel, it was inevitable. It happened with his last dark novel Choke. The new book Lullaby is the first of his... more

Chuck Palahniuk is now a best selling author. I never thought those words would ever come together in that way. But with the release of the David Fincher film Fight Club based on Chuck's novel, it was inevitable. It happened with his last dark novel Choke.

The new book Lullaby is the first of his reinventions of horror. In Lullaby, Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or "culling song". This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle; who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before; for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail.

While his books may often have outrageous and dark elements in them, his life hasn't been much different. In 1999, his own father was murdered, spinning Chuck into a nightmarish legal process in which he would end up being cross-examined by the killer.

Many things in Chuck's books have strangely come to pass in certain ways. After the release of the Fight Club film, illegal fight clubs sprung up around the country. In his novel Survivor there is a terrifying plane crash and it would be tough to forget the images of the buildings collapsing in Fight Club as well. But he tells me himself that he is no seer and it's all done in fun.

Check out the website for Lullaby at: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lullaby/

Check out Chuck's website for all sorts of cool stuff: ChuckPalahniuk.net

Dan Epstein: I interviewed you last year for Davidfincher.net.

Chuck Palahniuk: I remember. Did you celebrate his birthday in august?

DE: No I didn't know when it was.

CP: Yeah he turned forty. I turned forty in February and Brad Pitt turns forty this year.

DE: You have said Lullaby is the first reinventions of horror that you're writing. What genre is Lullaby?

CP: Witches. We haven't seen a witch story other than say Harry Potter in a long time. It's really about people fantasizing about having power. Children love Harry Potter because it's children with incredible powers. It's the same way they love the X-Men.

DE: Your publishers call you a seer. How‚s that feel?

CP: [laughs] Boy marketing people will say anything. People seem to be a little freaked out by the amount of things in my book have come to pass. The thing that people are reeling from now is that it was about a year ago it was deiced to put the picture of the dead bird on the cover of Lullaby. Now dead crows are the first signs of West Nile virus in an area. There has some been backlash. People are saying we're taking advantage of West Nile virus. I wrote this two years ago.

DE: Do you believe in people being able to see the future?

CP: No. I believe that some people are gifted in ways that others aren't, I would be stupid not to say that. I can't see jack shit.

DE: I read that Lullaby was partly inspired by Nine Inch Nails Fixed album. It's an amazing album.

CP: There is one cut on that album that I just played over and over again.

DE: It's a great album to do that with since it never ends that way. I know you and Trent [Reznor] are acquaintances. What did he think of that?

CP: I know he liked the book. I sent the manuscript to him last fall in Los Angeles. He called me and said he was bored and that he wanted to read it.

DE: Wasn't he supposed to do the music for Fight Club?

CP: Yes. He has a connection with Fincher through the music videos but he was really caught in making his album The Fragile.

DE: What elements of Lullaby are autobiographical?

CP: The resentment of noise because when I am writing I like to pretend the rest of the world isn't out there.

DE: Lullaby is part of three-book deal I think.

CP: Sort of three books dedication to reinventing horror.

DE: What book is next?

CP: The next one is done and it's called Period Revival. It's going to be a conspiracy horror book like Ira Levin used to do so well. With Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, he was really the master of conspiracy horror even though he wrote the Barbra Streisand song He Touched Me. At the time he wrote those books it was a really building era of paranoid in our culture. I really think the period conspiracy novel really needs to come back now.

DE: Is there going to be monsters?

CP: No but there will be someone who finds out that they've been manipulated their entire adult life and that she's had control over her life.

DE: Were you surprised when your last book, Choke, became a best seller?

CP: [laughs] Yes I was. I heard my editor was dancing on his desk. I never thought I would see that day. I figured that it was about as likely as it becoming an Oprah book.

DE: Didn't you try to get your editor to steal from Oprah?

CP: My editor, Jerry, was going to a party at her house for Quincy Jones and I was trying to get him to take a souvenir out of her bathroom.

DE: Maybe a vial of fat.

CP: Yeah that little red wagon full of fat she was pulling around for a while. But he wouldn't do it so as revenge I was going on the radio and talking about how he stole her diaphragm and we were going to sell it on ebay. Then I got this really pointed call from Random House saying they got a call from Oprah's company Harpo and that I better just shut up.

DE: It's a good thing she cancelled her book club because then she wouldn't push your books.

CP: Like that would ever happen. It's when you got nothing to risk that you can do things like that.

DE: How has the success of Choke changed things?

CP: Well all of my books are in print and they sell really nicely. As each new book came out it was an increasing success. When someone comes to an event they buy a few of my books. When people bring five books to get signed, it's great.

DE: But then they sell them on ebay.

CP: I can‚t look at that stuff. You can't look at that and keep any sense of reality. Well I stopped working a regular job in 1998 but it hasn't changed things a hell of a lot. I really committed that if I'm going to be a writer I'm going to work as hard as I would any day job. So if I do that I could do at least one book a year and if I can't do that then I'm not working at it hard enough. It hasn't changed much of anything except the amount of people who come to signings.

DE: What was it like being cross-examined by your father's killer?

CP: It was infuriating. I was so angry. I told myself I was going to be cool about it and I wasn't going to react. Then up there I was slathering like a rabid dog and furious. Thank god the judge stepped in and called it to a halt.

DE: This is real life horror hitting you in the face. Was it the hardest thing you ever did?

CP: No not by any means. It was so sudden. We didn't know until me and the other surviving children went to court that I was going to be called up there. There was no time for it to build up and worry about it. It could have been much worse.

DE: I think you had said a few years ago that you wanted to write a father/son relationship type book.

CP: In a way that was Fight Club. It was so much about the relationship or lack of a relationship between fathers and sons. In a way I felt I bashed fathers so much, that's why I had to do Choke and take a few swings at mothers to even the score. For the time being I probably won't do that.

DE: You spoke to your dad during a séance I read.

CP: I was just writing about that this morning for a British magazine. A friend of mine claims he lives in a haunted house and I wanted to debunk all that. I was house-sitting for him when he was out of town and I asked a friend to bring some psychics over. They held a séance and they told me some stories about stuff that happened between my father and I when I was four years old that I never told anyone. They said my father was really sorry.

DE: I went to an introductory meeting at the Landmark Forum.

CP: Really.

DE: I walked out after about an hour. I couldn't deal with it. I read a little about what you said about it. It felt too culty.

CP: I walked out after 45 minutes. I went to the introduction and told off
the guest speaker. I called her a cult leader, a witch, which I knew what
they were up to and walked out.

DE: What made you go back in?

CP: After I walked out, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was 26 years old, I've got it all figured out and I'm just going to wait for the rest of my life for something to come along and hurt me. So why not take a chance at being young again. I went back in and apologized. That same night I started Fight Club.

DE: Has 9/11 changed the way you write?

CP: To a certain extent it sort of happened at the perfect time for my career because I did not want to be standing on the soapbox as an angry young man into my forties. This way I get sort of transitioned into my cultural criticisms in a forward way. The best cultural criticism of the 40's and 50's came out of oppressive times. It was fantasy and science fiction and it wasn't taken like form someone on a soapbox. It's my goal to be charming and entertaining in my rants.

DE: I read you take grappling classes.

CP: I did until about a year ago, the guy who taught the classes moved to England. It was a great class. A lot of fun and it was the best exercise ever. I broke two ribs while I was writing Choke. That injury gave the excuse to sit down and write.

DE: Were people excited to grapple with the guy who wrote Fight Club?

CP: At first but that stuff tends to burn off really fast.

DE: How are things going to be different now that you‚re forty?

CP: I'm a little more family oriented. The books sort of reflect that. They're less about the struggle to find personal identity and more about the struggle with the external world, family and relationship issues.

DE: I read you ate a mink coat at a Pink Floyd laser show. Were you on ecstasy or something?

CP: It was the first time anyone gave me LSD. I was grinding my teeth really bad and one of my friends told me to put something in my mouth. I meant to put my winter muffler in my mouth and after a few minutes I found that I had picked up the sleeve of a mink coat that belonged to the woman next to me. I had chewed this whole sleeve off the elbow. I was choking on the fur and it was the worst thing to find in your mouth when you're high on acid. Hair was in my mouth and in my sinuses. I knew the moment the lights came up this woman was going to freak out and I was going to go to jail. That is a recipe for a bad trip.

DE: You had told me last year that Jake Paltrow [Gwyneth's brother] had written a screenplay based on your book Survivor [which is about the sole passenger of a jet, moments away from slamming first into the Australian outback and then into oblivion]. I am going to assume that project isn't going to happen.

CP: You could win money on that bet.

DE: Anything moving with the Choke movie?

CP: Bandera Entertainment, the guys who did Requiem for a Dream have Clark Gregg [writer of What Lies Beneath] writing a draft. That looks like it will be the next movie.

DE: Do you have any plans to do any screenplays?

CP: David Fincher and I have talked about doing Chemical Pink, which is a dark novel about female bodybuilding. I think Fincher is hemming and hawing about Mission Impossible 3. I know he has the option. I think he got the option and put the deal together with me as the screenwriter. Our agents have talked about it. I tried to tell David that I've never written a screenplay before. He seems fine with it.

DE: I heard you and Jim Uhls [screenwriter of Fight Club] might be doing an HBO series.

CP: We were putting together a concept and a pilot because HBO really wanted to do something and promote it "From the creators of Fight Club". But between David's offer with Chemical Pink and all the books I really had to back away from it.

DE: What would it be about?

CP: The concept was to do a Friends type situational Sex and the City comedy but it would be a lot darker. Each person would have a different compulsion or dysfunction and use their support group the same way the Friends use their coffee house or whatever they do. Do that as dark and upsetting as possible. They wouldn't even be friends they would be failed enemies because they don't want each other to recover. Failed Enablers.

DE: Was it funny to see Jared Leto get beaten in Fincher's Panic Room like he did in Fight Club?

CP: It's funny because Jared Leto is like the new Kevin Bacon. He's in every movie and he gets the crap beaten out of him in American Psycho. I think there is a real desire in life to destroy beautiful things. We want to see these things disempowered.

DE: Here is something you might not know about. 20th Century Fox may not be releasing Fight Club as a special edition DVD anymore.

CP: That would be disappointing, but if all someone wants is the movie? As long as the special edition is somehow available it's fine. The European DVD doesn't have my commentary track on it.

DE: Chuck, thank you so much.