by Lisa Brady It seems like all we hear about these days is how the economy is in the crapper, so I am doing my part to save some money and make a kick ass accessory at the same time.  The great thing about making something from scratch is it’s completely customizable.  I went to the fabric store... more

by Lisa Brady


It seems like all we hear about these days is how the economy is in the crapper, so I am doing my part to save some money and make a kick ass accessory at the same time.  The great thing about making something from scratch is it’s completely customizable.  I went to the fabric store and got a couple of yards of different fabrics that tickled my fancy and got to sewin’.  This is how to make a quick and adorable tote bag.

• Step 1: Pick your fabric (I went leopard.  Rawr.) and decide how big of a tote you want to make.


• Step 2: Use fabric scissors so you get the cleanest cut possible.


• Step 3: I cut a 12 ¼” by 24 ¼” rectangle.  The extra ¼” will be used up when folding the top down to finish the seam later on.

• Step 4: Fold in half inside out and sew a  ¼” seam.  Repeat on opposite side.


• Step 5: Pinch the bottom corners into a 2” triangle.  This takes some finesse.  It took me a long time to be able to do this effortlessly.  Just practice!


• Step 6: Sew across the top.  How far in you sew will determine how the bottom of the bag will look.  I usually just eyeball it.  The measurement in the photo is about 1 ½”.  Repeat on other corner.

• Step 7: Use either your fabric scissors, or pinking shears if you have them, and cut the excess fabric from the corner.


• Step 8: Turn the bag right side out and poke the corners until the bottom boxes out.  This is the bottom’s finished result.


• Step 9: Create straps by either using the same fabric as the bag (or even a different fabric if you’re feeling creative) or use a nylon webbing as I did here.  You can buy it by the yard at most fabric or craft stores.  Measure 2” from the side seam and pin the webbing to the top of the bag, making sure the straps are the same length.  Then sew forward and in reverse 2 or 3 times to make sure it’s secure.  Repeat for all four straps.

• Step 10: Fold down top about ¼” to ½” (putting straps into the bag) and pin.  Sew all the way across the top.


• Step 11: It should look like this when you pull the straps back out.


• Step 12: Double the strap back once more and sew forward and back 2 to 3 times.

• Step 13: Close up of step 12.


• Step 14: Snip those loose threads and you’re ready to go!

This is so easy and comes out so cute you’re going to be making tons of these things.  Try not to get frustrated because you will jam your machine or run out of thread at a really inconvenient time.
Just remember the only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.

by Pandie Suicide Today’s post on the music industry is going to be a little more ‘how-to’ than last week’s piece of mine on What it Means to Be a Woman in Heavy Music Today. We are going to cover that crazy, amazing, thing: the rock n roll tour, or the metal tour, or the punk tour, or the whatever... more

by Pandie Suicide

Today’s post on the music industry is going to be a little more ‘how-to’ than last week’s piece of mine on What it Means to Be a Woman in Heavy Music Today. We are going to cover that crazy, amazing, thing: the rock n roll tour, or the metal tour, or the punk tour, or the whatever kind of tour. Going on tour is one of the most awesome things in the world, if you are lucky enough to experience this fun time, even if it’s in a gritty van. It’s the chance to live the rock n roll dream, a different town, city, venue, crowd, every night. It’s parties and late nights, good drugs and alcohol, music, fans, fame, fortune, an escape from the normal ‘9-5’. It’s an excuse to get a little wild. And that’s why we love it. That glittering, dreamy thing…

But it isn’t all private jets and five star hotel rooms every night, Almost Famous-style…well maybe sometimes it is… the truth is a lot of times, no matter how much fun you’re having, tour can be a hard slog, which is why I’ve enlisted not only my own resources and experiences from touring myself, but also the help of a few people who ought to know a thing or two about a thing or two to come up with some practical, helpful little pieces of advice:

Top tips for tour survival:

Be prepared for anything.

Expect the level of gay jokes to go skyhigh within the first day of tour. And multiply by ten each day thereafter.

Remember that having to be inside a moving vehicle for hours on end does not always mix well with last night’s jagerbombs and tequila shots.

Grab sleep when you can, you never know when you might need it.

Cops like to pull over vehicles, they especially like to pull over vehicles full of suspicious looking characters, such as musicians. Do not give them any reason to pull you over, make sure all your registration, licence and vehicle maintenance is in order because once they decide to pull you over for a broken tail light or speeding,  you can bet they’re going to want to see what kinds of fun illegal substances, weapons, and other cool stuff that you may or may not have on board, and once they have a reason to get in there and  search, you’re pretty much screwed if you do, and even if you don’t it’s a lot of hassle to go through that  you just don’t need, so it’s best to avoid that situation from happening, in the first place.

Bring lots of snacks, or be prepared to live off truck stops, convenience stores, and fast food joints, unless that is, you are lucky enough to get catering, but even then, be prepared that you might have little to no food choices that taste good or are good for your body, so bring some snacks with you! I bring larabars in enormous quantities with me everywhere. They have saved my life many a time before.

Try to eat healthy. This may seem a bit of an oxymoron, especially with what was mentioned above, but if the opportunity for some fresh salad greens or fruit presents itself to you, jump on it when you can, remember you are what you eat, literally, and if you want to look  (and feel)  like a sexy salad on a stage, as opposed to a greasy burger, there you go.

While it may be hard to fit in any kind of regular workout, especially if you’re not staying anywhere near a gym, try to at least get some walking in each day, maybe a pushup or two wouldn’t go amiss either, when half the day you’re sitting down, and your only real movement is at night when on stage or carrying equipment around etc, it’s eventually going to be hard to perform at your optimum level if you’re not feeling fit and ready to go. A good little walk to check out the city you’ve woken up in today is usually a pretty good start to maintaining your fitness level, you don’t have to get crazy, but like I said the odd push up or stretch etc (also very good for a back/neck that is aching from sleeping in a bus or van!) couldn’t hurt.

If you do value your appearance, bring face wipes, skincare products, haircare products (all travelsize of course to save space!), toothbrush and toothpaste etc, the heat, the late nights, the alcohol, airconditioning, smoky bars etc, these all play havoc on your hair and skin driving them out, so even if you’re a tough guy, you’re probably going to want to look after your skin somewhat, and dental hygiene is sexy.

Drink lots of water, lotttts and lottts of water. And by water I don’t mean Red Bull. I mean pure clean drinking water, your body is going to need it from all the shit you’re putting it through. Trust me.

Bring a book, ipod, playstation portable, mini tv/dvd player, colouring book and crayons, or something, whatever will keep you entertained, there are some lonnng drives, flights, and periods of downtime on tour, and you can only fistfight with your bandmates so much before it becomes old hat.

If you had a boyfriend or girlfriend/ wife/husband etc before you left for tour and you still want to have said boyfriend/girlfriend/wife etc when you return, be sure to initiate contact with them often, to let them know you’re thinking about them to curb those jealousy issues. On that note,  some relationships are cool with being ‘open’ and involving others in them, but if yours is not like that, and you don’t want your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/ husband to cheat on you, don’t cheat on them.  It’s a pretty simple but often overlooked rule of thumb. Karma can be a bit of a bitch sometimes.

Keep it together, remember drama is amplified by so many bodies living in such close quarters. When the urge to fist fight or lift baseball bats arises, breathe for a minute, assess the situation calmly including assessing how many alcoholic beverages and or other mind-altering substances you may or may not have consumed in the last 24 hours (are you mad because you’re drunk or hungover? Is the other person?), and then decide what course of action to take.  If someone’s got to be the better person here, then it might as well be you.

Similar to the tip above:  “Create Mutual Respect. It doesn’t matter if this is between you and the sound tech, you and the counter clerk at the convenience store or you and LaVonda the Waitress at the IHOP. Mutual Respect for our fellow human beings is essential. What if LaVonda is a rabid music fan and because you’re nice to her at the IHOP and you leave her with a copy of your cd (and a generous tip) she brings 20 of her friend to a show? Mutual respect pays big dividends. And it costs nothing.” The same goes for between band members and crew.

Tips from a few people who know whats up:

• Don’t shit on the tour bus! (DangerRuss, co-host Poor Kids Radio/Glenn Danzig’s personal security)


• Don’t be a slob – try to be clean (DangerRuss, co-host Poor Kids Radio/Glenn Danzig’s personal security)


• Bring lots of water, babywipes and duct tape (Toxsick Trip – lead singer, Blue Felix)


• Buy a great set of headphones…then you can block out the world, snoring room mates, shitty support bands, and noisy airplanes full of kids.. (Gavin Downie, guitar tech)


• Forget about showering! Just get used to the fact you’re not going to be able to shower for days, sometimes….weeks. (Travis Neal – lead singer, Divine Heresy – currently on tour with Fear Factory)


• Have the absolute time of your life! (Pandie Suicide)

Feel free to comment here on suicidegirlsblog.com with more tips!

Deep in the Congo, a scientist named Jenny Lowe is running for her life from the machine-gun fire of guerillas when she comes upon the isolated cabin of a colleague who has always kept his distance despite their identical fields of study – primatology. Finding him dead in his doorway and his cabin ransacked... more

Deep in the Congo, a scientist named Jenny Lowe is running for her life from the machine-gun fire of guerillas when she comes upon the isolated cabin of a colleague who has always kept his distance despite their identical fields of study – primatology. Finding him dead in his doorway and his cabin ransacked for valuables, she is about to press on when a figure hiding inside catches her eye: a young girl. Acting on instinct, Jenny grabs the girl and they race through the darkness towards the safety of a helicopter: it’s not until the danger subsides that the girl, Lucy, is seen clearly. She is, in a word, different: dark, sleek, and muscular, with features that are proportional, yet very exotic. She proves to be startlingly well-educated – fluent in poetry and mathematics – yet culturally autistic, having been born and bred in the jungle.

Lucy also has a secret, one even she is not aware of and which explains her lifelong isolation: she is the product of a gene-splicing experiment undertaken by her now-deceased father to create a child that has both the cognitive abilities of a human and the physical and emotional attributes of an ape – the parting gift of a man convinced that humanity (as currently constituted) is doomed. Lucy comes from the mind of journalist and author Laurence Gonzales, known for his best-selling non-fiction books Deep Survival and Everyday Survival, which explore how and why some people respond better in crisis situations than others. SuicideGirls recently called up Gonzales to talk about the creation of Lucy, and why she is his vision of the ultimate survivor.



Ryan Stewart: What are you working on today?

Laurence Gonzales: I’m writing a new novel. It’s kind of a long story, but I’ll tell you if you want.

RS: Sure.

LG: It’s speculative fiction. I’ve done a lot of research about global warming and written a lot of non-fiction, and I had this idea that I would write something. So, I did all this research and then two things happened: I got the impression that people were just saturated. They’d made up their minds and were not listening anymore. They either thought it was a problem or they thought it wasn’t, but you couldn’t really say anything that they hadn’t already heard, or at least thought they’d heard. The second thing was that every time I’d come across something that was saying ‘This might happen in thirty years’ I’d turn around and see the news saying that it was already happening. So, things were happening a lot faster than anyone thought and no one was listening and I was struggling with this idea, which was: How do you approach the subject of global warming? And I have a seven year old son, so I thought ‘I wonder what the world will be like when he’s my age.’ I’m 62. So, I thought ‘Okay, what if we just jump over all of this and say that everything they think is going to happen has happened. What does the world look like? What is life like for someone who would have been in kindergarten or first grade right now?’ And that’s essentially what I’m writing about.

RS: There’s some pessimism in Lucy about how we’re doing as a species and where we’re headed, as I see it. You seem to suggest that humans don’t have what it takes to make it in the long haul, and all that can save us is a sort of radical genetic intervention, a deus ex machina that alters our evolution. Although admittedly, that’s the point of view of one character, Lucy’s father.

LG: You have to read Lucy’s father as a bit of a mad scientist. Nobody would do this, otherwise. His theories about why he would do it are his own, not mine. And I wanted to get past all of that, because the main thrust of the story is: What if you had such a person? Forget about how she got here. What would happen if such a person existed? How would the world react? I think that’s the main interest of the story. So, I don’t feel that. When I read the news about what’s happening around the world in various places I can certainly get pessimistic, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly don’t think that genetically engineering a new race of people is the answer. What I think is that people basically respond to pleasure and pain. If something works and gives them pleasure they do it again and again and again, like those guys on Wall Street with the mortgage default swaps. Those seemed like such a great idea because it was a money machine, until it wasn’t. And people respond equally to pain. If something is going really wrong, they tend to correct it eventually, it’s just a question of how much pain they have to be in first. During the energy crisis of the 1970s people actually cut back on their driving so much – because the cost of gas had become so high – that if it had gone on for another year we would have been completely independent of foreign oil. Most people don’t remember that, but we actually did do the right thing. Doing the right thing is always possible, it’s just a question of whether we’ll do it in time.

RS: I read somewhere that you’ve actually visited prisons to study inmates. Did that affect your view of human potential at all?

LG: Well, at the time I went there I was writing about a number of different kinds of institutions. I spent a lot of time in a mental hospital too. And the idea behind it was that I wanted to show people something they probably would not see themselves. Prison is one of the great institutions of this country. We have more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world, and while that’s a shocking and awful thing, there are certainly people who belong there. There are just an awful lot of people in there, and I don’t think people understand what the conditions are. So, the idea wasn’t so much a comment on our humanity as much as an exploration of a piece of our culture that most people know nothing about. And the thing about the mental institution was that there really is no effective treatment for serious mental illness and these institutions, well, they do what they can, I guess, but that’s another thing where people don’t just walk in and take a look at their local mental institution.

RS: There’s a rather insane character in Lucy, a government veterinarian who captures Lucy at one point and experiments on her with no ethical qualms. As someone who has written extensively about survival and what kind of person is a survivor type, do you think that fundamentalists are survivors?

LG: Yes, I do think that. As my model for the veterinarian I read a book called The Banality of Evil about the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was the mastermind of Hitler’s death machine, but he was essentially a bland bureaucrat who just figured out an efficient way to do things, namely recordkeeping and moving logistical things around. And he was tried and executed for killing all these people, even though he never actually killed anybody. He just did these mechanistic things that got the job done. And that’s kind of what this guy [in the book] is like: very low affect, not subject to emotional pleas. There are people like that in any society and, yeah, they do tend to survive, which is not such a good thing.

RS: I noticed that you don’t really do the Michael Crichton thing in this book of overwhelming us with data to make an airtight scientific case. Is there plausibility in the book’s premise?

LG: There is plausibility in the premise. I don’t know if you noticed, but Arizona just passed a law that goes into effect this week that would make it a felony to create Lucy. It’s a law against creating human-animal hybrids. Several other states have made similar laws and the reason these laws are appearing now is because it is becoming possible to do this sort of thing. Now, I didn’t think for the purposes of the narrative that it would be very interesting to go through all of the possible genetic mechanisms by which you could create a human-animal hybrid – it’s very complex stuff. But yeah, it is possible, but the question of what you would get is an open question. As far as I know, no one has tried it. I took the Frankenstein idea and turned it on its head. Creating a monster that’s bad is one way of doing a story, but creating a monster that is unequivocally good poses a whole new set of problems that I hadn’t seen examined very much. Everybody likes Lucy, but she’s got this weird genetic picture, so what do you do with that? It would be a different thing if she were roaming the countryside killing people – that would make it much simpler.

RS: Do you have a position on the morality of experimenting with human-animal hybrids?

LG: Well, in writing the novel my impulse to deal with that subject matter was to get people talking about it before we’re actually faced with it. I wanted to open the discussion, to say ‘Here’s this stuff and it’s out there, now what are we going to do about it before some high-school student in China actually does it?’ That’s probably what will happen. You can get biotechnology kits right now. You can get the components free from MIT, they have a library of genetic elements called BioBricks. And there’s a company that will sell you a kit for assembling these for $235. So, anybody can start doing genetic engineering. It’s kind of like the computer revolution in 1971. I’m essentially an observer, not a philosopher, and as an observer I think people are going to start doing this stuff. Not necessarily creating a Lucy character, but creating elements of genetic systems that combine human and animal genetic material. For example, you can grow human organs, conceivably, in a pig. So, we take your genetic material and implant it in a pig through all of these genetic techniques and you can conceivably get your transplant kidney grown in an animal. I think that’s probably the direction we will go, initially.

RS: Just to go back to the philosophical side for a second, do you generally take the Peter Singer position that animals like chimpanzees are entitled to right to life and protection from harm?

LG: Yes. I believe that great apes, which would include chimpanzees and bonobos, should not be used for experimentation. Ideally, they should not be put in cages, but what are you gonna do? They are many, many of them in cages and you can’t repatriate them to the jungle because they’d die there. They’re not used to that if they were born in captivity. So, treating them as well as possible in whatever setting you find them is certainly my position.

RS: They say that bonobos can recognize themselves in a mirror, which is supposedly a key criterion of self-awareness.

LG: It goes way beyond that. They’re so smart that if you spend time with them you’ll immediately recognize how close to us they are. I went the other day to the Milwaukee Zoo, where they have the largest captive group of bonobos. I hadn’t been there in about two years, but while I was doing research for this novel I had gotten to know a bonobo there called Viaje, and he was from Mexico. He had been a captive bonobo in Mexico all his life – he’s 24 years old – and no one had ever spoken Spanish to him. I spoke Spanish to him and when I did his head snapped around in recognition and he came right over to me. It was clear that he was like ‘Finally, somebody who can talk!’ He had been hearing only English since he came to the United States. Well, that was two years ago and I came the other day to have a photo shoot done there and as soon as I came near the cage he came up to the glass and started pounding on the glass. And during the whole photo shoot I was close to the glass and he sat right next to me. Wherever I moved, he moved over to be next to me – he clearly knew who I was. He’s a smart guy.

RS: There are some interesting digressions in the book where you remind people that as bright as chimpanzees are, they also occasionally leave people horribly maimed or dead. Do you take the Werner Herzog position that it’s naïve to forget that they are still animals at heart?

LG: Yes, it is naïve and dangerous as well. Bonobos are not as violent as chimps, but they will hurt you just like they hurt each other. They do fight. Chimpanzees are notoriously violent animals and extremely dangerous to humans. The usual scenario is that someone gets a chimp as an infant – they’re very attractive as infants – but as they reach maturity the males especially become quite dangerous. People will find at that time that if they don’t have them placed somewhere they will eventually attack someone. So, yeah, they are definitely animals and definitely dangerous.

RS: As the book goes on, Lucy starts to embrace her animal side, her violent side, more casually. She starts biting off fingers at the first provocation.

LG: Well, what happens is that Lucy is fine if she’s left alone. Once she’s attacked, she defends herself. When she is attacked, her violent side comes out, but I think we should bear in mind that this violent side is something we as humans possess too. Most people are capable of being violent when threatened and also of being much stronger than they are normally.

RS: Lucy doesn’t always wait for a threat to be verbalized, because she has a very heightened awareness of nonverbal communication. That’s a big feature in the book.

LG: I did a lot of research on nonverbal communication and it’s a real thing. It’s a formal area of study in science and I think it’s something that people ignore to their detriment. There are a lot of professions in which you’re forced to rely on the type of communication that Lucy refers to as The Stream – a constant stream of messages that don’t involve words, which all animals exchange all the time. For example, police officers, firefighters, people in hazardous professions – they learn to recognize these signals because their lives depend on them. Most of us don’t need to because we live in a protected environment, but Lucy was raised in the jungle and is very much attuned to that. Throughout the book she is constantly reading The Stream and I think it helps drive the story.

RS: You said it’s a scientific discipline? Does it involve trying to prove the existence of telepathy?

LG: No, there’s a fellow named Paul Ekman who sort of pioneered a study where he took high-speed video of people to show what he referred to as micro-expressions that send signals. A person can be seeming to talk to you in a friendly, normal way, but embedded in that in increments that are too small to recognize consciously are micro-expressions where someone might grimace, for example, when it looks like he’s smiling. People are able to process that through their emotional system and receive those messages, but they don’t hit the level of consciousness because they’re too quick. I could give you the whole neuro-scientific rundown, but it goes through the amygdale, which is a very fast route, instead of going through the normal visual cortex which produces a clearer picture. But anyway, Ekman was one of the pioneers of this. It’s not considered telepathy at all; it involves things like body language, micro-expressions of the face, and pheromones, which you can’t consciously smell, but they send signals. So, in these ways people are constantly exchanging information without knowing it. You may yourself recognize this if you meet someone and the person makes you really uncomfortable, but you don’t know why. It’s probably some set of signals this person is sending. Also, if you see two young people who are attracted to one another in a bar on a date, and they’re hitting it off, watch them carefully and you’ll see that they start to mimic each other. They’ll start to synchronize their body movements and sort of mirror each other, even to the point of taking their drinks at the same time or folding their arms at the same time, and they’ll gradually even synchronize their blood pressure and heart rate. There’ve been a series of experiments done showing how this works.

RS: It’s interesting how in the book Lucy’s education seems to come from everywhere but school. Her father taught her abstract thinking, and she has all these strategies for dealing with things.

LG: Well, I never learned anything in school, did you? [laughs] I always think of that Paul Simon song about high-school: When I think back to all the crap I learned in high-school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. I’m being facetious of course, but her father was intensely educating her and she knew more by the time she got to high-school than she would have learned in high-school, so that becomes a non-starter. She was planning on going straight to college. She is a character of superior intelligence, and is meant to be special in that way. And because she’s unfamiliar with technology she thinks of things that people who use those technologies every day of their lives might not think of. She’s a very creative individual. But the only critique of high school I was making was that it really isn’t a place of learning, it’s a place for socialization.

RS: You describe Lucy as “exotic” in the book a few times, but you never really commit to describing her in detail. Do you have an image of her in your mind?

LG: I think I do have an image in my mind, but it’s sort of a vague image. I think I purposefully kept it a little vague, because people tend to create images for characters in books in their own minds and you don’t want to step on that too much. A lot of the fun of reading is what the reader brings to the subject, so rather than give a very detailed description of her I left it a bit sketchy. I think people will jump at the opportunity of adding their own thoughts. When you say to someone: What would you get if you crossed an ape and a human, they’ll come up with something.

RS: We have to think about the movie, though, right?

LG: Here’s what I think about the casting process: it doesn’t really matter what Lucy looks like as long as she’s pleasant-looking. But when the movie is made, somebody completely unknown will probably play Lucy. Or at least, that’s how I imagine it.

RS: After the novel you’re currently writing is done, do you plan to write more about survival? Is there anything new to say on the subject?

LG: Well, the novel I described to you earlier is very much about survival, because people are left in a depleted world and they have to change their strategy. But yeah, there’s a book that I’m in the research stages of which is about what happens after a survival incident. We always see these stories where the rescue takes place and the helicopter takes off and that’s the end of the story, when in fact that’s really only the beginning of the story. People have to go through a tremendous amount of adjustment after they’ve been through a survival situation in order to get on with their lives. So, I’m talking to war veterans and people who’ve been through traumatic experiences like shark attacks and things like that, to see how their lives went afterwards.





Lucy is available in bookstores everywhere.

Justin Halpern is an ordinary guy who curates an extraordinary Twitter page. In less than a year it's garnered over 1.3 million fans who follow Justin simply to keep track of the latest and greatest shit his dad says. Justin's talent lies in realizing the aforementioned shit was of a superior... more

Justin Halpern is an ordinary guy who curates an extraordinary Twitter page. In less than a year it's garnered over 1.3 million fans who follow Justin simply to keep track of the latest and greatest shit his dad says. Justin's talent lies in realizing the aforementioned shit was of a superior quality to that emitted from other dad's mouths. He also has a knack for conveying the underlying heart behind his father's seemingly harsh witticisms.

Raised on a farm in Kentucky, Justin's dad, Sam Halpern, is a man of few words - who knows how to make every syllable count. The exact opposite of passive-aggressive, Halpern, Sr. has never been backwards about coming forwards with his often-unsolicited opinions and words of advice. Growing up, this brutal honesty was difficult to deal with, but now Justin is reaping the rewards. His @ShitMyDadSays Twitter page has spawned a hilarious yet surprisingly touching book of longer vignettes -- brilliantly retold by Justin -- and a TV sitcom produced by Warner Brothers for CBS starring William Shatner, which was co-written by Halpern, Jr. in association with the team behind Will & Grace.

The @ShitMyDadSays phenomenon was precipitated by a very humbling experience for Justin. As the founder of the Holy Taco comedy site, a Maxim.com contributor and an aspiring screenwriter who was free to work wherever is laptop rested, he decided to move back from Los Angeles to his hometown of San Diego to share an apartment with his girlfriend who also happened to reside there. Things didn't go to plan however; Justin's love interest broke up with him the day they were supposed to start cohabiting. To add insult to injury, having already given up his LA apartment, at 28 Justin had little option but to move back in with his folks. Fortunately his story, or at least this chapter of it, has a happy ending.

SuicideGirls caught up with Justin, who now splits his time between Los Angeles and San Diego, to find out more about the upside of living in close proximity to your grumpy old dad (and the fun that can be had with irritable bowel syndrome).

Nicole Powers: Do you still live at your parents house when you're in San Diego?

Justin Halpern: Actually I don't. I've moved out since. I live with my girlfriend in San Diego but I'm at my parent's house quite a bit. When I'm in San Diego I work out of there because I have a shitty little apartment and I don't actually have enough room to work.

NP: And do you go home to do your laundry? (Sam Halpern: "I'd say I was gonna miss you, but you're moving ten minutes away, so instead I'll just say don't come over and do your fucking laundry here.")

JH: I do go home still to do my laundry. Even when I'm in LA, I'll save it up until I have to go down to San Diego and then I'll do it at my parent's house.

NP: So on that point you're defying your father? It's complete dissension on the laundry front.

JH: Yeah. I feel like that was one of those things where he said it to get it out into the cosmos knowing that it was never going to happen.

NP: Your dad seems like a wonderful man in doses of 140 characters or less, but I can imagine he might have been a little tough to live with.

JH: Yeah. Growing up it was tense, but I feel that everybody has times when they're growing up with their parents that they wish that their parents didn't live with them. You go through those kinds of things, the only difference I think was that my dad never sugar-coated anything.

NP: What was the most brutal thing he said to you that still stings to this day?

JH: I think it's actually one quote in the book. Most people probably just glance over it, but I remember it being a formative moment in my life. I was really into Lego, but I was terrible at building things. I just was not good at it. He came by one time as I'm building some stuff with Lego. It just looked like a big mess on the ground. He's just come home from work and he goes, "Listen, I don't want to stifle your creativity but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of shit." I remember when I was thinking of quotes to put in the book, when I saw that one I thought that one still stings a bit.

NP: So a promising career in construction ended before it began.

JH: Yes, but the thing is, I don't think I had a promising career in construction. The reason that stuck with me was because he was never afraid to tell me when I wasn't good at something. He always told me when I was, but he was like, "Hey, maybe this isn't your thing," and I definitely respect that now as an adult.

NP: I think that's what children need more of. I know that parents are often told by so-called experts to encourage their kids whatever. But if you say "good job" to your kids even when what they've done is a steaming pile of shit those words completely lose value. When you did get praise from your dad, it must have meant something.

JH: Totally. I grew up in a middle class community but right next to us was a really wealthy community. Everything they did their parents were, "Oh, it's fantastic. Everything you do is so great." My dad was never like that. Now, going back home, I see those kids a lot and a lot of them, they don't have jobs, they didn't graduate college. Basically, as soon as life gave them a kick in the nuts they just quit. And I never did because I was used to the realities of sucking at something and having to try harder, and try again or try something else.

NP: Your dad might have proverbially kicked you in the nuts but then he would also give you the flip side of that -- the genius of his comments is that they are very double-edged.

JH: Yeah. When I stopped playing baseball, my dad really wanted me to be a pro baseball player but I could kind of tell that that wasn't going to happen. I was good, but I wasn't good enough to be professional. So my junior year of college I quit the college team and focused on writing and filmmaking, and it was hard for him but he was like, "As long as you give one hundred percent at this and you're realistic with whether or not you have talent, then I'll be as supportive as you need me to be." And he was.

NP: You don't talk much in the book about when you actually decided to start writing. Are there any vignettes you can recall when you first showed him some of the early stuff you'd written?

JH: Yeah. In my first screenwriting class...you know, you're taking all these classes in college and every once in a while you'll get behind and you'll have something due the next day and you'll have to rush it. I remember I had to write the first act of the screenplay, and I had left it until the last, last minute. I read it and I'm like, "Oh god, this is not very good." I think I almost wanted to get shit on because I knew I had done such a bad job and I asked my dad if he could read it. He read it and he looks at me and goes, "You're not going to get a dime writing if this is how you're going to write. This is total shit and you should fail yourself. Don't even give it to your teacher, just give yourself an 'F' and take the class again."

I was so upset. I was like, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Can you honestly say that you tried with this piece of shit?" And I was like, "You know what? I didn't." And he's like, "Well I don't know what you're doing, because if you're not going try in the one class that you are supposedly studying then you should just give up and try something else." That was my wake-up call in terms of being a writer. It was like, I've got to take this seriously if I want to do it because I've got to see if I have any talent.

NP: What's the main thing that you know you should have learnt from your dad that you haven't quite got the hang of yet?

JH: I think the biggest thing is growing up with him I encountered a lot of awkward situations, because he says whatever he wants to say whenever he wants to say it. I felt like I was constantly giving a preamble before people would meet him or apologizing for something he said, even though it really didn't necessitate an apology. I'm still a little bit that way. I'm still a little bit too non-confrontational and I tend to err of the side of not hurting someone's feelings even if it's something that they need to hear. I tend to kind of wussy out and I wish I had a little bit more of his chutzpah.

NP: Although warning visiting friends that your dad might be wondering around the house naked is probably a good thing. People need to be prepared to see that.

JH: That's a necessary one.

NP: So where did your dad get his wisdom and humor from? Do you remember your dad's dad?

JH: Yes. My grandfather died when I was fifteen, so I did get to know him a little bit. My dad said he was the toughest human being he's ever met...The best story that sums up my grandfather is, my dad when he was ten, he was on a wagon at the farm and he fell off, and the wagon rolled over his arm. It mangled his arm and they took him to the emergency room in a small town in Kentucky, which was the closest hospital. The doctor said, "We're gong to have to amputate this arm or else your son might die." And my grandfather said, "Then let him die. There's no room in this world for a one-armed farmer." So they didn't amputate the arm, and they waited it out. My dad obviously survived, but that was the kind of guy my grandfather was.

NP: How does your mom cope with your dad's rather strong personality?

JH: Well she's the smartest person in the family by far.

NP: Which is saying something considering your dad a nuclear scientist.

JH: A doctor of nuclear medicine, yeah exactly, but she's smarter than he is. She's also quicker than he is -- and he's quick. If I try to verbally spar with my dad, it's pointless. He'll beat me into submission, but she can hang with him no problem. She runs circles around him. I mean part of the reason why she was attracted to him was because he's so honest and so truthful. She knew she was marrying a really honest and fair guy.

NP: Obviously your mom's good at the instant comeback, but are there lines you wished you'd said that just came to you too late?

JH: I would spend the next ten hours thinking of what I could say. He would saying something when I was growing up and it would just cut right to the bone, and I'd be just so pissed off. I would literally be sitting in my room or playing outside by myself just trying to think of what I could say if he ever said something like that to me again. It was so frustrating because he just does it so effortlessly and I'm sitting there, essentially in my own writer's room, by myself trying to figure out how to one-up a guy who just says stuff off the top of his head.

NP: How old were you when you started to see the wisdom in your dad's words?

JH: I think it wasn't until I had graduated from college. I started to see some kind of wisdom in what he was saying a little earlier than that but it didn't make me feel any better. I wasn't able to really process what he was saying until probably 24 or 25. I moved to LA and got a job as a waiter...That was right around the time I started to kind of enjoy the things he said, and was able to process the information and not have it be clouded by hurt feelings.

NP: At what point did you start writing down the shit that your dad said?

JH: I was probably about eleven or twelve. I mean, I wrote everything down. I was a really angsty kid who wrote a lot in journals. I wrote everything down and some of what was in there was things that my dad had said to me that made me upset. I didn't think they were funny at the time. Looking back, some of them were really funny, but at the time I didn't [see it]. I lost most of [the journals] but some of them I still have and they're just sort of like the kick and scratch and drawings of a kid that was a little awkward and upset quite a bit.

NP: Some of your dad's advice I love best is his dating advice. For a fuddy-duddy, he was really hip when it came to getting the girl.

JH: Yeah, it's weird, even now, he's like 74 and he'll admit it himself, he says he was never really a good-looking guy. He said he always looked a little older than he was, and he was never really that cool looking. But even now when women talk to him that are 30 years younger than him, he's pretty charming. He just has this supreme confidence. My brother says dad always acts like he could give a fuck if you would want to screw him or not. That's one of the reasons why I think women love him. I think when he was younger and he was single, he was never hitting on women, he was just being himself. He never acted like someone was out of his league. He would just ask whomever he wanted out.

I mean there's this story in the book about when he set my brother up with this woman who was a brain surgeon and used to be Miss Oklahoma or something. My brother was terrified and so upset that my dad had set him up with her, because my brother was 29 and living at home and washing dishes at Hooters. My dad was like, "Who gives a shit? You're a man, she's a woman."

NP: Your dad had natural game.

JH: Yeah, which was not passed down to any of his sons.

NP: But you've got a girlfriend now.

JH: I do, I do. It's the same girlfriend that I split up with in the book. Well when I say "I spilt up," I mean "she split up with me." We've been dating four years. We've had a couple of break ups here and there, but, yeah, I've had the same one for a long time.

NP: At what point did she take you back?

JH: Everybody asks that -- is she after your book money? No. We broke up right when I moved down [to San Diego], like the day that I moved down. Then we were probably apart for two months, and we got back together before any of the Shit My Dad Says stuff had hit. But I didn't want to move back in right away, because it's like you're on shaky ground when you get back together -- you want to make sure everything's cool. So I took it really, really slowly and I stayed at my parent's house, and we kind of slowly got back together. So we started before any of this happened.

NP: The whole Twitter to book thing happened so fast, 'cause you only started doing the Twitter page in August 2009.

JH: It's crazy yes. I can't believe [it]. I mean actually a year ago, pretty much, I moved back home with my dad. I had my tail between my legs and things were not going that well for me. I had a good job, but I had pretty much nothing else.

NP: The book came out May 4th. I love your account of how you didn't really know what to do at your first book signing.

JH: [laughs] Oh, you read the blog. I didn't know if anyone actually reads it. Yes, I just did one last night too. I did my second one last night and that was equally as awkward. I got yelled at by the person who was running the bookstore because they were like, "You're writing too much when you're signing for people. Just sign your name." And I was like, "But they're coming out to see me. It's like so nice I want to at least write something personal." And they're like, "You're taking too long, the line's taking too long."

NP: And you've also been doing TV, Carson Daly?

JH: Yeah, that's been really weird, because I'm very comfortable when I'm writing. I'm even somewhat comfortable with small groups -- I like people so I'm pretty comfortable when I'm talking to people at book signings and stuff like that. But I'm not comfortable in front of a camera. I'm very self-conscious. I was very nerdy growing up, and I'm not comfortable being in front of a camera. That's taken me some getting used to and I still haven't gotten it. I watched that Carson Daily interview when I got home and it was like horrible because I was saying the word "like" every four words. I sound like some kind of like 13-year old girl from San Fernando Valley.

NP: I think that's just an affliction that comes with living in California.

JH: I know, it's not one of our finer [qualities].

NP: At least we've stopped saying "rad" -- look on the bright side.

JH: That's true.

NP: So did Carson Daly know that you'd farted in his ex-girlfriend's face? [Justin wrote a blog about his penchant for relieving the boredom of his old job as a waiter by farting on celebrity customers, a questionable skill he can perform more or less at will thanks to his IBS issues.]

JH: [laughs] You know what? I talked to the producer, and I was like, "I really want to tell this story." It's the only story in my whole entire life that I've ever wanted to tell on TV. I told the producer, and the producer was like, "That's hilarious, but I don't know if we can could tell that story on the air." Carson was really nice and I never really talked to him about it. I was just told by the producer beforehand, "We want to stay on track, we don't want to tell that story." I was bummed.

NP: How can anyone object to a decent fart story?

JH: That's what I thought. It had a beginning, middle and end. It had tension and conflict, there were characters involved, it was a very well rounded fart story.

NP: And fart stories are the bread and butter of comedy.

JH: Yeah, and who better to fart on than Jennifer Love Hewitt.

NP: So what had you been eating prior to the incident? Was there some Brussels sprouts or black beans involved?

JH: Yeah, I had had Mexican food. It was a hot one. I gave her everything that I had. I could feel it coming out of my collar because my shirt was tucked in -- that was how hot it was!

NP: Have you been back to the scene of the crime to see your former employers since you let that story out on Holy Taco?

JH: Well the Crocodile Café, the one I worked at, no longer exists. But I went back to [the place where it used to be] yesterday for the first time since I had left there because my book signing was a couple of blocks away. It was a kind of surreal feeling. I actually did sit at the table that I farted on Jennifer Love Hewitt at.

NP: There should be a plaque there really shouldn't there?

JH: [laughs] I like your style. I wish you ran that restaurant.

NP: I'd put a nice brass memorial plaque there. It'd be a premium table.

JH: Exactly, exactly. History happened there.

NP: We'd have a velvet rope in front of it.

JH: [laughs] That'd be awesome.

NP: So do you still take pride in farting on celebrities?

JH: Yes. I do. I've farted on quite a few. That was the best one, but I've farted on quite a few celebrities to the point where there's kind of a small contingent of my friends that if we're out and we see celebrities, that's all that they're focused on.

NP: So what was the last celeb you got?

JH: Well, I don't know if this counts, it's a little gross, but I was in the Warner Brothers' building because that's where I have my offices now, and I went to the bathroom and Scott Bakula, the guy from Quantum Leap, was in the bathroom next to me. We took a shit next to each other and during the shit I farted. I don't know if that counts. I think that counts as half, I'm not sure.

NP: I think that counts. It's like double points if you also got to dump side by side.

JH: Exactly. There's these moments you know when you've made it and that was mine.

NP: Yeah. I was proud of taking a piss next to Diana Ross but you've seriously trumped that one.

JH: That's pretty awesome though.

NP: I thought so too. It was on the Paramount lot, so it was a premium location and she was in full Diana Ross mode with the big hair.

JH: [laughs] I knew a SuicideGirls interview would be interesting.

NP: So if you're working out of the Warner Bros building, is that connected to the TV series?

JH: Yes. We actually shot the pilot already.

NP: Oh my god, with William Shatner?

JH: Yes. It was great. He was fantastic. He reminds me a lot of my dad in the sense that, he's not profane, he's very much a gentleman, but he doesn't want to engage in any unnecessary conversation or anything like that. He comes in, he does his work and he leaves, but -- I'm going to throw this word out there -- he's brilliant. You think he's not in on the joke, but he's in on every joke. He knows exactly what he's doing. He knows the best way to deliver everything. He is really something.

NP: I know your dad hasn't wanted to get involved in any interviews or promotion, but presumably William Shatner wanted to meet your dad for research -- did that happen?

JH: They actually did meet, but he didn't ever ask to meet my dad. My dad came to the pilot taping and at the end of the show the executives were like, "Bring your dad down. Have him meet Mr. Shatner." I could tell that neither my dad nor Mr. Shatner were that interested in meeting one another. Everyone wanted them to take a picture together, so my dad walks down and Mr. Shatner says, "Hello sir." And my dad says, "Hello." They take a picture and then they turn in opposite directions and walk away from each other. That was it.

NP: I guess that was all that was required.

JH: Yes. It was the most perfect meeting. I was so happy. I was like, man, they both delivered.

NP: I'm surprised you even got your dad down to the taping.

JH: He wasn't going to go. He's like, "Can I show up late and stand in the back?" And I'm like, "It's not my fucking sixth grade play. You've got to come and sit for the whole thing." My mom talked him into it so that's why he came, but other than that he hasn't done anything.

NP: What was his reaction afterwards?

JH: It was funny, he ruined one of the takes of the show. It's a live audience and we're all sitting there and there's this moment where Shatner says he's going to think about something while he takes a shit, and all of a sudden I hear my dad in the audience go, "I do do that." He ruined the take.

NP: Bless. I think you should have kept that in personally.

JH: I know. If this show ends up getting picked up by CBS and we get on the air I will lobby for that take to go in there just for the ten people that read my blog and know that that happened.

NP: How's the TV show different from the book?

JH: Instead of the main character, who is basically me, coming back because his girlfriend has split up with him, he's coming back for economic reasons. He worked at a magazine and the magazine folded, and he's going under, he needs money, he needs a place to live. That's kind of the impetuous for the show whereas in my situation it was a breakup that instigated it.

NP: Whose choice was that to change it?

JH: That was mine. I co-wrote the show with my writing partner Patrick Schumacker, and then the two gentlemen that created Will & Grace, very talented guys, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. When we were pitching it we really wanted to touch upon [the current economic situation] because so many of my friends are out of work. They have college educations, and some of them have master's degrees, and they just can't find any work. We're having this generation of people who aren't lazy bums who don't want to get a job, these people did everything right and once they get out of school society just gives them the finger right now because of the times were in.

NP: I know, there's a whole generation of thirty and forty-somethings that are having to move back in with their parents so you're definitely capturing a moment.

JH: That's what we were hoping to do.

NP: But not everyone has parents like yours.

JH: That's true. I've been very lucky.

NP: Well I'm very much looking forward to seeing the TV show. I'm such a huge fan of William Shatner and love your Twitter page -- it's two of my favorite things in the universe colliding.

JH: Awesome. That's great to hear. You will love him in this. This is him. He has absolutely nailed it. It's crazy. The audience is going apeshit for him in this role. When we were doing it, I was with all these TV veterans, these guys that have done Will & Grace, and they're like, "You don't see this at a pilot taping very often. Soak it up."

NP: I would ask that your refrain from farting on William Shatner, unless you have a Denny Crane/Alan Shore moment over a cigar and he's OK with it.

JH: I will never, ever fart on Mr. Shatner. You can put that down. I would never do that.

NP: Well, I would say never say never, there may just be the right moment on the right balcony.

JH: [laughs]

NP: I just wouldn't want you to fart bomb him without his permission. I think he deserves a bit more.

JH: He does. He definitely does.

NP: Well, thank you very much for taking the time to chat, and for sharing your fart stories.

JH: No, thank you. This is by far the most fun I've had in an interview.


Shit My Dad Says is available at Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. For further info go to: ShitMyDadSays.com.

by Tara Diane So I’m sure most of you have heard of the Rasterbator, but I’m sincerely sad for those of you that have not!  Rasterbator is the most insanely easy and cheap decorating tool in the fricking world.  You take any small image and Rasterbator makes that shit gianormous!  Hells yeah, right?! more

by Tara Diane

So I’m sure most of you have heard of the Rasterbator, but I’m sincerely sad for those of you that have not!  Rasterbator is the most insanely easy and cheap decorating tool in the fricking world.  You take any small image and Rasterbator makes that shit gianormous!  Hells yeah, right?!



Anyways, here are some tips:

•    If you go to college, use the school lab.  If you work in an office, use your secret agent skills to stealthily use their printer (but you didn’t hear that from me).
•    Don’t do this shit on your own printer!  Not that I know from experience (cough) but you can easily burn through thee black cartridges in one project.
•    Measure ahead of time!  Mother Nature cries when you rasterbate, but she cries a whole lot more if you do it, fuck it up, then have to do it again.  Size DOES matter; take two seconds to see how you measure up.
•    If you throw temper tantrums, drink a beer first.  Chillax.  You will mess up, there will be a couple of crooked pieces, and you will need to check your ponytail and not throw a bitch fit.
•    Don’t use an inkjet printer.  The solid black pages may get soggy from the ink, causing the edges to curl.

Okay, here I am in action!  I used a stock image from Deviant Art (thanks Grant-Thomas!) but you can use any image your heart desires.

And yes, this IS my first time trying to use imovie, so shut it.



(Thanks for the music, Neon Cobra!)

Have a good day, ladies and gents.

The issue of abortion has always been a volatile debate between proponents of choice and passionate defenders of life at conception. At the intersection of 12th St. and Delaware Ave in Fort Pierce, FL, forces battle directly. In 1991, A Woman's World Medical Center opened offering pregnancy services... more

The issue of abortion has always been a volatile debate between proponents of choice and passionate defenders of life at conception. At the intersection of 12th St. and Delaware Ave in Fort Pierce, FL, forces battle directly. In 1991, A Woman's World Medical Center opened offering pregnancy services including abortion. In 1991, pro-life organization Pregnancy Care Center opened across the street.

12th & Delaware chronicles the struggles of both sides at this literal intersection of ideas. Pro life protestors stand outside the clinic begging patients to come with them instead. A vocal protestor Tony displays pictures of aborted fetuses near the local elementary school, and stalks the doctors who try to keep their identity secret for safety. Anne welcomes Woman's World patients who wander into her clinic by mistake, and offers them free lunch, educational material and services for keeping the baby. At A Woman's World, Candace tries to keep her patients safe, provide them the accurate information and medical services they choose.

Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady had full access with both sides. They sat in on patient consultations at both offices, sometimes interviewing the patient and other times framing them out so we can only hear their voice. They also have another film opening this year, on a lighter subject. They contributed a segment to Freakonomics, based on the Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner book that applies statistics to more practical real life issues like real estate and education. In their segment, they showed one school system's attempt to motivate students with monetary rewards for good grades. The students they followed did not raise their grades or collect the reward.

Interviewing Ewing and Grady on the subject of 12th & Delaware can be sensitive. They're careful not to come across defending either side, and a reporter's question can so easily harbod personal feelings. Also, the filmmaking duo sound alike by phone, so they had to identify themselves with each comment.

Fred Topel: Could one of the unspoken problems with the abortion debate be that there can't be any 100% all of anything on any issue? Nothing in life is all one or all the other.

Rachel Grady: Well, I think that people on both sides on this issue, as they are on both sides of most very fraught and complicated issues, see things in black and white. You're just suggesting that a lot of decisions are in the gray. I would agree with that. Also just because you make one particular decision, say a woman makes one particular decision for themselves, doesn't mean they even have a position on it. I think every situation is unique on top of that.

FT: How can there be any progress on issues where people want to make it black and white?

RG: I don't think we're ever going to get that with this topic. I don't think that this is a situation that you're ever going to get everybody on board on either side.

FT: Also, since when is all life precious? We let atrocities happen all over the world.

Heidi Ewing: I think the anti-abortion forces or the anti-abortion lobby feels that this is an unprotected life, that if you leave it alone it will become a person. They feel that they are in charge of protecting what they consider an unborn person. So they believe that categorically it is a life and if you have an abortion it's murder. So if someone believes that truly, it's impossible to change their mind. There's no talking to somebody who believes that abortion is unadulterated murder. I think that's part of the problem and that's why it just seems that every year the two sides, pro and anti-abortion, seem further away from each other. There's no having a conversation when one side believes that abortion is always in every case murder at any stage in a pregnancy. So I can't speak for either side of the issue but I think that's part of the reason there's almost no understanding between the two camps.

FT: On a simpler level, does anyone suggest screaming at people is unproductive?

RG: Well, I think that Candace would probably say it was counter-productive, the woman that runs the abortion clinic but I think the people that are doing it in the film think that it's very effective. If not for the particular pregancy that's happening at the time, but any pregnancies that might happen in the future. They feel like their words can resonate with that woman down the road as well.

FT: Is there no law about representing a business accurately, that someone could go to the wrong building and sit there for hours?

RG: That's interesting that you ask that because that's actually legislation that has to happen state by state. A law was just put into effect by the Baltimore city council. It's under the auspice of truth in advertising. Crisis pregnancy centers now have to indicate that they don't provide abortions nor any kind of abortion recommendations or birth control recommendations in a prominently displayed place. That is going to be legally mandated so other cities since that precedent has been set, other cities are taking on that approach. That's just starting to happen in the United States.

FT: But don't they have to say, "If you're looking for A Woman's World, this is not A Woman's World?"

RG: I don't know if they have to be that specific but they have to say that they don't recommend abortions or provide abortions, which some people may or may not walk in, read that sign, turn around and walk out.

FT: One woman offered to go to the bank and get money right there for the woman she stopped from going to A Woman's World. Did she actually do what she promised?

HE: Yeah, she did that.

FT: How many women has she paid for out of pocket?

RG: Actually, she's only been there for less than a year and she hasn't really been around since. So she had a short little jaunt as a protester there. She was kind of a newcomer when we started hanging out there. Shortly thereafter we shot that scene, which was the end of the summer last summer, she disappeared.

FT: That's doubly interesting. She did what she said, but didn't continue beyond that.

HE: She basically repaid her for the down payment for the abortion. So the deposit that that woman left was reimbursed to her by the activist, the protester. That was the extent of the help to the woman, the Hispanic woman at the end of the film.

FT: Were you surprised how articulate the patients were about their decisions?

HE: No, actually I was pleasantly surprised how open and articulate the women were. I think that just goes to show that women who are making the decision between having an abortion and continuing their pregnancy, that these women are really sort of the faceless population that we never hear from. This issue has gotten to be so politicized and so polarizing that you only hear from activists on either side of the "issue." You never really hear from or see the women who are in the middle of this debate, the women who walk into a crisis pregnancy center or who walk into an abortion clinic. They're the people most affected by these laws that are being passed and legislation that's coming through. So for us it was refreshing to make these women the core and center of the film. It became important to us that they led the film and the story and that they were not overwhelmed by the protesters or the political aspect of the issue. We really grounded the film, put the film in these women's hands. It became clear to us early on in the shooting that that was the best thing to do because they're the most affected by the abortion wars and they're the ones who are voiceless. They're people that the media rarely talks to. I think that's what makes our film different than other documentaries surrounding the abortion issue.

FT: Even without being verbose, they can still convey the thought process that led them to this decision.

HE: I think you can read a lot of expressions in these women's faces. I think a little goes a long way. Their expressions, you can see how wrenching this decision is and how much pressure they're under. I think that went a long way in the emotional aspect of the film, just to see how they're dealing with it. There's a lot of emotion in these women's faces and I think it comes across in the film.

FT: Could Pregnancy Care Center have anyone scarier than Tony working for pro-life?

HE: I think that Tony for us in the film represents that undeniable aspect of danger that exists for people who work in abortion clinics. He is definitely a menacing figure in the film. I think after all the research we've done and the people we've spoken to anecdotally who work at Planned Parenthood or in independent abortion clinics, there is almost always an element of fear in working in an abortion clinic on the part of the doctor or the clinic workers. I don't think that Tony's an uncommon figure that's drawn to this debate. So in a way he's a very important aspect to this film. He sort of reminds the viewer that this is still truly a war going on in this country when it comes to this issue.

FT: Were you ever scared?

HE: No, not really. We always take precautions in all the films we make. We gauge what we should and shouldn't be doing and we didn't feel that we were in any danger.

FT: Do you see any hope for a resolution of this issue?

RG: I mean, not to be negative, but not really. I mean, resolution meaning everybody feels comfortable with what's happening and the laws? No. I mean, how do you define resolution? Not in the classic way. I think that this is an issue that has been extremely controversial, passion provoking since the first unplanned pregnancy thousands of years ago. So I can't see it going away.

FT: What about a resolution where one side is happy and the other side has to live with it?

RG: No, I don't think so. Not in this country.

FT: As filmmakers, is that the essence of drama?

HE: I don't think you have to have a situation like that to make a film dramatic. For example, An Inconvenient Truth at the end of the film gives what they perceive as possible solutions. So some documentary films do attempt to give practical solutions to problems they investigate in their movies. We just happen to profile or make a film about an issue that really is extremely sticky and there doesn't seem to be a tenable resolution in sight. That just happens to be the kind of issue this is but I don't think it's necessary for a documentary film to explore issues that have no solution. No, I think all films are different and this is a tough one. I think in our lifetime there will continue to be this battle. There doesn't seem to be any signs that either side is going to concede to the other.

FT: When did you film the Freakonomics school incentive experiment?

HE: We did it from the school year 2009-2010. It's not actually in the book, an exploration of this particular experiment where you pay kids to get good grades. That was not explored in either of the books although incentives and parenting are explored in the book. Freakonomics is all about incentives. Paying kids to get good grades is all about incentives and it kind of figures into the parenting chapter. In that sense it's tied to the book.

FT: Have the kids you profiled seen the film?

RG: They haven't seen it yet.

FT: I understand they may think studying isn't cool, but isn't failing out of high school also not cool?

HE: I definitely don't think that failing out of high school is cool. Absolutely, I agree with you. I think the die was cast with Kevin. I think he needed help earlier on than he got it.

FT: Did they also address broader issues of the public school program?

HE: It was pretty focused to see how much financial incentives could or could not incent a kid to improve their grades. It was very, very focused and it really kind of didn't work, so I think they're tweaking the experiment and trying it again. I think it's interesting that economists are looking in their own way to try to come up with solutions in the education system. I mean, Iím glad they're trying. It can't hurt to try but this experiment definitely was not considered a success.

FT: Was it fun to follow those kids?

RG: It was really fun. It was the funnest thing that we were working on last year for sure. More entertaining. Making a film about abortion is really hard. And we've made a lot of films about young people and teenagers. We enjoy them a lot.

FT: Was there ever any frustration seeing them refuse to take advantage of these opportunities?

RG: Not really because we didn't have any huge expectations. We were just more observing. This is just one tiny little thing that could possibly point someone in the right direction, so I don't think the stakes were incredibly high.

FT: You could sense the viewer identification in the screening, just hoping they'd get their acts together.

RG: I guess whenever you're watching a young person make stupid decisions, you just wish that they could jump into the future and know how much it actually does matter. But this one was, as I said, low stakes.

FT: Is it possibly good that this document exists for kids to see in the future?

HE: I think hopefully the film, although it's a short film, will be thought provoking. Any film that provokes a discussion where we can discuss what our priorities are and where we're going as a country, especially in education, is a positive step. Hopefully this film, even though it's entertaining and funny, will get a conversation going about incenting our kids to do better in school.

12th & Delaware premieres August 2 on HBO. Freakonomics opens this fall.

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca... more

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca Guadagnino, who first worked with Swinton when she took the lead role in his 1999 feature-length debut, The Protagonists.

At the center of I Am Love, is Emma Recchi, played by Swinton. She's a trophy wife acquired by her Russian art-loving husband on a foray into the former socialist republic. By marriage, Emma is part of an Italian industrial dynasty that is born of fascism but embracing capitalism. But having served her primary purpose, giving birth to and raising those that will carry on the Recchi lineage, Emma is searching for a place in life beyond that at the end of a well-laid dinner table. At a point where she's at a crossroads in her own life, Antonio Biscaglia crosses her path. As a chef, he's below stairs and below her status, but he proves to be irresistible to her, and their passion ignites a chain of events that rocks the stability of the Recchi patriarchy.

Though I Am Love is a work of fiction, there are distinct parallels to Swinton's own life. "You're always playing yourself," the actress told The Observer newspaper back in 2005 while promoting the film Thumbsucker. "It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself."

With luminous pale skin, Celtic coloring and disconcertingly vivid green eyes, Tilda is clearly not born of Italian capitalist / nouveau aristocratic stock. However she comes from one of the oldest feudal baronial families in the United Kingdom, and can trace her bloodline back to the ninth century, so understands what it is to be a woman in a grand family. The mother of twins by Scottish writer John Byrne, who is twenty years her senior, since 2004 Swinton has been in a much-speculated about relationship with German-born painter Sandro Kopp, who is her junior by 18 years. Though this love triangle has echoes of that in her latest film, ultimately the outcomes are very different. The choice Byrne made to give Swinton his blessing in order to preserve their love and family life for the sake of themselves and their children is as progressive as her partner's alternate choice in the film is archaic.

We sat down with Swinton at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to talk about her philosophies on filmmaking and love.

Nicole Powers: What originally drew you to this project?

Tilda Swinton: Well Luca [Guadagnino] and I have been friends for a very long time. I say that we've been talking about this particular film for about eleven years but we started developing the story about seven years ago. The reason I can date it is because we made a film eleven and a half years ago and, as tends to happen when you have a long-term working relationship with someone, you make a piece of work and then as that film is being cut you start talking about the next one and it's usually 180 degrees from the one you've just made.

NP: What was the initial concept behind the story?

TS: Seven years ago we made a film, it was an interview. Luca interviewed me and he made a film out of the close-up of me as I talked. It was called The Love Factory and it was basically us having a conversation about life in general, but at a certain point we were talking about love. At the end of the process of making that film we turned to each other and said let's make that idea - the idea of the revolutionary aspect of love - the germ in the heart of the narrative of the film we make.

We'd already been talking about a kind of film, what we call a sense-sational film. For many years we even talked about the possibility of it being a silent film. A film that does things one hopes that the films we adore from [Luchino] Visconti, from [Alfred] Hitchcock, from John Huston do, which is to get you feeling and smelling and luxuriating. We'd been thinking, how is it possible for modern cinema to be sense-sational in that way? To actually be involving in that way, rather than being satisfying as a story or interesting as a concept or maybe overwhelming as a special effects experience. How is it possible to make a modern film that's sense-sational like these classic language-of-cinema films? So that's what we've been discussing for eleven years.

But when we started thinking about the story, we started with this idea of love that we decided to place at the heart of the story, the concept of the revolutionary aspect of love. From that we sort of went outwards. So this love story would happen in the heart of a woman who I would play. She has to be an alien in an environment which is breakable by that love. It has to be able to actually disrupt the status quo. Then like detectives we started to [think] what's that status quo going to be? What is antipathetic to that kind of volcanic love? And then we worked our way through all the possibilities and very quickly ended up in Milan.

NP: Working in Milan, that must have been...

TS: Hot - especially in the winter scenes. Milan was the only [place]. Milan is the subject if you like. Milan is where those families live and go about being very discreet about their lives and their great industrial wealth. The architecture of Milan is everything. You'll walk down what looks like a perfectly normal business street but behind every single door will be a courtyard with some exquisite palazzo inside that's lived in by some great family that made most of their money during the fascist era.

NP: And you refer to that in the movie.

TS: The story in a way is a fable, it's like a fairy story really. It's not a documentary. It's about tendencies, but it's not about any particular family. But the reason why it felt most productive for us to set it in Milan is because we wanted to explore this idea of love and this idea of nature being set, human nature and the bred-in tooth and claw element of natural progress...

And it occurred to us that we're not talking about the feudal aristocracy of Visconti's Leopard, which has much, much more latitude within itself to change, to be organic. It's a much more robust phenomenon the aristocracy because it's a social project. However exploitative feudalism might have been, there's always this sense that it's necessary to keep morphing and evolving as a beast, the whole aristocratic principle. Whereas this kind of high capitalism, you know, it's pretty brutal. It's very anti-natural. It's all based on the idea of denial.

If you're going to spend your days operating a house like that, operating a business like that, ordering countless Diptyque candles and getting more and more fittings for your Jil Sander wardrobes, you're going to have to be in denial about where that money comes from. You can't sit in a corner and worry about the workers who are living in high rises - they're actually earning the money that is keeping you in these Ferragamo shoes - you have to operate a kind of blinker system, and that makes you very vulnerable. It makes you vulnerable to the idea of real natural evolution and change.

NP: Which leads us to the glorious love scene, which sows the seed of change within the Recchi family, which is set within nature - Emma and Antonio are just like animals in the grass.

TS: Well it's all so democratic.

NP: You're stripped of your designer clothes and your pearls.

TS: Completely, it's an animal and mortal business. And of course we then intercut it with what I call these Dallas letters - "LONDON" - and come straight into an industrial London landscape and go back into the concrete world, which is manageable, and again breakable. I mean it is as much about nature as anything.

NP: That scene is so real, so tangible and tactile, and you talk about how you wanted almost to make a silent movie that involves the senses. Obviously the use of food plays an important part in the execution of that in this film, but I also love the way that you used sound and silence. So often when there's a stressful scene in a movie, it's so shrill and high volume that I'm repelled from it. But in this film, when you had those highly emotional scenes you turned the volume down so it actually draws you in, which is such a powerful device to use. The silences speak volumes.

TS: It's a very honorable tradition, and it's something that we learned from Hitchcock. Hitchcock is always talking about the style of a film being the content and the dialogue just being atmosphere. We knew always that we wanted to make a film where what people actually said to each other was not really that important. For that reason we decided that the woman, Emma, would be out of her own language. She's not an articulate person. She's not somebody that uses language, possibly not even in Russian. The most she speaks is when she's talking about her past to Antonio. She's not someone who relies on expressing herself verbally.

And we wanted to show behavior more. I remember saying very early on to Luca that I wanted to make a film where the way in which a woman would roll up a ribbon off an unwrapped present would tell you more than some long speech about her life. Just those details, which you don't often see in modern cinema - you still are able to look for that kind of detail in modern novels but you can't really look for it in modern cinema very often - we wanted to recoup that possibility.

NP: Right, there's not the texture there anymore.

TS: The texture and the observation, for the camera to observe that. For there to be both in the direction but also in the cinematography the possibility to go there and catch it, and not always be there and be listening to what's being said. To look at body language and to feel the way in which people fill space. To try and work out what they're thinking and feeling rather than just listening to what they're saying.

NP: The film also explores the idea of happiness. There's an amazing line that your daughter says in the movie where she talks about how happy is a very sad word. In cinema and literature there's always a price to be paid for happiness. We're always told that about happiness, and made to feel guilty about it.

TS: Well I think the idea of love as some kind of antidote to pain, the myth of romantic love, particularly two people in a romantic situation being joined together in such a union that they will never feel pain again, and they will never really need to be alone again, and in fact they will never experience anything alone again either, this kind of bondage forever, is something that we talked about in that film The Love Factory that was the genesis of the idea of this film.

What I was talking about in The Love Factory was a different kind of concept of love, which is that at the very heart of a real proper concept of love is an idea of loneliness. That if one is really, really in proper collusion with one's own loneliness then one is really in a fit state to love another person. And that's something that I think parenting has the opportunity to teach you, which is why Emma is presented as a really quite advanced mother. I mean the way that she is able to embrace her daughter coming out and they way that she gracefully absorbs her daughter's liberation, and the way in which her daughter comes out to her, there is absolutely no feeling of there being any schism for Emma at all.

It shows that she actually is quite an advanced mother. She's prepared for her children to leave. She understands enough about love in relation to the love of her children to know that she is alone from them. They have left her now and they are going on to live their own lives, and she's kind of cool with that. So the idea that to truly love another, whether it's in a romantic situation...I mean her husband has the opportunity to love her at the end when she says to him, "You no longer know who I am. I love Antonio." He has the opportunity to say, "That's fine." And, "On you go, my love. I will support you." For him to love her conditionally, so conditionally that he actually says to her, "You don't exist," that's a very archaic and breakable kind of concept of love I think.

NP: Going back to this idea of love being a cure for loneliness, I always think you should work on being as complete of a human being as you can on your own, then you'll likely find and attract other complete souls. But if you consider yourself to be half of a being and are set on looking for another half, all you'll find is another incomplete soul. Even if you find a partner under those conditions, instead of ever being whole you're destined to walk through life as two incomplete or broken souls.

TS: Well the idea that loneliness is either something that should be healed or could be healed is completely ridiculous. I think it's a modern construct, and it's something by the way I think that capitalism has co-opted very successfully. The idea that the second you feel lonely you have to go out and buy more stuff, and that you can actually be cured of your loneliness by buying more stuff is one of the ways that capitalism actually works...

Lonely people make the best company it seems to me. And there's a difference between alone-ness and loneliness. But really that existential loneliness of knowing that at the end of the day you are the only one on your particular path means that you can really properly communicate with somebody else who knows the same thing about themselves.

I mean, what do you do with the idea that you have to cut parts off yourself in order to be in communion with somebody else? Whether they're a lover, or whether they're a child, or whether they're a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, or even a friend, to sort of go, "Well, we're very close but I used to love to go raving, and I can't go raving anymore because he doesn't like it" or "I can't go raving anymore because my children wouldn't approve," that's kind of a terrible waste of life.


I Am Love opens in theaters on June 18.

Deep in the Congo, a scientist named Jenny Lowe is running for her life from the machine-gun fire of guerillas when she comes upon the isolated cabin of a colleague who has always kept his distance despite their identical fields of study – primatology. Finding him dead in his doorway and his cabin ransacked... more

Deep in the Congo, a scientist named Jenny Lowe is running for her life from the machine-gun fire of guerillas when she comes upon the isolated cabin of a colleague who has always kept his distance despite their identical fields of study – primatology. Finding him dead in his doorway and his cabin ransacked for valuables, she is about to press on when a figure hiding inside catches her eye: a young girl. Acting on instinct, Jenny grabs the girl and they race through the darkness towards the safety of a helicopter: it’s not until the danger subsides that the girl, Lucy, is seen clearly. She is, in a word, different: dark, sleek, and muscular, with features that are proportional, yet very exotic. She proves to be startlingly well-educated – fluent in poetry and mathematics – yet culturally autistic, having been born and bred in the jungle.

Lucy also has a secret, one even she is not aware of and which explains her lifelong isolation: she is the product of a gene-splicing experiment undertaken by her now-deceased father to create a child that has both the cognitive abilities of a human and the physical and emotional attributes of an ape – the parting gift of a man convinced that humanity (as currently constituted) is doomed. Lucy comes from the mind of journalist and author Laurence Gonzales, known for his best-selling non-fiction books Deep Survival and Everyday Survival, which explore how and why some people respond better in crisis situations than others. SuicideGirls recently called up Gonzales to talk about the creation of Lucy, and why she is his vision of the ultimate survivor.



Ryan Stewart: What are you working on today?

Laurence Gonzales: I’m writing a new novel. It’s kind of a long story, but I’ll tell you if you want.

RS: Sure.

LG: It’s speculative fiction. I’ve done a lot of research about global warming and written a lot of non-fiction, and I had this idea that I would write something. So, I did all this research and then two things happened: I got the impression that people were just saturated. They’d made up their minds and were not listening anymore. They either thought it was a problem or they thought it wasn’t, but you couldn’t really say anything that they hadn’t already heard, or at least thought they’d heard. The second thing was that every time I’d come across something that was saying ‘This might happen in thirty years’ I’d turn around and see the news saying that it was already happening. So, things were happening a lot faster than anyone thought and no one was listening and I was struggling with this idea, which was: How do you approach the subject of global warming? And I have a seven year old son, so I thought ‘I wonder what the world will be like when he’s my age.’ I’m 62. So, I thought ‘Okay, what if we just jump over all of this and say that everything they think is going to happen has happened. What does the world look like? What is life like for someone who would have been in kindergarten or first grade right now?’ And that’s essentially what I’m writing about.

RS: There’s some pessimism in Lucy about how we’re doing as a species and where we’re headed, as I see it. You seem to suggest that humans don’t have what it takes to make it in the long haul, and all that can save us is a sort of radical genetic intervention, a deus ex machina that alters our evolution. Although admittedly, that’s the point of view of one character, Lucy’s father.

LG: You have to read Lucy’s father as a bit of a mad scientist. Nobody would do this, otherwise. His theories about why he would do it are his own, not mine. And I wanted to get past all of that, because the main thrust of the story is: What if you had such a person? Forget about how she got here. What would happen if such a person existed? How would the world react? I think that’s the main interest of the story. So, I don’t feel that. When I read the news about what’s happening around the world in various places I can certainly get pessimistic, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly don’t think that genetically engineering a new race of people is the answer. What I think is that people basically respond to pleasure and pain. If something works and gives them pleasure they do it again and again and again, like those guys on Wall Street with the mortgage default swaps. Those seemed like such a great idea because it was a money machine, until it wasn’t. And people respond equally to pain. If something is going really wrong, they tend to correct it eventually, it’s just a question of how much pain they have to be in first. During the energy crisis of the 1970s people actually cut back on their driving so much – because the cost of gas had become so high – that if it had gone on for another year we would have been completely independent of foreign oil. Most people don’t remember that, but we actually did do the right thing. Doing the right thing is always possible, it’s just a question of whether we’ll do it in time.

RS: I read somewhere that you’ve actually visited prisons to study inmates. Did that affect your view of human potential at all?

LG: Well, at the time I went there I was writing about a number of different kinds of institutions. I spent a lot of time in a mental hospital too. And the idea behind it was that I wanted to show people something they probably would not see themselves. Prison is one of the great institutions of this country. We have more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world, and while that’s a shocking and awful thing, there are certainly people who belong there. There are just an awful lot of people in there, and I don’t think people understand what the conditions are. So, the idea wasn’t so much a comment on our humanity as much as an exploration of a piece of our culture that most people know nothing about. And the thing about the mental institution was that there really is no effective treatment for serious mental illness and these institutions, well, they do what they can, I guess, but that’s another thing where people don’t just walk in and take a look at their local mental institution.

RS: There’s a rather insane character in Lucy, a government veterinarian who captures Lucy at one point and experiments on her with no ethical qualms. As someone who has written extensively about survival and what kind of person is a survivor type, do you think that fundamentalists are survivors?

LG: Yes, I do think that. As my model for the veterinarian I read a book called The Banality of Evil about the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was the mastermind of Hitler’s death machine, but he was essentially a bland bureaucrat who just figured out an efficient way to do things, namely recordkeeping and moving logistical things around. And he was tried and executed for killing all these people, even though he never actually killed anybody. He just did these mechanistic things that got the job done. And that’s kind of what this guy [in the book] is like: very low affect, not subject to emotional pleas. There are people like that in any society and, yeah, they do tend to survive, which is not such a good thing.

RS: I noticed that you don’t really do the Michael Crichton thing in this book of overwhelming us with data to make an airtight scientific case. Is there plausibility in the book’s premise?

LG: There is plausibility in the premise. I don’t know if you noticed, but Arizona just passed a law that goes into effect this week that would make it a felony to create Lucy. It’s a law against creating human-animal hybrids. Several other states have made similar laws and the reason these laws are appearing now is because it is becoming possible to do this sort of thing. Now, I didn’t think for the purposes of the narrative that it would be very interesting to go through all of the possible genetic mechanisms by which you could create a human-animal hybrid – it’s very complex stuff. But yeah, it is possible, but the question of what you would get is an open question. As far as I know, no one has tried it. I took the Frankenstein idea and turned it on its head. Creating a monster that’s bad is one way of doing a story, but creating a monster that is unequivocally good poses a whole new set of problems that I hadn’t seen examined very much. Everybody likes Lucy, but she’s got this weird genetic picture, so what do you do with that? It would be a different thing if she were roaming the countryside killing people – that would make it much simpler.

RS: Do you have a position on the morality of experimenting with human-animal hybrids?

LG: Well, in writing the novel my impulse to deal with that subject matter was to get people talking about it before we’re actually faced with it. I wanted to open the discussion, to say ‘Here’s this stuff and it’s out there, now what are we going to do about it before some high-school student in China actually does it?’ That’s probably what will happen. You can get biotechnology kits right now. You can get the components free from MIT, they have a library of genetic elements called BioBricks. And there’s a company that will sell you a kit for assembling these for $235. So, anybody can start doing genetic engineering. It’s kind of like the computer revolution in 1971. I’m essentially an observer, not a philosopher, and as an observer I think people are going to start doing this stuff. Not necessarily creating a Lucy character, but creating elements of genetic systems that combine human and animal genetic material. For example, you can grow human organs, conceivably, in a pig. So, we take your genetic material and implant it in a pig through all of these genetic techniques and you can conceivably get your transplant kidney grown in an animal. I think that’s probably the direction we will go, initially.

RS: Just to go back to the philosophical side for a second, do you generally take the Peter Singer position that animals like chimpanzees are entitled to right to life and protection from harm?

LG: Yes. I believe that great apes, which would include chimpanzees and bonobos, should not be used for experimentation. Ideally, they should not be put in cages, but what are you gonna do? They are many, many of them in cages and you can’t repatriate them to the jungle because they’d die there. They’re not used to that if they were born in captivity. So, treating them as well as possible in whatever setting you find them is certainly my position.

RS: They say that bonobos can recognize themselves in a mirror, which is supposedly a key criterion of self-awareness.

LG: It goes way beyond that. They’re so smart that if you spend time with them you’ll immediately recognize how close to us they are. I went the other day to the Milwaukee Zoo, where they have the largest captive group of bonobos. I hadn’t been there in about two years, but while I was doing research for this novel I had gotten to know a bonobo there called Viaje, and he was from Mexico. He had been a captive bonobo in Mexico all his life – he’s 24 years old – and no one had ever spoken Spanish to him. I spoke Spanish to him and when I did his head snapped around in recognition and he came right over to me. It was clear that he was like ‘Finally, somebody who can talk!’ He had been hearing only English since he came to the United States. Well, that was two years ago and I came the other day to have a photo shoot done there and as soon as I came near the cage he came up to the glass and started pounding on the glass. And during the whole photo shoot I was close to the glass and he sat right next to me. Wherever I moved, he moved over to be next to me – he clearly knew who I was. He’s a smart guy.

RS: There are some interesting digressions in the book where you remind people that as bright as chimpanzees are, they also occasionally leave people horribly maimed or dead. Do you take the Werner Herzog position that it’s naïve to forget that they are still animals at heart?

LG: Yes, it is naïve and dangerous as well. Bonobos are not as violent as chimps, but they will hurt you just like they hurt each other. They do fight. Chimpanzees are notoriously violent animals and extremely dangerous to humans. The usual scenario is that someone gets a chimp as an infant – they’re very attractive as infants – but as they reach maturity the males especially become quite dangerous. People will find at that time that if they don’t have them placed somewhere they will eventually attack someone. So, yeah, they are definitely animals and definitely dangerous.

RS: As the book goes on, Lucy starts to embrace her animal side, her violent side, more casually. She starts biting off fingers at the first provocation.

LG: Well, what happens is that Lucy is fine if she’s left alone. Once she’s attacked, she defends herself. When she is attacked, her violent side comes out, but I think we should bear in mind that this violent side is something we as humans possess too. Most people are capable of being violent when threatened and also of being much stronger than they are normally.

RS: Lucy doesn’t always wait for a threat to be verbalized, because she has a very heightened awareness of nonverbal communication. That’s a big feature in the book.

LG: I did a lot of research on nonverbal communication and it’s a real thing. It’s a formal area of study in science and I think it’s something that people ignore to their detriment. There are a lot of professions in which you’re forced to rely on the type of communication that Lucy refers to as The Stream – a constant stream of messages that don’t involve words, which all animals exchange all the time. For example, police officers, firefighters, people in hazardous professions – they learn to recognize these signals because their lives depend on them. Most of us don’t need to because we live in a protected environment, but Lucy was raised in the jungle and is very much attuned to that. Throughout the book she is constantly reading The Stream and I think it helps drive the story.

RS: You said it’s a scientific discipline? Does it involve trying to prove the existence of telepathy?

LG: No, there’s a fellow named Paul Ekman who sort of pioneered a study where he took high-speed video of people to show what he referred to as micro-expressions that send signals. A person can be seeming to talk to you in a friendly, normal way, but embedded in that in increments that are too small to recognize consciously are micro-expressions where someone might grimace, for example, when it looks like he’s smiling. People are able to process that through their emotional system and receive those messages, but they don’t hit the level of consciousness because they’re too quick. I could give you the whole neuro-scientific rundown, but it goes through the amygdale, which is a very fast route, instead of going through the normal visual cortex which produces a clearer picture. But anyway, Ekman was one of the pioneers of this. It’s not considered telepathy at all; it involves things like body language, micro-expressions of the face, and pheromones, which you can’t consciously smell, but they send signals. So, in these ways people are constantly exchanging information without knowing it. You may yourself recognize this if you meet someone and the person makes you really uncomfortable, but you don’t know why. It’s probably some set of signals this person is sending. Also, if you see two young people who are attracted to one another in a bar on a date, and they’re hitting it off, watch them carefully and you’ll see that they start to mimic each other. They’ll start to synchronize their body movements and sort of mirror each other, even to the point of taking their drinks at the same time or folding their arms at the same time, and they’ll gradually even synchronize their blood pressure and heart rate. There’ve been a series of experiments done showing how this works.

RS: It’s interesting how in the book Lucy’s education seems to come from everywhere but school. Her father taught her abstract thinking, and she has all these strategies for dealing with things.

LG: Well, I never learned anything in school, did you? [laughs] I always think of that Paul Simon song about high-school: When I think back to all the crap I learned in high-school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. I’m being facetious of course, but her father was intensely educating her and she knew more by the time she got to high-school than she would have learned in high-school, so that becomes a non-starter. She was planning on going straight to college. She is a character of superior intelligence, and is meant to be special in that way. And because she’s unfamiliar with technology she thinks of things that people who use those technologies every day of their lives might not think of. She’s a very creative individual. But the only critique of high school I was making was that it really isn’t a place of learning, it’s a place for socialization.

RS: You describe Lucy as “exotic” in the book a few times, but you never really commit to describing her in detail. Do you have an image of her in your mind?

LG: I think I do have an image in my mind, but it’s sort of a vague image. I think I purposefully kept it a little vague, because people tend to create images for characters in books in their own minds and you don’t want to step on that too much. A lot of the fun of reading is what the reader brings to the subject, so rather than give a very detailed description of her I left it a bit sketchy. I think people will jump at the opportunity of adding their own thoughts. When you say to someone: What would you get if you crossed an ape and a human, they’ll come up with something.

RS: We have to think about the movie, though, right?

LG: Here’s what I think about the casting process: it doesn’t really matter what Lucy looks like as long as she’s pleasant-looking. But when the movie is made, somebody completely unknown will probably play Lucy. Or at least, that’s how I imagine it.

RS: After the novel you’re currently writing is done, do you plan to write more about survival? Is there anything new to say on the subject?

LG: Well, the novel I described to you earlier is very much about survival, because people are left in a depleted world and they have to change their strategy. But yeah, there’s a book that I’m in the research stages of which is about what happens after a survival incident. We always see these stories where the rescue takes place and the helicopter takes off and that’s the end of the story, when in fact that’s really only the beginning of the story. People have to go through a tremendous amount of adjustment after they’ve been through a survival situation in order to get on with their lives. So, I’m talking to war veterans and people who’ve been through traumatic experiences like shark attacks and things like that, to see how their lives went afterwards.





Lucy is available in bookstores everywhere.

Is an entertainment journalist out of his depth with a hard news reporter and documentarian? Expertise in superheroes and slasher killers might not impress war correspondents, but we do what we can to help out. We can't send Suicide Girls to Afghanistan for the troops, but at least we can talk to... more

Is an entertainment journalist out of his depth with a hard news reporter and documentarian? Expertise in superheroes and slasher killers might not impress war correspondents, but we do what we can to help out. We can't send Suicide Girls to Afghanistan for the troops, but at least we can talk to some people who went.

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent a year with a platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. They documented a year in the unit's tour for articles in Vanity Fair, Junger's book War and Heatherington's photo galleries. The experience also became the film Restrepo.

Juan Restrepo was a soldier who died early in the Junger and Hetherington's chronicle. Restrepo impacted his troop so greatly that when they set up an outpost in the Korengal, they named it Restrepo. The movie shows the perspective of an embedded camera, taking fire with the soldiers, dealing with difficult translations with Afghani people, and trying sometimes to kick back and relax.

Years of war correspondence, filmmaking, post-production and press tours have kind of wiped out Junger and Hetherington. They'd been on the run so long, they found themselves catching up in between questions during an interview. Junger may be best known as the author of The Perfect Storm which inspired a hit movie. Hetherington makes his directorial debut with Restrepo after serving as a cameraman on previous war docs.

Fred Topel: A bigger picture question I had about this movie is is you obviously have National Geographic and Vanity Fair behind this. With so many hard news organizations losing money and folding, who will pay for this type of in depth journalism in the future?

Sebastian Junger: We actually financed the film ourselves. We sold the finished film to National Geographic.

FT: But you had an assignment for Vanity Fair that allowed you to do the work.

SJ: Yeah, the trips over there were very cheap. The painful part of the financing was post-production, the editing. The trips over there were really, really cheap. We could have paid that ourselves but we didn't have to. Would Vanity Fair sign up for this again? I think they probably would.

FT: Does that also suggest that pure human initiative can get news done even without a company paying for it?

Tim Hetherington: Well, a lot of books are written, a lot of projects are done out of pure human initiative. At the end of the day, there needs to be some kind of coherent strategy for covering news that pure human initiative doesn't generate. If you think about The New York Times, regardless of what you think about the reporting, what you do notice is that stories are followed coherently. The Afghan War is covered every day and Pakistan's every other day. They follow a story through and through on a kind of cycle. Those are the kind of cycles I've noticed have been lost in the U.K. on U.K. newspaper reporting, which is a great tragedy. So that strategy of covering news needs to continue but if newspapers or the media cuts down on foreign reporting, then it's going to break into that strategy and no amount of human initiative, no amount of individual funding of desire to go and make a story because you think it's valuable can really make up a coherent news strategy for covering foreign events.

FT: Has the new media changed the way you do journalism and documentary?

TH: I think what you've seen with Sebastian and I is a new kind of paradigm. Traditionally, you might think I'm a photographer but I'm also an image maker. Sebastian is a novelist, is a writer. We're both contributors to Vanity Fair but he, you see, is working completely across the spectrum. That might point to one of the solutions in terms of the future covering of stories, that instead of just being somebody who works in one media form, here we are, we did magazine assignments for Vanity Fair, we did two Nightline pieces for ABC news. I did photographs that were syndicated worldwide. I made art gallery pieces. He's written a book. I've got a book coming out in October called Infidel. We made a feature film. I think the problem with journalism partly is overproduction of short pieces. The best journalism is about time. You can read a piece of journalism or see a piece of journalism, you can smell the time that's spent. And yet, there's less time you can put into a story and we've got this overproduction of short pieces which in the end is meaningless ephemera floating.

FT: Even in entertainment, the market is going towards quantity over quality.

TH: That's also what I mean because journalists are working in one single form strand, therefore they're creating all these pieces. What we've done is we've gone across the different forms on one story. So in supporting ourselves with bits of money and bits of funding or bits of financial payment from each of those strands, that's what allows us therefore to follow the story concretely.

FT: Do you see new opportunities as the industry changes?

SJ: I think for a freelancer, it's actually not a bad time. If I were young, I would go to Kabul. I'd have a video camera, a tape recorder. There's internet obviously. Because the news organizations don't have the money to pay to have a correspondent there permanently, freelancers I think can step in and fill that void in a number of different media. You could be freelancing for the New York Times when the regular correspondent is somewhere else or they're not there at all. Then you're shipping video off to ABC News or whatever. Actually, I think it's an interesting time for freelancers.

FT: Everything I've seen about the war is on ground level. Why do you think no one else has documented the mountainous regions?

TH: I think there's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of political information about the war really floating out there. A lot of people covered it pretty thoroughly. Because we see network news where we have two or three minute news clips of the kind of combat where the reporter is often the story, what you don't have is really a long form experiential visceral kind of war films. I'm a photographer. I do see pictures from the mountains but I'd never seen somebody make the kind of film we've made.

SJ: It was also on foot. On the flatlands, there's a lot of humvees and stuff. The mountains is on foot. The gear is heavy. Frankly a lot of journalists are not in very good shape. You really have to be to be on a patrol with those guys, so I think there's a certain amount of weeding out that happens just in that sense.

FT: Even in Hollywood fictional films, they stick to Iraq or the desert.

TH: Maybe it's easier to film. Or I don't know, they could obviously film in Colorado. I was going to say they could film in Jordan.

FT: How well did each of you get to know Restrepo before he died?

SJ: I met him but I didn't get to know him very well. It was my first trip. Tim wasn't with my yet. You meet 35 guys all at once and it's hard to keep them apart at first. It takes a couple of trips to sort people in your mind. By the time Tim and I went back, Restrepo had already been killed. So I met him but I didn't know him.

TH: It's kind of interesting that the title, people have asked, there was discussion about what we were going to call it. We call it Restrepo for a number of reasons. I think when you've watched the film maybe you understand. It's like sure, it's named after Juan Restrepo, this guy you really don't get to know in the film. And it's named after this outpost they build and they call it Restrepo. It's where all the action takes place. Okay, I get that. It's what you call the film. But also really Restrepo is really a metaphor. It's a metaphor for every soldier or the sense of loss that every soldier goes through. The end of screenings, we have Vietnam vets coming up to us and telling us, "Thanks for telling our story." I have friends in the military who have watched The Hurt Locker and say The Hurt Locker is a very good Hollywood film for them but they don't think it represents their experience. For some reason, this film manages to communicate an experience of what it's like to be a soldier. In that term kind of having the idea of Restrepo is this kind of larger idea that this is every soldier's experience.

FT: This also spends an entire year with them.

TH: We did 10 one month trips, five each coming in and out. It's very funny because we were coming and going, we both had responsibilities back in the States we had to take care of. Sebastian's married and I had other jobs I had to do. Somebody asked me and said, "Do I have any regrets at the end of making the film?" I said yeah, it was that I didn't spend the whole time out there. I wish I'd done the whole deployment.

FT: Are things going any differently under Obama?

SJ: There's more troops there. The reason there's a war happening right now is that Bush essentially walked away and went to Iraq. They crushed the Taliban very easily. The Taliban were hated by the Afghans and he left 15,000 troops there and that wasn't enough and it just got worse and worse every year. So now Obama's got 97,000, heading towards 100,000 American troops there. It may be too late so I don't know if it's going to work or not but that's certainly a different level of involvement than under the Bush administration.

FT: Is that even a good thing? Can there be a good outcome to this?

TH: I don't know. What's interesting is that Human Rights Watch came out with the figures for civilian casualties in the ë90s and the present day. I think the figures are since 2001, the NATO invasion, 16,000 Afghans have died, civilians have died because of the war. That's a terrible figure, you know what I mean. Obviously those figures need to come down but at the same, Human Rights Watch figures for the 90's under the Taliban and the civil war were 400,000. So whatever your politics, the fact is that less civilians are dying now than did in the 90's. Obviously [with] a swift NATO pullout would be the danger that you go back to the old days.

FT: How do these guys even wake up in the morning to face this daily onslaught?

SJ: They're soldiers. They're trained for it. They're like the football team. Football players play football and they're good at it and they're into the fact that they're good at it. Soldiers fight and they're into the fact that they're good at it. They didn't get drafted into this. They chose it. Furthermore, they didn't just choose to join the army, they chose to be in a combat unit. There are psychological adaptations that happen in combat or in any crisis that people make and you can sort of get used to anything.

TH: But what they're not good at is they're not good at talking about it. Soldiers don't come back home and talk to their wives or their loved ones about what happened there. Those wives and those loved ones are caught up in this kind of maelstrom of trauma. The guys out there have a unit that they can kind of bond to but their wives or their girlfriends are usually alone. They want to know what is that experience like? That's what we really hope the film helps those people, all the hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people back in the states who have loved ones in the military who want to know what is it that happens out there that my husband comes back and won't talk to me about. What is it? I think the film kind of can help them understand that.

FT: They even play war games on PSP. What do you make of that?

SJ: I mean, they're teenagers.

TH: It shows you how divorced the video games are from the real thing. At the end of the day, as Sebastian said they're 18 to 24. There's an idea that combat is addictive but it's also about this kind of sense of brotherhood that draws them back.

SJ: The analogy would be football players some kind of football video game which they probably do.

FT: What was your latest follow-up with the guys?

TH: I was out with them last night. One just came to the screening down in Santa Monica and I went out and had a drink with him. We're in touch with them all. Facebook pages, through Facebook and they come to the screenings. We showed them the film first of all actually.

FT: Are any of their situations drastically different now?

SJ: They're almost all of them in the army. They're still in the army. They didn't come home. They're soldiers. One of them got out so his situation's drastically changed but they're all either in second platoon and they're back over there fighting again or they're in other units and getting ready to deploy.

FT: By choice or were they stop lossed?

SJ: By choice. You sign a contract with the army and when your contract comes due, you either sign up again, you renew the contract or you don't and you go home? Only one guy decided to not renew his contract.

FT: Which one?

SJ: Brendan O'Byrne.

FT: What's going on at Restrepo today?

TH: The U.S. left the Korengal in April. They totally pulled out. Images were on the TV from Al Jazeera who were embedded with an insurgent group that took over Restrepo. The guys that we spoke to our really upset about it all obviously. They could understand that strategy needs to change. It evolves as the war evolves but the U.S. has pulled out and it hurt them a lot, knowing that all that blood, sweat and tears went into those places.

FT: And now it's being used by the insurgents?

TH: In fact I have no idea. The Korengal is no longer in U.S. [possession]. There is no U.S. presence in the Korengal and my guess is that the Korengalis are out kind of tilling their fields and getting on with life as they know it.

FT: What feedback have you had from Restrepo's family?

TH: They sent an e-mail the other day actually wanting to know when the film was going to come and open in Canada. We were in contact with Restrepo's mother when we decided that we wanted to call the film Restrepo, and she was supportive of that.

SJ: Yup, she was very supportive. I met her in Miami a few days ago.

TH: Oh, you didn't tell me that.

SJ: Yeah, I know. We have a lot to get caught up on. She hadn't seen the movie yet but we're going to send her a DVD. It's a delicate matter when you send the material to someone who's lost a loved one. So we had a nice dinner. She asked me to explain exactly how her son died. So I told her in as much detail as I knew. It was a very emotional conversation.

FT: Did she have an opinion on naming the film after him?

SJ: She said she was very proud of it. She thanked me for what we'd done. There's no footage of Restrepo being killed. We weren't there when he was killed so there's nothing in the movie visually that relates to her son except a couple brief frames of him. But she said she was very proud of the fact that the film bore her family's name.

TH: I had a phone call once. We've been doing these kind of festival screenings. We were screening in Missouri and I was going to get out of there but we were caught in a snowstorm in New York. One of the soldiers went down to Missouri and he phoned me up before the screening and he was really excited. Not just excited but a bit beside himself. He was overcome a little bit and Rudy, as we called him, he said, "You won't believe it, Tim, you won't believe it. I'm looking out on the street and up on the cinema in big letters outside is the name Restrepo." He said, "I'd never ever dreamt that I'd see my dead friend's name writ so large." That shows you how moving it is for them that their experiences are not being forgotten in Afghanistan. Although outpost Restrepo is dismantled and in insurgent control that the idea of their experience lives on.

FT: What will your next assignments be?

TH: I think you're going to be spending time with your wife.

SJ: Maybe take a long nap.

TH: I think we've got to do an assignment for Vanity Fair coming up.

FT: Is there another subject you're interested in pursuing?

SJ: I mean, I've been covering Afghanistan since 1996 so I'm going to keep going back there. Yeah, there are subjects. The Horn of Africa. Just spin the globe and put your finger on it and there's a subject so I don't know exactly yet.

FT: Has fishing gotten any safer since The Perfect Storm and the movie came out?

SJ: No. I mean, there's just a certain reality that you can only make ships so big and steel are only so strong and waves get to be 100 feet and it's just math at that point. So I don't think there's much you can do about it.

FT: Even as far as not going out in dangerous times, they haven't taken precautions?

SJ: Well, if you're 1000 miles out fishing and a storm comes in in three days, it's not a question of not going out. They do one month, six week trips. They're way out in the middle of the Atlantic. They're not day fishing.

FT: Have you had any news from the children of those families, who have now grown up and gotten some help from The Perfect Storm Foundation?

SJ: Yeah, I'm not as much in touch with that as I used to be but they get a certain amount of help. It's not life changing but it helps some of these kids in Gloucester. I don't know if we radically changed anyone's life but we definitely helped a few people. We help a few people every year.

Restrepo is now playing in select cities.

Steve Niles remains best known for “30 Days of Night,” a three issue comic series that grew into a massive hit and later a successful film. Since then Niles has written a number of sequels to the book, but he’s also moved in different directions including Batman, Simon Dark, Criminal Macabre and... more

Steve Niles remains best known for “30 Days of Night,” a three issue comic series that grew into a massive hit and later a successful film. Since then Niles has written a number of sequels to the book, but he’s also moved in different directions including Batman, Simon Dark, Criminal Macabre and collaborations with Rob Zombie, Thomas Jane, Richard Corben and Tim Bradstreet.

Last month IDW, the publisher of “30 Days of Night,” released “Mystery Society,” a new book written by Niles, and a hardcover collection of “The Ghoul,” a book Niles did with legendary artist Bernie Wrightson. Niles agreed to appear and sign at every comic store that bought 1000 copies of “Mystery Society” and thirteen stores across the country took him up on that offer.

Between now and the end of the year there are number of Niles-written books coming out including an “X-Files/30 Days of Night” crossover miniseries that starts this month. He’s also writing a novel that’s scheduled for release next year in addition to co-writing the movie “30 Days of Night: Dark Days” and working with filmmaker John Carpenter to write the video game “F.E.A.R. 3.” In the midst of a long month that included criss-crossing the nation, signing thousands of books and his birthday, Niles poke with us by phone and gave us an exclusive look at artwork for his upcoming books “Something Monstrous” illustrated by Stephanie Buscema, “Edge of Doom” illustrated by Kelley Jones and “Lot 13” illustrated by Glenn Fabry.


ALEX DUEBEN: I’m glad we could find the time to talk. You’ve been on tour for Mystery Society and the deal was that you would appear that any shore that bought 1000 copies, is that right?

STEVE NILES: One thousand issues. I signed over ten thousand books in three weeks.

AD: I’m amazed you can hold the phone to talk at this point

SN: It’s not too bad. Everybody’s been really nice. Believe me, I’m so happy they ordered a thousand copies, I’m more than happy to appear at the store and do the signings.

AD: You’re pegged as a horror guy, but one of your big influences, at least I’ve thought so, has been pulp, and Mystery Society is really in that vein.

SN: Definitely. That’s what’s really funny. For all the horror I do, I probably read and watch a lot more pulp stuff than anything. It’s definitely much more in the vein of classic movies. Action adventure as opposed to horror.



AD: Where did this idea come from?

SN: I really like writing about happy couples. I did it in 30 Days of Night and I’ve done it a couple other places. You just don’t see that anymore. I always loved the old Thin Man movies with Nick and Nora. That they were really in love with each other and just happened to always have to deal with these mysteries. When I was talking to Ashley Wood about it, we just sort of collided it with Unsolved Mysteries, In Search Of kinds of things. Again not so much horror, but strange phenomenon and just weird stuff. We meshed those two ideas together and came up with the Mystery Society.

AD: The book may center around a happy couple but there is an actual society that you’re building.

SN: Oh yeah. By the second issue there will be six members total.

AD: Any strange odd characters you want to mention?

SN: One of them turns out to be a robot with a brain in it that looks almost like a turn of the century diving suit. His name is Verne and when questioned a little further they realize he spells his name V-E-R-N-E. It’s very possible that he is in fact Jules Verne, or at least his brain is. Again, a little macabre, but mostly for fun. Comics have gotten kind of deadly serious over the last few years and it’s nice to just have some fun.



AD: It is and people probably wouldn’t expect you to be the one to bring the fun back.

SN: I guess. I’m enjoying everybody being so surprised by this, but I guess I can’t blame them considering what my output has been for the past ten years. I’ve definitely been focusing on horror but I have a lot of other interests in my life and it’s really nice to just have fun for a change.

AD: Every time we’ve met, you’re always a nice, fun guy. I don’t know why we should expect you to always create morbid and dark work.

SN: Thanks. I don’t know. You meet the guys who do horror and starting with Clive Barker, who writes some of the darkest stuff in the world, he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. I find that to be the case almost across the board with horror guys. Generally we work our shit out on paper. [laughs] People are always surprised. I don’t know what they expect. I’m going to be a little troll with an axe? I always get that. You’re so nice. You seem so happy.

AD: Your other big project, which starts next month is the X-Files/30 Days of Night crossover.

SN: That turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t really sure how that was going to shake out. I had been offered other crossovers for 30 Days of Night in the past and just thought they didn’t quite work. When Wildstorm and IDW came to me with the X-Files idea, I immediately saw potential. Mostly because they both sort of exist in a real world sensibility where X-Files always tries to find some basis in reality that these horrors can exist and for 30 Days of Night, one of the things I did in the series was strip away all of the mythology and things that were more on the supernatural side. At the time I was trying to find a project for me and my friend Adam Jones to work on and I asked if he wanted to join in. Being a big X-Files fan like I am, he jumped in and came up with the hook that I think made the series work.



AD: What was hook, can you say?

SN: I can’t tell you other than one of the big issues we had to address was making sure the continuity worked. Keep in mind this is a crossover between X-Files the TV Show and 30 Days of Night the comicbook. Adam came up with a really cool twist on that, so I’m very happy. What I can elaborate on is we wound up exploring that the Arctic Circle is this really perfect place for vampires. The attack on Barrow is just one of many over hundreds of years.

AD: That’s interesting because you look at the Arctic and every year there’s disappearances and strange deaths and bodies going missing and lots of really odd circumstances.

SN: You look back at some of the original explorers, there are cases of entire ships disappearing and neither the crew nor the ship ever seen again. We dipped into a little actual history because there’s a large amount of actual Arctic disappearances and saying that maybe they met with a grimmer fate than people think wasn’t too big a stretch.

AD: Will the next one be “Global Warming: Polar Bears and Vampires Move South?”

SN: No. [laughs] We’ll stay away from all that. Despite the changes in the climate it still gets dark up there for a long time.

AD: You mentioned old movies earlier and recently you’ve been doing books with the great artist Bernie Wrightson. Most recently The Ghoul, which just came out in paperback and you have another one coming out this fall, Doc Macabre.

SN: It started with Dead, She Said which was about a detective, Coogan, who basically has to solve his own murder and find out why he’s still alive after being murdered. It was followed by The Ghoul and in The Ghoul for people who’ve read it, there’s an appearance by Coogan and an appearance by Doc Macabre. On top of being self-contained books, going back to the idea of old Universal movies where everybody lived in the same universe and would interact and team up and all that. And so what Bernie and I are building towards with this, after Doc Macabre we’re going to do a thing called The Moorpark Rejects. That will be a series starring the Ghoul, Doc Macabre and Coogan and possibly some other characters.



AD: And this all started with City of Others that you both did for Dark Horse years ago.

SN: City of Others was supposed the umbrella title that we did this under, which is why we were going to call it “City of Others,” which would we populate with all these characters, but Dark Horse crapped out after the first run. We took the idea to IDW and started doing them all as individual series and this two year plan that Bernie and I had is starting to come together. We’ve got two of the books out. We’re halfway through Doc Macabre right now. We’re already making plans for what The Moorpark Rejects will be like. It seems to be working.

AD: It feels like you’re having a lot of fun.

SN: Getting to work with Bernie Wrightson. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.

AD: Are there plans to continue after The Moorpark Rejects? Are you leaving it open-ended to possibly continue?

SN:[/B} The idea was to keep feeling around to see what people respond to and people seem to have really responded to the Ghoul, so we’re thinking that after The Moorpark Rejects, we’ll probably do more Ghoul books. We’re having fun with all of the characters, but we definitely want to see what readers seem to respond to the most, and right now that seem to be the Ghoul.

AD: I wanted to ask about the sequel to the 30 Days of Night movie, Dark Days. It doesn’t have a release date yet, does it?

SN: It does not have a release date. I’m actually waiting to see a final cut of it. I helped write it almost a year or two ago. I did some story meetings with Sam Raimi and the director Ben Ketai. This is very much Ben’s movie. My involvement was fairly limited and we had much less to work with than the first one, but Ben was responsible for doing the webisodes that came out on FEARnet. I was really happy with those, so I have high hopes that this movie will be on par with those.

AD: It helps that the first one is set in Barrow in this almost hermetically sealed world that had to be recreated while this one takes place in Los Angeles mostly.

SN: Exactly. 30 Days of Night and it all takes place in LA (laughs) We’re hoping that what will wind up happening is we’ll get to do the third one, Return to Barrow and then have the whole trilogy made. Like I said, I have high hopes for it. It’s a very different world because it’s going to have limited theatrical and we recast and all that so I’m curious to see what happens.

AD: You have Mia Kirshner as Lilith, the Vampire queen, which I’m excited about because I think she’s always amazing.

SN: You know more than I do! (laughs)

I’m curious to see the reaction to Dark Days. Like I said, we had a fraction of the budget and recast and limited theatrical but Ben did so well with much less with those webisodes. I’m really curious. I’m just now starting to pay a little more attention to the direct to DVD market and it seems like there’s a lot of really interesting stuff, especially scifi and stuff that has a following. We have to figure out different ways to get movies to people. It gets harder and harder to do theatrical and so I’m very very curious to see if it works. I’ve been talking to other people about doing lower budget horror movies and try to get them right to people.

AD: That’s a nice segue because one company that’s had success is DC and Warner Brothers and their animated direct to DVD films.

SN: I wrote the short Spectre for the last Justice League [movie] and I had a blast. The response to that has been really positive. It seems like there’s a market for it. I know there’s been a lot of scifi stuff and I’m hoping for the same thing for horror.

AD: Had you written for animation before?

SN: No. Well, this was first thing that was ever produced that I wrote for animation. I wrote something for Heavy Metal with Bill Sienkiewicz that hopefully will someday see the light of day.

AD: I wanted to ask about Ashley Wood and Fiona Staples with whom you’re doing Mystery Society. You mentioned that you and Ashley came up with idea.

SN: Ashley and I have known each other now for well over ten years and we worked together peripherally. He did the covers for the first run of 30 Days of Night. We worked together for Todd MacFarlane on Hellspawn for a short amount of time. We did Book of the the Dead together, a history of Spawn. Mystery Society was one of these things that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but either I was too busy or he was too busy. We finally decided to seek out another artist and I found Fiona and I just can’t say enough about her. I feel like her artwork really helped solidify Mystery Society as something different. So many people associate me with a lot of the work that I’ve done with these very dark artists. She has, I don’t know if you can tell from the first issue, it definitely kicks in on the second, but she has this amazing sense of comic timing. She can do action and people’s expressions and all these little touches that really help bring out the fun and the humor in particular scenes and she’s added so much to this series. Like I said, I can’t say enough about her. She’s one of my favorite artists right now.



AD: The only other project I’ve seen from her was “North 40” from Wildstom the other year.

SN: Yeah I feel bad because my editor at Wildstorm actually sent me an advance copy and asked me for a quote. Basically I swiped her. [laughs] I called her right away and was like, I don’t know what you’re doing after North 40, but I would love to do something with you. I lucked out because she wound up being nominated for an Eisner for North 40. I’m really glad I got her for at least the first run of Mystery Society before she went off and became all famous, which is going to happen. I’m hoping one day we’ll get Ashley to do an issue. I’d love to do a giant size one with him. In the meantime he and I are creating other stuff and we’re always talking. We’re on skype together all the time. We’re working on a very dark paranormal story together right now that we might do in short installments in one of his publications.

AD: We’ve covered god knows how many things, but I know you’re in the midst of so much more. It’s a lot to juggle.

SN: You juggle half a dozen and you’re lucky if two see the light of day. I have permanent freelancers disease and I can never relax. I’m always worried about where my next job is going to be coming from. I’ve got a few things going on at once. One of them is with Glenn Fabry called Lot 13 that I’m doing through Wildstorm. We’ve got about four issues of that in the can. It’s so visually over the top. It’s easily some of the most graphic stuff that we’ve ever done, both me and Glenn. He has a way of making it look so beautiful.

I’ve got a new creator owned series coming up with Kelly Jones at IDW called Edge of Doom and I’m playing around with the short form. It’s a five issue series that you can read in any order. Every issue is a standalone 22 page horror story and they all wind up being tied together but you can read them all in any sequence you want. You can do a series of one shots and they wind up just getting lost in the shuffle, but we wanted to come up with a way to tie it together. The Twilight Zone is always brought together by the fact that these stories happen in the Twilight Zone. In Night Gallery they’re always brought together by the fact that they come from these paintings. We came up with a similar add-on to the stories that make them all interconnected, but again at the same time each one is a little mini-movie within itself. It’s the best Kelly Jones artwork we’ve ever seen. He’s just it’s amazing.



Kelly, like Bernie, is one of those guys where we spend hours talking about our favorite movies and obscure stories. Being able to sit down and jam on our own stories especially with Edge of Doom. The first one is a Gullivers Travels in Hell kind of story. The second one is a story about a guy marooned on a planet. The third one is a completely over the top just unbelievably graphic story about scientists out of control.

I have a novel I’m working on. I’m doing this book for Pocket books, Simon and Schuster, called The World of Hurt which will be out July 2011

AD: Do you want to say anything about the book or should I ask in year?

SN: I’m going for more cops and monsters, like Cal McDonald, but with no humor. People always look at Cal McDonald as being a horror series, but I’ve always looked at Cal as being comedy. To me it’s much more comedy than anything else, so I want to try to up the ante and do it dead serious.

AD: So this fall, F.E.A.R. 3 comes out that you worked on with John Carpenter. What was that liked?

SN: I was scared to death at first [laughs] Like Bernie, he’s one of those guys who has influenced me on every level. Especially John, because John did movies independently, he made his own music, he did some of my favorites. The Thing has had a huge influence on me. I was so nervous and he turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. We’ve struck up a friendship and working with him was so easy.

AD: It’s been a while since he came out with a movie.

SN: He’s working on one now. We met to work together on a movie that didn’t pan out. When I was working with him on that I discovered that he was a big video game fan, so when the F.E.A.R. 3 offer came in for me, I was already a fan of the series and I knew John was too, so I suggested that he come on with me. We worked really close with Day One and Monolith and Warner Brothers and I think we managed to come up with a way to tie the two previous games together but at the same time kind of restart the whole thing, too, without giving too much away.

They’re running demos right now where if you run it in this new co-op mode, one character can telepathically hold a soldier off the ground while the other one empties clips into him. It’s so freaking violent it’s unbelievable. F.E.A.R. 2 ended on a very specific, odd note and John and I took that idea and ran with it. There’s some pretty dark shit coming.

AD: So a John Carpenter-Steve Niles film collaboration is in fact a possibility?

SN: That would be a dream come true. I’m hoping to talk with John about doing some comics, but right now he’s been filming and editing his latest movie so I’m hoping when the dust settles we’ll get to sit down and figure out some new stuff to work on.

AD: You’ve worked with so many artists with a defined style, but you really create a story that is a collaboration in a way that many other writers don’t.

SN: I really do try. That comes from working with the artist. Also, when I look at my favorite writers or filmmakers or artists, it’s the variety of their work and the body of their work that inspires me. That John Carpenter, for example, can do Halloween and The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, you can hardly believe it’s the same filmmaker who made the three movies. If I can come within a mile of that, that makes me really happy. I’d hate to think I was doing the same thing over and over again.

AD: You want to be one of those old hollywood filmmakers jumping from one film and one genre to another.

SN: At the end of the day I’m still a sixteen year old nerd making super-8 movies. I just love telling stories for whatever reason and it’s what motivates me and gets me excited. I have fun with Mystery Society because I’m having so much fun with the characters and then seeing what Fiona did with them got me even more excited. I like to do a lot of stuff because it’s kind of all I do. I don’t have much of a life outside this stuff, I’m afraid to say.

AD: Maybe we should end on that note. [laughs]

SN: [laughs] Let’s end on, I have no life.

AD: You’re on facebook. Doesn’t anybody want to be your friend? [laughs]

SN: [Laughs] Really, the best part of doing this tour is finding out how much I like my fans. They’re really nice people and I can have ten people in line and nobody brings me the same book. They’re not even aware of the other ones. People come up and they’re like, I love 30 Days and they don’t know Criminal Macabre exists. Or they just read the Batman stuff. I had somebody come in and the first thing they ever saw of mine was the Spectre cartoon and so they were working backwards. I talked to IDW today and said let’s do more of connecting directly with the retailers and the fans. I think it really helps.