“You’re so pale,” Blair says to Clay near the end of Imperial Bedrooms, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1985 book Less Than Zero. Fans will remember that Blair made the same off-handed comment to Clay near the beginning of the earlier book, only this time there’s... more

“You’re so pale,” Blair says to Clay near the end of Imperial Bedrooms, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1985 book Less Than Zero. Fans will remember that Blair made the same off-handed comment to Clay near the beginning of the earlier book, only this time there’s a touch of menace to it, because after all he’s seen by the end of the book, Clay should be pale, from fright. In the 25 years since they snorted, lied and fucked their way through a living dead existence as massively over-privileged, disaffected Beverly Hills teenagers, Ellis’s golden Gods have seen their youth mercilessly evaporate and their universe contract into a noirish bubble where naked power grabs, bottomless secrets and bad plastic surgery are the norm. They may still be at the summit of society, living and working in the movie business in upscale L.A., but they are no longer enviable. They are cursed beings now, seizing and devouring youth and beauty wherever they find it, while failing to arrest their own inexorable slide into ugliness and irrelevance.

Devotees of Less Than Zero who scratched their heads at its 1987 film adaptation, which morphed the tough source material into a Reaganesque anti-drug parable starring sympathetic junkie Robert Downey Jr. and snipped its most significant scenes – the characters’ dead-eyed reaction to the running of a snuff film at a mansion party and later, an actual rape – will howl with laughter at Imperial Bedrooms’ opening passages, which see Ellis’s characters watching the candy-coated film about their lives and reacting to it. The film did happen in their universe, thanks to a book one of them happened to later write, but hey, it was just a movie. You want to know the real story, right? It’s a classically Ellis spin into the metatextual, blending character and actor, fiction and reality, author and reader into one whirring margarita mix in much the same fashion as his last book, 2005’s maybe-autobiographical Lunar Park. Imperial Bedrooms even sees Ellis using Clay as a surrogate to relate some of the author’s own experiences as a producer on 2008’s disastrous film adaptation of his own 1994 short story collection, The Informers.

Ellis has never been a stranger to the movie business – fans of the Christian Bale-starring adaptation of his grisly 1991 classic American Psycho dog him at every book reading. But in recent years he’s embraced the business with a newfound gusto, diving into a number of original projects, including a collaboration with Gus Van Sant on a biopic about the mutual suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and a long-simmering collaboration with Roger Avary on a film adaptation of what some consider his masterpiece, 1998’s Glamorama, a Kubrickian horror story about a shadowy organization of supermodel terrorists. Avary and Ellis are also in possession of what’s becoming an urban legend, a feature film called Glitterati that Avary shot on the sly in Europe while filming scenes for 2002’s The Rules of Attraction. Legally unscreenable in any public forum because it contains (very) intimate scenes featuring non-actors unaware they were in a movie, as well as other scenes that both parties curiously refuse to discuss, Glitterati is already Hollywood folklore. SuicideGirls recently called up Bret Easton Ellis at a hotel in Portland to discuss as many of these things as possible.




Ryan Stewart: How’s the book tour going?

Bret Easton Ellis: It’s going really well. I’m in Portland right now. It’s been surprising. I’m surprised by the crowds.

RS: A mix of book fans and movie fans?

BEE: All kinds of fans. It’s a bit nerve-wracking, but I suppose it’s a really good thing. It’s been positive. I don’t know if it’s necessarily good for me in terms of my ego and my narcissism, because it does feed those things to an incredible degree. But then, you know what happens? The tour itself kind of bitch-slaps me and says “Snap out of it!” The tour itself is a lot of work. It brings you back to the reality of a 9 to 5 job. You’re out there for hours with people who, for whatever reason, your work has meant something to them. They’ve showed up and they have stories they want to tell you and books they want to have signed. It’s a strange life, and life isn’t that strange in the years when I’m just myself working on whatever I’m working on. But every five or six years when I go out on tour it’s a reminder that there’s another Bret Easton Ellis out there, one that people respond to very differently than, say, my friends do, who really couldn’t care less, you know?

RS: Do the horror fans still show up?

BEE: Oh, completely. It’s a wide array, but I’ve noticed that there are groups of people who are into, like, one book. There are different factions, and some of them were introduced to the work through some of the movies and yeah, there are the factions who are definitely interested in American Psycho, and also Lunar Park. It’s interesting.

RS: Do you get offers to do the comedic TV interviews, like The Daily Show?

BEE: None. I get no offers to do that. I also don’t think I’d be any good at it. It takes a lot of deep breathing and some Xanax just to get in front of a large crowd and read the book and answer questions coherently, in a long-form format. I actually read for a very short amount of time and then I just like to talk to the audience, do the Q&A and have an interactive thing going. And as long as I’m kind of in control of that I can relax a little bit and loosen up, though it takes like ten or fifteen minutes and maybe a shot or two of tequila before moving on to that part of the night. But no, I haven’t been offered any of that. I’ve done no television for this tour.

RS: Are you quick with a joke? Would you do well in that format, maybe with some coaching?

BEE: First of all, I wouldn’t want coaching, and I’m not that interested in the format. I’m more or less relieved that there hasn’t been any television this tour, for any number of reasons. For most morning shows you have to get up at around 6:00am, and I also hate looking at myself on screen. And also, just the way you have to sell yourself in those four minutes that you have -- it turns you into a kind of ad man. You’re out there shilling for the publishing house and you have to be presentable and you’ve got to get it all focused into four minutes and also have the funny stories prepared. It’s just more artificial than what I guess I’m used to, so in a way I am glad it hasn’t happened. I did do one TV thing in Atlanta, this Fox morning show and it was fine, but it was still just, like, if there’s any other way to talk about the book and help out the good folks at Random House, I’d rather do that.

RS: I’d imagine this is a very socially active time for you in general, just because you’ve got so much movie business going on.

BEE: Yeah, it is a more socially active time. Even this tour has a lot of social activity just because I know more people in more places now. At every stop, I’m seeing a lot of friends. But also, in terms of my life in L.A., yeah, if you’re involved in projects you have a lot of meetings and you’re trying to get people to give you money to make a movie and yeah, it is social. Part of what I find enjoyable about L.A. and that business in particular, is that there’s something about working together with people towards a goal of making a project that you believe in…there’s a team spirit to it that I like. Very, very different from working on a novel, where you’re just alone with this thing for many years. As fun as it can be, you’re alone and that’s just the way it is. It’s not pink or black or bad or good, it’s just how it is. They’re two very different ways of working and one is social and one is a-social.

RS: Are you embracing your new role as a producer? Do you hang out in clubs and meet the up-and-coming actors?

BEE: Well, so far we’re only talking about one movie as producer and writer.

RS: What about Lunar Park and, hopefully, this?

BEE: We don’t know about this one. No one is attached to anything on Imperial Bedrooms. Whenever someone tells me they’ve heard that a project is going forward, and that it was on IMDB, I look on IMDB and I scratch my head and think ‘But that’s not going anywhere, it’s not in pre-production.’ What you read on IMDB isn’t always correct, and no, that’s not happening. And Lunar Park I’m not involved with. I know the guys who are making it, and I’m friends with them, but I’m not involved on the creative level with that movie even though I might have some kind of producing credit. And hanging out in the clubs is not part of the process! [laughs] It’s more low-key than that. It’s drinks. It’s dinner. It’s a social function at someone’s house. It is not hanging out at clubs, trolling for young actresses and actors to be in my movies. I know that might disappoint some people, but it’s just a fact.

RS: I read your recent quotes about how actors aren’t particularly smart. Were you including emotional intelligence in that?

BEE: Actors have to be emotionally smart. Or, good actors have to. And most of the actors I’ve met are emotionally smart. And yeah, I was making a distinction between emotional intelligence, which is a big thing to have, and an important thing to have. And having a college degree doesn’t necessarily make anybody smarter, I guess. I have plenty of friends who are very successful and did not finish college, so I’m not making judgments on that. But actors usually have not gone to college and actors have usually not gotten an education. They usually start their career when they’re in high-school or very young, and that’s what they’ve been focused on. That’s just the way it is. But yeah, they do have to have that emotional intelligence to move forward and that can be just as important as having an M.F.A. from some liberal arts college. I do like actors, I would never diss them.

RS: I know you’re an admirer of David Thomson’s writing. Did you read his biography of Nicole Kidman?

BEE: Yes, I did.

RS: I was riveted by that book. I’d never before read a book by a film critic where the critic admitted to having emotional feelings for the actress he’s writing about. He more or less cops to being in love with her.

BEE: I think what he captured is what we all feel. That’s what movies engender, and that’s a movie star engenders in us. They do make us fall in love with them, by the very nature of the medium. It’s us gazing at them alone in a dark room. There’s a very intense, sexual, voyeuristic thing about the way we look at actors and actresses. So, to me that was not such a huge surprise. What was a surprise was how naked he was in admitting it. But all of his writing is like that, really. I had read everything up to the Nicole Kidman book, and when I read that book it wasn’t really a surprise, it was more like ‘Oh, finally someone has placed this emotion within a context, within a critical essay.’ And that was exciting. Anyone who reads David Thomson knows that he’s had a hard-on for Nicole Kidman for a long time.

RS: Have you ever been so taken with an actor or actress?

BEE: Not to the point that I’d devote a book to it! Off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone. There are certainly a lot of filmmakers that I have been, but we’re talking about a sexual and a visual response to an object, in a way. When you’re younger, that happens. As someone who is older now, it doesn’t happen with the frequency that it happened when I was younger, but I’m sure I have. And if it comes to me over the course of this interview I will tell you! [laughs]

RS: The struggling actress/femme fatale in Imperial Bedrooms, Rain Turner – is she a composite of real actresses you met or is she just something you thought up?

BEE: I would say she’s a combination of both. She was a composite of what I sensed – and to a degree, experienced – in terms of the desperation factor among actors in L.A. It was something I had never really had to deal with before. I’d had friends who were actors, but they were successful. I had never before been involved in the casting process of a movie like I was with The Informers. And I was very surprised by what became available to me during those months, as someone who had written the script, written the book it was based on, and was a producer on the movie. I was surprised. I didn’t know that that was really something that happened. And in the book it’s dark, but I think of it as a kind of comedy, in a way. It’s not that bad. I mean, what? Trading favors with studios is worse. “If I write this movie, will you do my passion project? Will you guys fund the development for The Golden Suicides, the movie I want to make with Gus Van Sant, if I write your shark movie?” That’s how it is. It’s mutual exploitation and people just doing favors for each other. But the disappointment and the sordidness of managers lying to you or lawyers or agents fucking up something – that’s much more stressful than the casting couch. Which is a joke, and pretty harmless. In the book, because of Clay’s pathology and his masochistic-romantic tendencies, it becomes something much bigger for him. But yeah, it was based on things that I witnessed. I’m not going to say that there were things I partook of, but there were things I was noticing while I was putting together Imperial Bedrooms.

RS: Did you have a long-standing desire to try your hand at writing a Raymond Chandler vixen -- one of those human onions that you can never get to the bottom of?

BEE: Not particularly, but I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler. And I did want to imbue Imperial Bedrooms with a noir quality. So, yeah, a femme fatale entered into the picture. Now, because of who Clay is and because of his narcissism, she really doesn’t get the kind of play that maybe another narrator would have given her. Clay is only interested in his own desires and his own needs. He’s really not interested in anyone else’s at all. He doesn’t care about them at all, so he doesn’t really ask the right questions. Nor does he uncover enough about her for her to become a full-blown femme fatale. And therefore, the novel doesn’t really become a full-blown noir. It has noir elements, but not really the resolutions that a lot of noir has, just because of who our narrator is. He’s not a detective, he’s not solving the crime, he’s much more interested in his own needs. That was something that was very interesting to me, as a writer, to explore within a novel. But to get back to your original question, I had not really been feeling that, been thinking about creating a character like Rain Turner, but she needs to be there.

RS: I would think the noir framework gave you some cover to write rotten females without the usual suspects coming down on you again, like they did with your recent comments about women directors.

BEE: Well, but I’m not really thinking about writing rotten female characters. The men in my books are so much more rotten than the females that I really don’t get the misogyny label. I do think I misspoke when I said that thing about female directors. I think I should have couched it by saying ‘Look, the movies that I really respond to were made by men, not by women, but women are fine!’ Or something along those lines. Yet, in the last year or so I find myself confronted by the fact that a lot of the movies I’ve responded to are directed by women. My favorite movie of the year is Fish Tank, by Andrea Arnold, this British filmmaker. I’ve tweeted about how much I love it. But yeah, I made some comments that I’m not taking back at all, but I probably should have prefaced them a little bit more. [laughs] I should have been more aware of what the reaction would be. I did get a lot of women quite angry with me about that comment, and oddly enough, no men. I looked at all the tweets and all the blogs and not a single man came to defense of the female directors, which was telling.

RS: You made it a little weirder by saying later that Kathryn Bigelow is a more exciting female director because she’s good-looking.

BEE: Well, I feel that way! I stand by what I think about The Hurt Locker. I think that if a man or an average-looking woman had made The Hurt Locker it would not have been as interesting a movie as it was by the fact that a beautiful woman made it. That is something that’s just….true! I can’t self-censor myself. That is something that I was thinking about while watching that movie at the ArcLight last summer or whenever it came out. I was thinking ‘God, a lot of this is kind of been-there-done-that, but it’s pretty well-made’…but I could not get it out of my head that this really beautiful woman made that movie.

RS: Full stop?

BEE:Yep. There you go.

RS: You’ve said elsewhere that you refuse to believe that Imperial Bedrooms could affect Less Than Zero’s reputation in any way. Did that mindset give you the freedom to migrate these beloved characters into what’s essentially a different genre?

BEE: Completely. As a writer you have to write what you want to write and your need to write a novel can’t be predicated on what the audience wants or what the readership demands from you. If that happens, you’re screwed. You can never write a novel based on people’s feelings about your other books. If that was the case, I’d be trying to write American Psycho every other year. I’d be trying to appease the fanbase. So, I never feel pressure. I never feel any kind of weirdness. It’s never a struggle to write a book. It’s an emotional thing, and it’s not pragmatic or logical. And because it is an emotional thing, there really isn’t any stress. These feelings keep pouring forward and that creates a novel and sort of makes the book appear. None of it’s hard or difficult, though it might have been at a difficult point in my life. The creation of a novel, or a lot of novels, stems from pain and stress and drama. But working on the novel and figuring the novel out? That’s what releases you from the pain and stress. It’s a transporting experience to lose yourself in the writing of a novel, no matter how painful the basis for it might have been.

RS: I couldn’t help but notice that this novel and Less Than Zero both have these terribly sad Black Dahlias that wander into each book’s final passages and get eaten alive by the city. Are you haunted by the idea of a hayseed stepping off the bus in downtown L.A.?

BEE: Of course. If you’re working in L.A. that is something you’ll be confronted with on a daily basis. That’s how the town works. I imagine it would be the same in another context in Las Vegas, which is another gambler’s town. Actually, there’s probably more logic to gambling than to how this business runs. If you learn to gamble you can probably make a lot more money than you’ll probably make in Hollywood. Am I haunted by it? Yeah, I was haunted by it. I’m not haunted by it now, but when I was first confronted with it, it was haunting. But at the same time not everything ends up being tragic. A lot of people come out to that town at a very young age to become an actress or an actor, and they do work it, but there’s an expiration date, you know? There’s a timeframe in which they can make it. And when that timeframe begins to reach its close, it can be upsetting. It can be upsetting for you, and for the person who is trying to make it and it just isn’t happening, and they know that in a year or so they’ll be selling real estate. That is the reality of the situation. And you know what? A lot of people make the move, and then it’s okay. They gave it a shot, it didn’t happen, it hurts, but you move on with your life. You can’t let it haunt you forever. A lot of the people who I know that didn’t make it are probably – if you want to know the truth – more content than when they were hustling for auditions and being rejected twelve times a week.

RS: You’re still in contact with those people?

BEE: Oh, yeah. I know a lot of people who’ve moved on to other professions, people who before I even knew them were actors or actresses. When we talk about the business and the system, they’ll be like ‘Oh, God, when I first got here at age twenty I did that and my self-esteem was shredded.’ A lot of the people I know who came out here to make it in the business have the same war stories, and they’ll start telling them as the night nears its end.

RS: Did you make a conscious choice in the book not to linger on how L.A. has changed over 25 years? The city doesn’t intrude on Clay nearly as much this time.

BEE: He doesn’t care anymore. He’s now the fully-formed person. He’s no longer a vacant party boy, drifting around and noticing stuff and being bored, and not a lot is going on and he doesn’t have a lot to do. Clay has appetites, and he’s hungry and focused and successful. He wants what he wants, and I think that’s why this novel is so much more focused, simply because of who Clay is at this age and what his personality is like. When I was working on the book, I did what I do with every book: I did a very long outline that’s just about how this narrator is going to narrate this book. I’ve done that with every narrator, whether it was Patrick Bateman or Victor Ward or even the first Clay in Less Than Zero. And this time it was ‘Okay, Clay is not going to notice this, this, or this.’ I would write a scene for the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms and then I would realize ‘Oh, I have to cut those two lines out because Clay would never notice that.’ Or ‘He would never pay attention to that particular line of dialogue.’ Everything really had to be about whatever situation he was in. It had to be much more focused than, you know, rambling dialogue that the first Clay in Less Than Zero would have overheard someplace. So much depends on where the narrator is now in his life, in terms of what is noticed and what is not noticed. I think what you’re talking about, in terms of how each Clay perceives Los Angeles, just has to do with age and time. Maybe if Imperial Bedrooms was narrated in the third person it would have much more of a feel for how L.A. has changed. Though I don’t really know if L.A. has changed that much. I don’t think it really has. I mean, it’s pretty much the same city it was when I left at 18 or 19. I’ve changed since then, I think, but I don’t think the city has. Not that much.

RS: I think you mentioned somewhere that you’d prefer directors to adapt your work who had your same upscale L.A. background. That might have been in reference to The Informers, maybe?

BEE: I was talking about The Informers, where I realized almost near completion that a fatal mistake had been made that none of us realized. And the mistake was that it really did need someone who had grown up out here and got these characters, lived with them, grew up with them, to make a movie about them. Regardless of how much the producer, the director and I all seemed to be on the same page with the script, once the movie started to be shot and cut together, it became apparent that – no – this has been misread. It happens in slow-motion, at first. And you think ‘Huh. That’s a little off. That’s not really how it was in the script. Let’s see what happens.’ Then, suddenly it becomes like an avalanche. You’re like ‘Oh God, the tone of this is all off.’ And yes, I really do think that a lot of it had to do with Gregor being Australian and Marco Weber, who was the main producer on it, living and working in Germany for so long. That was his first American production and it has this strange, disconnected feel to it. With someone who lived out here, understood those people, knew them well, I think the movie would have been a lot funnier. It was written with a lot of humor in it, and none of it is apparent in the film. There are a couple of obvious laughs here and there, but overall there should have been a looser, more comedic tension to the movie that it didn’t have.

RS: A making-of documentary about The Informers would probably be more interesting than the movie turned out to be.

BEE: Well, there wasn’t one made, I can tell you that! I was there for some of it. But I was not there once the production moved to Europe. They did shoot a lot of it in Uruguay and Argentina. And the writer’s strike hit, and that prohibited any writers from visiting the set of any film. I had been on set while they were shooting a lot of the stuff in L.A., and I was able to work with the actors on any problems they had with their lines and I was even there on the set re-writing stuff, but once it moved to Europe I wasn’t allowed on the set. And I heard some things. I heard that it was a fairly wild set once it moved out of L.A. So, maybe you’re right, maybe a making-of documentary of The Listeners – Ha, I’m already moving back to Imperial Bedrooms! – maybe a making-of documentary of The Informers would, in fact, be more interesting. And that is sad to me, because there was so much work done on that movie. And there was so much hope for it to be really good. But by now I’ve learned that that’s true of every movie, it’s always a miracle when a movie works out or even becomes halfway-coherent. So many things can happen out of the blue that will just derail a film.

RS: Do you regret signing away the perpetual rights for Glamorama to Roger Avary? You couldn’t have predicted his misfortunes, but still.

BEE: Yes and no. I do regret doing it, but at the time it seemed like a really good idea. In retrospect, I guess I do wish that I’d kept the rights. But only because it’s such a different movie culture now. Back when Roger bought the rights it was still possible to conceive of a movie like Glamorama and to do it within the studio system. Now that’s no longer true. The studios won’t allow a movie like that to be made. It could be made as an expensive independent film, but that would be incredibly risky. It’s also a very long book, so how do you prune it down? I had dinner with a pretty successful British TV director who has also done features – an action director – who has been following Glamorama since its publication, and we mused about the idea of doing it as a series for HBO. We’d do it as a one-season series, a ten-part or twelve-part miniseries. But then you realize that HBO doesn’t do miniseries’ like Glamorama, they do miniseries’ that win Emmys. They do John Adams and The Pacific and Band of Brothers, movies about big, important historical subjects. Glamorama doesn’t really fall into that category.

RS: Speaking of Roger, the legend of Glitterati is sort of growing by the day. It’s like that Jerry Lewis clown movie. I can’t pass up the opportunity to ask something about.

BEE: Ask me specific questions, and I’ll give you yes or no answers.

RS: I’ve heard that certain famous people pop up during the film, and maybe they’re acting, but maybe they’re not acting? Is that true?

BEE: To a degree. [laughs]

RS: Who pops up? Come on, tell me.

BEE: I really can’t say. Until Roger feels comfortable enough to show the movie, I personally don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I kind of wish that I never had talked about it. I talked about it once because I had just seen it and I was kind of shocked. I just thought ‘Whoa.’ Roger came over to my place and showed it to me on his computer. We watched the entire movie on his computer.

RS: How long is it?

BEE: Oh, maybe 90 minutes. And I just felt like there was nothing you could do with it. I really don’t know what you can do with it! Roger’s got to figure that out.

RS: If you were looking at it as a film critic, would you say that it’s a valuable piece of art?

BEE: Yes, I would. It’s good. I like it.

RS: Are you in correspondence with Roger?

BEE: I was in correspondence with him, but I haven’t talked to him in a couple of months. I was actually in the middle of doing a project with Roger and James Van Der Beek, we were all working together on this project, and Roger was…he was not in jail, what was that?

RS: He was out on work furlough during the day, I think?

BEE: Right, exactly. He was in the work furlough program, and we were working on our project, and then I guess that’s when the twittering started.

RS: Sarcastic twittering about “life in jail.”

BEE: Which they did not find jokey. And then he got into a lot of trouble. So, no, I haven’t [corresponded recently], but I think he’s getting out shortly. I was just talking to James -- James is in touch with Roger a lot -- and I think Roger is supposed to be out very shortly.

RS: If they do end up making a movie of Imperial Bedrooms, it will need to be heavily sentimentalized in order to tonally match with Less Than Zero, right?

BEE: [laughs] Right! My first response to that would be that there’s no way they can sentimentalize Imperial Bedrooms because of the nature of the book, but they did it with Less Than Zero! If they did it with that, they can probably do it with Imperial Bedrooms. But I really don’t know if Imperial Bedrooms will be turned into a movie. It would depend on a lot of factors, and I just don’t know if in today’s movie culture it’s viable. Unless Robert Downey Jr. says “Yes, I want to do it” in which case it will be made next week.

RS: I think Jami Gertz is retired, right?

BEE: Doesn’t she do television?

RS: Maybe, I don’t know. Unless I’m mistaken, though, her last screen appearance was in Twister.

BEE: Well, she’s got a big family. I think she would do this, though. And I’ve talked to Andrew McCarthy many times and he would totally do it. And there’s some talk that James Spader would totally do it, so it really just depends upon Downey, and also how you figure out how to make the movie. The movie would be “These are the real people, and Less Than Zero the film was just a movie.” You’d have to show them watching the movie Less Than Zero, and then commenting on it as they’re leaving the screening room – then we cut to their real lives. So, I think it might be overly meta for an audience, but maybe not.

RS: If they have to watch Less Than Zero, you’ll have to recreate scenes from Less Than Zero with new actors so that they’re not watching themselves on screen.

BEE: Right, yes. And then they leave. The idea of doing that is very intriguing, but I don’t know how realistic it is.

RS: When I was reading the book I kept having this vision of James Spader with excessive plastic surgery. Very upsetting.

BEE: I know, I know. I gotta tell you the truth, though, when I’m working on a book I’m not thinking of any actors, so I never had those images in my head. I wasn’t picturing Jami Gertz as Blair, I wasn’t thinking of Andrew McCarthy as Clay, I just had these vague, vague, anonymous people in my head while I was working on it. I was not thinking about what James Spader looks like now in terms of how Rip would look now.

RS: I noticed that on your twitter page you recently made lists of American things and people that are delineated as “empire” and “post-empire.” For example, porn star Ginger Lynn is “empire” and Sasha Grey is “post-empire.” Why is Shia LaBeouf post-empire?

BEE: Hmmm….why did I write that? When I think about who the big action stars were during the empire, they seemed to be much less boyish. Now, everyone seems to be kind of a boy. So, Shia seems to me to be emblematic of a post-empire sensibility in terms of an action guy. And Shia is post-empire. Post-empire is really post 9/11. That’s the spike, and then let’s say it really starts in ’04 or ’05. Wouldn’t you say his career really started in the last six years?

RS: Oh, sure. His career pretty much started with Disturbia, and that was in early ’07.

BEE: Yeah, so he’s post-empire.

RS: So, it’s basically just a time delineation.

BEE: Yes, I should have prefaced with the fact that it’s a time delineation. Empire is 1945 to September 11, 2001, with a spike in the early Aughties and then once you get to ’05 or ’06, we’re really in a post-empire world. But it’s interesting, because when I play this game with some people they throw out some weird ones and there are arguments about it. Sarah Silverman?

RS: She was a name stand-up in the mid 90s. She was on HBO shows during that period as well, like Mr. Show.

BEE: Right! But half the group said “Oh, empire!” and some people said “Post-empire!” and there was this weird discussion about how you can be empire and still somehow be relevant in the post-empire age. Or something can be a post-empire thing and still have its roots in the empire. [laughs] This could go on and on and on! It really just depends on your sensibility and what you think is empire. But basically, if you do really just follow the time constraints, there’s a clear delineation between empire and post-empire.

RS: Someone else gave me a good question to end on, they wanted me to just ask what your favorite book is and what you’re currently reading.

BEE: Well, what I’m reading right now on tour is not really representative of anything, but I’ll tell you what I’m reading on tour. I am reading a collection of short stories called Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, by Maile Maloy. I have also started a novel that I picked up at Jay McInerney’s house, because I was staying there in the Hamptons over the weekend. I picked up this book called Mergers and Acquisitions by Dana Vachon, and for some reason I’m carrying that around and I’ve read the first chapter. I am also reading a book about the making of the movie Nashville, and it’s called The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece. So, those are the three books that I have with me at the moment. My favorite book of all time – and I’ve said this many times – is L’Education sentimentale by Flaubert. But again, I’m just telling you what I’m reading. I’m not saying these are fantastic books and I’m loving them, I’m only telling you what I have on the road with me. And of course I’m always looking for new things in Imperial Bedrooms to read at each reading to mix it up a little bit. I found myself getting a little bored with the section I was reading, and I’ve been trying to find something else, but it’s hard to find stuff in the middle and later sections that will make any sense to an audience that hasn’t read the book.

RS: The opening must be the crowd-pleaser.

BEE: Oh, yeah. That’s basically what I stick with. And you know what? I only read for like five minutes anyway, I don’t read for a long time at all. I’ll leaf through it today if I have time, to try to find three or four pages, but I have a feeling I’m just gonna go back to the very beginning.

RS: Sounds like a plan. Thanks for taking the time, Bret.

BEE: No problem. I like SuicideGirls and I was happy to do it.





Imperial Bedrooms is available in bookstores everywhere.

Twilight fans hang on Kristen Stewart's every word, so she has to be careful what she says. On her first press rounds for Twilight, some of Stewart's thoughts got taken out of context and the fans got upset. That still happens, but now she chooses her words carefully and you can tell she's... more

Twilight fans hang on Kristen Stewart's every word, so she has to be careful what she says. On her first press rounds for Twilight, some of Stewart's thoughts got taken out of context and the fans got upset. That still happens, but now she chooses her words carefully and you can tell she's much more poised and polished about what she says.

If you haven't read Eclipse, here's a quick recap. Bella (Stewart) is thinking about Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson)'s marriage proposal. Her condition is that she wants to become a vampire to live with him forever. He doesn't want her to loser her humanity, so you see the dilemma. Meanwhile, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) is still trying to convince Bella he's the right one for her. Also, her old enemy Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) is building a vampire army to come and get her, so the boys have to join forces to protect Bella.

The Twilight phenomenon may be overwhelming but that's not all there is to Kristen Stewart. She manages to have two releases a year in between Twilight movies. This year was The Runaways, in which she played rocker Joan Jett, and The Yellow Handkerchief, a post-Katrina road movie. If you missed them, they'll be on DVD soon.

At a time when the media can be invasive, and the promotional demands of a movie keep her on the road, a press conference was the closest a reporter could get to Stewart. Even with dozens of tape recorders and microphones in her face, Stewart has a certain natural intimacy that comes across when she's formulating her thoughts. Let's face it, Kristen Stewart is F'ing cool. She's in an awesome position and takes it seriously. It may take her a few tries to express it exactly the way she wants, but she'll stay honest, no matter how many Twihards nitpick her.

Q: You're in the middle of this journey with Bella Swan. Do you worry that it's taking over your whole career, that it becomes your persona?

KS: This is a unique situation. I get to play her for a really long time and that also is a serious indulgence and something that's really lucky because I feel really sad when I lose a character at the end of a short shoot, which is typically six weeks on a small movie which is what I'm used to. It definitely is obviously the one role that has put me in this sort of epic position. But, it's just another movie and I think it doesn't matter if you're doing a studio movie or you're doing an independent movie. When you get to set and you're doing a scene it's always going to be the same job. I really don't think about my career in terms of planning it out and what this does for me. This was a part that I just really wanted to play and luckily I got to do it for a really long time.

Q: In this film, Bella has to make her decision for Edward or Jacob. Do you feel like that's a big challenge in the movies so far?

KS: Yeah. She's pushed to the point where the decision needs to made in this one but she does that in each movie. What's cool is that things change and as certain as she is sometimes and as absolutely gung-ho and young and courageous and brave as she is, she's also willing to take a step back and go, “Okay, I'm going to reconsider my options and reconsider how I'm treating everybody.” She acknowledges that she's being a little bit selfish. She makes the choice but I feel like the choice has been made. As soon she sees him in the first one, it's done but it's hard for her to get to point where everyone is going to accept that and this is the one that it sort of happens in.

Q: We see Bella really mature in this film, especially choosing to be a vampire, not just for Edward but for other reasons. How do you see Bella maturing as a woman?

KS: She's definitely making decisions for herself and she's not just going along with what Edward is saying to do, which is something that people instantly just latch onto, that she's this weak and codependent girl that's just in need all the time of this guy. It's so not the case. I think if it were to be told from his perspective that he would be just as vulnerable and needy as her. It's told from her mind though so obviously those things are going to be more apparent. I think she's definitely, like I say over and over, owning up to things that have gone down. They've been both good and bad. She can reap the benefits from the ways that she's dealt with in a good way and also make the relationships in her life stronger based on the mistakes that she's made. As soon as you sort of screw someone over and go back and say, “I admit that. Can we still be cool? I've been really selfish.” Everyone now in the family is looking at her differently, like, “Oh, maybe she really does know what she wants. Maybe she's not acting so immature and crazy.” I'm glad that you felt that. That's awesome.

Q: Was the action in Eclipse more difficult for you than the previous films?

KS: The action is actually absolutely everybody else's responsibility. I just stand behind people that are stronger than me literally the entire time. I didn't get to run around as much as I did in the second movie. So the action wasn't difficult.

Q: Some people suggest that the success of these movies has to do with forbidden love, loving a vampire and its mix with traditional family values. What do you think?

KS: Right. I think if you took all the mythical aspects away from the story that it would still stand as a really strong, interesting thing to be a part of. I think the whole vampire and the whole werewolf thing are really good sort of plot devices. All of the aspects of the vampire and all the aspects of a werewolf are fully encompassed by the humans, by Jacob and Edward. If all of that was gone they would still be the same people. I don't think it's a big phenomenon because of the vampire mythical aspect. It definitely takes a good story and it raises the stakes and it makes it a little bit more interesting but I think it's just about who the characters are and how easy it is to have faith in them and be sort of addicted to them. They let you down a lot and then pick themselves back up. I don't think it has anything to do with the vampire thing. I think it just makes that a little cooler.

Q: How did you work with the new director, David Slade? He shot a lot of close-ups so was there anything you had to adjust in your style of acting to compliment his filmmaking?

KS: No. We've worked with the same DP [director of photography] now, for New Moon and Eclipse and I always ask Javier, “Hey, how close are you?” That's something that David intentionally does, not tell you stuff like that which I completely understand because most actors are crazy and neurotic and don't want to know the camera is up their nose but it's good to know. No, I didn't do anything differently though. You have to change a little bit every time that you work with a new director but it's cool working with someone different on each one of those. As long as someone has the same passion for it, as long as they're into it, you have to do all this re-work. You have to reconsider all the ideas that had you been working with the same person you might just say, “Oh, we've covered that. We don't need to go over that.” But in this case I have to introduce my character to David. He meets Bella through me. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm playing her. We've done something already and it's cool to let a new person into the fold. It's fun.

Q: Now that you've done three of these films, are there things that you wish had made into the movie from the book that didn't?

KS: Yeah, totally. There are a million things. I mean every single time we watch one of the movies, especially when the cast watches it together it's always an incredibly frustrating experience. That's why I'm glad that Breaking Dawn is going to be two movies which I can finally say. So there's going to be less of that, less of having to lose stuff. I know you want specific things but I'm trying to think of one now but I can't.

Q: Is there a scene in Breaking Dawn that you hope makes the movie?

KS: There are a million and we haven't even shot it yet. I can't wait to see Renesmee and I can't wait to have a kid and get married. It's all of that. It's going to be crazy.

Q: How long have you known that Breaking Dawn was going to be two films and how long will it take to film them?

KS: The shoot is going to be something like six months I think. We start in October. I think we're not going to be finished until maybe March or something, maybe February. I clearly don't really look at a whole lot of schedules. I had to hold onto this forever. They've been talking about it for a really long time and we all sort of knew it was definitely going to be two movies forever now. It's been really hard not to say that. We're all really stoked on that.

Q: Do you see an opportunity in Breaking Dawn since it's two films to create two interpretations of Bella, pre-vampire and post-vampire?

KS: Yeah, actually. I really can't wait to get into that because I've been on the outskirts of what it would feel like to play one of them. I've had to think about it a lot considering that Bella is dating one of them very seriously. If your significant other has been dealing with these issues, I've thought about it a lot and I can't wait to actually be it. It's going to be a trip. It's going to be weird and I think she does change a lot.

Q: Do you think they might go for a full on R rating, considering some of the things that will happen in Breaking Dawn?

KS: I guess everybody interprets those things differently. My guess is that it'll be PG-13. I have no idea. I mean, I guess we'll all see when it comes out.

Q: In Eclipse, Bella has an awkward conversation about the birds and bees with her father. Was that something that you had to deal with in real life?

KS: No. I knew everything from word go. I was really, really mature that way. [Laughs] No, I don't know. Sure, I guess I probably have that moment. I guess that everybody does. I never had the talk. I could never have the talk. I don't know, I didn't need it.

Q: I think some of the nicest scenes in all these films are the scenes between Bella and her father. What's that like, working with Billy Burke?

KS: I really, really love working with Billy. Just try to think of a good thing to say about someone you really enjoy working with. He's very no B.S. and obviously as an actor that's what you need. He's really good at knowing if the scene works or doesn't work, if something's real. I think he really understands the dynamic, the Charlie/Bella thing. It's not a normal father/daughter relationship. They haven't known each other very long. She just moved to Forks literally and has memories of him when she was a little kid, but I love the gradual trust thing that happens. He's really good at that because he doesn't force it and it's never creepy and a lot of times it gets weird when some guy is playing your dad and it doesn't feel real to you. It feels like they're forcing sentiment. It's disgusting and I never feel that with him. I think he's great and I love him.

Q: What other films are you looking forward to making besides Breaking Dawn?

KS: I'm playing Marylou in On The Road. It was my first favorite book and that character is iconic and Walter Salles is directing it. I'm a huge fan of his so I'm going to start that right as soon as this press tour is over. In July we start a four week beatnik boot camp thing. We're going to read everything. It's a small movie, too and so four weeks of rehearsal is crazy cool.

Q: Are you at the point now with Rob Pattinson where when you're doing a very passionate or dramatic scene that all of a sudden you just start laughing?

KS: That totally happens all the time, definitely. More so with me and Taylor because we have so much fun with stuff and because our intimate moments are so few and far between and weird, the way they happen in the book. We have a little bit more of that. Me and Rob are always so serious because the scenes mean a lot and we're always like, “Oh God, did we do it right?”

Eclipse opens June 30.

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that... more

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that it should have been. Indeed they might even say it was a "shit sandwich" (well, actually, Martin did). Fortunately, Tank Girl's superhuman, and her fuck you spirit would never allow a bunch of scummy film execs and industry cheese weasels to have the last word. Down but not out, after a hiatus of over a decade, she put her Tank Boots back on, and kicked, screamed and farted her way back from near oblivion, with a little help from Martin.

In the process of documenting Tank Girl's past for a best-of book called The Cream of Tank Girl (out October 2008), Martin found a renewed passion for his foul-mouthed, mutant kangaroo-humping friend. Original draftsman Jamie Hewlett may have moved on to pastures new with Damon Albarn and their virtual Gorillaz band, but Tank Girl has found new pen pals to roughhouse with.

With a slew of fresh Tank Girl adventures already in print, in the bag, and on the horizon, Martin and his badly behaved progeny are smashing ("Sleesh! Plock! Glump!") their way into one of their most prolific periods ever. We sat down for a long distance chat with Martin, and took a gander at what the future holds for Tank Girl.

Alan Martin: Where are you calling from?

Nicole Powers: Los Angeles.

AM: What accent is that? It doesn't sound very American.

NP: No, you've got me there, I'm actually from Sheffield.

AM: Are you? That's just down the road from me then.

NP: So where are you right now?

AM: Well not just down the road, I live in Berwick-Upon-Tweed just on the border with Scotland.

NP: That's along way from where Tank Girl started in Worthing.

AM: It is, yes, thankfully.

NP: How did you end up there?

AM: My wife started a business with her mother running a shop, so we now live here and started our family here, a long way from Worthing. It couldn't be further in fact without going into Scotland.

NP: So are we going to see Tank Girl painting her face blue and going all Braveheart on us?

AM: [laughs] That's a good idea actually. I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, we could take it in that direction.

NP: When you created Tank Girl some twenty years ago, what was the original concept? What did you have in mind?

AM: Nothing really. It was just a hotchpotch of ideas, of things that we liked. There was no real formula to it. Everything that went in just had to tick the cool boxes, you know. Did it look good? Did it sound good? Did it taste good? If it did, then it was OK to go in our comic. So pretty much everything that we were into, the style of clothes we were wearing, and all our friends were wearing, whatever band we were into. And as far as formulating story lines or plots, it just never happened. There was no high-brow construction. It was just what do we like? Brilliant, we'll put it in. That was as far as it went.

NP: You mention the clothes, and I have to say out of any comic book character Tank Girl has the coolest wardrobe.

AM: Yeah, well that's all entirely down to Jamie. I just dress like a tramp basically.

NP: If we opened up your closet doors what would we see?

AM: Mould. [laughs] Mildew and mould. No, I'm not that bad really, but Jamie is a real clothes horse, he really loves his clothes. He always did, even when he didn't have much money he was very, in a way, sharply dressed by going to charity shops and thrift shops, if that's possible. But he always had a very idiosyncratic style that was all his own, so that completely carried through to the comics. But the gang that we were all in, we all dressed very similarly in the current styles that were around, we all had leather jackets etc., etc.. So that all filtered through into the original Tank Girl, and then, as time went on, hippy influences came in as crusty and grunge reared its head and everything mutated slowly right the way through to Brit pop, when it all just went down the pan.

NP: That was one of the things that shocked me with the Tank Girl book, I never realized that she had a psychedelic, flower-powered, hippy-dippy period. What was that about?

AM: [laughs] I think it was a lot to do with us smoking too much pot really, and watching Easy Rider whilst we were drawing comics. There was definitely a few months where we were getting very stoned and watching Easy Rider or Woodstock the movie or whatever else was made in that era, you know, anything with Jack Nicholson in from the mid-sixties, so that all just filtered through, and then the same as all the original influences, they just sort of disappeared as we moved onto something else with our limited attention span.

NP: She has changed over the years. I guess if she was in her mid-twenties in 1988 that would put her in her mid-forties come 2008.

AM: Yes. Well, I guess the only mention I ever made of her age in the comic was at the beginning of one of the early strips when she says, "I'm 23," and that was when I was 23. So, yes, she'd be exactly the same age as me, and I was 22 ten it all started and I'm 42 now on her 20th anniversary. You don't need to be a mathematician to work that one out, but yes, she would be in her forties.

NP: Would she be wearing sensible shoes by now do you think?

AM: Some of the time, some of the time with her tongue firmly in her cheek. We did actually, when Ashley Wood, the artist who did the comeback series last year, The Gifting, he did the initial publicity poster for it and he drew her looking like a librarian. The picture came through to me and it was just a complete shock. I looked at it and went, "Oh my god. That is truly upsetting because everyone is going to say, 'why isn't she dressed like a punk anymore.'"

Then I thought about it and I remembered a line form the beginning of Darling with Julie Christie. In the movie she [talks] about not rebelling being the new rebellion, and so I wrote a blog about that and put it out, and the backlash was phenomenal. People were so upset. They thought that Tank Girl had changed into this sort of normal working girl, a nine-to-fiver dressed in middle class clothing, and we were almost lynched for it. Absolutely no one had a sense of humor about her. I was sat there going, "this is great," because it got us so much more publicity than if we'd just drawn her wearing what she was wearing when everyone last saw her.

NP: You really know how to ruin people's days.

AM: I know, but originally, like I say in The Cream of Tank Girl, that was what happened first time around, we were always battling other people's preconceived ideas of what she was. If anyone came up to us and went, "Brilliant, she's so much like me," we'd look at the and go, "Right, we're going to make her so much not like you the next time she comes in a comic." So we just kicked back against everything that tried to assimilate her, that tried to claim her or dominate her.

And it worked again with Ashley. I don't know whether he was actually thinking that, or whether he just doodled away and that's what came out but, yes, the backlash had started even before the comic came out. I was just laughing because, you know, it's a comic character, people need to get a bit of perspective really.

NP: Obviously Tank Girl had her Hollywood period. I always knew Tank Girl was going to go Hollywood because she had really white teeth. She was destined to go there. And I was watching the film last night, and what struck me was I couldn't understand what Gwen Stefani was doing running around in a tank. Lori Petty has the Gwen Stefani look, voice and...

AM: Or perhaps the other way around.

NP: I think so, I think so.

AM: Which came first, yeah. Yes, well, you know, people have their influences, however perverse they might be.

NP: In interviews you talk about how you would have liked to put Grange Hill and Benny Hill references into the Tank Girl script...

AM: Well, we were never actually really allowed to touch anything to do with that film. It was actually written into our contract that we weren't to have anything to do with it, but they did sort of wave the script in front of us. I think that quote came from Jamie, and I think it was a bit of artistic license there, but we did want to include references to the stuff that was in the original comic, but, obviously, ninety percent of it would have been lost on a worldwide audience because it was purely Brit stuff. The children's TV shows that we referenced, and the seventies pop bands, would have been lost on an American or even Australian [audience], so yeah, any idea like that we put forward to them was vetoed instantly, and so we soon thought that we wouldn't bother so...

NP: You say that, but since the success of shows like The Office, Ali G, and Little Britain, which is now in the USA, American's have become a lot more tolerant of us Brits twittering on about shit that means nothing to them, and they kind of get a kick out of it on some level, so do you think if it had been written today, you'd have been able to get away with a lot more?

AM: I still don't know. They focus grouped it in front of sixteen year olds. I think with The Office, and stuff like that, you'll get a more high-brow audience, even though it's quite a daft show it will be more lenient. But with your average MTV crowd, probably they'd look at it and go, "sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. This is absolute nonsense, I can't understand it," and they'd maybe be less tolerant of it. But, that said, I didn't think that was the audience we should have been aiming for. It shouldn't have been MTV, it should have been a much more cult film, it should have been much lower budget, and it should have had me writing it.

NP: Would you go for it again if you had the opportunity to do it right?

AM: We don't own the rights. MGM own the rights. We sold the rights. "In perpetuity" I think it says on the contract. MGM/UA own the rights, but I think it's actually been sold on to Sony. Anyway, whoever's got it probably doesn't even know they've got it, and I think the idea of doing another movie might be like throwing good money after bad, but you never know, you never know. I never thought I'd write the comic again -- that happened.

NP: What inspired you to revisit Tank Girl?

AM: What happened was, about seven years ago, Titan, the U.K. publishers, came to us and they said, "we'd like to have a bash at reissuing the Tank Girl stuff," because...there was obviously interest still out there. They said they'd like to reissue all of the original books. I wrote introductions for them and for one of them, because it was a bit of a thin book, I wrote a fake script supposedly that hadn't been used back in the early nineties, just to fill a few pages. It was an unused script with no images or anything, and I wrote it in about a day, and I just sat there and thought, "Well, that was easy." Then I looked at it and thought, "Well, actually I think that's quite good as far as Tank Girl scripts go."

So I suggested to them that we generate some new stuff, and then I started writing some more prosaic stuff rather than scripts, just short stories etc., and that formed the basis of my novel in inverted commas, Armadillo, which came out earlier this year. From then on it all just sort of spiralled. After that I wrote The Gifting, the series, and then punted that around looking for artists, and eventually came up with Ashley Wood, and it all grew from there.

NP: And now you have Rufus Dayglo doing some of the art.

AM: Rufus is pretty much doing all of it now. He's a comic drawing machine, and my savior.

NP: So how did you bump into him?

AM: Well actually, when I first wrote the Armadillo book, I was having trouble getting it published, so I published it myself and sold it on eBay. I was just printing to order. People would order it from me, I'd print it off on my home printer and just package it up and send it out. I sent it out around the world, to Japan and America and Kuala Lumpur, and various places, and Rufus in London, being an avid Tank Girl fan from back in the day, and also a comic art dealer, so he's always looking for stuff like that, he bought a copy off of me. Then he just got in touch with me, and he said, "This is great, what else are you doing?"

I told him that I'd written some comic scripts, and he said, "Well, why don't you do it with Ashley Wood, 'cause Ashley's a big Tank Girl fan." So he actually put me in touch with Ashley. At the time Rufus was working for an animation studio, but eventually he just ended up being the artist. It just seemed so natural. Ashley brought him in to do some layouts on the first comics, and from that we could just see that he had the sense of humor, and he had the style, and it all worked very well. We haven't looked back really. Rufus is just doing so much, he just has so much output. He's a very fast artist, he does two pages a day, so I'm having trouble keeping up with him because I don't write that fast.

NP: Stylistically what do you think Rufus brings to the page?

AM: I mean it's a whole different Tank Girl from what Jamie used to do, but Rufus is like an original punk. He knows loads of punks, not just punks on the street, he knows lots of actual punk bands etc.. He was very good friends with Dee Dee Ramone, who's going to be making an appearance in one of our comics actually, in Skidmarks.

He's a spikey-haired chap. His arms are covered in tattoos of Mick McMahon's Judge Dredd, and you just need to look at him and you know he's got style that is just sort of oozing out of his pores. In the same way Jamie had his particular style, you can tell instantly just by looking at him. He's a very impressive look, and he brings that to it, and his own peculiar sense of humor etc.. He brings the full kit. Everything I need, and also empathy with my scripts and my sense of humor.

NP: What can we expect in the future from you guys?

AM: Well at the moment we're just concentrating solely on standard comics. We're doing a strip in the U.K. in Judge Dredd Magazine, which is called Skidmarks. That's just eight pages a month, but that will be put into comics which will be come out as a mini series which will come out next year. That will be available in the States. Then that will come out in a graphic novel.

Next year we're doing another series with IDW, who did the stuff with Ashley Wood for us, called The Royal Escape. That's scheduled for around late spring I think. Also, we've got a whole new series that we're doing with Titan called Bad Wind Rising, which will be lots of little stories. So really, just a complete blitz on comics.

Also, it's taken a long time to manifest, but with original 200 AD artist Mick McMahon, were doing a six part comic called Carioca which is a whole complete departure from what Tank Girl usually looks like, and usually sounds like. It's a strange hybrid, but all very interesting stuff.

NP: Does Tank Girl appear in all these strips?

AM: It's all Tank Girl. Everything I said, it's all Tank Girl, that's what she's up to until, pretty much Christmas 2009, and maybe a bit beyond that.

NP: You have this book, The Cream of Tank Girl, coming out. Was that a trip to put together? Because you've got early sketches and bits torn off someone's jacket. How was it pulling all that stuff together? Was it all organized? Or did you have to rip the house apart?

AM: Well at lot of it was in my mom's loft, a lot of it was in Jamie's plan chest, and the rest of it was on eBay. I spent about a year just gathering magazines. I had a few copies of Deadline, where it was all originally produced from back in the day, but I've now got a full set of them. I had to get all that together, and I had to rifle through my mum's loft and rescue bits and bobs that were just buried in trunks from 20 years ago. Jamie's stuff as well, I had to go through his archive, if you can call it that, and scan all that in.

It was a labor of love. It took about a year and a half, even though it doesn't look like it, just to actually get enough stuff that was of good enough quality to make a book and then sit down and make notes on all of that, and chronologicalize it. It was a work.

NP: In that process of rediscovering your own life, what did you discover that you'd forgotten you knew, or forgotten you felt, or forgotten you did?

AM: I don't know if I'd forgotten any of it to be honest. I think because I'd spent so long not writing, and doing jobs that I didn't want to do, I dwelt on the stuff that I did love to do, and those memories maybe sort of became larger than life. I don't think any of it was buried in my memory, it all came to the fore very easily.

NP: Did the process of looking back bring back the enthusiasm? Because right now you're probably going through one of your most prolific periods ever.

AM: Yes, I was a lazy sod back in the day. I really didn't do a lot for my bread and butter. Yes, it did, it definitely rekindled my love for the character. Because the last thing that we did, the movie, not that we did it, but it just left such a bad taste in our mouths. We didn't even discuss it, we just knew we had to leave it behind, so that rekindled my enthusiasm, but also becoming a father has made me pull my finger out.

NP: How many children?

AM: I've just got one at the moment, just a little two-year old. A little boy, Rufus.

NP: It's going to be interesting as a dad, because obviously Tank Girl was quite a controversial character, with a potty mouth and some interesting sexual peccadilloes. At what point would you want your son reading this?

AM: It's funny...my nephew had an argument with this kid at school. He said, "My uncle writes Tank Girl." And this other kid, who'd obviously never even heard of Tank Girl, said, "Yeah, well so does mine." He had this big argument with him over whose dad actually wrote Tank Girl. So he told me that, and I though I could just give him a copy of Tank Girl and like sign it and he could take it along.

Then I thought, no, all of this has got swearing in it. So the last series has no swearing in it. Visions of Booga, it has a "bastard" here and a "bitch" there, but it doesn't have any F-words or C-words. So I'd given him the whole collection of that and he's sort of proudly taken it to school to show his mate and say, "Look, there you go." And we name checked him on one of the pages as well, just to really sort of rub it in. So I'll probably show my son that one first to break him in, then wait until he's eighteen and say, "Look, this is what it's really about."

NP: Do you think that's going to influence you as you're doing the Tank Girl stuff moving forward? Are you going to make it more PG-13?

AM: I don't really think about it to be honest. I know that so many people are going to be reading it as well that he just has to join the fray really.

NP: At least he'll learn some decent swear words reading your stuff.

AM: Exactly. He's going to go to school, he's going to learn how to swear, he's going to learn dirty jokes and read pornography behind the bike sheds and do everything that everyone else has done, so really I'm not in denial that a fifteen-year old boy might actually come into contact with some of the nastiness of the world. I'm just hopeful that he'll have my sense of humor about it all.

NP: And swear well.

AM: Well, yes, that's the dream isn't it. You can always hope. [laughs]

NP: So one of the other things I noticed about the book is that it's got a lot of bloody pirates in there. It's a good job I'm partial to pirates post-Johnny Depp. What's that about?

AM: Well there's only two strips. Really, that book, it isn't just Tank Girl, it was all about everything that me and Jamie did in that time, but the majority of it was Tank Girl. We slipped in everything else that were collaborations that we did, like the Ginsberg, Stipe & Kerouac strip that went into ID Magazine, and various other ideas that went nowhere like The 16s, and good pictures. It was just trying to compile everything that was mine and Jamie's collectively because it just hasn't been seen in a long time. The main thrust of it is that Jamie has a lot of people who are very interested in his art, and there's nowhere to see that stuff, how it all manifested, how it all evolved. So I thought it would be an interesting anthropological exercise to put all that in -- plus it fills up the pages.

NP: Are you and Jamie likely to do anything in the future?

AM: Well, Jamie's main collaborations are with Damon and his music now, so probably not, but never say never. He's just off on a different trajectory at the moment. I know he doesn't want to draw comics, but I'm very much into writing comics, so I wouldn't say anything in the near future, but who knows.

NP: Is he cool about you carrying on with Tank Girl?

AM: Absolutely, he's really supportive. He just let me go wild with it. Said get in there and do whatever you want with it really. I think as far as he's concerned he's sort of washed his hands of Tank Girl. Unless somebody actually came along and said, "Right Jamie, do an animated movie of Tank Girl, here's a hundred million," I doubt whether he'd have any interest in it, and he might not even then.

NP: But it still smacks of a generous spirit doesn't it?

AM: It does, yes. He's been very generous indeed, just letting me run wild with it. I can't imagine many other people doing that, but, because Tank Girl was always such a free-for-all in the first place it would be difficult for him to try keep a tight rein on it, or just say no completely. The spirit of Tank Girl runs like a wild horse. It's untamable. I don't think anyone could try and nail it down.

NP: Did Jamie have anything to say about the return of Tank Girl when she was dressed like a librarian?

AM: He laughed at it all basically. That's one of my criteria, my goals with everything I do. My target audience is Jamie. I'm always thinking, "Will Jamie like it? Will Jamie think it's funny?" Usually I keep on a sort of even keel because that keeps her where she always was, because that's how we always used to work. He was thinking, "Will Alan like this?" We were both sniggering at it together. So when I write, I'm always thinking of my old mates and various Tank Girl fans, and predominantly Jamie. Will he think it's funny? And now Rufus as well, because Rufus has to sit there and draw the damn stuff.

The other thing that Rufus loves is the fact that I'm always a little bit behind with my scripts, so he never knows what's going to happen in the next episode. Whereas with a regular job he would get a synopsis, he would get all the scripts up front, he'd read the whole lot, and he's be bored before he was half-way through the first episode. But the stuff we're doing at the moment, he says he loves it because each month he just does not know what's coming next. It's like reading a comic, but very slowly because he's drawing it.

NP: It's funny you say that you get things in late, because I went to the new website and it said, "Coming Summer 2008," and yet it's autumn.

AM: We did have it up by mid-September I think, which is late summer. It's up now though. It's full-fledged now. It hasn't got the animation and stuff that we're planning to do on it but it's definitely there. So go and have a look, because it's blossoming into a nice site.




Thanks to the rather wonderful Rufus Dayglo for the exclusive Tank Girl illustration. Love n' pencils right back at ya!

Alan and Rufus will be doing an exclusive page a month of Tankie for Suicide Girls. The first installment will run November 2. Check back the first Sunday of each month for more.

Zooey Deschanel is as beautiful, funny and charming in person as you all expected. Even though she comes from a family of movie people, her father is legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Zooey seems as down to earth as anyone. I got a chance to talk with her at the Toronto Film Festival where Winter... more

Zooey Deschanel is as beautiful, funny and charming in person as you all expected. Even though she comes from a family of movie people, her father is legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Zooey seems as down to earth as anyone. I got a chance to talk with her at the Toronto Film Festival where Winter Passing, her newest independent film, premiered.

Winter Passing has Deschanel playing a young actor who returns home after a seven-year absence to her famous alcoholic father [Ed Harris] and a house full of strangers that include a religious wandering loner [Will Ferrell] and one of her father’s former students [Amelia Warner].

Check out the official site for Winter Passing

Daniel Robert Epstein: I liked Winter Passing a lot.

Zooey Deschanel: Oh thank you!

DRE: Have you been to the Toronto Film Festival before?

ZD: I have, yeah. My first film, Mumford, was here. It’s exciting to be back. It's a really great festival.

DRE: I’ve been to festivals in New York. It’s nice to be able to leave and go home when you’re done. Toronto is obviously different

ZD: Yeah I know. It is weird once you travel to places for work and you have to navigate your way in a new place and be working at the same time.

DRE: I saw you and Bryce [Dallas Howard] chatting with each other. It’s nice to see people like you interact naturally with one another.

ZD: Right, [laughs] she's a good friend of mine but I haven't seen her in a long time. It's nice when all these people who travel so much gather in one place for a couple days. You end up running into a lot of old friends.

DRE: How did Winter Passing come to you?

ZD: My agents and manager read it and really liked it. They sent it to me and I thought it was really great. It was interesting to read a script that had such a complex female character. It's so rare in this business for a female character to have so much depth. I was really excited about it and I hoped I would get a chance to do it. I wanted to work with [writer/director] Adam [Rapp] because he’s such an interesting and incredible writer.

DRE: Had you seen his stage plays?

ZD: No, I'd never seen anything he'd done.

DRE: I’ve only seen his brother’s acting.

ZD: His brother's just an amazing actor and he had a part in Winter Passing which was really funny. Since we did the movie I’ve read more of Adam’s work and he has such an amazing voice. We're lucky that we got him to do films because up until now he was just doing theatre.

DRE: I saw your sister’s show being advertised everywhere.

ZD: Isn't she wonderful? I was just driving down Pico Blvd and there's my big sister on this huge billboard. It is so amazing and exciting.

DRE: Being from a family of artists like your sister and of course your father, did that help you relate to your role in Winter Passing?

ZD: Obviously the family in Winter Passing is very dysfunctional. She’s an actress and her parents were writers so they treat art as almost another member of the family. There's a line in the film where I say, “This house is one big silent museum of suffering.” It’s that artistic temperament hanging over everybody's head. In that family it is almost more important than family members in some ways.

My own family has always had a very close relationship. I've always been very supported. My work doesn’t really have much to do with my personal relationships but it is exciting to grow as an artist and to be able to do more complex roles. It’s wonderful to have family to talk to who can see things from that point of view.

DRE: Your character is in such an awful emotional state most of the movie, it must be scary to put yourself in that mindset so much. Especially that scene where you walk in on Ed Harris crying.

ZD: Yeah, that was a really intense scene. We were shooting in New Jersey in the dead of winter and we were all really tired. It was the middle of the night and that garage was like the coldest place I've ever been.

DRE: So it wasn’t a set?

ZD: Oh no. It was a real garage. Sets are for movies with money. It was definitely intimidating to work with an actor of Ed’s caliber. I think that informed some of it. Ed was so heartbreaking when he cried and even though this was the difficult job I’ve ever done, Ed is such a generous actor that the scenes with him were almost easy. It was an incredible, fortunate turn of events that allowed me to work with such an incredible actor.

DRE: This could be one of my favorite Ed Harris roles.

What made this character so difficult for you?

ZD: It’s a character that's teetering all the time. It is so much easier to be crying all the time in a role because extreme emotions are much easier than playing someone who’s constantly on the edge of something. In the beginning she's someone who can't feel any emotion and then it slowly gets to the point where she becomes in touch with her own feelings and can actually walk down the street with a guy.

DRE: The sex scenes and nudity were totally relevant too.

ZD: If it's gratuitous it's not interesting but if it informs the movie and it helps explain the character I don't think that there's anything wrong with nudity. But sometimes it seems that there's a lot of gratuitous sex and nudity in films that doesn't help tell the story. I never felt taken advantage of.

DRE: When I spoke with Neve Campbell recently she said that for her first nude scene her director [James Toback] pretty much allowed her to direct herself and he followed her with the camera. Did Adam do anything like that?

ZD: Really it was a discussion. It was great working with Adam, because it was always a dialogue. The ideal situation is a director guiding things along. If I can’t bring in my ideas then why even hire an actor, just get a model. With Adam it was always back and forth. As far as the sex scenes, I think we all just discussed what would be the most appropriate thing.

DRE: If the movie had a different ending when you read it, would you have wanted to be in the movie?

ZD: There was a draft with a different ending. I might have said something about it but I don't do a movie for an ending. I do a movie because the material is good. Though it would have been a shame if the ending was different but I definitely wouldn't have turned it down.

DRE: Did you bring the script to Will Ferrell?

ZD: No! It was pure coincidence. I met Adam at a bar at this hotel and he said “I just met Will Ferrell for the part.” I was really excited because I didn't know who to picture in that role. But when he said Will, I couldn’t think of anyone more perfect. Will is such a good actor and he has such like a heartbreaking quality about him that works perfectly in the movie. I thought it was such a great thing for him to show that side of himself.

DRE: Were you disappointed that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn’t do very well?

ZD: I don't know. All of us going into it were excited because it was this really cool director who makes these incredible music videos; it had all these interesting actors and this great material. We took our best shot at it. I really like the film and I want to please people but in the end, you have to just put it out there and do your best work. I guess I don’t really care what anybody else thinks.

DRE: Have you heard of SuicideGirls?

ZD: I have heard of it, yeah. There was somebody I knew who was working for SuicideGirls. I haven't been on the site, but it sounded really cool.

DRE: The members really like you and the way you put yourself together. Do you do it all yourself?

ZD: I do. I have naturally dark hair and pale skin so people put certain things on me because of the way I look. It’s my job to play with that a little bit as an actor. But there's a certain core persona that you can't change. Obviously my style and my idea of what looks cool is one thing. I wear my own clothes. People always want me to dye my hair for roles but I feel comfortable with my brown hair. It's fun to play with different identities but it's important to me to present myself as I am.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then. His latest... more

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then.

His latest film takes you deeper into his personal world than you may want to go. The Thorn in the Heart is a documentary about Gondry's aunt Suzette and her son Jean-Yves. Filming discussions with them and other family members reveals the Gondry legacy in the film industry, but also some lifelong emotional conflicts. It's like when you're at someone's house for dinner and they start fighting, only you can't leave. Gondry's camera is still there.

The documentary played at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, where Gondry was surely the only person speaking broken English in a French accent. The echo in a large meeting room way too big for a single interview, and made him sound surreal. The subject of his film led to a discussion about his very artistic process, more about the meaning of film than its literal content.

That sort of discussion seems appropriate to Gondry's body of work. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep leave a lot open to interpretation. You could analyze the themes or just marvel at the handcrafted imagery. Even the high concept comedy Be Kind Rewind turned out to be a call to arms for people to pick up cameras and make their own films. The Thorn in the Heart may be a personal exercise or it may speak to everyone, but either way, here is some insight into all the films Gondry has and will make.


Question: Do you think film was in your blood?

Michel Gondry: Oh, in my genes? I think in a way yes. I mean, I never had the ambition to become a director because I didn't really think of it. I didn't think of the director when I was watching a movie, what it took to make the film, until I bought a camera. But, my father was doing a lot of Super8 and my cousin, as you've seen in the film. Being surrounded by this and photo, I was printing my own photo when I was really young, so the technical aspect of it really attracted me. The idea that you can imprint an image with a chemical element on a piece of paper was really magical to me.

Q: Do you think it's something you can be born with, even if you don't grow up around the technique?

MG: It's hard to answer that. I think it's always a combination because you can have it and then if you are exposed to it, then the fact that you have it in you, it captures it and then it reveals it. So you can have it in you and then you're not exposed and you never knew you had it in you. Or, you can not have it in you and then by a succession of coincidences, you end up doing it and being good at it so you do it. So it's very hard. I don't know how I could identify that. I tried to remember. I remember watching Chaplin movies and liking them but never in a sense of "That's what I want to do" until I was in my '20s.

Q: What makes people need to do what they need to do, like you make films and I need to write?

MG: Well, I think it's always a combination of things, coming from inside and coming from outside. As well, there is a great deal of privilege when you can be an artist and do your hobby for a living. You have to really appreciate that because I think if you're not born in the right place in the world, then you're fucked. It's going to be a million times harder. People always say, "Oh, it's amazing. You've worked with the guy I was at school with" and see the world as small. It sound corny, but I say it's small because I don't share it. In an artistic profession, there is a sense where people get really protective to maintain their privilege. They're not really trying to share it and share the creativity with other people. I think everybody should be entitled to express themselves or have creativity or do an activity that makes them happy when they wake up.

Q: So people who work mundane jobs, like offices or factory, is that because they didn't have an interest or didn't know about it?

MG: I think most of them didn't have the opportunity. It's a social class thing. We still work on the same principal where some people have the luck to be born in the right place and some people don't have this luck. The people who are born in a place that makes their life easy, most of them don't try really to help the others or to see the unfairness. On the contrary, they try to maintain their privilege or oppress people who are already oppressed. It's just a system that's always been there and it's sort of terrible. It's what we should think of now instead of thinking how to make more automobiles because for the capitalist world, it thinks the only way that society can function is if you make more things then people buy more stuff and there are more jobs and more money to spend. It doesn't work like that anymore. We're going to have more and more crap. I'm talking a little bit above my head because I'm not really a specialist but I really feel people should look at other activities. People need to have activities I think but the production and fabrication of objects, finding an excuse, creating the desire for the buyer to buy them, it's wrong. Now we're exhausted. We're exhausted this way and should think of that.

Q: Is documentary a truer form of filmmaking to you than fiction narrative?

MG: Yeah, if not more. Some of my favorite filmmakers are making documentaries. I don't see that any lesser than a feature film. It is just amazing. The creation lays in other places. It's in the moment, not as much in the preparation, but in the moment and also the editing of course is very important. I watch mostly documentaries on my TV. I don't like to watch fiction, to be honest.

Q: Have you seen the documentary competition at SXSW?

MG: No, but you know when you go to festivals as a filmmaker, you never watch anything because I'm here doing these interviews. Lately I've seen this documentary that was amazing. It was called 51 Birch Street about this guy that puts a camera on his family and reveals all the story of his mom after she passed away and her father. It was just amazing. I watched it twice and I couldn't believe how enriching it was.

Q: Do you think it's the place of drama, whether fiction or documentary, to ask questions rather than provide answers?

MG: Well, it's not ask questions like you would ask a question to get an answer. You find more of the answer in the question in the sense that I think first of all, you don't want to ask a question if you know the answer. I think it's very important. It's like in science, if you hope too much for a result, then you're going to be biased. Your observation won't be really objective. The real discovery, and there is some intuition or truth that can be found and then proven, but a lot of discoveries are made as side effects. Somebody is looking for some experiment and then discover another property. Like they invented the transistor by complete randomness. I think that's interesting to be in a state of being observant to a point that you're going to capture something you were not looking for.

Q: In journalism they say you should know the answers to the questions you're asking.

MG: I think it's totally wrong. I cannot disagree more with that. I think if you're pressing for an answer, sometimes some journalists are trying to get me to say something and I can tell it right away. Either I'm going to tell it just to make them at peace or I'm not going to do it at all because it pisses me off. I think you go on an interview or an investigation like a conversation. You have to be curious of the person you're talking to. If you're not ready to be surprised then what's the point? You could write your article and not ask the person. Maybe you're hoping to go into some territory and discover something but you have to be ready to be completely surprised or taken by surprise. That's the beauty of it.

Q: Is that the difference between journalism and drama, that you can be more inquisitive in drama?

MG: Yeah, but you work with a screenplay. Or it depends, because some people like Mike Leigh who is one of my favorite directors, doesn't write a screenplay. He has a structure and he builds a character with his actor. A lot happening in front of the camera is not planned. There are some other directors who do a movie that's great and everything is carefully planned, but you have to have a lot of time to be able to write all the details of something that must look like life because it's very complex.

Q: I'm including documentary as drama, as a dramatic way to portray real life.

MG: Yeah, well, but when you say dramatic, it's some way to provoke emotion when you watch it for instance? I think if you connect with it, if people reveal things that they were not necessarily willing to say, not by manipulation but just by asking questions and asking what you would be shy to ask, I think that may be embarrassing a little bit but things you really wonder. I think if you do that then people reveal themselves in a way that's dramatic, meaning that's going to interest people.

Q: Has your family always known that they could be the inspiration for your personal films?

MG: Maybe not. It's hard to tell how they think. They encountered so much. Of course by doing that, I show it to them so it's sort of comforting probably. If I have any success, they are sort of part of it because they've been supportive all the time, so they're a part of it anyway but to show it, to officialize it probably gives them some pride.

Q: You weathered a lot of problems on The Green Hornet. Why was was it so hard to make?

MG: It's a little bit cursed. Even the one with Bruce Lee had just one season and was cancelled, so it doesn't have a history of success, which could be scary to say but it's challenging. It's interesting. That was what was proposed to me and I was interested in doing it, so I had a choice. I could have done it or done something else. It has not been a straight road. It's been very windy.

Q: Is it a relief to be done principal photography?

MG: Yeah, of course. Now I see all the problem. I see, "Oh, I should have shot it this way." I wish I had known, but it's always like that.

Q: Do you look at the comic book movies like The Dark Knight and Watchmen to see where the style is going?

MG: It doesn't fit very much in that style. I respect it but it's sort of a caricature of filmmaking. I always thought comic book being a much lighter art form should not be depending on film but should be leading film and be more creative. I see more of those comic books as overly filmic. Dark Knights and these serious knights are not my cup of tea. I like comic books but more like Crumb or the independent ones. I don't like genres that have so many codes. I don't like zomie movies, I don't like vampire movies. I know a lot of people like that because they're sort of in control of society with rules. Really it's not for me. I don't like for instance games that you play like Monopoly and such, because it's not creative to me to have so many rules.

Q: We're wondering what the Michel Gondry take on an action movie would be.

MG: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good I think.

The Thorn in the Heart is now playing in select theaters.