It's impossible to pin down Clive Barker, the man who created the iconic Pinhead character. The multi-faceted and irrepressible filmmaker, video game designer, artist, and author travels through different mediums and genres with the kind of ease that a shapeshifter might exchange forms. Take, for example, his current diverse slate of creative output. He's recently released anniversary editions of two of his most popular novels: Weaveworld and Cabal, which respectively reside towards opposite ends of the fantasy/horror spectrum (something that Barker envisions as a boundaryless continuum). Meanwhile he's writing his next adult novel and applying paint to canvas for two more installments of his popular Abarat all ages adventure, which is told in words and pictures. A new comic series, New Testament, came out earlier this year, which Barker produced with Mark Miller, who also serves as his editor and the Vice President of his production company, Seraphim. And starting October 19, Barker is presenting an art exhibition at Culver City's Century Guild in association with the gallery's founder and owner Thomas Negovan. Entitled Grand-Guignol, the group show will feature Barker's paintings alongside other works he's curated with Negovan. In addition, later this month the Beyond Fest will present a special screening at Hollywood's Egyptian Theater of the Cabal Cut of Night Breed, which sees Barker's cult classic film restored to a form that more closely resembles his original vision and the book upon which it was based.
On a recent edition of SuicideGirls Radio, the British born and internationally acclaimed master of multiple light and dark arts joined us by phone from his Beverly Hills home to talk about the varied proverbial irons he's keeping warm with his creative fire. A transcript of our 30 minute conversation is below. [Miller and Negovan also joined us in-studio - you can view the full two-hour show here.]
Nicole Powers: I've wanted to speak to you for such a long time, ever since I read Weaveworld, which is one of my all time favorite books. [For those that aren't familiar, the book's about a mythical world that's woven into a carpet.] Most people know you for your horror worlds through Candyman and Hellraiser, but Weaveworld was such a beautiful fantasy novel.
Clive Barker: It's the 25th anniversary this year of the book. We've got a beautiful special edition just come out... But you say fantasy and horror...I think that there's a point where you don't really need to make these distinctions anymore. You just simply say this is imaginative work - whether it's paintings, or writing, or films. Always in my horror work there was an element of the fantastic...I've always preferred to write something that had a supernatural edge to it, and there are some dark things in Weaveworld aren't there?
NP: Yes, for definite.
CB: So they shade into one another is what I think I'm saying. The horror, at its most supernatural end becomes fantastical, and the fantasy at its most horrific end becomes horror.
NP: Similarly, when you create, there doesn't seem to be a line, it seams that the art and the words flow together...
CB: As a culture we seem to be very much into pigeonholing things, and I've never been able or wanted to do that. Jean Cocteau is a huge influence on me. Cocteau was a filmmaker, an artist, a play write, a poet, an opium user...
NP: A fully rounded individual.
CB: And not the opium, but the rest of it is stuff I've done and will continue to do. I think it's self-limiting to say I'm just a writer or I'm just a filmmaker. Filmmakers, for instance, very often are very good artists, they just tend not to push all the way to the gallery. They don't go all the way to having their work in a gallery setting. I've chosen to do that because when I did the Abarat books, I illustrated them with 800 oil paintings and they're big oil paintings. I realized that the only way to really show them beside in the books obviously - you know, one of them is 25 feet long - [was] in a gallery setting.
NP: Also, you're presenting them in a book, but paintings are very much three-dimensional things.
CB: Absolutely, and getting close to a painting, particularly for a younger audience who perhaps don't get to look at oil paintings very much - though Abarat is written for all ages...It's been wonderful seeing the younger audience actually look at the paintings as objects, actually be able to go into an exhibition space and look at them. And it's kind of nice having a tyke that's only four feet tall in front of a picture that's twelve feet tall. It's actually nice to feel that the painting is almost embracing them. I would have liked it as a kid - I don't know who it would have been, some writer that I admired - if I'd been able to look at their visuals as well, if I'd been able to get close to a painting. Because I think paintings speak very intimately, sometimes more even than words.
NP: I remember Weaveworld, back in the day, was marketed as a young adult book.
CB: Yeah, I think those distinctions again are pigeonholes, you know.
NP: Exactly, because I don't think young people like being talked down to.
CB: No, no.
NP: That's one of the worst things that you can do. And when you read these heavy-handed books for kids...
CB: Ugh! Laborious!
NP: It's no wonder that kids don't like reading these days because the "young adult" stuff is insulting to them.
CB: I think it true with movies too. I think movies for kids are often pitched at such a low level - I would have been insulted by them...We should call the kids to their higher selves, not speak down to them.
NP: So how does your process work? Does the idea for a book come first, which you then flesh out in a painting...
CB: Actually the reverse. Abarat did not exist until I started to paint it. I painted it into being, if you will. This is true, though it sounds preposterous; it was only after 200 paintings that I realized that I was painting a world.
NP: You didn't catch on after the first 99?
CB: No, you know, I didn't. It's an embarrassment. I realize it's embarrassing but I was actually painting erotica at the time. I started to just diverge from the erotica to stuff that was very, very different, and sometimes very dark, sometimes rather comical. I realized I was not really painting erotica swiftly, but I didn't realize that...Something had happened in my past 10 years before; I'd gone to my then publishers, HarperCollins, and asked to write something that would resemble roughly Narnia, and they'd said no. They'd said no repeatedly actually. In the intervening 10 years I kept going to them and they said no, no, no because they were making a lot of money from the other books I was writing.
NP: I want to go beat up the executive that said that to you.
CB: [laughs] So do I!
NP: Because one of the reasons that I read Weaveworld was because I finished all the Narnia books and I was looking around for something similar. I read Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series and then I read Weaveworld, and knowing that you wanted to go further down that route - that makes me so angry.
CB: The first book I wrote for a younger audience was called The Thief of Always, though again it plays for everybody, and I had to sell that to Harper Collins for a dollar. The only way they would agree to publish it was if there was minimum risk for them. So I said, OK, I've written this thing, I love this thing, you can have it for a dollar - just put the book out there.
NP: This is making me so mad. I want that executive's name and address. I'm going round to his house, I'm going to sort this shit out.
CB: But you know it isn't a single executive, it's a system. There's an entire mindset at work here, which is about diversity... Thomas, for instance, invited me to be a part of his gallery, he knows and loves that I'm somebody that is involved in many media. Most people are not happy with that. My cinematic career as a director has been three movies long only, because I've got lots of other things to do. And I was always told by my agent at CAA that I wouldn't get very far because I couldn't commit to movies as my real job.
NP: [laughs]
CB: I know, I know, that made me mad for the same reasons that you've just been made mad. It's the idea of being picked up, put in a little hole, and told, OK, that's where you belong and if you won't play by staying in that little hole then we won't play with you.
NP: These people have no business being anywhere near artists.
CB: Abso-fucking-lutely, well said. Absolutely.
NP: And the fact that the executive told you you weren't allowed to go in the direction of C.S. Lewis and Narnia, that's making me mad, because in the same way C.S. Lewis with Narnia explored spirituality, a lot of your work does too.
CB: Yep.
NP: I know there's been a lot of speculation as to whether you're a Christian or not, and some of these things can't be answered with a simple yes or a no...
CB: No, but you go to a good point; Part of this again goes back to the sorry question of pigeonholing. A while ago, fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Sacrament,which by its very title has a religious dimension to it. Its hero is a gay man who is a photographer of wildlife that is about to be driven to extinction. He is attacked by a polar bear in the very early part of the novel while photographing polar bears - which are of course are on their way to extinction - and in his coma goes back to his childhood in Yorkshire, England and a confrontation with two supernatural beings who were intimately connected with the business of driving living things to extinction.
When the novel came out it was almost ignored by the press, except obviously by the gay press who would have liked there to be no animals in it, just keep it about the gay stuff, and there were a few animal lovers who wished there wasn't the gay stuff in it. Now, over the years it's done well, but it's sold perhaps only half of what Weaveworld would sell for instance. Now, all right, there's some gay sex in there, but there's only like five pages in the whole novel of that.
The point is, I'm a gay man and I'm talking about my own sexuality. At that point AIDS was even more of a problem than it is now, so that was something I wanted to deal with. Because I felt my own sub-species, gay men, were certainly in Reagan's time being driven to extinction, because Reagan never cared. And it's set in Yorkshire because my own cousin who lived in Yorkshire - lived in exactly the place where I'd described the hero's life - died of AIDS. So it was intimately attached to my own life in so many ways. The reason I raise that subject is because religion, or the larger question of just metaphysics, the larger question of why are we here. You know, the things we ask as kids, and that we are in fact still asking as adults. I'm 61 in two days time, and I'm almost an adult...
NP: These are the questions we instinctively ask as kids, and as adults sometimes forget to ask.
CB: Well, we start asking them at 3 o'clock in the morning... Right? They're what I call "cold sweat" questions. You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and you go, hell, what am I here for? How can I have forgotten to ask these questions? The fact is that kids ask them because they're actually completely natural questions to ask. And the reason we ask them is as valid when we're 61 as it is when we're 16.
NP: So, for you, tackling subjects that weren't popular with your publishers...
CB: Yes, there's a pattern here, isn't there?
NP: At what point in your career do you feel the power shifted, and you were just able to do what the fuck you liked, whether your publishers liked it or not.
CB: I don't think I've ever got there. Mark will testify to how many struggles we continue to have with publishers who really want things a different way. I mean, we probably don't have time within this context to entertain you with stories of bad editing but I actually asked Mark, who's a man I respect hugely to edit my books in place of somebody within the publishing world because he's infinitely smarter and I respect him a lot more than I do the people who tried to edit my books. As a consequence, I think we got some bloody fine books out of it.
It would be comical if I was to show you Abarat III for instance, as it was edited by my publishers. You would either pull out your hair or laugh. Because the book took me two years to write and there's probably forty remarks in the whole thing. They're one-word remarks, [like] "Yikes!" It's terrifying, because that is two years of my life. I doubt whether the person involved took two hours to actually scan this book. She didn't read it, she scanned the book, and to me that's disrespectful.
Back in the day, when Weaveworld came out, there were editors around who read the words, who understood where the full stops [periods] and the semicolons should go. And this is not, by the way, anything to do with age, because most of my editors who have really let me down in the last 10 years have been my age or older. It's not about that, it's about the pressure that they're under within the publishing system. I don't blame them for that, the horrendous pressure to actually succeed. If you've got a Harry Potter on your list, it doesn't matter about the rest of the books...It's all about money.
NP: But you can't predict where success is going to come from...
CB: No, no, you're right...The book they gave a dollar for is [printed] in forty-five languages.
NP: And who knows whether the books you would have written had you not been pushed to write the ones they wanted you to write...
CB: I never did. I never did. I've never, ever once worked for the man. I've never once done something I didn't want to do. Mark will testify to that. We've gone down bloody roads many times, but I've never made a movie I didn't want to make, I've never written a book I didn't want to write - even though, and this will entertain you... When I took Sacrament to my editor he said, I'll be in Los Angeles next week, we need to sit and have lunch. So we went to a really fancy restaurant and he sat down and said look, obviously the book's well written, there's one simple thing you can do: make the protagonist straight and we'll publish it.
NP: What?
CB: And I had conniptions, I had conniptions...
NP: I'm having conniptions. I cannot believe that came out of a publisher's mouth. I mean, what century was that in?
CB: Well, no, it was a man who then was probably touching forty and was therefore younger than I by ten years or so back then, and was very smart, but was entirely driven by market pressures. Honestly, all he cared about was the fact that a book with a gay protagonist - they never even wanted me to be out in the first place - there was huge problems...
NP: I guess that's the difference between art and content. With art you're following your muse and with content you're just fulfilling a commercial demand.
CB: And there's a lot more of this commercial demand being followed isn't there? Particularly in this town, than there should be. I mean, I can, hand on heart, say I've never written anything I didn't want to write. When they came to me and asked me if I wanted to write a sequel to Peter Pan...Now Peter Pan is one of my favorite books and I said absolutely not. Hell will freeze over before I write a sequel to Peter Pan. They said, but we thought you liked it, and I said, that's why I won't write a sequel to it.
NP: You say that, but the SyFy channel did a really good prequel to Peter Pan Neverland. I didn't think I was going to like it, but I did.
CB: Yeah, I saw it. I agree, it was better than we expected.
NP: It was quite clever the way they tied in why Peter Pan flew and why he never grew up.
CB: Yes, but I tell you, if somebody writes a prequel to Weaveworld after I'm dead, I will be back. I will be back.
NP: You will be back to haunt them.
CB: Haunting is a kind word. I will haunt them with a machete.
NP: [laughs] You're a man that knows how to haunt people.
CB: Yeah, they will be very, very sorry they put pen to paper.
NP: Which of your characters will the ghost of you look like?
CB: Pinhead. I'll be back with that immaculate English accent and the face full of pins.
NP: And you'll be pulling pins out of your skull and putting them in the eyes of your enemy.
CB: Exactly...They'll be sorry.
The Grand-Guignol exhibition, which is presented by Clive Barker, opens on October 19 and runs through November 2 at the Century Guild in Culver City, CA. The group exhibition features period works from 1880-1920, plus new works by Clive Barker, Jeremy Bastian, Matthew Bone, Steve Kilbey and more. For more information visit: CenturyGuild.net.
Barker's latest comic series, Next Testament, which is written by Clive Barker and Mark Miller and features the art of Haemi Jang, is available now via Boom! Studios.
The 25th Anniversary Edition of Weaveworld is available now via Earthling Publications, and a very limited 30th Anniversary Edition of Cabal (the book upon which the film Night Breed is based) is available now via Fiddleblack Ltd.
The director's Cabal Cut of Night Breed, which features over 45 minutes of long lost additional footage, will be screened at the closing night gala of the Beyond Fest at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, CA on October 26.
For more on Clive Barker visit his Beautiful Moment all ages site and his main Revelations site.
