Gerhard Hormann interview with Clive Barker
1996
| When Clive Barker visited Amsterdam in April to attend the
13-th Festival of Film Fantastique he was interviewed by Dutch journalist Gerhard Hormann (35). Parts of it were published in the weekly magazine Aktueel (issue 20, the 9-th of May 1996), but here's the full-lenght, unedited conversation. Hormann is a horror/thriller-writer himself. His first novel Sporen Van Angst (Traces Of Fear) will be published in September. He and Barker have the same editor in Holland (uitgeverij Luitingh-Sijthoff). Gerhard Hormann: we met before, eight years ago... Clive Barker: 'My God! My God! Well, hello again.' GH: you seem to be a lot more famous than you were then. CB: 'I don't know... GH: well, I get only fifteen minutes this time! CB: (laughs aloud) 'It's all down to the time, right!? Well, where should we begin?' GH: I've seen Lord Of Illusios this morning. But there is also a director's cut around? CB: 'Yes, there's also a director's cut. It will be shown on the festival. It's about 12 and a half minutes longer. It contains a lot more dialogue, a lot more about Harry, a lot of background-story, a lot about the Cultists and how they've become what they are. We watch them murder all they families before they return to join Nix. We have a scene between Harry and Swan - the magician - in which they talk about what Nix's appeal was. Why people were so interested in Nix. So a lot of it is what I should call psychological stuff. United Artists wanted a more brutal, a more effects-driven movie. So what they had me remove - and they said that if I didn't do it, they would - was material that tended to be about character. I then said I would only do it, if I could put it all back for the laser-version, the video and for film-festivals like this. I like both versions. I'm not saying I don't like the version you saw this morning. It's still a narrow 1 hour and 45 mintes of my movie. It's just that I think the other version is psychologically richer. It's a slightly less conventional horror-movie that way. The version you saw is much more in your face; there's less moments where people are just talking. And I think that's a reflection to some extent of the way modern audiences are. Modern audiences want action.' GH: they don't wanna think? CB: 'No, they don't want to think. They want spectacle. They want effects. They want the rollercoaster-ride. And Lord Of Illusions delivers that to them. I think the director's cut puts more of the thinky stuff in it. And that's a problem for some audiences, unfortunately. I think it's regrettable that we've come to that, but we have...' GH: but are those people gonna read you books? CB: 'Very interesting question. There's no real way of ever knowing that. Clearly there's an overlap between my readership and the people who see the movies. But any information I have of that is purely anecdotal. It's people I would meet at a convention or whatever. I mean, I'm assuming that a number of the people I meet today or tomorrow, will also have read the books, or some of them. It's a curious phenomenon. The books are in 23 languages, they sell consistently, they are what publishers call good backlist-books. Books I published 12 years ago are still in print and are still selling reasonable numbers of copies. Whether those readers are also renting Hellraiser? It's impossible to really guess. There's an overlap, of course. But I also think that for certain viewers of a 2 hour horror-movie the 900 pages of Everville or the 1000 pages of Imajica is tough! I think that's hard. I'm just enlighted there's still such al large audience for big books. It's very gratifying that there are still readers who will say: oh, 900 pages, cool!' GH: during the years you have invented some very original ways of having people killed. how do you do that? is that a question of sitting behind your typewriter and making it up? CB: 'Well, for Lord... I wanted to do a big set-piece death as part of the illusion. So the swords dropping on Swan, I knew it had to be just real fun to watch. We go to magic shows. And there's something very morbid about magic shows. They have this strange, morbid undertone to them. When you think about what you're watching, when you're watching an illusionist... You're watching: oh, he's cutting the woman in half! Or: he's tied to this machine and the swords are coming down, or whatever it's gonna be. I think that when we watch David Copperfield or one of those large scale illusionists, there's always the suspicion - the hope, even - that something will go wrong. That something terrible will happen. That this time they'll try and stick the woman together, ans she won't stick. So what I wanted to do with Lord... was doing a big magic show that goes awfully wrong. And it had to be a really big trick. So that was fun to try and create. It all happende in practical as well. We actually rented this big theatre in Los Angeles, we set up the whole gag, the swords really dropped, and there was an audience of a 1000 people watching it. I mean, it was fun to do. So those things will always interest me. But in the 8 years since we met last, I haven't written any horror-books. I've been writing Fantasy-books and children's books. So I haven't been doing so much creative killing lately. I mean, it hasn' t been a very important part of my life. But once in a while, when a movie requires it, you still come up with someting interesting. You hope.' GH: is there a reason for moving away from the blood and the gore? CB: 'I just felt I had done it. I had done what I could, I had written what I thought was interesting and imaginative, and then it was time to go on and do something fresh. The last thing I'd ever wanna do was to become bored with the process of writing. So that constantly means - for me - that you have to refresh yourself. To ask yourself: how can I restimulate myself? What can I make this time? If someone would come up to me and say: we're gonna give you an awful lot of money, but you have to write horror-novels the rest of your life, I'd prefer to say: keep your money, 'cause I only get one life, I only get one chance to do this. Let me do what my heart asks me to do... I was fed up with writing that stuff. It was time to do someting different.' GH: does the fact you make up other worlds mean that you are not completely happy with the world we live in? CB: 'I'm completely dissatisfied with the world in which we live, but that's not really why I write other world-fiction. I do that to reflect on this world. I think if Fantasy-fiction is of any use as oppossed to simply being escapism, it has to be because it makes you look back on our world and see it with new eyes. Science fiction can do that as well. Something it makes the world in which you live look totally different. Fantasy-fiction can liberate our imagination into realizing who we are, and who we could be. It doesn't have to be a simple escape. It can be more.' GH: why are you so dissatisfied with the world? CB: '... Shall we just turn on the news?' GH: okay, that's good enough an answer... Other question: you've written a story in which there are demons that can actually take the shape of one's biggest fear - terrata they're called, I believe. If such a demon appeared in front of you, how would it look like? CB: 'Well, shall we start with Pat Buchanan... I think, in all seriousness, the things I fear in the world right now have a political face. They have a face of reason. The politician can sit before you and tell you very calmly that all people with AIDS should be put in camps. That's a terrifying spectacle. We're at a very - this is true for America, I can't obviously say what's it like here - but I think in America we're in a very dangerous place right now, because there's huge sociological dissatisfaction. I use that word, because it's more than just economic dissatisfaction. It's about the fact that people don't believe in anything anymore. The people that stand up and say: here's what I do believe in, will have an audience around them in 5 seconds. Even if what they're saying, what they believe in, is a terrifying and terrible thing. Like, what Buchanan was proposing. Or the Christian Coalition who have their finger on mister Dole's shoulder, there's no question about that. Those guys, the guys who smile sweetly and talk about profound social repression, those are the people that scare me.' GH: do you think then that there's maybe room again for a dictator like Hitler? CB: 'I am amazed about how easy it is to forget holocausts. The rise of neo-nazi's is really terrible. Holland seems to be a much more sensible country. But still you must be aware that it's everywhere around you...' GH: the terrata-question was sent to me via e-mail by someone from Canada.... CB: 'That's very cool!' GH: you seem to be omnipresent on the internet... CB: 'Yeah, we have The Web Of Lost Souls, several unofficial ones as well. Er... this is all very technical. I don't have a typewriter, much less a computer. Everything I do is handwritten. My boyfriend and I, we have two can-openers in my house. One is an electrical can-opener for my boyfriend, the other is a mechanical one for me. I'm very bad with that stuff. So, I admire those people... There's a fellow called Nick Owen, who works at Oxford, who came to me and said: I want to set up a web-site. I said: cool! What's a web-site? (laughs) He then set up this Web Of Lost Souls that has won all these awards. He's done an amazing job!' GH: that means you have seen it yourself? CB: 'Sure, I've seen it. If you put a computer in front of me right now and told me to go to it, I wouldn't have the first idea how to get there. But I know it exists. And it is and extraordinary way to communicate... I mean, there's no question about that. It's a great way of putting people who are fans in contact with each other. Like you are getting an e-mail question from an other part of the world... Tremendous! By the way, how did your e-mail correspondentt know you were gonna talk to me?' GH: I contacted him. I found his name and address on the WOLS-site, and asked him if there was one question he'd always wanted to ask you... CB: 'Ah, that's very clever... I think that sort of thing is going on all the time now. I think that people are communicating more and more. I think 44.000 people visited The Web Of Lost Souls last week. Every now and then somebody shows me what's on it, and I think: wow! And we were able to do some good thing with it. We auctioned a painting of mine on the web-site for AIDS. There were all those people from all over the world able to do a bidding. It put money in the pocket of a charity that was great. So, those kind of things are fun things. But ask me how it works... and I haven't got a clue.' GH: last question. would you dare to stand in front of a mirror and say Candyman five times? CB: 'Yes, I would, because I've done it. Somebody said rtecentleey to me: would you do that? And I said: yes. I'm not a very superstitious person at all. But Ii don't know if I would stand in front of a mirror and say Pat Buchanan five times... (laughs very loudly)' GH: thank you very much CB: 'Thank you!' After the interview Clive Barker mentioned the ongoing Hellraiser-cyclus to some of his German fans. He said: 'They're talking about making another one now - a fifth one - which I won't have anything to do with. And to be honest I'm kinda fed up with the whole Hellraiser-thing. It would be nice if it all stopped right now. But I think that - unfortunately - they're gonna continue to make these movies until they no longer make profit, you know. They'll be making a new one sometime next year.' One of them said he had read 'this crazy interview on the Internet talking about you constructing a dungeon down in your cellar'. According to Clive this is utter nonsense. 'Oh my God, I don't know where the hell that came from. I just wished I had one! The trouble with the Internet is that anybody can say just about anything. You don't know where they live... But it's just a lie. I definitively don't have a dungeon in my cellar.' The fans wanted to know why he is so succesful in Tjechoslowakia. He seems to be selling as many books as Stephen King over there. Clive answered: 'Right! How do you know about that? I didn't realize I was so succesful over there, until they sent me all these editions... It's great, but I can't really explain it.' Finally, what music does he listen to at home? Clive took some time to think about that question. 'Er... what have I been listening to lately... Dead Can Dance, Diamanda Galas.... er... but I also listen to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. I paint listening to music like Nine Inch Nails. But I wouldn't ever think of writing listening to it. I think that would be too much of a distraction!' |