Petey & Ginger: Interview with Ada Bligaard Søby

review_PeteyandGinger2
Petey and Ginger

Format: VOD

Release date: 1 October 2012 (Denmark)

Director: Ada Bligaard Søby

Writer: Ada Bligaard Søby, Dunja Gry Jensen

Denmark 2012

58 mins

Danish filmmaker Ada Bligaard Søby makes beautiful, oblique, rock’n’roll Super 8 documentaries that look at big issues in Western society from an individual perspective. In the brilliant Petey and Ginger, she examined the economic crisis from the viewpoint of two of her American friends, San Francisco-based Petey, former bassist of Thee Oh Sees, and New York fortune-teller Ginger, both of whom have worked in the sex industry.

Virginie Sé;lavy talked to the director about suicidal Santas, losers and winners, and the magic of Super 8.

Virginie Sé;lavy: Petey and Ginger is part of a trilogy, is that right?

Ada Bligaard Søby: Yes, it’s part of a trilogy with Black Hearts and American Losers, about my friends in America. American Losers is about two people who are really amazing but haven’t done well in life. The movie reflects on what a loser is and what a winner is. I come from a very academic background, my parents are very educated, but I’m not very academic, so I felt like a loser. And I’m always attracted to the people who are not doing so well, because they take more risks and it’s more fun. So I made that film because American society is so bent on making money. Black Hearts is about some friends of mine who got married when I was living in New York. I filmed their wedding in Super 8 and gave it to them as a wedding present. And 10 years later they got divorced, so it’s their divorce story – why do people get divorced, why does love fail. I’m using 9/11 as a background for the story as I was in New York then, because 9/11 was also the American dream that crumbled. All those immigrants going to America to do things in a new way, because they’re not welcome where they come from, so they want to start a new world and a new society. That’s the same when you get married: you feel like you’re going to conquer the world your way, and then it collapses, and whose fault is it?

Petey and Ginger is available on VOD in Europe and North America. For more information visit www.peteygingerfilm.com.

The film is explicitly about the economic crisis, but it seems that it’s just as much about America.

It’s about America, but it’s also about the Western world and how we are fucking ourselves up. We’re going to be finished soon, I think. Petey and Ginger don’t know each other, but what they had in common was a certain chaos in their lives and the fact that they were not part of the rat race, they were tagging along, struggling along. They didn’t own anything so they didn’t lose anything in the financial crisis. But it trickled down and touched them in very strange ways, and I found that very inspiring.

You use Super 8 as well as still photographs, which makes everything look very melancholy and beautiful, including dereliction and poverty. It seems like you find a beauty in America, but you also feel a little sad and distant from it.

Yes, definitely, I couldn’t have said it better. The slums are beautiful. They’ve got soul. But it’s also super sad. If I could I’d look at everything through Super 8. Because it lifts up the ordinary to another level. But that’s impossible.

You film America from an outsider’s perspective. What is the thing that fascinates you the most about the place?

Because I come from a Scandinavian place, I meet these people and they seem a lot like me, but the platform on which we have to build our lives is very different. Here it’s very safe and secure and stable. If you have a baby it doesn’t cost you anything. If you’re unemployed they help you. Over there, circumstances are very different and that makes people feistier. Those extreme conditions bring out some things in people that are very creative and beautiful and vibrant that you don’t find here, because things can’t go that bad, so people don’t make that much of an effort. I’m fascinated by that effort that Americans have to make to help other people, because they might need that help back to develop their talent.

For you, what were the most interesting things that Petey and Ginger said about the financial crisis?

I found it interesting that when she was working as an escort, Ginger could feel within her clients that something was wrong, because she’s so intuitively intelligent. She could pick up that something was not right. These people think they’re partying, but they’re not partying. And with Petey I think it’s hilarious that he’s selling dildos and shipping fantasies to the world, and meanwhile the world economy is a fantasy, and money is a fantasy – money doesn’t really exist.

That’s another thing they have in common: they both work or have worked in the sex industry, in more or less unusual ways. Was that also something that you were interested in exploring?

It’s connected to the fact that when you’re in America you have to work with what you’ve got. And sometimes you might end up in something that is considered dirty, but that’s what you can get at that point in time. In San Francisco there’s no film industry because it’s in Los Angeles, but there’s a huge porn industry. So many people work in porn, and there are also many people who deal weed because there are a lot of weed farms. And that might be illegal, but that’s what’s going on. I like that casual approach to things that people may look down on. I have seen that a lot in America. People have to trudge in the dirt, or the reality of things. And the reality of things is that a lot of people want escort girls and a lot of people order porn.

Ginger became a fortune teller after working briefly as an escort girl (which she did for unusual and fascinating reasons). Were the people you filmed real clients?

They were friends. We gave them a free reading and asked if we could film them. We made sure they were all dudes because we thought it was interesting that she used to provide one kind of service, and now she’s providing another kind of service. It’s all about feeling good, it’s all about solutions to your problems.

With Petey, you could have made a documentary about him and Thee Oh Sees.

I wasn’t interested in making a band film. I would have liked to make more of the complexities of being in a band, but it was very hard because there are so many layers to everything and so many things to talk about. You have to keep a focus when you’re doing a film like this. And also because they’re like a family – they were a family, they’re not together anymore, Petey has left the band – it was a hard environment to break into. They let me in but they were very aware of the camera and what that means. When you enter a family like that there are many things that are going on that they might not want revealed to the outside world. I was a big fan of their music and of all of them, they’re all my friends. But there would have been too many angles if I’d done a band film.

The music is obviously really important in the film and you’ve got a great soundtrack.

When I worked in San Francisco I became friends with all these bands. There’s a big music scene that is really amazing. I bought a lot of records while I was there and then I asked if I could use the songs. For New York, the bands I wanted I couldn’t afford, because New York is always so hip.

Do you still have the same relationship with your friends?

Yes, I have an even better relationship with them. They really trusted me and they were very brave. But being there with a camera sucks. When you’re making a film, you’re the observer, you’re trying to make your friends talk about things, you’re manipulating them. But I think I’m so bad at manipulating people that they just look at me and go, OK we’re going to have to help her.

What did they think of your films?

I think they liked them. American Losers was tough because I used the word ‘loser’ without knowing how hard it was. Kevin, one of the characters, said to me, ‘you’ve got it so wrong that you got it right’. It was really tough to call someone a loser in America. But I had to have that title to have an effect. Maybe my friends were a little sad about that but I think they understood that I didn’t mean to harm them. When you make art you’re not supposed to please, you’re supposed to push, otherwise why do it?

One of the most memorable images in Petey and Ginger is that of Santa Claus about to commit suicide from a rooftop. How did you get that?

On one of my research trips to San Francisco I went to Petey’s house, and I found this picture in his old photos of Santa Claus trying to commit suicide. He told me the story of how he was walking in the Mission in San Francisco and he saw that situation, and I thought it was the perfect image for that film. So I recreated it. I got someone to wear a Santa Claus outfit on a roof.

Why did you think it was perfect for the film?

Because Santa Claus is this guy who doesn’t have any problems, he has presents coming out of his arse, there are no limits to his goodness or his willingness to share what he has. And there’s nobody asking where he gets the presents from, so it’s the perfect picture for the financial crisis and people’s relationship to money, to the environment, to everything. There are no limits – I want more, more, more, and I’m not going to think about the consequences.

The film is subtitled ‘A testament to the awesomeness of mankind’.

My friend Brian came up with this phrase and I thought it was perfect. It’s a celebration of people – some people doing the right thing. I feel that Petey and Ginger have figured it out from the beginning: there’s no free lunch, there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no gold coming out of the river, you have to work for things, and you have to be honest, and you have to try and understand things. They’re smarter than everybody else.

It feels like it could be the subtitle to all of your films. Does that define your approach to filmmaking?

I don’t know. I’ve stopped making films because I was so worn out. I think my old approach is not going to work anymore, I have that feeling that something else is going to have to enter the scene. I will do something in a new way.

Interview by Virginie Sé;lavy

Watch the trailer for Petey and Ginger:

Petey Dammit’s Film Jukebox

Petey Dammit
Petey Dammit

Petey Dammit is an American daredevil who became an icon in the 1970s for his incredible motorcycle stunts. Some of his most famous include riding through fire walls, jumping over rattlesnakes, flying over Greyhound buses, and nearly dying from a launch over the fountains in front of Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. Before becoming a stuntman, he had a greatly varied career in underground music, including such bands as Big Techno Werewolves, Dylan Shearer, The Birth Defects and Thee Oh Sees. He broke 37 bones and one guitar during his lifetime. He is also one of the main characters in Ada Bligaard Søby’s documentary Petey and Ginger. Below Petey picks the 10 films that have most affected him.

1. The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997)
This movie centres around the Kerrigans, an Australian family who has to fight to keep their home from being taken away by a neighbouring airport expansion. I watched this movie on a flight to Australia the first time we toured over there, and it gave me pretty much everything I needed to know about the amazingness that country had to offer, and I instantly fell in love. Everything about this movie is great and works really well together. The low-budget look of the film and set designs go perfectly with the acting, and the Kerrigan family as a whole. Although it’s a great comedy with constant dry laughs and memorable quotes, I can’t help but tearing up in happiness at the end with the amount of love the family members have for each other.

2. Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987)
I think I’ve watched this movie more times than any other movie throughout my life. I could quote it word for word while watching it. In fact, I don’t like watching it with other people, because I know how annoying my ability to speak along with the dialogue must be. There is a pencil sketch of Nicolas Cage hanging on my wall that I bought at a tourist trap here in San Francisco, and I can’t look at it without thinking, ‘My name is H.I. McDunnough… Call me Hi.’ Nicolas Cage is the man!

3. Wristcutters: A Love Story (Goran Dukic, 2006)
This love/buddy/road-trip black comedy is set in an alternate, afterlife limbo designated for people who commit suicide. The main character is distraught after his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he decides to kill himself. As punishment, he finds himself in a new world where everything is pretty much the same as when he was alive, except slightly crappier. For such a depressing (yet extremely interesting) concept, it’s surprisingly upbeat and has a lot of cameos from great people like Tom Waits, John Hawkes, Will Arnett and Eddie Steeples.

4. Festen (Thomas Vinterberg,1998)
Oh man, whenever I try to talk about this movie to friends, I explain that after watching it you will either call your parents and tell them you love them, or you will never speak to them again. This is a pretty heavy film, and the first of the Dogme 95 films. I think this works to Vinterberg’s advantage, because the simplistic nature of the filming and acting make it seem more believable, as if you were there at the party witnessing all the events unfold. I feel pretty gross after watching it, and that’s why it’s one of my all-time favourite movies. Not for that feeling of grossness, but because it makes me feel it so much.

5. Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 1999)
Guitar Wolf, the coolest rock’n’roll band in the world, get a feature-length film that is just as cool as they are! This movie has pretty much everything that you’d need for a Saturday night – zombies, gratuitous blood and gore, UFOs, fire-spurting microphones, hot pants, a transsexual, a naked girl firing guns, and the best takedown of an alien mothership ever put to film! Just watch it!

6. Mother Night (Keith Gordon, 1996)
I’m a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, but I can’t think of too many examples where his books have been translated to film with much success. This one is about as good as it can get. Nick Nolte is perfect as Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American-born playwright in Germany during WWII who spews Nazi propaganda that is laced with important hidden messages for the Allies on a radio show. Years later he is living in New York and his former life comes back to haunt him. I find a lot of this movie to be pretty powerful without being cheesy or in your face. It’s great for Sunday afternoon, lying around the house movie watching.

7. Jerkbeast (Brady Hall and Calvin Lee Reeder, 2005)
A friend in Seattle played this movie for us during some down time on tour and it changed my life. Jerkbeast started as a small, public-access TV show where viewers would call in to dial-an-insult the cast (including Brady Hall in a giant, papier mâché monster costume). The cast was known to assault the callers with hilariously foul-mouthed insults at rapid-fire speed. After the TV show ended, they decided to amp up the insults and create a feature out of the carnage. Starting a punk band with many name changes (Blood Butt, Anus Pussy and Steaming Wolf Penis) they hit the road to perform shows for no one, slinging as many insults as possible, such as, ‘I don’t know how I resist the urge to stab you in the face with a frozen stream of horse piss!’ until fame and fortune finds, and then ultimately destroys them. This no-budget (purportedly $5,000–$6,000) movie is perfect for sitting around with your mates getting drunk and laughing until you can’t even sing the words to ‘Looks Like Chocolate, Tastes Like Shit’ any longer. Co-director Calvin Lee Reeder has also made the surreal films The Rambler and The Oregonian, which are also worth checking out if you want to take a drug-free journey to bad acid town. A lot of great clips from the public access show are up on YouTube.

8. Duel to the Death (Ching Siu-tung, 1983)
I love kung fu/wuxia films, and this one has it all. Duel to the Death is from my favourite era of these films, because it was made in the days (and was among the first) where invisible wires and matting worked alongside the martial arts action to create the fantasy style which I greatly love. I generally don’t like CGI-heavy films as they don’t seem real enough for me, or they look slightly off enough that my brain can’t trick me into believing what I’m looking at is real. In this film, a Chinese swordsman is pitted against a Japanese swordsman to determine who is the best, and which nation has the greatest honour. Leading up to this battle, we find that this year’s fight is rigged and no one is to be trusted. The incredible fight scenes aside, this movie features a lot of bad ass ninjas! Kite-flying ninjas, buried-in-sand ninjas, a naked ninja and a fifteen-foot-tall ninja who explodes into multiple ninjas. Why would you not want to watch that?

9. Bunny and the Bull (Paul King, 2009)
OK, I know I just said I don’t like CGI-heavy movies, but I love this movie. The effects create the world within the movie instead of enhancing the world that we know, and it’s amazing. I’m a huge fan of British comedy shows, so finding out this starred many of my favourite people was a treat.

10. Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010)
Chris Morris, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain? I’m there!! I’ve gotten tired of being constantly bombarded with the ‘War on Terror’ and terrorists. It’s frustrating, because I know that those words/phrases are primarily used as a scare tactic to divide our nation and make us afraid of people/cultures that we don’t know or understand, so we will be complacent while the government continues to make the world a worse place by keeping cultures and people apart. The War on Terror is also a great vehicle for continuing a pro-Christian agenda, which also separates society into a hopeless us vs. them scenario. I think Four Lions does a great job of satirising our fears without exploiting any one. Even though the main characters are jihadists trying to kill people, I still want to hang out with them. I still want to help them, and I’m saddened that their plans fail or when they die in the most idiotic situations. On top of it being a great movie, I love it because of that aspect. It’s nice to see a movie where Muslims who are normally portrayed as negative stereotypes are here portrayed as people, who happen to be Muslim. We’re all people, we have different ideas, but that’s what makes the world interesting. Rubber dinghy rapids, bro!

The Congress: Interview with Ari Folman

The Congress 1
The Congress

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 August 2014

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ari Folman

Writer: Ari Folman

Based on the novel: The Futurological Congress by Stanislav Lem

Cast: Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Paul Giamatti, Danny Huston

Israel, Germany, Poland, France 2013

120 mins

In 2008, Ari Folman astounded audiences with Waltz with Bashir, in which he used a mix of animation and live action to tell a devastating account of his experience as a soldier during the 1980s Israel-Lebanon war. Six years later, he returns with a remarkably ambitious, intelligent science-fiction film loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Richly resonant, multilayered and beautifully psychedelic, The Congress again combines live action and animation to tell the story of Robin (Robin Wright), an ageing actress forced to sell her scanned image to her studio Miramount for them to use as they please. Twenty years later, she attends a congress on the future of cinema, which takes place in a zone of chemically-induced animated hallucinations. But following a violent intervention by rebels, Robin finds herself propelled into a strange future world that is even less real.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Ari Folman about transposing Stanislaw Lem’s novel to our world, the merits of escaping from reality, and why The Congress is a documentary.

The Congress is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray on 8 December 2014 by Studiocanal.

Virginie Sélavy: Waltz with Bashir was a very personal film, while The Congress is a much larger-scale speculative reflection on our world. Was adapting a novel a way of getting out of the realm of your own personal experience?

Ari Folman: Making Waltz with Bashir was very tough, travelling with the film afterwards was very tough, so I needed an escape route from Bashir, from myself, from history, from war, from everything you can imagine. And I thought The Congress was a good one because it’s a novel I read when I was very young and I loved it. I’m a sci-fi buff.

Stanislaw Lem’s idea of a world that is made of grimmer and grimmer layers of reality disguised by illusory appearances feels fairly prescient. Was that one of the reasons why you wanted to adapt it?

Yes, it was. In many aspects I think that The Congress is a documentary. I only make documentaries – and sci-fi. The Congress is documentary sci-fi. When I wrote the script I had no clue that they’d been scanning actors in LA for a long time now. In the film it’s supposed to be an X-ray-machine room, and when I arrived in LA I read for the first time about the scanning facilities that they have over there. Technology has changed tremendously, in cinema you now have CGI, motion capture, scanned actors and everything. They can make movies with no actors. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it, but it could be done. So that’s the first part of the movie. The second part is more inspired by Lem’s novel, it’s about identity, human identity. So yes, I’d say it reflects our lives in many ways.

That’s one of the major changes you’ve made to the book: space traveller Ijon Tichy, the main character in the book, becomes an ageing actress, and you shift the action from the world of science to the world of cinema.

When I optioned the book I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then in Cannes I met this ageing American actress, very famous, from the 60s-70s, and I didn’t recognize her at all. I had this vision, it was going to be her, a goddess from 45 years ago who now is a nobody. That was the starting point for the script. I went backwards in time, thinking about identity. I didn’t live in Poland in the late 60s communist era when Lem wrote his novel, so I had to make this translation to things that I’m really into. That’s how I ended up talking about cinema and the future of cinema, which is represented by an ageing actress in our world.

That adds another layer to the novel’s blurring of fiction and reality, because of course cinema is also about reality and its representation.

Not all cinema – I don’t think that it is what cinema always does. But in general, for me, good cinema is taking this real time that we live in, which is the time that our subconscious lives in, and trying to make it one piece of time that you work into a movie. It’s what I try to do, this combination really attracts me.

Was Robin Wright the actress you wanted from the start?

No, it was meant to be Cate Blanchett, and I wrote the treatment for her. But then I met Robin Wright by chance in LA, and the moment I saw her I knew that it could only be her.

That adds even another layer, as she plays ‘Robin Wright’ in the film. How involved was she in the project?
She was very much involved from the very beginning. I researched her and I pitched the project to her, then she joined me and we worked on the character together, and I went home and wrote the script. She was involved in many aspects, from the writing until the end of editing. She was a great partner, very intelligent woman, very sharp. She really was the best partner that I could have.

As in Waltz with Bashir you use a mix of live action and animation, but with different implications: here it is perfectly suited to the exploration of the real and the unreal. Do you see this mix of filmic forms as essential to your work?

After Waltz with Bashir I decided I wanted to explore, I wanted to make something that mixed the two, live action and animation, no matter what I was going to do, I wanted to try, for the sake of the experiment. With The Congress, and with Waltz with Bashir as well, we decided to start with documentary rather than fiction, and fiction rather than sci-fi, because otherwise it can be a bit conventional. I try to explore new things, and here the biggest challenge was writing and directing a movie where you go from a first, straight hour with a lovely actress and a story, and then in the second hour she breaks the conventions and she becomes animated, and that was a big challenge for me as the director to make it happen.

Live action in your films is always about a terrible reality, and animation is a way of escaping, or dealing with, the full horror of that reality. Is that fair to say?

I hadn’t thought of that but that’s an interesting idea. . I think that maybe live action is there for bad issues and actions.. It happened with Waltz with Bashir, and here again I make the most of the beautiful creatures of the animated world, because we are exposed to a very tough and harsh world, and it can probably be shown only in animation. I think animation gives you many more layers as a director – I’m talking about animation for adults, which is a rare thing, unfortunately.

At the end, there is no easy answer as to what is best, whether living in the real world or hallucinating a more beautiful world. Was that openness essential to you?

Yes, absolutely. With my films, it’s a matter of interpretation, you have to decide what you think with what you are, with your conscience, your psychology. It’s not my duty to guide you towards a decision as to what is best. It’s a conscience that we experience in the Western world every day of our lives, because the world of hallucinations is a metaphor for a lot of things: it could be money, it could be addiction to sex, it could be addiction to many things, it doesn’t have to be just drugs. In the book, of course, Lem goes for drugs, and it looks very cinematic and psychedelic, but everyone has to find an escape route, which can be very addictive and has nothing to do with real life. And it’s your own decision to know what’s best.

Some elements in the film suggest that what we see from the moment it becomes an animation could be the product of Aaron’s (Robin’s son) mind. Is that a possibility that you wanted to put in the audience’s heads?

I’ve heard this interpretation. It was not one of my intentions, but I really like to hear other people’s interpretations of the film. When I walked out of the premiere in Cannes, my sister came to me and she was very pissed off. She loved the movie and she couldn’t understand what happens to Aaron at the end. She said, ‘it’s a shame, you shouldn’t have done that’. I tried to explain to her that it’s not like that. I told her, ‘I wrote the script, I know what I wrote’, but afterwards I gave up and I liked that interpretation. I thought, OK, this is what she saw in the movie and she has her own specific reading, and that’s fine.

Would you make the same choice as Robin at the end?

Me? Definitely.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch a clip from The Congress:

The Futurological Congress

The Congress 2
The Congress

To celebrate the UK theatrical release of Ari Folman’s The Congress on 15 August 2014, we are pleased to be able to publish the following excerpt from one of Stanislaw Lem’s greatest sci-fi short novels, The Futurological Congress, which served as loose inspiration for the film.

The Congress is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray on 8 December 2014 by Studiocanal.

Excerpt from The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. English translation copyright © 1974 by The Continuum Publishing Corporation. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Futurological Congress p43
Futurological Congress p44
To buy The Futurological Congress from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt please visit the HMH website.

Adam Roberts is Solaris

Solaris 1
Solaris

Born in 1965, Adam Roberts was educated at ‘a rundown’ state school in Kent and the ancient University of Aberdeen. While teaching English Literature and Creative Writing (at Royal Holloway, University of London) he set about eschewing the traditional path of a science fiction novelist – constructing 10 volumes of the one epic story written over a large number of years – and instead challenged himself to invent something new and original with every book. With that as his motto he has penned, among other things, a steampunk fantasy, where Swift’s Lilliputians are enslaved by the British Empire (Swiftly), a Soviet-era paranoid conspiracy theory novel (Yellow Blue Tibia), and an imagined second English Civil War where hackers and tech heads take power from the Establishment (New Model Army). His latest novel, Bete (Gollancz), concerns the nature of intelligence, artificial intelligence and talking cats. Eithne Farry

If I were offered the chance to be any film character, I would like to be Solaris. I’m talking, of course, about the films made from Stanislaw Lem’s great science fiction novel Solaris (first published in Polish in 1961; first English translation 1970). The first movie was made by the peerless Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and was released in 1972. The second – Soderbergh’s 2002 film – suffers from not being by Tarkovsky; but I’ve always liked it. It has a very different feel, and lacks some of the potently rebarbative strangeness and slowness of Tarkovsky’s film; but it’s closer to the novel and achieves an eerie beauty just this side of the real-deal uncanny.

‘So,’ I hear you ask, ‘which character in either – or both – of these films would you like to be?’ But you misunderstand. I’ve already explained who I’d like to be. I would like to be Solaris. That is, I’d like to be the sentient planet around which the human characters are in orbit, and which interferes in their lives by (for instance) recreating a material, living-breathing-thinking version of Hari (renamed ‘Rheya’ in the 2002 film), the main character Kelvin’s dead wife, out of his memories. If this choice looks as though I have delusions of grandeur, then permit me to explain myself. We watch these movies and naturally identify with the situation of the human characters, because we are human ourselves. I choose to read them differently. Lem famously objected to Tarkovsky’s version of his book, saying that he had taken a story about the alienating nature of man’s encounter with the radical otherness of the cosmos and turned it into Crime and Punishment. But it has always seemed to me that Solaris, the entity, is a proxy for The Writer (‘So: Lem is… ‘). At a pinch, it could stand in for the film director – for Tarkovsky, or Soderbergh.

As a writer myself, this interpretation resonates with me. Writers and directors create characters, summon them into life from nothing, out of the neutral nothingness of metaphorical neutrinos. We do so for our own reasons. Solaris is a book, and two films, that situate this act of creation on (as it were) the receiving end. It is Euripides’ Alcestis recast not only as science fiction, but as the disturbing fable of the arbitrary power of art to embody on any terms. Just as Euripides the writer – as mysteriously distant and alien to his created world as the planet in Lem’s novel – takes a widower and forces him to meet again with the simulacrum of his dead wife; so Solaris gets to the heart of how unnerving that power is. And, what is more, it understands how sometimes a piece of characterisation can look perfect from the outside, and yet be strangely and unsettlingly wrong and alien. So I’d like to be Solaris, not because I crave the godlike powers of a planet-sized being, but because I recognise in it – him? her? – a fellow worker in the unforgiving field of ‘making characters’.

Adam Roberts