Author Sarah Pinborough has been writing stories since she was five years old. When she was little she didn’t sleep much at night because she was too aware of all the things that can come alive when darkness falls. She’s used that sense of unease in her six horror novels and in her latest endeavour, supernatural crime thriller trilogy The Dog-Faced Gods. The second volume, Shadow of the Soul, is out in April (Gollancz). Below, she tells us about her filmic alter ego. EITHNE FARRY
If I could choose to be a character in a horror film, I think it would have to be Ripley in the Alien movies. I have the box-set and never get tired of watching them, late at night, when I can’t sleep. For me, they’re up there with The Thing for the best ‘monster’ movies made. While mulling over my choice, I did almost pick Catherine Deneuve’s vampire in The Hunger – after all, she was beautiful, sexy, stylish and lived forever, but at the same time, she was a mass-murdering, cold-hearted dead vampire, and to be fair, that’s a bit of a downside.
Ellen Ripley, however, is atypical for a female in a horror film. She’s not a victim, and although Sigourney Weaver is gorgeous, it’s not that Hollywood blonde thing. She’s the one that kicks ass and saves the day – and I’ve always wanted to be the kind of woman that kicks ass, because in real life everything scares me! My favourite Ripley incarnation is Alien: Resurrection when she’s been cloned and has part of the Alien’s DNA. She’s strong and sensual and completely in control of herself and the rest of the survivors. She is über-cool and has blood that can melt metal. What more could a girl want?
Author Mary Horlock’s original, compelling debut The Book of Lies is like a murder mystery in reverse. It opens with 15-year-old Catherine Rozier’s confession, as she claims the crime of killing her ex-best friend, on a Guernsey cliff edge, and then spools backwards to ravel a tangled web of secrets, hidden truths and the suppressed history of the island under German occupation in WW2. Below, Mary Horlock explains why her filmic alter ego would be Totoro in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. Eithne Farry
It’s difficult to explain why I want to be a giant, furry tree-dwelling monster, but My Neighbour Totoro just has that effect on me. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, it was the first Studio Ghibli film I ever saw, and I’ve since worked my way through them all. I return again and again to My Neighbour Totoro for lots of reasons. There’s the beautifully drawn landscapes that jump alive at every turn, there’s the two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, and their wide-eyed wonder as they explore their new home, and then there’s the fantastical wood spirits that just happen to live in the trees next door.
It’s Mei who first follows two mysterious rabbit-like creatures through the undergrowth and into the hollow of a large camphor tree. There she finds the sleeping Totoro. He’s this vast bulk of fur, but Mei merrily bounces onto his belly and clings to him, giggling, as he slowly wakes up and roars like a gale force wind. I love the fact that she’s not at all scared of him, but instead just asks him his name.
Totoro is a completely surreal creation – a Cheshire cat mouth with bristling black whiskers, pointed rabbit ears, and despite his considerable girth he can perch on a branch like a wise old owl. And of course he has magical powers and makes seeds grow into trees overnight, and he can levitate over the earth on a tiny spinning top, and he has a Catbus. Oh yes, when Mei disappears and Satsuki asks Totoro for help he summons a grinning giant cat with a surprisingly spacious interior who bounds across the countryside to find little Mei.
I want to be Totoro and ride on the Catbus, and fly on a magic spinning top over endless rice fields. Who wouldn’t?
Mary Horlock
The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock is published by Canongate.
Before John Niven became an author, he was a guitarist with 1980s band The Wishing Stones. Having ditched a career as an A&R man in London’s music industry, he used his insider knowledge to write the scabrously funny Kill Your Friends. His second book, The Amateurs, took a violent sideswipe at the safe image of golf. Next up he’s gunning for God in The Second Coming, out in May. If he was a film character he would be Don Logan from Sexy Beast as he explains below. Eithne Farry
Which bitter film character would I be? I thought for a while about choosing Willy T. Stokes, the Bad Santa played by Billy Bob Thornton in the eponymous 2003 movie, but decided he’s more nihilistic than bitter. No, for pure curdled bitterness it’d have to be Don Logan from Sexy Beast, as played Ben Kingsley. Don is a man so hate-ravaged he’s moved to scream at Ray Winstone’s Gal: ‘I won’t let you be happy! Why should I?’ In other words, ‘I’m unhappy, so I’m fucked if anyone else is going to be happy’.
I was actually very resistant to watching Sexy Beast when it came out 10 years ago: another British gangster movie, starring Ray Winstone, directed by a pop video director (Jonathan Glazier), with a soundtrack by trip-hoppers du jour Unkle? The omens, I felt, weren’t good. What a clown I was. It’s also easy to forget what a shock it was to see nice old Ghandi playing the most psychotic character in recent movie history. The scene in which Don’s name is first mentioned is a masterpiece of understatement on the part of writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Everyone at the table nearly soils themselves at just the sound of those three letters. The mention of his name is enough to ruin an evening. You know this guy means business before he’s appeared in one frame.
And, oh, to be Don Logan. Gratuitously pissing on your friend’s carpets (Don’s pissing stance alone is worth the price of admission), openly smoking on airplanes and then offering to stub your cigarette out on a fellow passenger’s eyeball (‘Agreeable?’), greeting your friends with the words ‘I’m sweating like a cunt’ (Kingsley’s first line in the movie). Just the way he says the word ‘orgy’…
Interestingly, Sir Ben said he approached playing the character as if he were ‘the best Sergeant Major in the army’ and it is exactly this quality he brings to Logan: someone in a relaxed, holiday setting who cannot relax and who never, ever goes on holiday. A man so consumed by bile and fury that he uses his dying words to tell his friend that he fucked his wife.
Author Sarah Moss’s atmospheric, ghostly debut novel Cold Earth (Granta) is set in Arctic Greenland. As the temperature drops, six ill-prepared archaeologists, who are attempting to unearth traces of a lost Viking settlement, begin to suspect that there’s something decidedly eerie watching their faltering progress. Fittingly, Sarah Moss’s choice of filmic alter ego also inhabits a haunted, wintery world… EITHNE FARRY
‘If I could be a character in a film…’
Before my children were born, I used to write early in the morning, sometimes finishing a day’s work before most people had got to the office. On those days, I rewarded myself with solitary afternoon cinema trips, settling back with blissful anonymity and fine chocolate in Oxford’s art house cinema, to watch anything at all as long as it didn’t involve people getting killed on screen. Cinema-going is among the worst casualties of parenthood, and I’ve hardly been at all in the last eight years, but I think if I could choose now I’d want to be Filippa in Babette’s Feast, and not only for the food at the end. Filippa and her sister Martina live almost in silence for most of their lives, honouring the commands of their dead father, a dissenting minister who forbade them from realising any kind of dream. Theirs are impoverished lives in almost every sense, but the cinematography makes their windswept headland and the dark clothes and simple movements of their daily lives hauntingly beautiful. From my house, full of toys and pictures and little pots of smoked paprika and recherché teas, the scrubbed floorboards, white walls and bare windows of the sisters’ cold home seem enormously appealing. I’m sure I’d hate it in reality – after all, I like new shoes and silly hats and over-priced cupcakes and would be much happier in the 1870s Paris Babette is fleeing than on the dour Danish peninsula where she finds refuge – but the low northern light, the wind through the grass and the greyness of the sea stay with me for days after I’ve watched the film.
In Rebecca Hunt’s well-received debut novel, Mr Chartwell, the ‘black dog’ of Winston Churchill’s depression is materialised into an actual black dog, a constant companion of the retired politician in his late years, and one who may also visit other people’s lives. Below, Rebecca Hunt explains why she’d be Ferris Bueller if she were a film character.
I think I’d choose Ferris Bueller as my alter ego. It’s not that I like him much as a character – I nearly dislike him in a curious way – it’s more that I admire his impossible, effortless sense of entitlement to luck, fun and success. In his famous day off we see him relishing a day of fast cars, art, fancy restaurants, the Von Steuben Day parade, and general triumph with his friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. Ferris is universally adored by everyone except his furious chump of a head teacher, Rooney, and his jealous older sister, Jeanie. Both, we are certain, will never succeed in their attempts to bring about Ferris’s downfall. We are also certain that attempts to destroy Ferris will only boomerang viciously back, leading to the humiliating defeat of anyone who tries. This is because Ferris is channelling a magical invincibility.
Watching his day off, it’s obvious that this particular day isn’t exceptional; it’s just a 24-hour taster of how all Ferris’s days are and will be in the future. The film’s parade scene is probably the most bizarre example of how fortune smiles on Ferris, when he disappears for five minutes simply to appear again on a parade float. Surrounded by beautiful dancers he lip-synchs along to ‘Twist and Shout’ as people pack the streets and go haywire. Clearly, if I tried to hijack a float and mime to songs it would be a different scene… an odd, unsettling scene. Even if my own sense of embarrassment and social obedience didn’t somehow spark off and prevent me from leaping onto the float, I’m pretty sure the dancers would.
But despite the enormous differences between us, there is a little innate Ferris-type in me which I remind myself to plug into when I see this film. I appreciate his confidence that it’s not all about slavish adherence to perceived duties; that it’s not all about – or even at all about – pleasing the Rooneys and Jeanies of this world. There is merit in fun. Inevitably, being Ferris Bueller, he’s right about this.
Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt is published by Fig Tree.
Edward Hollis studied architecture before working on Shri Lankan ruins and on old Scottish breweries. In The Secret Lives of Buildings, he charts the history of 13 buildings through time and multiple transformations, from the Parthenon and the Alhambra to the Berlin Wall and the theme parks of Las Vegas. Below, he explains why Wall-E is his filmic alter ego.
In the future, movies will always begin in Manhattan. There will be an opening shot of the East River and the cloud-capped towers of Midtown. The cameras will do a wide, lazy pan, and then zoom into some crevice where somebody normal is doing something normal. It’s always the same.
Give it a few minutes, and it won’t be normal any more. King Kong will be battling biplanes on top of the Empire State, Godzilla will have surfaced from the deep, and the day after tomorrow, a tsunami will be followed by a great freeze. Thousands of years in the future, a robot boy will sit buried under the ice, staring at a fairground attraction.
I don’t want to be a blonde starlet caught in the arms of a gorilla (not this time), nor a dinosaur, nor an artificial child, but I do want to live in that future Manhattan of disasters and miracles; and when I’m there, my movie will start exactly the same way as all the others: the river, the towers, the pan, the zoom – and little old me, scurrying along the sidewalk, being normal.
Except in the future life of my alter ego, nothing is normal, and I’m not in Manhattan. Rather, I live in a gigantic simulacrum of that long-lost city, a simulacrum I have painstakingly constructed myself. The river is a river of dust, and I have built the great towers out of little cubes of compacted rubbish, the detritus of the original Manhattan.
I am a menial robot. Every day I scavenge for rubbish, and occasionally I find a treasure or two. In the evening I drag them back to an abandoned shipping container, and in my cabinet of abandoned curiosities, I rest until morning. I do not sleep. Instead, I spend the night watching my only film: it’s a story set in a vibrant, vanished, New York. ‘Put on your Sunday best,’ sings Dolly, in the guise of Barbra Streisand.
My alter ego, Wall-E, like the junk market at the beginning of Star Wars, the City of the Dead in Barbarella, and the leaking Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Blade Runner, reminds us that in the future, cities won’t be futuristic. They will be quite as messy as those of the past. Indeed, they will be made out of their broken remains, as they have always been.
At the end of the film, the returning human race turn the robot’s trash Manhattan into an Eden, then a garden, then a farm, then a village, a town, and a great city once again. Their efforts are represented in paintings that develop from cave painting to abstraction via every style in between. In each of them appears Wall-E, the robot rubbish collector, more mythic with every redepiction.
Perhaps it’s all happened before. Cities abandoned in jungles and deserts were futuristic once. That we have outlived them is a tribute to the toiling midgets who inhabited their ruins. In the future I want to be a scavenging robot, the sentimental fan of Hello Dolly, upon whose drudgery will be constructed an entire civilisation.
The Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis is published by Portobello Books.
Writer Patrick Hargadon is obsessed with having a good view in the cinema, but has always been thwarted by people with large heads or big hair. His first film memory is watching Hitchcock’s Rope on television, but being told to turn it off to go to bed. This curtailed watching experience has led to countless viewing of Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon in the hope of getting to grips with the avant-garde. He is currently working on a non-fiction book: 366 Grand Things To Do When the Sky Is Grey and You’re Feeling Blue. His alter ego of choice is Yul Brynner as The Gunslinger in Futureworld (1976). EITHNE FARRY
There are moments in life when being Yul Brynner in Futureworld would be very useful. You’d just get things done quicker and more effectively. I’m not really the gun-toting lunatic type though, just sometimes in my mind when I’m angry. But I’d rather be Yul Brynner as the Gunslinger. I think it’s the lasso-dancing with Gwyneth Paltrow’s mum that impressed me the most. I have never before been so amazed by a fantasy sequence. Blythe Danner sits in a large contraption that records her dreams. She’s obviously got some problems as her unconscious makes her run around an empty house in a floral dress only to be captured by men in red body stockings and then be tied to a large cross. Yul saves the day, not only untying her but also lassoing her into what can only be described as a dance of love, all the time keeping those little shiny eyes fixed on her in a permanent glare. He may be a gun-crazy psychopathic robot killer, but his android heart beats a rhythm that makes this lady just wanna dance. Well, you might, after narrowly escaping crucifixion. It’s the only sequence I know where the invincibility of a male superhuman gone mad is undone by a starring role in a middle-aged woman’s hot flush. At the end of the scene, the scientists explain to Blythe’s boyfriend that she will need some rest so they aren’t going to wake her up immediately – understandable given the range of her imagination. So the Gunslinger exits into the distance to fight another day, or perhaps not, as it is only truly at this moment that the cryptic tagline of the film makes precise sense: ‘Futureworld – where the only way to survive is to kill yourself.’
Having spent his childhood shuttling between his dad’s flat in Austin, Texas, and his mum’s rentals in LA, screenwriter and novelist Ryan David Jahn ditched school at 16 for a job in a record shop and then headed off to join the army. Demobbed and glad to put that ‘ludicrous experience’ behind him, he used the hours spent reading James M Cain, Carver, Chandler and Stephen King in public libraries to good effect in Acts of Violence, his blood-drenched, contemporary noir debut. Based on a real-life crime – the killing of Kitty Genovese outside her New York apartment in 1964 – it explores the ‘bystander theory’ from multiple perspectives. His latest book, Low Life, is just as powerful – a tightly plotted, psychologically astute existential investigation of identity, murder and memory. Here he wonders what it would be like to be Jim Thompson. EITHNE FARRY
If it included having to live his life, no one thinking clearly would want to be Jim Thompson. The years of obscurity, the alcoholism that resulted in frequent hospitalisations, the money trouble, the strokes, and the anonymous death with his career at its nadir and every one of his books out of print: that’s not a life anyone would choose.
But if one could just be Jim Thompson the writer, that’s a different matter. Sitting at his typewriter he was fearless. He would not hold back. Most people can’t be completely honest with their shrink; Jim Thompson put his psyche on every page for the world to see. And more: he was entertaining as hell while he did so.
I think of Savage Night, in which the protagonist/narrator Charles ‘Little’ Bigger recounts meeting a man who claimed to grow sexual organs, ‘the more interesting portions of the female anatomy’, on a farm in Vermont:
‘I fertilize them with wild goat manure,’ he said. ‘The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads, howling.’
I think of the end of that same novel, when the goats return, and how it makes even the end of Cain’s Double Indemnity seem positively optimistic by comparison.
I think of the mad hell Doc and Carol McCoy find themselves in at the end of The Getaway, when they finally arrive in El Rey, towards which they’ve been running for the length of the novel. It’s a madness not even Peckinpah had the courage to try to capture on film.
Twenty-seven-year old Craig Silvey grew up on an orchard in Dwellingup, Western Australia. He wrote his first novel, Rhubarb, when he was 19. His latest book, Jasper Jones, is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel, set over a shimmering hot summer of 1965. It tells the story of 13-year-old bookish Charlie Bucktin, whose life is upended by Jasper Jones, a half-Aborigine boy. Jasper, with his troubled home life and a charismatic sense of self-sufficiency, is implicated in the calamitous disappearance of a local girl, but is too mindful of the consequences to admit his involvement. Saluting To Kill a Mocking Bird, and Huckleberry Finn, Silvey movingly explores the stifling secrets that lurk behind the most ordinary of facades. Below, Craig Silvey tells us why he would be the Fantastic Mr Fox if he was a film character.Eithne Farry
Foxes, traditionally, get a rough deal. They’re crafty, resourceful, clever and ambitious – which yields resentment in most quarters, but admiration in mine.
There is something very attractive about Mr Fox. He’s charming and capable, generous and daring. He’s loyal to his competitive instincts, but he also understands that his nature is his weakness. The very things that make him remarkable also cause him the greatest peril. Still, the thrill of the squab heist almost always outweighs the pressure of being caught. He can’t help himself.
And so, in that sense, he is burdened by his own truth and he battles with the compromise. And what could be more human than the struggle to straddle the line between right and wrong, between the things you want and the things you should have?
And it’s tough. Mr Fox can only deny his nature for so long before it gets the best of him. He falls prey to his discontent and his lust for adventure, inspiring him to stage the mother of all coups, which, despite its success, has considerably dire consequences.
But, just like his nature imperils his community, it’s those same impulses that ensure their safety. And it is here, I must confess, that I feel some kinship with Mr Fox. Not that I share these traits, but I would like to. Like Randal P McMurphy, Cool Hand Luke and Atticus Finch before him, Mr Fox has the comforting ability to draw people in and settle their nerves, despite his own racing pulse. I’m attracted by that valorous sureness and strength of presence, and my heart goes out to his vanity and folly and insecurity. Under Mr Fox’s flawed leadership, even though he caused the clustercuss in the first place, we know that we’re going to be OK.
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is published by Windmill Books.
Phil Smith is a British academic, writer, performer and playwright in experimental, physical and music theatres. His new book, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is a collection of diaries, letters, narratives, notes and other documents, written by artists and various practitioners of the art of walking that explores its modern uses, from meditative to subversive. To find out more, visit the wonderful Mythogeography website or the Triarchy Press website. Below, Phil Smith explains why he would be Michael Travis if he was a film character.
Michael Travis, the pilgrim ingénue of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 O Lucky Man! is who I would be if I were a film character.
Travis because, when I can, I walk in his shoes. He’s an accidental explorer in a corrupt and magical England. And I like his corrosive psyche.
Malcolm McDowell plays Travis as a generous-hearted amoralist. He’s psychogeographic, feeling what his surroundings feel and playing the parts these worlds demand. In sales class he’s eager, among the rich acquisitive, under interrogation defiant. His lovers include Helen Mirren, but he leaves her the moment the road calls.
So what is Travis? Empty on the inside, he sucks in what he finds: a trainee coffee salesman who gets a big break. Driving a brown hatchback across North East England, he goes from thankless cold calls to the warm bosom of municipal corruption. Then a nuclear disaster sends him stumbling across a burning moor in a gold lamé suit to the bosom (literal this time) of a vicar’s wife in a harvest-bedecked country church. But this ‘green and pleasant’ soon opens onto a motorway, a lift in a Bentley and a medical institute’s voracious experiments.
I like this unfolding journey through paranoid landscapes where encounters with damaged mythic characters (bent coppers, mad designers, nomadic musicians, vulpine financiers) assemble themselves in a matrix of self-pleasuring order.
Making the film at the height of trade union power in Britain, leftist Anderson and writer David Sherwin eschewed collectivism, leapfrogging a generation to make a hero we are only just catching up with; a nomadic sleeper cell in the heart of shock-capitalism. Mick Travis pushes conformity and ambition to the point of chaos, an optimistic, anti-spectacular consumer-radical with an ache of hunger behind his chameleon smile; he helps as he destroys as he enjoys. I’d like to introduce you…
Phil Smith
Mythogeography
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
