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Interview with Canadian Genre Writer Tony Burgess

Ejecta 2

Greg Klymkiw’s Colonial Report (on cinema) from the Dominion of Canada

The Dominion of Canada is one massive cesspool of alternately creepy and majestic wilderness. In one isolated corner of the colonies, evil permeates the very soil upon which the foundations of Canada are built.

It is in this seemingly innocuous burgh where we find an all-night disc jockey trapped in an isolated, rural radio station while a virus rages outdoors, sending its victims into states of madness, violence and almost superhuman strength.

Not too far away is the nefarious local factory, providing most of the community’s livelihood, but spilling its foul industrial waste into its faulty septic system, which unloads into the watershed, whereupon a brave septic man plunges into the bowels of the system and gradually turns into a hideously deformed monster, half man, half shit.

There is, of course, a multitude of decrepit graveyards in the burgh, and one unlucky crypt keeper becomes an unlikely hero against a network of evil that leads to the very maw of Hell.

And then, there are the alien visitations.

Ejecta is available in North America and Canada on DVD + Blu-ray (A/1) via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada, IFC Midnight (USA) and Raven Banner Entertainment (World Sales). It is also available in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray (B/2), released by Signature Entertainment earlier this year.
Pontypool is available on DVD (Region 1 or 2), released in 2010.

These four respective tales of horror, Pontypool, Septic Man, Hellmouth and Ejecta, all spring from the diseased brain of one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists and screenwriters. The first film was directed by Canada’s King of Rock ‘n’ Road movies, Bruce (Roadkill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) McDonald. The three other films were spawned by Foresight Features, an independent south-western Ontario production company headed by Jesse T. Cook, John Geddes and Matthew Wiele, three 30-year-old gents who love horror movies as much, if not more, than life itself.

They have an unholy alliance as filmmakers with the aforementioned author.

Tony Burgess lives in Stayner, Ontario. It’s just to the south of where the mighty Bruce Peninsula begins. Yes, The Bruce is the very pioneer territory I do my writing from. Stayner itself is situated quite conveniently next door to Collingwood, Ontario, home and production headquarters of Foresight Features.

Mr Burgess has agreed to a few pulls from a jug of local shine and to chat with me about the science-fiction horror thriller Ejecta.

* * *

Greg Klymkiw: One of the many reasons Ejecta resonates with me, especially in terms of the writing – character, dialogue in particular – is that it comes from a place that FEELS legit. Sure, everyone is fascinated with the notion of other worlds, aliens, etc… God knows, even as a kid, the 50s-60s science fiction I watched and/or read fuelled me, as did the nutcase Erich von Daniken. But during the past 15 years or so, I became hooked on the Art Bell/George Noory ‘Coast-to-Coast A.M.’ radio program, and via that unhealthy obsession, I became quite an avid reader of the Graham Hancock books, especially his Fingerprints of the Gods and The Mars Mystery tomes about pyramids on Mars and how humans come from Martians. And, Jesus, I’ve even read a whack of stuff from Zecharia Sitchin, that nutcase who’s written a zillion books about ancient races of aliens on Earth who seeded all of humanity with their interplanetary love juices. I’ve even read scholarly works like Life beyond Earth: The Search for Habitable Worlds in the Universe by Athena Coustenis and Therese Encrenaz who are astro-biologists. Like, really, I love there’s actually a legit scientific field dealing with extraterrestrial life. And, of course, I’m crazy about the beautifully written books by physicist Michio Kaku, who makes my worst subject in high school completely understandable, albeit 35 years after the fact. In book after book Kaku links physics to stuff like parallel universe theory, the shitload of dimensions that exist but that we can’t even begin to comprehend, and all sorts of other neat factoids pointing to life outside of our own measly planet. So given all that, Ejecta feels very real and, as such, is really fucking scary.

Tony Burgess: Well, generally I’d say that working in genre film and novels, the first fascination on any given project is always some conceptual novelty… but once you start batting away at it, you realise that it all has to be happening to someone in a way you/they are compelled to believe in. And that can be done no matter how stretched the reality is. I call it the toilet rule: is it is more riveting to be invisible in a bathroom watching someone wash their face than it is to listen to the Mercury Theatre radio play of War of the Worlds? So everything I do has to have a scene like that – where you’re with someone and nothing is happening – and if it’s not mesmerising somehow, then nothing is. For example, an owl in the attic that frightens a babysitter for two hours can work. So can time-travelling Sasquatch robots. Just hang out in the bathroom for a while to see if you’re getting the job done.

What fuelled your need to write Ejecta?

Well, in this case many of the story elements were brought to me. Initially co-director Matt Wiele approached me with an eye to making a found-footage alien feature. We then did what’s become a ritual between me and Foresight Features. We met at dawn, hammered a few pots of coffee back and then drove a few story pylons into the ground. Around 4pm or so, when were fairly sure we could trust ’em to be sturdy, we pulled out the whiskey – we affectionately called it ‘pull’ – and then we drank our way through the finer points of the story until the wee hours. It’s an excellent way of building a stable structure, then decorating it madly.

Gotta love those frilly dollops of icing on the cake, eh? Those delectables you leave for last.

Ah, but alas, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange says, ‘we then got to the long and weepy part of our story’. We realized once we put everything that I’d written into the can, not enough footage had been shot. We didn’t have anything resembling a feature length. So we had meetings, fights, meetings, fights, pull, meetings, fights, suicide watch, pull, more meetings, more fights, more pull etc., until we came up with the wrap-around story.

Uh, the rest of the movie, eh?

It ended up being a hell of a ride. And you know, the film is very close to my heart.

How so?

What I wanted was to dramatically explore the idea of aliens meeting inside a human mind, that the brain of an individual is really just another room in a building for them. I also liked the feel of a single night in a single place that starts to feel broken up, and perilous. There was a trick I was trying too, which became necessary in part because it’s a film swallowed by a film, and that is the notion of NOW not EVER being verifiable. The timeline is sort of like a Moebius comic… ending on the moment it started, but if you parse its linearity it has to be ending LATER.

Why do YOU think the aliens like the room of William Cassidy’s mind? I like that they DO like it, but I must admit that while watching the movie, I also like that I’m not always sure WHY they like it. It’s only in retrospect that I can figure out why, or at least, figure out ‘why’ in terms of the things you’ve provided in the script with respect to his character. Still, this inquiring mind needs to know. Why do YOU think the aliens like his ‘room’?

It’s one of those things that really is just suggested and not verified by the film, which, I agree, is preferable. Is it his location? Is it a feature of his personality? His reclusiveness? Hmm, actually, I’d kinda rather hear your answer than mine.

Well, I’d get a kick out of having some tea and crumpets in Julian Richings’s mind.

I love it that Julian’s been in every Foresight Features movie I’ve written to date.

Goddam, he is a great actor, a super crazy-ass fucker.

It never hurts having Julian Richings howling out from the derailed train [laughs, almost demonically]. It was sort of cubist in a way… a broken lens that allowed timelines and POVS to scramble the present image. It rhymes with the way thought takes on the characteristic of a place. The mind is a great place to house beings that can choose to ignore their surroundings. I can also put it this way: HOW the film was made resembles what is IN the film. One film has no idea that it’s in the other film, and that’s also how the central struggle is constructed. The aliens inside Julian’s character have little understanding of who or what he is. He’s a room. His mind is a room that they like, for whatever reason, finally.

Were the various POVs employed directly linked to infusing the movie with the creepy-crawly sense of reality which pervades the piece?

Oh yes, for sure. And you know, it was such great fun to work with two directors [Wiele and Chad Archibald], because it forced me to think about two incommensurate directorial styles of storytelling in the same story – the film within the film, or rather the film enveloping the film, the wrap-around, which is the real-time aspect of the story. That it works is certainly the willingness of everyone to entertain big engineering feats and leaps of faith.

Have you always been ‘obsessed’ with alien encounters in the ‘normal’ way many people are, or have you ever, or continue to be, ‘unhealthily’ obsessed with aliens?

To tell you the truth, I am a stone-cold sceptic: I don’t believe in ghosts, aliens, God, reincarnation… anything. I just see all those things, at least in the way they’re talked about, as being too important to the person talking. Oddly, I live in a ‘haunted house’ and hear voices, footsteps, etc. almost daily and I still point a finger of blame at my house rather than in the direction of any paranormal shenanigans. I do, however, believe in some very peculiar sensations I have from time to time that suggest massive differences between what is is and what we think is.

I used to experience hearing voices on the old Windfields estate where Uncle Normie Jewison has his film school, the Canadian Film Centre. When I used to work there alone at odd hours, I could never hear precisely what was being said, but I could tell the sex, the rough age-range and the emotional state of the voices. In your house, can you make out any words in the voices you hear? Or rather, WHAT do you hear?

I hear very natural snippets of conversation. I can’t make out what is said and my impression is that I am not expected to. I also hear, all the time, footsteps upstairs and furniture move. I would say I hear something every day. I have even yelled ‘Quiet!’ without ever compromising my scepticism.

Have you read any of the decent non-fiction on the subject of other worlds, parallel universe, etc.?

I did go through a period, yes, of reading all that. My wife and children are avid believers, so I get exposed to lots of alien hunter-type stuff. I can freak myself out easily but I think that’s explained to a willing suspension of disbelief. I am a classic want-to-believe type so I have all the time in the world for those that do.

Living in Winnipeg for so many decades and now in the middle of fucking nowhere on the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula, I am always looking at the sky. Do YOU also look to the skies where you live in Stayner?

Well, yes, of course. A friend of mine once claimed to have seen something in the sky up here. For years he thought that if he submerged his head in a bathtub those beings would communicate with him [laughs]. Sort of ‘Close Encounters of The Drownsman’. Not a bad idea… [The Drownsman is a recent Canadian horror thriller about a Freddy/Jason-type who drags cute, young babes into water and drowns them.]

It seems Ejecta adheres to the J. Allen Hynek triple-header of close encounters. How conscious were you of injecting it into the screenplay?

Not very, except that those classifications are now part of how we all imagine an encounter. The idea of contact. This is the threshold all faiths enshrined. The trail that leads to the thing. The indexical sign. The holy relic and the spectral photobomb. I have stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled `Shut up!’ but even that is too soft to be contact.

Am I just being too egg-headed about this?

[Laughs] Yeah, totally.

Forgive the yellow viscous oospore of my line of questioning. Does Ejecta simply come from a cool idea that morphed into what it became?

Well, yes of course, but I do believe that the process of constructing a story attracts other kinds of stories, pulls at shadow elements, sneaky resonances, that if you tune things right, will reveal themselves. Is it about something? I can only answer that as a member of the audience.

Do you write for yourself? Are YOU the audience?

Oh, I think both. There are elements, especially things I don’t want to fully understand, that I create as a member of the audience, and things for myself, which are illegible, half-lit ideas.

Did the style of cinematic storytelling employed have more to do with exigencies of low-budget production or is it more deeply linked to my aforementioned thoughts on creating a sense of reality?

Well, the two don’t cancel each other out. It’s so very hard, especially with film, to know exactly what you are making. You prep things and talk about things then you push it all in front of a light for a few moments. What is it? If you want it to feel that it is something, that it’s a good idea, then it always helps to have people who can think on their toes, turn on a dime and do it with immediate conviction. This really was a great team to work with.

I’ve been impressed and obsessed with the Foresight Features guys since they started making movies. Here they are in Collingwood, Ontario, all pals, making cool shit in the middle of nowhere. It really reminds me of other pockets of regional, low-budget waves like Romero, Tony Buba and company in Pittsburgh, and certainly all the Winnipeg wackos like myself, Maddin and Paizs, plus, of course the Astron-6 nut bars. You clearly love working with these guys. To what extent is the region of Collingwood/Stayner an influence upon what you write and what those guys make?

These guys are my brothers now. When I had a heart attack a few months ago, I got sprung three days after the surgery and it was THEM, all three of ’em, who drove down to the hospital in Newmarket to get me home. So those relationships now go beyond creative partnerships. But yeah, how we work, where we work, it often reminds me of those eccentric bands of characters who spring up locally and do shit the way they want to. I think of John Waters and his Dreamland gang too. And yes, being here, doing it all here changes everything. It marks everything. It’s in my books too. It was certainly a part of Pontypool. The names, the people, the streets, the buildings; you make shit in your backyard.

Was there a piece of writing or movie that was some kind of epiphany for you in terms of pursuing writing and the kind of stuff you write?

When I was a teenager I thought I was insane, so I sought out things I could read that would help me cultivate the insanity rather than fear it. You know, all the usual stuff a kid might read: Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet, Isidore Ducasse. Surrealists provided the survival guides I needed to shore up my crumbling personality and mind. And from early childhood I was always a horror fan. I used to hide in my room at night, all night, and make those plastic monster models.

Moi aussi, dude. I loved all those Aurora models from the Universal Pictures monster movies of the 30s and 40s.

I couldn’t help but associate horror films with supercharged unnatural events that I was actually experiencing. The airplane glue I used to put the monster models together would make me hallucinate when I woke up in the middle of the night, which I almost always did.

Yeah, like who doesn’t?

You asked if I had any epiphanies? Oh yeah! Dracula would be staring me down from the end of my bed and the Hunchback of Notre Dame would be springing around my room like some deformed toad on crystal meth.

Interview by Greg Klymkiw

SCI-FI-LONDON 2014

OXV The Manual
OXV: The Manual

SCI-FI-LONDON

24 April – 4 May 2014

London, UK

SFL website

Out of synch numerically with each year it’s been in operation, this year SCI-FI-LONDON skipped (unlucky) no.13 and used November 2012’s first Stratford-based autumn festival to make up the numbers so that SCI-FI-LONDON 14 could take place in 2014. Taking place at Stratford East Picturehouse and BFI Southbank, and with notable events in other venues, the festival offered a rich array of films, taking on a wide range of topics from Star Wars to alien asteroid collision and subjugating frequencies.

Lost Time (Christian Sesma, 2014)
The opener to this year’s festival wasn’t a strong start. A mishmash of the last 30 years of genre clichés, from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) to The X-Files (1993-2002) with a healthy dose of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) thrown in, this half-baked smorgasbord of mysticism, alien abduction, parallel worlds and incarcerated lunatics would have been watchable if the script writers had chosen a couple of those themes rather than muddling through all of them. Stolid performances by B-movie actors Robert Davi and Luke Goss seem to be the project’s raison d’&#234tre. While the film opens well with an intriguing and disturbing juxtaposition of a cancer sufferer with her dreams of alien abduction and disembowelment, the following hour or so indeed feels like lost time for members of the audience waiting for the plot to successfully develop.

Watch the trailer for Lost Time:

Bunker 6 (Greg Jackson, 2013)
Luckily the second day of the festival saw not only the premiere of a terrific new Canadian sci-fi film but also the festival’s first use of an amazing, atmospheric screening location. Bunker 6 imagines an alternative 1970s where the increasingly claustrophobic survivors of an alternative Cuban Missile Crisis where the nukes flew are bickering over dwindling supplies in their subterranean fallout bunker. A tight, excellent cast and a real-life location – that apparently needed little kitting out to convince viewers of its period setting – combine to make a taut, intelligent thriller that deserves a larger audience. The screening at SCI-FI-LONDON took place in a genuine World War II bunker beneath the streets of Dalston and at times made the audience feel like a hole had been cut in the wall to reveal a drama beyond. One hopes the festival can programme more esoteric events like this in the future.

Watch the trailer for Bunker 6:

Beyond (Tom Large and Joseph Baker, 2014)
The third premiere of the festival apparently almost didn’t make it into the programme as there were doubts as to whether the film qualifies as science fiction (it depends on how you interpret the scenes set in the present). In any case, Beyond is a great new Scottish genre movie, set in two time periods – one before an extinction level asteroid is en route to the Earth and the other after aliens have depopulated the planet to a minority of survivors who successfully hid during the first cull. Cutting back and forth between the two, the plot follows the travails of a pair of engaging leads played by Richard J. Danum and Gillian MacGregor as the scenarios take their toll on the pair’s relationship. With a backdrop of impressive special effects and a sense of impending doom, the film often comes across as a sci-fi response to Once (2006), albeit one with aliens instead of singing, and that’s no bad thing at all.

Watch the trailer for Beyond:

Struggled Reagans (Gregg Golding, 2013)
If I described Struggled Reagans as a punk-trash porno tongue-in-cheek underground take on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-present) then no matter how much I may explain how wretched a film-watching experience it is, it’s safe to say that it’d be bound to glean an audience of ironic hipster / student fans of gonzo filmmaking, or B-movie fanatics with a drink in their hands. For about half its running time Struggled Reagans is amusing or quirky enough to justify its existence, with the filmmakers channelling the style of early John Waters or Troma films reasonably well, but it is a struggle to persevere with the 85-minute runtime and the story would have been better received if delivered in shorter instalments like its TV forebear.

Watch the trailer for Struggled Reagans:

SOS: Save Our Skins (Kent Sobey, 2014)
Weirdly, SCI-FI-LONDON 14 had no fewer than three pairs of movies whose plots mirrored each other. SOS, like Beyond, is a British film that tells the tale of a giant rock about to hit the Earth, which presages an alien invasion (see below for reviews of another pair – OXV: The Manual and LFO), but here the story is told for comedic rather than tragic effect. In SOS, a duo of hapless geeks staying in New York to attend a sci-fi convention find a deserted city, with the only signs of life an elderly cannibal, an escaped female lunatic and a blue monster dogging their steps. The cast is filled with stalwarts from British TV comedy and the low budget is extremely well used, with shots of empty streets in Manhattan as effective and unnerving as anything from an American blockbuster. Films that juggle sci-fi, comedy and horror often struggle not to be uneven, but this is an amiable and accomplished piece that leaves the viewer wanting more.

Watch the trailer for SOS: Save Our Skins:

Saving Star Wars (Gary Wood, 2004)
A bittersweet comedy-drama that follows a Star Wars fan to a sci-fi convention with the hope of meeting George Lucas. Saving Star Wars has inevitably an early Kevin Smith vibe complete with longueurs and scenes that stay beyond their welcome. However, this is a hard film to dislike, made with love, obvious familiarity with the subject matter and contemporaneous genre films, and a lovely turn by Dave Prowse – the actor who wore the Darth Vader suit in the original Star Wars trilogy – playing himself. The director’s cut shown at SCI-FI-LONDON was apparently a little shorter than the original version, which the festival showed 10 years earlier, but could have been tightened further; perhaps another 10 minutes shorn off the length could have turned a likeable farce into a cult movie. As with early Smith, some of the performances are pretty good, some are fairly dire, but the script generally saves even the most leaden scenes, and for fans of George Lucas (who in this film, ironically, is played by the most wooden actor in the cast) the movie is worth watching for Prowse’s extended cameo alone.

Watch the trailer for Saving Star Wars:

Senn (Josh Feldman, 2013)
The artist Moebius (Jean Giraud) has been a great inspiration both directly and indirectly for SF cinema over the last five decades. Although only one film directly based on his comic book work – Blueberry (2004) – was made during his lifetime, this is possibly the thematically closest movie to his oeuvre since Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element in 1997. Senn features a couple who work on tedious production lines on a human-settled alien planet, making incomprehensible objets d’arts to be shipped off to other worlds. Their blue-collar existence seems prescribed until the day they die. But when lead character Senn finds a glowing sentience in his locker, which is soon followed by the arrival of a massive alien vessel, he and his girlfriend will be taken across the galaxy on an ark-like ship to uncover an ancient mystery. Senn looks terrific, with alien languages designed by a master of the medium (cinematic Star Trek’s Britton Watkins). The languid plot, devoid of the laser beams, space battles and ugly aliens which have cursed science fiction to casual onlookers, is refreshing to say the least. Let down only by perhaps too few plot incidents to fill the running time – which feels longer than its 84 minutes – Senn is a gem that will hopefully accrue the cult following it deserves.

Watch the trailer for Senn:

Who’s Changing? An Adventure in Time with Fans (Cameron McEwan, 2014)
A crowd-funded British documentary about the history and current face of Doctor Who fandom, Who’s Changing? is a brisk and enjoyable documentary by Who expert Cameron K. McEwan who has also written a coffee table book on the programme and runs a website devoted to it. Various actors associated with the TV show’s past – Sophie Aldred, Louise Jameson – and present – Neve McIntosh, Dan Starkey – are interviewed along with comic book writers, producers and fans of the programme and its spin-offs. All the interviews are professionally conducted and filmed, many in the environs of SF conventions and festivals, and contrast Doctor Who fandom in the early years – when Whovians were somewhat ridiculed by society – and the present day – where there is more diversity in the gender and age of fans. McEwan touches on interesting aspects of all the above, but perhaps not with enough depth or the insight that an anthropologist or sociologist might bring to the project. Ultimately a documentary for the fans and by the fans, Who’s Changing? is worth watching for anyone with a casual interest in one of the BBC’s most loved programmes, but rarely rises above the quality of a Doctor Who DVD extra, when it could have been a lot more.

Watch the trailer for Who’s Changing?:

LFO: The Movie (Antonio Tublén, 2013)
The first of another pair of similarly themed and named movies (see below for OXV), LFO is a tight Scandinavian drama that is presented like a sitcom – based around the relationship between a loner, the ghost of his dead wife and the couple who live opposite him – but contrasts its comedic moments with increasingly dark themes. Picked by festival curator Louis Savy as the best film of the 2014 line-up (I’d disagree and give it to OXV) the plot depicts an unstable sociopath who discovers a low frequency tone that when played can hypnotise and subjugate others to his will. There are touches of both ever-so-hip Scandi-noir and Berberian Sound Studio (2012) as lead actor Patrik Karlson (a bit part actor in Wallander and The Bridge) becomes increasingly obsessed with manipulating the world around him, just as the soundtrack begins to suggest he may not be an entirely reliable narrator. Disturbing, intriguing, amusing and thought-provoking in turn, LFO shows that a great science-fiction idea can be convincingly presented on a small number of sets with a tiny budget, and if nothing less, is a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking.

Watch the trailer for LFO: The Movie:

OXV: The Manual (Darren Paul Fisher, 2013)
A companion piece to LFO (the third pair of films with similar plots at SCI-FI-LONDON 14 were Upside Down (2012) and Patema Inverted (2013), both about a boy falling in love with an upside down girl, neither of which I got a chance to see), OXV is a tremendous new film about a semi-dystopian Britain, where people’s lives are dictated by what ‘frequency’ their body emits. In a parallel to class, IQ or susceptibility to viruses (as explored in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 a decade before), low frequency people get few perks or opportunities in life, along with a constant risk of bad luck, while high frequency people receive advantages, opportunities and good luck. This conceit is first used in the plot as a charming rom-com device to pair up a mismatched couple of opposing frequencies from school to adulthood. But it is then combined with the notion of secret, semi-magical words that can disrupt a person’s frequency and also bend a person’s will to your commands. A terrific cast, plot structure and cinematic aesthetic not only make OXV the finest film of this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON, but also the best British sci-fi film in years. OXV has found an American distributor – under the more prosaic title Frequencies – and one hopes an intelligent distribution company will also see it released in its country of origin.

Watch a scene from OXV: The Manual:

Alex Fitch

Philip Hoare is Thomas Jerome Newton

David Bowie_Man Who Fell to Earth_1
The Man Who Fell to Earth

Philip Hoare was born in Southampton and is the author of seven non-fiction books. His latest work, the magical The Sea Inside (published by Fourth Estate), is an invigorating tour of the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. Along the way, Hoare meets a cast of recluses, outcasts and travellers, from eccentric artists and scientists to tattooed warriors, as well as marvellous creatures, from a gothic crow to a great whale. Philip is a keen sea swimmer. Even in the depths of winter. Philip Hoare’s filmic alter ego is Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Eithne Farry

There is no contest as to my avatar. He is Thomas Jerome Newton, the flame-haired, paper-skinned, grounded angel in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In 1976, when Nicolas Roeg’s movie came out, I went to see it three times at the cinema. I even took my cassette recorder and taped the soundtrack. I so identified with Newton that friends accused me of making my nose bleed in a Tube lift to emulate a similar scene in the movie. I also wore plastic sandals like Newton. I nearly fainted at the private view of ‘David Bowie is’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum earlier this year when I came face to face with the black suit and white shirt Bowie wore for the film.

But it wasn’t just about my adulation for the Thin White Duke (whom I saw for the first time that year on the Station to Station tour at Earl’s Court; the opening act was Bunel’s Un chien andalou (1929), and Bowie performed in a similar black and white outfit, lit by Dan Flavin-like white strip lights). Roeg’s fantastical film has elements of Powell and Pressburger as much as it has of science fiction or surrealism.

The film’s references to Auden and Icarus echo Bowie’s shape-shifting personae (as well as 1970s dystopia). At one point, Newton is being driven through the American wilderness (a sequence inspired by the Cracked Actor (1975) documentary, which prompted Roeg to cast Bowie) when you suddenly hear a burst of hillbilly banjo and see, through a weird watery sepia, a vision of 19th century sharecroppers.

Newton crosses zones and cultures, an existential figure, a stranded alien in search of water for his parched planet. The scene in which he stands at the end of a dock was, to me, a direct echo of Jay Gatsby standing at the end of his Long Island dock, looking out to a green light and ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’.

For someone addicted to swimming in the sea every day, often in the dark and lonely hour before dawn, Newton’s predicament still strikes me, long and deep.

More information about Philip Hoare can be found here.

Philip Hoare

Prometheus and Panspermia

Prometheus

When considering the origin of life on Earth, it’s worth thinking of the planet as a giant petri dish. Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago life began to evolve. It’s unknown exactly what started the conversion of the primordial soup into the single-celled and then multi-celled organisms that would first populate the seas and then climb out of them, but there are two main theories. Abiogenesis suggests life naturally began to evolve when the surrounding conditions of the soup, the temperature of the Earth, cloud cover and so on, became ideal for the amino acids in the quagmire to start to coalesce. The other, exogenesis, requires an outside element, some kind of cosmic dust (rather than, say, a dissolving 8-foot albino humanoid) falling to Earth in a meteorite and starting off the chemical reactions.

The exogenesis theory is part of the notion of panspermia: that life – in the form of dormant bacteria (perhaps from the disintegration of older planets) floating through space – might seed a planet like ours and lead to the long process of evolution. More fanciful ideas of exogenesis and panspermia involve fully formed aliens (rather than bacteria) landing in spaceships and using the planet as a laboratory to create new life or give the existing fauna a push in the right direction.

This science-fictional concept was at its most popular in 1968 thanks to the book Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, written by Swiss author Erich Anton Paul von Dä;niken, who, not long after the publication of his most famous pseudo-scientific work, was arrested for other successes in the fields of fraud and forgery, in particular the embezzlement of $130,000 over a twelve-year period. The uncredited co-author of the book, filmmaker Wilhelm Utermann, found fame for disseminating another story that captured the imagination of the public a decade later – the adventures of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music.

Chariots of the Gods puts forward the theory that aliens visited the Earth in ancient history and had a hand in forming religions and civilisations. The popularity of this notion in the late 60s was further bolstered by the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the same year. Kubrick’s film shows aliens playing an active role in evolution, leaving a black monolith in prehistory, which inspires our primate ancestors to first pick up tools, and another on the moon to act as a calling card, suggesting that modern man, having found this second monolith, should travel on further to the next sign post on the galactic road.

All of the above, in a tangential way, brings us to the $120 million entertaining sci-fi epic Prometheus. Including elements from the science and pseudo-science I’ve talked about so far – the film mixes elements of panspermia, exogenesis, Chariots of the Gods, alien star maps and so on – Prometheus is a prequel to the seminal (and I mean that in every sense of the word) sci-fi horror film Alien (1979). Its status as part of the ongoing Alien franchise is something that the filmmakers became ambiguous about as the film neared release, which is understandable given the failure of many recent prequels. Furthermore, ‘prequel’ implies a direct narrative link to an existing story, which Prometheus doesn’t specifically have; the film certainly puts some of the 1979 film’s events in motion but it doesn’t end in a way that immediately sets up the plot of Alien, so using the term ‘prequel’ could lead to disappointment.

That said, I think any fan of Alien who sees Prometheus is much more likely to be disappointed not by the lack of explicit joining of dots, but rather by the poor quality of the dialogue and plot details that drive the film forward. There are lamentable lines of dialogue such as a geologist defining his character with the immortal line, ‘I’m a rock guy, I fucking love rocks’. Another problematic area is the cavalier attitude the characters display while on a scientific mission (compared to the miners in the original film, who might be forgiven for their actions): they open their helmets in an alien environment; finger the exogenic slime in a subterranean chamber; and try to befriend extra-terrestrial snake creatures when they rear from said obsidian goo… These are dumb movie characters acting in dumb movie ways and saying dumb movie lines; something that was not true of the original Alien films but did characterise the Alien vs Predator spin-offs, which this new film was supposedly created to replace and eradicate from our memories.

In fact, Prometheus can’t help but evoke the first AvP movie (2004), which echoes Chariots of the Gods with the existence of an ancient Mayan-style temple covered in alien symbols built beneath or before the Antarctic permafrost; this was designed as a weapons testing ground and discovered by a group of archaeologists, led by the titular head of the Weyland Industries corporation. That film received a worse critical reception than Prometheus has and certainly is the less impressive film of the two, but it also contained the input of some of the creators of the original Alien, in this case, the writers rather than the director.

There is one thing that AvP does better than Prometheus: the lighting of the sets. Much of the atmosphere of Prometheus is undone by overly lit chambers, in contrast to the stygian locales of Alien, which allowed the eponymous creature to hide in the shadows and create a genuinely disturbing world. One of the reasons for the existence of Prometheus seems to be to render some of the unused designs H.R. Giger had produced for the original film, such as the wall relief depicting the messianic original alien, a giant head in a mysterious cavern and more of his archetypal biomechanoid set designs. While it’s great to be able to see these on screen finally, having them too well lit destroys much of the atmosphere that made the first film so great.

Prometheus tries to be scientifically credible – the recent discovery of extremophiles, creatures that can withstand environments we didn’t believe could sustain life, improves the odds of finding life on another planet or moon – but it ultimately disappoints for having loftier aims than its predecessors, which it doesn’t realise in nearly as satisfying a way. In its characters and scenarios, Prometheus mines the rest of the franchise. Ripley’s iconic flame-thrower makes a return, as do mad scientists who mix alien DNA with humans – previously seen in Alien Resurrection (1997) – and an emotionless android who acts both in the interests of his human colleagues (as did Bishop in Aliens, 1986) and against them (as did Ash in Alien), and meets the same fate as one of his fellow robots. All this means that you could see the franchise itself working as panspermia, with characters and plot elements dispersed among the sequels where they take root and grow in different directions. Prometheus sows the seeds for a possible sequel, and leaves the door open for its makers to try and correct their flawed creation through further evolution in a future Prometheus 2.

Alex Fitch