Feature Category: Interviews

Before moving into television production himself and taking charge of Blue Peter, Richard Marson (pictured above) wrote for Doctor Who Magazine for five years in the 1980s, during the period in which John Nathan-Turner’s stewardship of the programme was proving the most controversial in the show’s history. Starburst recently spoke to Richard about his new book on the subject of the classic series’ last producer, JN-T The Life & Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner.

Starburst: How did you feel about the JNT era at the time he was producing the show?

Richard Marson: I guess his era splits fairly easily into three “chunks.” It was really John’s first two seasons that brought me back into Doctor Who and cemented me in fan terms, because I’d lost interest around the Graham Williams period. I’d probably done what most people have done: loved it when I was younger, and then grown out of it. It was only around 1980 that I really got back into it. Of course that was when John was taking over and I really did love his early time, I thought the casting of Peter Davison was just inspired and brilliant. But then the second half of it didn’t work for me at all, and by then of course I was much closer to it, seeing it being made; I suppose that affected my view. Towards the end of it, the latter part of John’s time, the Sylvester stuff really wasn’t for me at all.

So you knew John?

I knew him in the sense that he was at the epicentre of all things Doctor Who in the 1980s, so if you had any meaningful involvement with Doctor Who at all, and of course I spent four-and-a-half years banging out thousands of words of nonsense every month for Doctor Who Magazine, you had to deal with John. John was the root of all news, John’s blue pencil was there and ever handy if he didn’t like what you were writing. So I knew him in that sense, but I didn’t know him socially. I had had an early encounter with him which probably meant that he knew that I wasn’t particularly interested in knowing him socially at that time. I’d love to meet him now. I would love to have the chance to chew the fat with him now, I really would. But sadly, of course, that’s not possible.

An early encounter…?

It’s in the book! You’ll have to read that and see how much it makes your hair curl. I used to tell the story mainly for laughs. It happened after the first time I was invited up to go and see a recording of the show, and he just got a bit frisky, shall we say. I was a bit taken aback, I was only seventeen and at the time he famously said to me, “You’re so fucking provincial.” And of course I was fucking provincial, I came from Bishop’s Stortford, I didn’t know anything about anything! I just thought I was in this kind of Wonderland that was Television Centre, thinking it was an amazing place, and so I wasn’t really prepared for anything very sophisticated.

It’s so hard for people to get their heads around the pre-internet, pre-mobile phone era, but a lot of the time I was working for Marvel, I was a student at Durham, and I had a high old time as a student – lots of socialising, lots of putting on plays, and obviously work somewhere in between. So I quite often used to be hitting my pillow in the early hours, and somebody would come and knock on the door with grim regularity at eleven o’clock in the morning, and they would say, “Marson, they’ve got the BBC on the phone!” We had one pay-phone for the whole college that I was in, in this grotty little kitchenette, mounted on the wall, and I would have to rouse myself, drag on a dressing-gown and go in there, and Sarah Lee, John’s secretary, would be watching the clock and thinking, ‘Where the hell is he?’ and she’d say, “You’re keeping him waiting!” You know when you first wake up and your voice is a bit croaky? John would be put through straight away and it would be, “Hi! How are you?” And of course I realised that I didn’t have a pen to write down the news that he was telling me, so I’d gouge it in the cork-board on the wall, I’d improvise somehow and go frantically back to my room and have to write it up on my creaky old Amstrad. I say creaky; it wasn’t creaky then, it was state-of-the-art. People used to come and knock on my door and say, “Can we have a look at your computer?” I also had a video; I think I was the only student in 1984/85 who had a video, so I used to have parties where people would come round and we’d watch a film or something. And then we’d go out: “Oh it’s that guy; he’s got a VHS recorder.”

Was this book suggested to you, or was it your idea?

It was my idea. Basically, it had a fairly torturous genesis in that I was asked, by more than one publisher, whether I had a Doctor Who book that was worth offering. And of course you sit there and you think, ‘Well it’s a very very saturated marketplace, every possible angle has been covered.’ I went back to thinking, ‘Well, I’d like to write something that I really know about and care about and am interested in.’ I always felt that John, who was such a big, towering figure in Doctor Who, because he died so young I don’t think that he’s really had a fair evaluation. It struck me that it was getting on for a decade since he died, and that’s quite a good period of time in that a lot of people involved are still alive, but enough time’s elapsed for people to have perhaps a bit more of a balanced judgement and perhaps be a bit more even-handed. As I found in the course of the research – I talked to a hundred and ten people – he still had the power to reduce people to quite a gnashing of teeth, and in other cases floods of tears. So I thought he was a very interesting personality, and his time so coincided with my involvement that I thought that was a very good mix.

We’re amazed no one’s really tackled the subject before.

I suppose the problem is that it’s more complex than I’d thought. When I started to research it, I thought I kind of knew the headlines and I did. But you know, I’m a big fan of biographies, I read a lot of them, and I think the best ones – or the ones that aspire to be the better ones – really try to avoid the author telling you what you should think about this person, but have as many primary sources as possible, and really try to be even-handed and get as much of a kind of complex or detailed view as you can. As I started on the research for this I realised that there were a lot of complexities with John, that he was a very tricky individual to capture. One of the hardest things to capture is somebody’s sense of humour, and their charisma. He certainly had tons of charisma and he certainly had a great sense of humour. He was also terrifically kind and generous. But, if you think about it in terms of your own life, if somebody were writing your biography, you know that they would come across things that perhaps you were less proud of or didn’t show you in such a great light. That’s certainly true of John as well.

Did you find out much that you didn’t already know?

Yes. Yes, I think it’s fair to say. I didn’t really know much about his early life; the fact that I tracked down people who taught him, his childhood best friend, and lots of people he met when he was still in his teens, starting out in theatre; I think that really did fill in a lot of the gaps. You know, it’s that old line, “You show me the boy and I’ll show you the man.” I think a lot of the person John later was, and things that he was enthusiastic about, passionate about, were there right from the very beginning of his life. But I also found out an awful lot about how he was before Doctor Who professionally; how highly regarded he was, how so many people thought he was really going to be Controller of BBC1 – you know, he was ‘the boy most likely to’. And in a way, Doctor Who was the worst thing that happened to him. You can certainly form a cogent argument to say that in the end it destroyed him. It was also possibly the ruin of him in his own life; it was a terrifically sad story. I’m not ashamed to say that when I had finished it, and it wasn’t just that I was relieved to get to the end, but when I read the final draft last couple of chapters, I cried a lot – because it was just so remorseless, very sad, and – in the interest of full disclosure, as they say – the other reason I was drawn to write it is that there are parallels in our careers in the sense that he devoted more than a decade to that programme, which was all-consuming, and I devoted a decade of my life and career to Blue Peter. Which in a way is a sort of bed-fellow at the BBC with Doctor Who; it’s another flagship programme that has gone on a very long time, that has had a huge amount of interest. And if you work on it, as we always used to say on Blue Peter, you can always give more, there’s never a point at which you can hold back and say, “That’s where the day ends.” You live, breathe and sleep it; I certainly did and I think that was absolutely true of John. There were a lot of parallels in how the BBC worked, how it can be a bad thing, a toxic thing when your work becomes so much a part of your life, as it certainly did with him.

In a way, you’re both figures that have courted controversy.

I don’t know about courted; I feel like controversy has courted me, rather than the other way around! And I’m sure John would say the same. I tell you what, it did occur to me that it would be impossible for John to function, in the way that he was able to function in the 1980s, now, because the world has changed so much; it’s such a kind of leaky, litigious, tabloid shit-stormy world that a lot of the way that BBC people operated back in those days just simply couldn’t work now. Whether that would be an improvement, I don’t know, but certainly the degree of freedom he had in running Doctor Who… I would say that there’s an argument to be made that one of the reasons things went wrong with Doctor Who was there was such poor management, and such a lack of interest from above, in what John was doing that he wasn’t well supported, and the longer you do something, however good you are, however talented you are, you get tired, you get stale; it’s difficult to keep things fresh and I suspect that as you watch the creative decisions being made, some of those decisions were to do with, “Oh my God, we’ve got another 26 to make, we’ve got to find another Doctor, we’ve got to do this.” So I think that he wasn’t very well supported.

So did you find yourself identifying with him?

Oh yes, sometimes. Yes, definitely. I think anybody who’s spent any significant chunk of their career working right in the heart of the BBC will recognise some of the pressures, some of the privileges; it’s not just the bad things, there are some amazing things – it’s a very lucky place to be able to work. Or it was, in the heyday, because of the freedoms that you had and because of the amazing talent that you get to work with. A lot of the crews who worked on Doctor Who were also the people that I worked with on Blue Peter, and there were some amazingly gifted people. But I think you will see the parallels if you read the book – and I don’t make any bones about it, whether it’s good or bad as to whether I feel there’s some area of common ground, if you like. And it’s helpful when you’re writing somebody’s biography to have some understanding of the pressures they were under or the way in which they worked, because it gives you a greater insight. What I’ve tried to do is to deconstruct or to explain how the BBC worked from within, because I think that’s something that’s very rarely understood. Fans will often be very critical, and why not, about choices of writers or choices of directors, or why was this decision made; very often, there’s a lack of understanding that those decisions were not made perhaps just for creative reasons; there were pragmatic reasons or there were political reasons, and I try and deconstruct that a bit, and make it clearer that John was very much a man who was working within the parameters of the BBC, he wasn’t able to be just a completely free agent.

In some respects, it’s also a horror story.

It depends on your point of view. I don’t think that he thought it was a horror story, I think he probably thought he was having a great time! It is obviously going to divide opinions, but I was so nervous of that aspect of his life, not least because I really didn’t want it to become hijacked. I think if I’d discovered darker things than I did, I might have backed off. But actually, this is not to say that subsequently people won’t come forward and say, “You didn’t know about this,” or, “You didn’t know about that.” But I did a lot of research, and I think what you had was a promiscuous gay bloke in a position where his social life was very actively busy, and he had the opportunity to meet a lot of young people, and did like getting off with young guys. I don’t think he was predatory particularly, I don’t think he forced himself on the unwilling, I haven’t found any evidence of that. I think the whole thing about the age of consent – and you’ve to remember in the 1980s it was 21, which a lot of people at the time thought was extremely unreasonable, and is now obviously in line with the heterosexual age of consent – is it’s controversial and people will be very divided. I found I was much more cautious about his partner Gary, than I was about John. I think John was just a go-with-the-flow, life-is-a-party, you know, “I’ll try it on and if somebody says yes, then that’s up to them.” I have less of a benevolent view of Gary. I think one of the themes of the book is that, in falling in love with Gary Downie and in making his life with Gary, that was another massive issue in terms of the unravelling of his life and career.

How do you think people will react to the book?

I don’t know, it’s hard to tell really. I think if I’d put that at the forefront of my mind I wouldn’t have been able to write it. When you do these things you’ve got to try and trust your own judgement. I did make decisions about what to leave in and what to take out; there was some stuff that I just thought was unnecessary, or too private. There are things that it will be difficult for people to read, and inevitably what will tend to happen is that sometimes people will take what tends to support their view or supports their argument and ignore what doesn’t. And you just have to be fairly resilient about that. I’ve said what I’ve had to say and shown what I’ve uncovered, but as I say I’ve really tried to fairly represent the perspectives of all the people closest to him, his family, his friends, his colleagues; so I’ve tried not to do that thing of, “I won’t include them because I don’t like them.” It was very much an attempt to get everyone around the table, if you like. But there is a lot of stuff in there I think people won’t know, and I think some of it people will struggle with.

And have you come to a new perspective on John yourself?

I think I perhaps have more compassion for him than I did before. I have enormous compassion for how things went for him professionally. You can’t, I don’t think, fail to be affected by the strength of feeling, of loyalty and love that there is expressed for him still, by a lot of people – who give their reasons; they don’t just say, “Oh I liked him,” or “I loved him”; they’ve got reasons. Clearly John was capable of acts of real generosity and thoughtfulness, and in a way that touched people’s lives. And I think he really was a worker; you can argue whether he was the right person for that job, whether he was making the right decisions or not, but he certainly was a work-horse and he really did have certain qualities. The fact that he really understood the global potential of Doctor Who – he was in love with that show, and I have a lot of respect for that.

What were his strengths and weaknesses?

I think his strengths were that he could persuade people to do stuff for him. I think he was very persuasive, very good at getting deals; he was very good with actors, getting the company feeling, making actors feel empowered. I think he was fantastic at playing the BBC system for money, and making a very little go a long way, and I think he was amazing at publicity, amazing at seeing every opportunity for getting the show out there. In terms of weaknesses, you can’t ignore that the big weakness was he didn’t have much narrative sense. He wasn’t really a pure drama person and I think that he could easily be distracted from good storytelling by something about the frocks or the star name or whatever. In that sense he was very reliant on his script editors and writers, and that inevitably meant the results were patchy.

He had a curious habit of ditching experienced hands and giving untested ones a go.

I suspect that towards the end what was happening there was that he was so beaten down by what had gone on, that he slightly kind of thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got nothing left to lose.’ And I think also the other factor is that by 1987, the show was such damaged goods in the industry, that you weren’t going to get really experienced directors and writers who were going to want to do it. Even the writers and directors they got, some of the people I spoke to told me that their agents were saying, “Really? You really think you should be doing Doctor Who?” It was very much a poisoned chalice by then. Whereas earlier on… He was there so long, and circumstances change, that to begin with, when he was the young firebrand, the last thing he wanted was someone who actually he would call the ‘old toots’ telling him, “That’s not how we did it ten years ago.” The other thing is, the sexuality thing is an issue; that was an era where, even in a kind of virtually liberal institution, some of the directors who were around were more, shall we say, old school and wouldn’t have been his type of person. So why would he employ them?

And conversely, they may not have wanted to work with him.

Absolutely. And there’s no doubt, if you were made a producer when you were 31 or 32, and you’ve got a director who’s maybe ten years older and feels a bit disgruntled or whatever – there’s all that stuff going on. The BBC, then as now as probably forever, is absolutely riddled with all sorts of political tensions and goings-on. And all those things have an impact in the day-to-day running of a show like Doctor Who.

I’ve always thought Eric Saward was as responsible for Doctor Who’s troubles…

I would say that the death of Doctor Who was a slow death, and that there was never a point, post-1984, where the show wasn’t going to die. All this is in the book, that the likes of Jonathan Powell and Bill Cotton had given up on it, and I think they only let it stagger on, doing the minimum number of episodes a year, for two reasons. One was because there was money from Worldwide, or Enterprises as it was then, and the other was because they didn’t want the shit-storm of the row with the fans and all of that business, which the BBC have always been scared of; they don’t like bad publicity. Those are the two reasons it limped on a bit, and I think if you’d got Dennis bloody Potter and Tom Stoppard writing Doctor Who and you’d had the best directors, even if the thing had done an artistic u-turn, I think it would still have been cancelled. I just think they didn’t want to do that show. I also think that while John was there, they’d given up on John as well. There’s some astonishingly frank stuff in the book about BBC management’s views on John, and it was – as one of them now says – a very cruel process really, because they just let him wither with the show. So Eric, did he help or did he hinder? I think Eric had his limitations, certainly. The big problem with Eric – and it was one that you could just as easily lay at John’s door – was that these were two very powerful men in their way, who weren’t able to communicate effectively with each other. And I think what happened with Eric certainly didn’t help anybody, least of all Eric in the long-term. I think in artistic terms, he stayed there far too long. The idea that you take a programme off the air for artistic concerns, and then keep the same creative people in charge is a nonsense. It was a nonsense then, it’s a nonsense now. And they knew that and Eric knew that, and I think that Eric was filled with self-loathing, and management made it very difficult for them to make a fresh start. But the dreadful disaster that was the Trial season fed into that, it’s a very painful thing to watch – on every level.

Even without the Doctor Who connection, your book still tells a very interesting story.

Mark Gatiss is currently doing his film about the beginnings of Doctor Who, but actually I think the death of Doctor Who in the 1980s has every ingredient to make a fantastic film, a microcosm of what was happening at the BBC, the changes at the BBC, the personalities involved, the treacheries – but also the loyalty showed people’s good sides too, when things were really under siege. There’s no doubt that had it not been for John, the show would have ended in 1985; there’s no doubt about that. Whether that would have been better in the long term, who knows? But he fought like a tiger in every way he knew how, to keep it going, and was rewarded with redundancy. There are a lot of elements in the period, from 1985 to 1989, that would make a pretty compelling drama in its own right.

Maybe something for the sixtieth, then…

I don’t think they’ll want to do something that doesn’t really reflect the BBC in a great light!

If they did, they’d have to use your book.

They certainly would, and that would be marvellous, for someone to option the film rights – which are available! I think the interesting thing is that there are some areas of fandom, and it was ever thus, that will struggle with the fact that this is a very adult book; it’s uncompromising in the sense that it’s about grown-up life things, not just about Doctor Who. It’s about people’s real lives and feelings, and emotions, and I really did try to get people to be honest and frank in a way that’s unusual in a Doctor Who book. There’s not very much of that hand-clappy, “Hurrah – everything’s marvellous!” stuff, because that fulfils a particular function, but it’s not actually very true.

JN-T – The Life & Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner is available to pre-order now from Miwk Publishing and is reviewed HERE.

Starburst caught up with actress Ashley Bell to talk about her starring role in The Last Exorcism Part II and more…

Starburst: What was your childhood like?

Ashley Bell: I was born in Santa Monica, California, but grew up in San Fernando Valley. Both my parents were actors. My father moved into doing voiceovers for the animated films such as Transformers and G.I. Joe and my mother is a Groundlings comedy group alumni. As a kid, we’d play in the backyard with Nerf guns, running around having fun. We’d have all kinds of pretend adventures and I could play a different character each time. I always knew I wanted to be an actress and my parents were very supportive of it.

My dad would take me to see all kinds of horror films such as Poltergeist, Susperia and my favorite; Pumpkinhead. I loved that film! When the special effects team was fitting my fingers for the prosthetics from the first film I had to go down to their studio. They gave me a tour and there in the corner was the creature Pumpkinhead! It was exciting to see something from my childhood that scared me.

I’d also watch a lot of the classic films with Bettie Davis, James Dean, Judy Garland. It’s important to know where you come from to know where you’re going as an actress. My parents encouraged me to pursue my dream and I enrolled at New York University to study drama.

What can you tell Starburst about Last Exorcism Part II?

Part II continues the very moment after the first one ended. It’s a continuation of the story. Nell doesn’t remember what happened to her and doesn’t know where she is. The film takes place in New Orleans and she’s trapped in the middle of choosing between good and evil during a decadent time.

How did you prepare for your character, Nell Sweetzer?

I did a lot of research through books and the internet to see what happened to people who encountered possession. Nell’s character has basically a love affair with the devil possessing her soul manipulating her actions. I also took cotillion lessons from a school in San Fernando Valley with the encouragement of my parents at a young age and that helped form Nell’s character having that Southern grace the women have there.

What kind of character would you like to play someday?

I’d like to explore a period piece film. It would be interesting to play a character in a film like that.

What’s up next?

I did a post apocalyptic film where I performed my own stunts called The Day. I have The Marine: Homefront coming out with Neal O’Donough , a romantic comedy called Bounceback, the graphic novel film adaptation of Sparks where I got to play a superhero. That was a lot of fun! I got to study muay thai martial arts and that was the best workout I ever had. 

I’m also behind the camera too. I completed a documentary called Love and Bananas about the plight of Cambodian logging elephants being rescued and taken to a sanctuary. A lot of elephants were mistreated in the past with bull hooks (which are now outlawed) being used by their owners forcing them to work. Elephants are very intelligent and emotional creatures. You can teach an elephant to do the same things with love and bananas rather than using forceful methods, hence the title.

THE LAST EXORCISM PART II hits US cinemas March 1st, and in the UK on June 7th.

Starburst recently caught up with television writer and producer Chris Chibnall in Dorset, in the very locations used for his new series Broadchurch, to talk about his writing on that, on Torchwood and Doctor Who…

Starburst: Not having done the New Adventures and so on, you weren’t necessarily the most obvious choice to write for the revived Doctor Who.

Chris Chibnall: I’d come up through theatre. Doctor Who fans aren’t going to know that, but I’d had an attachment to the National Theatre Studio, a year’s residence and a play produced at Soho Theatre, another at Southwark Playhouse, and one play that ran for three months in Paris and was produced around the world – still is. So I’d come up through that route rather than coming up through Big Finish or the novels.

By the point I came onto Torchwood, I’d written twenty hours of television, I’d worked with Julie on Life on Mars, and I’d got four seasons of what was a big hit for BBC1 with Born and Bred.

The producers would know you, but to viewers, you’d be an unknown name.

You don’t become a writer to be a famous name! I worked my way up through small fringe theatre venues, because I loved writing drama, loved the process of rehearsal and production. Still do, more than ever now.

The aim is to have a career. It’s like any job. I was lucky my first show got green-lit onto BBC1. The first episode of Born and Bred was the first hour-long drama I had made. So then I sat down to write episode two and I was like, “I’ve never written an episode two of anything! I don’t know what to do!” I’d done plays!

So, Julie remembered me for Torchwood because I’d done a good job on Life on Mars. I’m really proud of my episodes on that. Coming out of Born and Bred, the advice was, “Now you go and do your next show on your own.” But then I had a meeting with Kudos and they gave me episode one, and I read Matthew Graham’s script, and they said, “You wouldn’t fancy doing this?” I was so blown away by that script. It was one of those scripts that you just read and you went, “This is the show we never do in the UK.” So I jumped at that and I had a really great time doing that. I’m very proud of those episodes, especially the one in Season Two. Life on Mars is just one of my favourite experiences full-stop, and my favourite results.  John Simm and Phil Glenister: such amazing actors.

working on Life on Mars and Torchwood were very similar. Working on the first series – and actually the exciting place to work on any show is the first series – nobody knew whether they were going to work, either of them.

Gaffer! was one of your plays; is football your other passion, then?

I have ended up writing about it quite a bit because I find it endlessly fascinating, I really love it. It’s a closed world, full of passionate people, and it’s about those people having to work together in pursuit of something. And football tends to be a microcosm of society at any given moment, it reflects what’s going on in the world, in a very unique way. I wasn’t interested in football, and then after college, I went and worked at Sky when it had just bought the football rights, and there was nobody working there and I ended up working for Sky Sports by accident, doing lots of things for them, and being the guy who catalogued every shot of their football coverage! And then even floor-managing a couple of their outside broadcasts by accident, because the guy was off sick and somebody came over on a Friday and said, “Come with us to Norwich on Sunday, you can come and floor-manage for Richard Keys.” It was bananas! It was great, it was a funny old place to work then because they had no money; if you were around they’d just go, “Come and do this!” We lived in Nottingham when I was younger and my dad would take me to Forest games during the sort of ‘77 period: Brian Clough, European Champions and all that, so that was good.

So you didn’t grow up as a Manchester United fan?

No, not at all. United, hilariously, came out of Cyberwoman – because that was the first time I worked with James Strong. He’s a brilliant director, and he’s just done Broadchurch. He directed Cyberwoman and They Keep Killing Suzie, and we were just talking after that.

So was United your idea or James Strong’s?

James had been involved with a documentary about it that hadn’t happened, and so he was really interested in telling the story. I’d written this play about a football manager, Gaffer!, and Brian Minchin, who was a script editor and now produces Wizards Versus Aliens, gave James the script of Gaffer! while we were working together. And he read it, and while we were having a drink he said, “I’ve always wanted to do the Busby Babes.” That was just the point where I went, “Oh, that would be amazing, we should do it as a single film.” Julie Gardner gave me a script commission to write it, and then I didn’t have any time to write it because she made me do more Torchwoods and Doctor Whos, so it took me a couple of years to write it.

It built from there gradually, and then when Piers came in it was sort of verging on a green-light and Piers got it over into a green-light and was very supportive. It all came out of that. Everybody had been trying to do it, but we were just very lucky in that there had been six or seven different scripts for that idea in the industry, people had been trying to make films of it. But James had been and talked to the survivors, he talked to Harry Gregg and Kenny Morgans, all these people, and the pilot’s family; he’d really talked to everyone. So we used all that. And it was just at the point where BBC2 were starting to make single films again, because they hadn’t made them for a long time. So that’s how that came about.

42

I think Graeme ’s so brilliant at pace and energy and kind of operatic thrills and spills and actually that’s really really rare. There’re not many directors in this country who can do that. 42’s not a brilliant script, but he gave it great energy, and he also did the bit in the airlock really nicely too, that’s very character driven, that moment.

We’re not sure the imposition of the 42-minute thing helps it.

I don’t agree, I like it for that; I think it’s exciting for that. I like the real-time-ness of it, I think if you took that away it would have been a much thinner episode because I think it’s me trying to learn. And I think episodes need headlines. I know as a fan you don’t need those, but actually, in the Radio Times: Episode Seven of Series Three? “Oh look, it’s ‘real-time’; we haven’t seen that episode.” Russell and Steven are very acute about why people are turning on this week. Because you can’t take that for granted, and the moment you do is when the figures drop. I think it’s hard when you’re doing thirteen. I think there’s a million ways to do it; but it has to feel ‘special’. Every week there has to be a good reason , whether that’s a guest star or an idea or a monster, you want that headline or you want that image.

But also, that idea of real-time I think came from Russell as a way of trying to help me finish the script within the time; to focus momentum. The whole writing process from start to finish took six weeks, which normally you’d have for a first draft. Because they got the scheduling wrong and it had to be pulled forward, and I’d just been doing Torchwood so I was pretty much dead on my feet. So it wasn’t the environment in which to write your first Doctor Who episode.

It was an interesting one because when I agreed to do the episode, the episode I was pitched was a totally different episode. Russell said, “Come and write this episode,” a totally different story. It was one with the Ood, and it had Zack and Ida from The Impossible Planet, and it was like going to see what had happened to them afterwards. There were tiny elements of it in Planet of the Ood but it wasn’t the same story. And so we did a lot of planning on that – and it was an alien planet. And then I finished all my writing duties on Torchwood and we had the meeting and it was like, “Actually we can’t afford to do that. We need an episode set in corridors, with no monsters,” because we couldn’t afford monsters. That’s probably why there are no real aliens.

You still got your action figure.

Yeah, who’s named after a friend of mine, a Chicago playwright called John Corwin. I was on the Soho Writers attachment thing for a year, and we were very good friends. I wrote and said, “I’m going to name a villain after you.” And so he has his own action figure! Which I’m delighted for; it’s a gift to any friend!

THE HUNGRY EARTH

This feels like a 1970s Greatest Hits brought into the 21st Century, was that in your thinking?

No it wasn’t; to be honest, it was all in the brief I got. It was: bring the Silurians back, and there’s a mine and a drill. So I think the moment you get that brief fans are going to go, “Oh, it’s kind of a bit Pertwee-ish.” You never go into writing thinking that. I can see that when you watch it you probably tick a lot of those things off, but a lot of those things are in response to production, so what your intent is at the beginning is not necessarily where you’re going to end up at the end.

My response to Steven’s brief was, “I want a village on the top and a city underneath.” I pitched it more as a Passport to Pimlico with the Silurians; it didn’t have that tone, but that idea of just a small bunch of people… because with the Earth invasion stories you’ve got to be very careful about your scale. The thing I learned from Torchwood is, how you do that and how you contain threats and how you spread them; what choices you make is a very key decision that looks easy and is a very difficult thing to get.

There was a very specific creature – not an historic dinosaur, almost as if there’s a lost dinosaur – that the Silurians had kept, and I’d written the first fifteen minutes of the episode, which was them arriving at the drill and it’s instantly attacked by this creature. And the day after I delivered that first draft I had this email from Steven which was delirious, he was really excited about it and I sent him a reference picture and he was like, “Oh, this is great!” And then we had the meeting, three or four weeks later, and he was looking ashen. I think Piers made Steven tell me and Steven said, “But it’s not my decision!” And they said, “Could you cut the creature? We can’t afford the creature.” We couldn’t afford anything; we could only just afford three Silurians, because it was written as four Silurians obviously, and then we had to be three because they couldn’t afford four prosthetics. They were having a really tough time. That’s the thing about doing Episode Eight, you’ve got to be really careful! It’s a new team, and they want to get everything right in the early episodes because it’s a new Doctor. We took a lot of hits on that two-parter, because rightly – and I don’t say this with any negativity; it’s not a complaint at all because we got to do the Silurians, the big city of the Silurians which I really wanted to see, and the cast were great. And I’m sure there were other episodes that were under equal amounts of pressure – you knew that the early part of the season had to be great and you knew that they wanted to finish – literally – with a Big Bang. So we had to take a few hits, as I’m sure all the other writers did as well.

Then there were a few things in the edit of Cold Blood that we lost for time, which I worried about. They cut the really crucial moment of Mo confronting Malohkeh about his torture, before waking up Elliott, which for me felt really important and I’m sad we lost. That explained lots more about Malohkeh, his back-story and motivation, and it resolved how he and Mo and the Doctor could all be standing together, given what Malohkeh’s doing at the end of the first episode. The framing device of Cold Blood was entirely different at script and shooting stage, it was from Amy’s point of view, more emotional, about the loss of Rory. The episode starts with the Doctor holding her in the TARDIS, telling her to remember, just after Rory’s died, and we go into flashback and the episode is presented as a memory until we catch up with them again at that point. There was none of the Silurians’ narration; I preferred it being about Amy, it felt more intimate, more personal, but then I would say that! And across both episodes quite a lot of small character moments went, all for understandable reasons: pace and time.

We don’t think Moffat’s first series has the consistency of his second.

I’m not sure I agree with that. I think these things often come down to the vagaries of production. The Beast Below is probably one of Steven’s best ever scripts, and the production of it was so not what was in the script. I remember watching that and thinking, ‘Oh,’ because it’s a really beautiful, operatic visual piece of writing. It’s bigger than The End of the World, but actually the way the visuals went, something wasn’t quite right on the production of that. The tone of it is odd as well, the tone of it is not the tone of the script. And tone is something that often goes unrecognised as a key component in things. I think it’s always fascinating. I really vividly remember reading that, because I read The Eleventh Hour and thought that was extraordinary and really hurtles along, and then I thought he did something new in The Beast Below, and I think he probably doesn’t look on it that fondly but I think that actually, if he published that script at whatever it was, first or second draft, it was a really beautiful piece of writing.

BROADCHURCH

It’s been a lot of work, but I’m very excited by what we’ve made. I wrote Broadchurch on spec, for myself. I’d been having a great time on other people’s shows, but after United, I was so proud of that film, I wanted to make sure my next project was as authored as that, and as good. So I just wrote it for myself, and then I very cheekily rang up Laura Mackie at ITV, because I’d known her from Law & Order, and said, “I’ve got a series, I’ve got a first script and a set of storylines, and nobody else knows about them and there’s no company, and it’s a serial and it’s all one story. Do you want to read it?” And she said yes. She read it within 24 hours and she was incredibly positive and dynamic about it. It’s been the best experience of my career, along with United. Broadchurch has been really fabulous.

What’s next for Chris Chibnall?

The Great Train Robbery, for BBC1, for later this year, hopefully. We’re doing two ninety-minute films; it’s World Productions, the team who did United. We start shooting quite soon. I’m really excited about it; Julian Jarrold directs the first film, who did The Girl and Appropriate Adult, and then James Strong directs the second film.

Any plans, desires or ambitions looking further into the future?

Lots of plans. I’m doing a bit of theatre at the end of this year again, which is nice, and I’m doing projects for other companies which stretch into next year. I feel at the moment I’ve got a nice mix; I love doing the single films, I loved doing United and I’m loving doing The Great Train Robbery, and original pieces like Broadchurch, that would be the plan. But who knows, I don’t take anything for granted.

You seem to prefer doing something for a year or two years, and then moving on.

I really like variety. I mean with Law & Order, I loved setting that up, I had such a great time doing that, and I’m very proud that that’s still going, because it was one of those where everybody said, “Well, that’s not going to work,” and we’re on Series Eight now, they’re getting into Episode Sixty or whatever. And that was always the aim of that, you know, do the British version that can be running for years.

I like doing different things. For me, to be able to do United, and Dinosaurs, and Broadchurch, that’s what’s really exciting to me as a writer. I love nipping in and doing a Doctor Who, but I love that I don’t have to run it, frankly! I love that that’s Steven’s problem! And that he has those headaches, and does it brilliantly and adores it, and so actually it’s a really nice situation to be in at the moment. To be able to go and get a single film off the ground, I feel very lucky about that, and in a way those authored pieces are the sort of stuff I’m interested in pursuing.

And you have the clout to do it now.

I don’t know if it’s clout. I feel very very lucky. It’s quite new, it’s quite recent. I’m very proud of United, it got an amazing response. It was nominated for quite a few awards like the Prix Europa, we were at the Roma FictionFest, we got a ‘Highly Commended’ at the Broadcast Awards and we were RTS nominated, but actually even without that we were very proud. We felt we’d made a film that mirrored our intent: to honour that story. And we had a screening in Manchester in front of 120 relatives and survivors that confirmed that.

But some of this is because I’m also a very hands-on executive producer from pre-production to tx, I’m involved in all the decisions, from design to casting to lighting to cuts to music. So on my own pieces now, like Broadchurch, I help deliver the show we’ve promised to make, that we intended to make. And that’s the hard bit, really. The biggest pitfall in television production is the gap between intention and execution. It’s a very strange and complex process and it has to be shepherded through very gently and delicately, but also with a degree of toughness. A million things can go wrong, from first idea to final edit, and most often they’re not anybody’s fault. Everybody’s trying as hard as they can, working as hard as they can.

Because generally, you look at stuff you’ve done, and all you see are the things that are wrong with it. When you’ve made it, more so than anyone, you’re the one who looks at it and goes, “Tcha!” You see it completely differently, because you see the things you achieved despite the constraints, and the things you didn’t achieve because you got it wrong, and they’re very different to how another viewer might see that. And I think that’s very common of everyone who works on Doctor Who, everybody’s their own fiercest critic, genuinely, and I know people don’t believe that, but actually, it’s as much about what you’re trying to achieve and whether you get there. You can’t really judge things by whether people like them; it’s like what your intent is, and how far do you get to achieving your intent. It’s the hardest thing to do in TV, to achieve what you set out to achieve, and that’s why, for me, something like Dinosaurs works, because it delivers what we set out to deliver. Steven wanted a fast, funny blockbuster romp with incredible scale and we managed to do that. Then, you get The Power of Three which is entirely different: much more intimate in its intent but I also think it delivers what it promises: time with the Ponds, and an examination of their developing relationship with the Doctor and each other.

And maybe that’s the thing about the first season of Torchwood, it doesn’t quite deliver what it’s trying to deliver, because we’re trying to work out what it is and how we do it on time and to budget, and it’s thirteen episodes from nothing.

So that’s what you aim for, and I think for me, what I’m excited about and terrified about with Broadchurch, is I feel it’s very close to what I intended, and I don’t know whether people will like that. I don’t know whether people will come to it, they may or they may not, and that’s really interesting.

In issue 386 of Starburst, on sale now, Chris Chibnall talks about his Series 7 episodes of Doctor Who, as well as revealing more about his new series for ITV1, Broadchurch. For Part 1 of our exclusive online interview, click HERE.

Video game writer and novelist, Drew Karpyshyn has had a hand in crafting stories in two iconic universes. In a galaxy far, far away, Starburst was able to speak with this scribe of sci-fi to discuss his work. Activate the hyper drives and configure the mass relay! We are a go!

Starburst: In the spirit of Starburst, what are your favourite pieces of sc-fi, fantasy and horror?

Drew Karpyshyn: Wow – that’s a big question. For sci-fi, I think my favourite piece is the original Alien movie; I’m also a big fan of the novel Snowcrash. For fantasy, I have pretty classic tastes, but I’m going to pull out a novel called Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay as a great stand-alone fantasy work. And for horror, it would probably be something by Stephen King… let’s say Salem’s Lot.

When was it you knew writing is what you wanted to do as a career?

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. My mom actually saved a story I wrote when I was in the third grade; it’s obviously terrible and childish, but it shows that I’ve been writing almost as long as I could read.

Was it fuelled by what you studied in school/college or was it learned by yourself in your own time?

I did take some creative writing courses in university, and I think they helped me learn my craft. But as a writer, you really need to find your own way. Read as much as you can, and write as much as you can, in a wide variety of genres. That’s the only way to really build up your own skillset.

Did you become a writer for a studio first or did you begin writing books?

I sold my first novel to Wizards of the Coast a few months before I was hired by BioWare. The novel didn’t actually come out until after my first game credits. So technically the book came first, but both careers sort of took off at the same time.

When did you first see Star Wars and what was your reaction?

I was seven when I saw it, in the theatre. I loved it so much that I went as a jawa for Halloween the next three years.

You have written books of Mass Effect and Star Wars. Both are universes with a variety of races, locations and cultures. How did you find writing these books? Was it overwhelming or did you enjoy the challenge?

I always enjoy anything I write. If I didn’t I couldn’t sit down and do the work. Of course, when you’re working in a shared universe like Star Wars or Mass Effect you have to do your research and you have to make sure everything fits, but I never really found that to be a burden.

What do you enjoy most about writing?

Tough to say; I think I like taking a raw, rough idea and polishing it up into something that I as a reader would want to read myself. It’s hard work, and it’s easy to find excuses not to write, but once you’re done there’s a great feeling of accomplishment.

How do you write? Do you write for long periods of time or spread out the workload?

I try to spread the workload out; I can only write for 2-3 hours at a time before my mind gets a little bit fuzzy. Of course, sometimes deadlines creep up on me and I end up having to push things more than I want to. I think that’s pretty common for most writers.

What can we expect from you in 2013 and beyond that?

Right now I’m working on an original fantasy trilogy. The first novel, Children of Fire, will be coming out in 2013, though we haven’t locked down a date yet. The book is a classic fantasy tale, and I think the style shows the influence of writers I enjoy, like George R.R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay and Terry Brooks. Like most of my novels, there will be multiple characters, some murky morality and lots of action… I like to keep the story moving.

Starburst caught up with the very talented C. Robert Cargill, who is best known for his work on Ain’t It Cool News under the pseudonym of Massawyrm. His first film, Sinister, (which we quite liked) is now out on DVD and his debut novel, Dreams and Shadows, (which we also quite liked!) comes out at the end of February…

Starburst: Dreams and Shadows comes out at the end of this month. Why should we read it?

C. Robert Cargill: I’m really proud of the book. I tried to do something different but accessible. If you’re a fan of folklore and the old fairy tales; the dark core of what a fairy tale was, that’s what I was going for. I didn’t want to create a magical land of fairy dust where fairies are just awesome and the danger just comes from sword fights, I wanted to get to the root of what these fairy tales were, of our fears. Fairies are monsters and up to the beginning of last century people still believed publically that faries were a real thing.

What inspired you to write it?

I love all these tales and I love folklore. Folklore is a combined universe and nobody plays around with that side of it. If you look at the history of the Djinn, two of the biggest beliefs were that they were Fallen Angels or Middle Eastern fairies. The suggestion was that they were like the European fairies but adapted to that region and given themselves over to Islam, so their practices and powers change. Folklore evolves this way. I wanted to tell a story about a shared world that made sense. I’ve not seen anyone else create a book with a metaphysical reason for everything to exist in the world of that book.

Where do all these monsters come from?

There’s a line early on in the book in which Yashar the Djinn explains to Colby that there is not a beast in the world that has not once walked in the heart of a man. When you look at our fairy tales it’s all about explaining or training certain behaviours.

One of my favourite stories is of the Green Ladies from the UK. They have different names depending on which region you’re from, Green Annie, Green Molly or Green Teeth. They waited at the bottom of ponds to drown children, and the stories existed to scare kids away from getting too close to ponds. You look at the behaviour of angels, fairies and djinn; they’re all things that we attribute to man, both the best behaviour and the very worst.

One of the greatest bits of folklore is the idea that the devil made me do it. When really it’s just a reflection of humanity.  It’s mankind taking the terrible and horrible things that we do and putting it on the devil.

Should we expect to see more?

There’s definitely a second book coming, and the plan is to expand this universe, not just take the stuff you’ve already seen but to spend time with the other mythos scattered over the world. There’s a lot of fascinating folklore in the world and we’ll see how that plays into everything.

Sinister came out on DVD this week. For those of us who haven’t seen it in the cinema, tell us about it.

Sinister is a horror fairy tale, it’s the boogie man that lives in the images and will get you if you dare to watch. It’s another part of the mythology of weird monsters, a sort of pagan deity. The base story is about this writer who moves into the house of murder victims and discovers a box of super-8 footage. Thinking that it’s family films, he watches. Turns out that it’s footage of the family being murdered and no one has seen it before. Then he realises that all the films are of different murders and he’s onto the biggest case of his life. He has to decide between going to the police or using it as research for a book, and he chooses poorly, and he and his family descend into hell as a result.

What was the inspiration for the film?

A nightmare. I had seen The Ring and stayed up all night working, and took a short nap. As soon as my head hits the pillow I’m dreaming of going into my attic and I find a box of 8mm films. I spool it on to the projector and the first image is the opening shot of Sinister. That image haunted me for years, and I thought that there’s got to be a good story in there.

What can you tell us about Deus Ex? What are the challenges in converting a popular videogame franchise?

Oh man I’m so in love with Deus Ex. I’m a huge cyberpunk nerd, I was just the right age, I devoured that stuff in the eighties I may be one of the only people on the planet that still has Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk album that came with a Mac disc that had all sorts of cool little cyberpunky programmes that tied in with the album, so when Deus Ex came along I said hell yes.

Initially Scot came along and said that they wanted us to do a video game movie. I wanted to say no, but when he told me it was Deus Ex, we played through the game to see if there was a story and there is, it is phenomenal. We’ve done the draft script and it went swimmingly, we think there’s a really great movie. Fans of the game should be very happy.

We talked to Jim Swallow recently, the writer who worked on the Deus Ex game, and he seemed very interested in what you guys were doing, can you tell us any more?

Jim Swallow is a brilliant writer in his own right, I like his work a lot. Until I started this project, I had no idea he worked on it, but I was familiar with some of his stuff, especially his work on Warhammer 40K. When he tweeted me to say he was really excited by the movie I checked the credits and it made total sense as to why it was so good. They had so many brilliant guys working on it. I hope we do the Eidos Montreal Team justice, because we really want to introduce people into this world.

Why Cyberpunk?

The greatest thing about Cyberpunk is the social commentary, it’s entirely about our fears of the modern age and how humanity reacts to technology, and how that ties into the economy through corporate take-over, and what that does to our identities. All of this is at the heart of Deus Ex, so much potential for great storytelling.

Is there a particular tie-in franchise that you haven’t been involved in yet that you’d love to write for?

There’s nothing that’s coming to mind right now, because I don’t think I’m that guy, I don’t think anyone will call me on. To quote J.J. Abrams’ lie from a few months ago; “I’d much rather sit in a theatre and watch the new Star Wars movie.” To me, a Star Wars movie is something you watch not something you write.

There’s only one project that I really want, and I can’t tell you about because I’m in talks about it, and it’s responsible for me being a writer. It took me all of three seconds to say yes to it. Hopefully there’ll be an announcement in the next few weeks.

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book for company, what would that book be?

I’d have to cheat and say The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide. Though it might get edged out by Pride and Prejudice. I get picked on for that but it’s such a great book it has some of my favourite characters ever. I married a woman who is a lot like Elizabeth Bennet, who is a fantastic character, of course.

What other fictional worlds inspire you? What else inspires you (Music, TV, People)?

My biggest inspiration comes from genre film, I devour film constantly. I love the structure of Westerns, and I love the morality tales of westerns and just how dark and flawed the protagonists are allowed to be in that genre over any other genre. In most fantasy your protagonist has to be a really good guy. Audiences of fantasy like to have big shining heroes. That hasn’t always been the case; Robert E Howard wrote one of the greatest fantasy heroes of all time with Conan and he’s not a nice guy at all, and continued that on with Solomon Kane, who had redeemed himself.

I’m drawn to tales of deeply flawed characters who have very rough backgrounds or make very bad choices and then ultimately their heroics come from them redeeming themselves in some way, and you find that in a lot of Westerns. Look at the Leone stuff in the Sixties, or a lot of the Clint Eastwood movies. When I wrote the end of Dreams and Shadows I was listening to a playlist of about a hundred Ennio Morricone that I played on a loop, and that’s what made it work. I draw a lot from Westerns, though I write across the genres, at its root I always come back to the structure of Westerns, that’s the core of where I write from.

The Simpsons or Futurama?

That’s Beatles or Elvis. Futurama is consistently funnier, but not a day goes by where I don’t quote The Simpsons.

Seelie or Unseelie?

Unseelie. Seelie are boring. I’d rather have Seelie over for my tea and in my house, but I’d rather write about Unseelie. They are so much more interesting.

Truth or Beauty?

Truth, always. Beauty is flash, Truth is substance. Give me ugly truth every day of the week.

Star Trek or Star Wars?

Neither of the above, Battle Beyond the Stars.

The Imperium of Man or Chaos?

Chaos. I have a Nurgle army.

Clint Eastwood or John Wayne?

Clint Eastwood. John Wayne is great, but Clint Eastwood has so many great movies. Clint Eastwood inspires the hell out of me.

Released next week, Crysis 3 is the eagerly awaited conclusion to the first-person shooter trilogy that began in 2007 with Crytek’s cutting-edge first installment and continued in 2009 with Crysis 2. When the first award-winning game was released for PCs it was lauded as a benchmark title so ambitious that it demanded the very best hardware, and when the sequel was released across multiple platforms it gained a similar reception, though some decried the linearity that was a sharp contrast to the open nature of Crysis 1. Will 3 capture the same magic for fans of the series? New writer Steven Hall certainly hopes so, and spoke exclusively to Starburst about his experience writing Crysis 3. Hall is the author of 2007’s best-selling, mind-blowing novel The Raw Shark Texts, in which the protagonist struggles to protect his sanity from the attacks of a conceptual shark that at times you can see swimming through the pages of the book!

Starburst: The Raw Shark Texts met critical acclaim when it was released and we’d imagine that it appeals to a pretty wide cross-section of readers, but there was very little to suggest a gun-toting action story. What was the path that led you to Crysis 3 from your first novel?

Steven Hall: The type of story is very different, but some of the ideas that interested me very much in Raw Shark are ones I’m coming back to again here. Identity, loss of self, what makes us who we are – these were some of the core concerns of my first novel, and they’re at the core of the Crysis 3 story too, although the toolbox is very different this time out. This certainly is an action story, but I think it’s more than that too. We’ve worked hard to bring the characters into the foreground for this installment. Prophet made some harsh calls in the previous games, and we’ll be seeing the consequences of those.

As for how I got here, I’m not sure there’s a path that leads directly from Raw Shark to Crysis because I haven’t moved from doing that to doing this, it’s just that I like to try different things. Storytelling in games is such a young and dynamic field, it’s still so new and everything is still up for grabs. That’s tremendously exciting to me. And Crytek, the people behind Crysis, make probably the most beautiful games on the planet. So there was the opportunity to tell a story that whole teams of world-class developers, designers, artists and directors would not only put onscreen, but make playable, and this story would then go out to millions of people and into millions of homes around the world. They asked me if I wanted to do that and I said yes, of course I did.

That’s not to say I’m any less invested in books though. Books are always going to be at the core of what I do. My second novel is a monster that I’ve been battling with every day since the release of Raw Shark. A long time now. I wanted to challenge myself with it, to attempt something I wasn’t sure I was capable of. It’s certainly been a challenge, and the monster isn’t beaten yet, but I’ve discovered along the way that I work best if I’m concentrating on more than one thing, because I’ve got the kind of brain that gets hopelessly bogged down in tiny specifics if I’m not careful and let my focus get too narrow.

So, there’s been Doctor Who, a secret project with the National Theatre, my screen adaptation of Stories for a Phone Book, and now Crysis 3 all keeping me sane and counterbalancing this second monster book, which is going to be called The End of Endings once it’s all finally down on paper.

Do you consider yourself a gamer? What are a few of your favourite games?

I do. I’ve played first-person shooters ever since GoldenEye on the N64. Actually, it goes further back than that, probably to Castle Wolfenstein. I’ve always loved games and that love of interactivity is there in all of my work. It’s certainly there in The Raw Shark Texts.

Tell us a little about the nuts and bolts of writing a game like this: How many of the ideas come from the developers, how many from you, and how much crossover is there?

Crytek had a plan for what they wanted to do with the game overall, and I got a lot of freedom within that. The entire process was very collaborative, lots of back and forth, refining and developing each other’s ideas or coming up with better alternatives. I’ve found that collaboration can either be a joy or a nightmare, depending on your collaborators, but this was a really productive experience. There are some smart story people over at Crytek – Director of Creative Development Rasmus Højengaard, is a story guy through-and-through, Animation Director Steven Bender is passionate and knowledgeable about the Crysis universe and Tim Partlett, who did some fine writing for Psycho on Crysis Warhead, was back onboard as a key part of the story team too. So yes, collaborative in a very fruitful way. I’d imagine the overall experience isn’t a million miles away from writing a Hollywood movie.

We get the impression that Crysis 3 will be heavily-scripted, with little scope for influencing the plot. Is there a part of you that wishes you’d had the opportunity to branch the story off in different directions?

It’s something I’d love to do at some point, but I think branching narratives would’ve been a bad fit for Crysis 3. This is the third part of a trilogy, the final act of Prophet’s story. Events here need to be definitive, because people will want to know how it all ends.

How influenced were you by Crysis and Crysis 2 when you were writing?

Massively. And not just influenced, it was a case of continuing and completing the same story, evolving it towards a conclusion I was excited about that was also completely logical and faithful to everything that had come before. It’s a tricky act to pull off because the Crysis 2 story stepped away from Crysis more than you might expect. So my job was to find the narrative strands that would pull the previous two stories back together and then pay the whole thing off in the third act. Crysis 3 is written as two games. It’s going to be accessible for new players, but this is absolutely the conclusion of the same story that began when Raptor Team landed on Lingshan in Crysis. It began on Lingshan and soon you’ll be able to see where it all ends. I’ve tried to be very faithful to everything that came before. This is a continuation and an ending to that entire story.

Can you elaborate a little on the path that Prophet has taken so far, as you see it, and hint at how a journey like that might end?

Okay, here’s the story so far: In 2020, Prophet was simply the call sign of a special ops soldier named Major Laurence Barnes, but the name would go on to be a lot more than that. Barnes and his team were equipped with experimental combat exoskeletons known as nanosuits. The suits allowed Prophet and co to perform superhuman feats of strength, speed and healing, and gave them an active camo mode, which made them virtually invisible. This equipment made them super-soldiers, but what Prophet and his team didn’t know was that the nanosuits were actually made from a mix of extremely advanced technology and genetically engineered alien material. The suits became increasingly symbiotic as time went by, bonding to their users and Prophet discovered that they could be upgraded too, allowing existing flesh and bone to be traded for more technology and alien upgrades. This gave Prophet more and more power, but each upgrade cost him more of his self, more of his identity and humanity. Eventually, Prophet sacrificed what was left of his original human body inside the suit and replaced with a dying marine named Alcatraz. For most of Crysis 2 the player thinks they are actually playing Alcatraz, but what’s happened is that Prophet has made the ultimate physical upgrade – Alcatraz’s flesh and blood is gradually amalgamated into a ‘post-human’ entity that’s now gone beyond being Laurence Barnes or Alcatraz, and is simply known as Prophet. For a short while, both personalities survive, but Alcatraz becomes hopelessly corrupted in the last battle of Crysis 2, leaving Laurence Barnes as the only ghost inside the machine.

That’s the back story, but you don’t need to have memorised all of that to understand Crysis 3! We were careful to open with a very graspable set-up – at the point the third game begins, Prophet is an ultimate war machine that’s just holding on to the last remnants of his humanity. It’s no coincidence he’s been locked away for 20 years. His allies are just as scared of him as his enemies, because he’s so close to losing control and tipping over to the Dark Side. Now Prophet has the internal and external battle of his life ahead of him – he’s sacrificed almost everything he had and everything he was for more power through alien parts and technology, and deep down, he knows that can’t keep happening. He’s almost out of time…

What are your general feelings about tightly-scripted games? There seems to be a school of thought that characters should be a blank canvas for players to impress themselves on, and another school that want that kind of Metal Gear Solid heavy-scripting.

I think that, even if you start with the former, all ongoing stories need to shift closer to the latter over time. Playable characters act upon the world – usually in a very big way – so as any series continues, there has to be consequences and repercussions for those actions. This means that the playable characters can’t help but become more rounded and more defined as you go on. You can’t keep those characters on the outside looking in, because increasingly they’re dramatically tangled up in the history of that world. I’m really glad we’ve gone this way in Crysis. Prophet has a lot to answer for at this stage, and his old mate Psycho certainly hasn’t forgotten it.

If you had complete freedom to follow up Crysis 3 with a remake of or sequel to any existing game, which would it be and why?

You know, I’d really love to see some classic literature adaptations. Hollywood mines books but it’s something I haven’t seen as often as you’d expect with games. Can you imagine the original 1898 novel War of the Worlds brought to life with the CryEngine? God, I’d love to work on that. That’d be amazing. Or Don Quixote. Yes, I’m putting my name out there to adapt Don Quixote, if anyone’s brave enough to attempt it!

CRYSIS 3 is released on Xbox/PS3/PC February 19th (US) and February 22nd (UK) (pre-order HERE). To read our full interview with Steven Hall, check out STARBURST Issue 385, available below…

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Starburst recently caught up with television writer and producer Chris Chibnall in Dorset, in the very locations used for his new series Broadchurch, to talk about his writing on that and Doctor Who. But first, we discussed his role on the first two series of Torchwood…

Starburst: How did your involvement in Torchwood come about?

Chris Chibnall: I came through Julie Gardner, because I’d worked with her on Life on Mars. Julie had been the BBC in-house exec on Life on Mars so I knew her from that. Years earlier we’d developed something, very briefly, in Mal Young’s department when she was just a producer there. Life on Mars made a big difference I think. I was the only one to do both series as well, and we had a really good time on it. You don’t realise when you say yes to these things, suddenly you’re stepping into another world and your life is going to go down that route for a while.

Working on Torchwood must have been an amazing experience.

It was a real once-in-a-lifetime thing. Julie Gardner said, “Come and have a drink,” and we went to this Private Members’ Club in London and she said, “We have to sit in the corner because there’s this secret thing.” It was like all executive producers always do: “I have a secret thing to tell you; it’s very important.” And then in this case… She said, “We’re going to do a 9 o’clock spin-off of Doctor Who. Do you want to do it?” and I said, “What?” That was really out of the blue, really unexpected. There was no sense that there were going to be spin-offs. She just said, “We’re going to do a show, a spin-off of Doctor Who, it’s going to be featuring Captain Jack, it’s going to be much more grown-up.” So that was the first I’d heard of it, and that took me really by surprise. She said, “You can’t tell anyone. There’s a page, that Russell’s written, and that’s it.” I stumbled out thinking, ‘What on Earth are they going to do?’ and then a day later the page showed up.

Initially, Torchwood took a lot of flak from Doctor Who fans.

That’s why you can’t go on the internet, that’s why you can’t get involved, because you have to be writing for another reason, you have to be writing because you want to.

After the first Torchwood went out, I had a look at a couple of reviews – of Russell’s episode – and I just thought, ‘I don’t agree. It’s not the intended audience.’ That was the point where I thought, ‘You’re not going to gain anything from reading this stuff.’ If they’re going to be like that about Russell, who is a really extraordinary writer and this is seven years ago when I had far fewer credits – I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be sniper-fire.’ The great thing about Doctor Who is, the best writers in the country run it. Russell is a genius of a writer, and Steven is. I don’t use that word lightly, they both are. I’ve worked with them both pretty closely, and they are both geniuses in very different and very similar ways. 

Literally the first dinner I had with Russell, and I hadn’t agreed to do the job, the first thing he said to me was, “If you come and do this, you must never go on-line ever again. It doesn’t matter whether you write brilliant stuff or shit stuff or whatever, it will destroy you.” I think he gave that piece of advice to everyone. I think he gave it to David , he gave it to John Simm, he gave it to everyone. I think it’s part of the territory now.

Torchwood was a huge show, particularly its viewing figures for BBC Three, I think it still stands that it’s the highest-rated drama on a satellite channel, just about, and that’s seven years ago. It’s quite difficult for me to have an objective viewpoint about it, because we were so “in it”, and making it, we really didn’t have time to pay attention to any response. What we were really grateful for was that people watched it, and it kept a loyal audience through that first season. And then I think the big thing that happened was, it went on BBC America and they went mad for it in a way that they’d never done for Doctor Who up to that point. Myself and Richard Stokes and Noel Clarke went out to Comic Con that year, in between Season One and Season Two, when Season One was starting on BBC America, and we were just blown away by the response. We thought we were just making a little show for BBC Three and then the way that people responded there really made us think, ‘Oh, actually there’s something here.’

I don’t think there were any of us who after that first season felt we’d cracked the show. We thought some bits of it worked better than others, some bits of it we liked that other people didn’t like and vice versa, but also the whole point with Torchwood, the brief, was, ‘Go and do something that isn’t like anything else.’ And that means playing with tone, playing with content, playing with character; playing with everything really. Coming into it, Russell really wanted that first season to try everything. He was very much, “We’re gonna go here, we’re gonna try this, we’re gonna do that,” and it was really just trying as many things as possible to see what the show would take. We all went into it with that spirit of experimentalism, to be honest, and that was the whole point of being on BBC Three. As far as people making the show, and as far as the brief from the BBC was, just be bold and different and odd and strange, which we did to greater and lesser degrees with greater and lesser success in different episodes.

I don’t think that first season has a cohesion; I think the second season is much more cohesive, but I sort of love the madness of that first season. The fact that Countrycide and Random Shoes can sit next to each other… that was the really great thing when Countrycide went out, we got a lot of response from people going, “I just didn’t think you could scare me, and you really have done.” And again, we were wondering, “How far into horror should we go, can we go, will we go?” And then with something like Out of Time, Catherine Tregenna’s episode, it was like how far into just a purely emotional human drama can you go without any of the sci-fi? It’s gorgeous, and in a sense that episode – and we all worked on all the episodes quite collegiately – was the one where we thought, ‘there’s something there for the show,’ that’s really fertile territory that we want to mine more of. Other things less so.

Also it was so fast. Russell delivered the first draft of Episode One in the January, probably like January the 2nd, and we were on-air on the 22nd of October. So it was ten months from nothing, literally nothing – nobody else was writing until Russell wrote that first episode, and you think of the amount of post-production and effects and all that… From a standing start we literally went from nought to a hundred, I don’t think I’ll ever work on a show that went that fast to screen ever again.

I had more involvement in the second season. I was there throughout but Russell had created the show and he knew where he wanted to go in the first season, and so in choosing the stories he would be saying, “That’s where we want to go,” and, “Let’s bring Suzie back in Episode Eight.” He was very much doing all that kind of stuff. I mean I ended up writing a lot of them just because, and I did a bit of polishing here and there, although I did a lot more in the second season. It was as much that I was there to write to take the pressure off him; some of those story ideas were his, Cyberwoman was his idea…

Perhaps the most reviled episode of Torchwood.

I’m sure! But the funny thing is, in the Torchwood magazine, they did a poll and it was in the top five! That’s why you can’t listen to anything.

Did you ever feel sorry that you left before Children of Earth?

I don’t feel sorry because I loved watching it and I had a lot of opportunity to work on it, they tried very hard to get me to do it. I knew what they were doing and they asked me a number of times, but the thing about doing those two years – well, three years really, once you factor everything in, because there was a bit of a gap between seasons – on Torchwood was, it was exhausting and it was hard work and it never quite got the funding. It was a struggle, because Doctor Who was always the priority so you were always sort of the second child. The things that we achieved on the budget we had and in the time that we had – it was very very hard to do that. As much as anything it was time to go for a break. And you know, you’d done 26 episodes and they’re all single episodes. I think if I’d have stayed, they probably would have done another thirteen, to be honest. I think we would have just gone on. That’s what they were talking to me about before I left.

What I felt very strongly after the end of Season Two was, I’d done as much as I could but also I wanted to go and run my own show because in the way things were set up, you know, I wouldn’t do it quite like that, and it just gets frustrating after a while. Also, I didn’t want to only ever be doing sci-fi or high concept. I like a lot of different genres. And Law & Order – to set that up in the UK, was a really unusual challenge and it really appealed to me. When I was setting up Law & Order: UK, Russell and Julie kept saying, “Just come and do this little five-parter, and write this with Russell.” So no, I had to turn that down a few times. I don’t regret it at all. I mean I think it’s brilliant and I think it’s the best iteration of Torchwood. But it also destroys everything about Torchwood; in order to make it work, you have to destroy the things that we were writing for, for two series: you destroy the Hub, you put them on the run, there’s no real sense of the Rift. So in a way, it’s a totally different format. And that’s what makes it work so brilliantly.

And Miracle Day?

I did a bit of very early storylining with Russell on Miracle Day, right at the start, before they pitched it to Fox, before they pitched it to Starz. I think somewhere along the way it sort of lost a little bit of its Torchwood-ness. Whether you like or dislike Torchwood, it has an essence – of madness and cheekiness and sexiness, and fun and darkness, those sort of polar facets of what it’s about, of putting those things together – and somehow it lost a bit of that somewhere in the process. when we were first talking about it, it was something a bit bolder, a bit cheekier. it may just come back to the fact that one of the great essences of Torchwood was taking those American tropes and doing them in Wales. And in a way, that’s what made Torchwood so brilliantly odd. Once you put it in California, it becomes more like other shows.

Do you think there will be another Torchwood?

it’s entirely down to Russell. I would expect he will have other things he’ll want to write, to be honest.

When I think about those first two seasons, there was a lot of pain involved in making them, but it really makes me smile what we achieved. And you look at all the shows that followed, and it blazed a trail for all sorts of shows. And in America, I think it was an entry point for Doctor Who that didn’t require an understanding of the mythology, so that was very useful and then people came on board. And now, Doctor Who has blazed its own trail but I think it certainly helped British sci-fi, particularly on BBC America.

I think that’s the wonderful thing of that universe that Russell created and interwove, because actually, what the whole thing is, is a massive exercise in marketing. And branding, because really he’s got a family show and an adult show and a kid’s show which are very separate entities but he used that umbrella. He and Julie Gardner just wove those together so cleverly, and used that to get them commissioned. Lesser people would not have got those green lights. That’s the real achievement of that era and I don’t think you’ll ever see the Doctor Who universe be as ubiquitous and all-encompassing. That was a really magic time, it was a very exciting time to be at Upper Boat.

Now, you’re in a different age of television as well. The purpose of the digital channels is different as well. Torchwood – and Sarah Jane to a certain extent, because of CBBC – were shows born when those digital channels needed flagships. And now they don’t need them in the same way.

Was Sarah Jane ever on your to-do list?

I don’t have a list!

Did you ever want to do it?

I didn’t. They were always filming at the same time as Torchwood. My kids absolutely love it, and my son just got the box set for Christmas. We bought it for him, my six-year-old, because he adores it. But I don’t really feel like I’m a completist and I need to have done that, although I love Sarah Jane. you don’t think, ‘Oh I’ll just do an episode of that so I can have the three series in the Doctor Who universe.’

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Archangel, Illusion and Invincible; these are albums born from the minds of Nick Phoenix and Thomas Bergersen. We recently spoke with Bergeson about his career in music, how he started and what the future holds…

Starburst: In the spirit of the magazine what are your favourite pieces of Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy?

Thomas Bergersen: I’m a big nostalgic. I have memories of watching Amityville, A New Generation, the one with the mirror, with a friend when I was 13-14. We were home alone, it was dark outside and we were scared out of our minds. At one point I got up to go to the bathroom and in the hallway hung a mirror pretty much identical to the one in the movie. It freaked me out so much I couldn’t watch horror movies for years after! I have a wide taste in movies though. In the Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy genres I like Arachnophobia, Fright Night – the original – Child’s Play, Lost in Space – the old TV-series – Dracula, The Thing, E.T, The Abyss, you know… the classics from the ‘70s through the ‘90s.

When did you realise you could write/make music?

I was always creative and never did things I was asked to do. I was pretty impossible as a kid, and now I’m probably even worse. I liked drums at a young age and would frequently set up drum kits using pots and pans from the kitchen, to my mom’s great delight… My dad had a tape recorder, so I started recording myself playing the kitchen drums, I must have been like 5. It was an awful barrage of noise, but I enjoyed it. I quickly discovered the piano thereafter, and found it infinitely more satisfying to make up my own melodies than play other people’s music, so naturally I had a falling out with my piano teacher after a fairly short run of piano lessons. From that point on I just went with the flow.

How much of a challenge did you find it when you started?

I don’t think I ever found it particularly challenging, perhaps blissfully unaware of how bad it sounded in the beginning. I found it frustrating some times because I couldn’t express the music I heard in my head due to lack of knowledge, tools and whatnot, but the music part has always come natural to me.

Were you taught in school or was it something you pursued in your own time?

I spent a lot of time in high school studying orchestration books, and I don’t mean in music class. I didn’t really care about anything but music, and being the rebel that I was I would frequently break out Walter Piston or Samuel Adler during math class, history or what have you. And my teachers would complain and call my parents in for extraordinary meetings to discuss how impossible I was and how they could change me. I got an F in music. My focus was not on learning Tom Dooley on guitar or playing twinkle twinkle on xylophone. I was into far more advanced things than that, but naturally my teachers never knew, and I liked it like that. I knew what I wanted to be. I think it probably cost my parents a lot of grief and frustration at the time but I have been blessed with understanding parents who never wanted to shape me in any way. They believed in letting kids discover and explore their creativity and not hold them down or limit their natural development to the confines of rigid school systems and social norms. I’m eternally grateful for that.

Was it always a collaborative process or did you learn your craft on your own?

I am 100% self-taught. Although I did attend music universities, I spent most of my time there pursuing girls.

When did you meet Nick Phoenix and how long did it take for Two Steps from Hell to happen?

Nick and I knew each other from an online forum where we had gotten into a little fight about the quality of some virtual instruments. We later met in Los Angeles and quickly realized we had more in common than we thought at first. Two Steps was founded many years after, and truthfully we didn’t have big expectations, we just wanted to do things a little differently and bring a little more soul into trailer music.

From where do you draw your inspiration?

From my emotions. Most of the time the mental state I’m in when I write music is directly reflected in the music itself. It comes from everything in life that has an emotional impact on me, be it a good movie, romance, change of seasons, rain, snow, fights, make-ups, break-ups, joy, sadness… it all inspires in one way or another.

What is the creative difference between an album by TSFH and an album that is just composed by you? Invincible and Illusions both have a distinct sound.

Illusions represents (largely) the core of my personal musical sensibility and preference. It is more developed, somewhat more focused and not written with trailers in mind. The creative process is similar to that of my work for TSFH, but while I’d typically spend a few days writing a TSFH track, I will more often than not spend weeks on something that holds more personal and emotional value to me.

What can your fans expect from you and TSFH in 2013?

In 2013 I will hopefully release Sun, the sequel to Illusions. TSFH will probably release another public album and a few non-public ones for the trailer industry. It depends on how inspired I am!

You have recently had your music in video games including Mass Effect. Are you a gamer?

I am, although I don’t really have much time these days. Back in the days when I was a teenager I would build my own computers. I would design maps for Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Doom etc. It’s safe to say I was a nerd. Nowadays I’m more of an occasional gamer. The last game I played was Hitman Absolution.

And finally if you could be in a band, what band would it be and why?

If I had the voice and a time travel device I would say Rat Pack in their golden days. Other than that, Rage Against the Machine or Nirvana maybe.

Thanks for your time Thomas.

You can find Bergersen’s music on his official YouTube channel and on iTunes. Enjoy!

Truly one of the greatest character actors of his generation, Vincent D’Onofrio is the consummate human chameleon who immerses himself into his believable roles. Starburst caught up with him to talk about his latest film, Chained…

Starburst: As an actor, you’ve played good guys, bad guys and troubled souls. How do you prepare for a role?

Vincent D’Onofrio: You need to read the script, find your character and how he influences the story. You ask yourself questions. Get inside his imagination; what’s he all about… then things start to come to you on how you want to portray him. You go back and forth reading and re-reading the script trying to see what works and what doesn’t, developing what kind of character he is and his motivation that’s integral to the plot.

Up until seeing you in the role of Bob in Chained, the one film that really disturbed us was your character as the crystal meth dealer, Pooh-Bear, who took one too many trips to the “honey jar” causing his nose to melt off in The Salton Sea. How the hell did they do that effect?

Those were the days of early CGI. There was a trailer on the set where they had a digital camera set up and they’d put these dots on my nose with a Magic Marker scanning it that took 45 minutes. They can now do a full body scan in 2 minutes with today’s technology.

The house where you filmed Chained is isolated and ominous, yet has a welcoming look about it. Do you think the house itself is a reflection of Bob’s character?

Yes. By the way, that’s all Jennifer.

The scenes between you and Eamon Farron are riveting acting as his surrogate father through fear and intimidation.

In acting, there are scenes that are “in-the-moment.” They create emotion in the plot which creates a reaction in the viewer.

If there was one character you could play, living or dead, real or fictional, who would it be?

That’s a tough question as there are so many choices. I would say it begins with the story and how good it is, the character’s motivation and goal. That’s what makes me want to be a part of it.

Anything coming up we’ll see you in next?

I’m working with Jennifer again on her next film; A Fall From Grace and few other things coming up.

CHAINED is out now on DVD/Blu-ray.

You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brooker

Ahead of next issue’s in-depth chat with the acclaimed writer/producer/presenter, we asked our friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook to suggest some extra questions to put to Charlie Brooker and he answered them. Just like he probably would have done if anyone had asked him the same questions directly on Twitter or Facebook. So, er, well, good on him for humouring us anyway.

What was the first horror film you saw?

It was King Kong. The proper 1933 version with Fay Wray, not the recent remake. Something about it, the mood, all the way through, and that style of model animation when Kong appeared spooked me. It has that jerky, unnatural, inorganic appearance, the way the fur moved, so even as a kid I could perceive the uncanny valley. The same with anything animated by Ray Harryhausen, particularly the skeletons in Sinbad.

Would you consider writing a novel, or maybe making a graphic novel?

When I’m done with the other things I’m doing, maybe. There was once a graphic novel of the Black Mirror episode, 15 Million Merits, around but I don’t know what happened to it. So, yes, maybe. When I’m done

How old will your son have to be before you start scaring him with TV and films? 

Well, he watches In the Night Garden, and he likes Iggle Piggle. Some people might find those characters a bit weird. But I don’t go out of my way to let him watch scarier stuff.

Why haven’t you written an episode of Doctor Who? Would you like to be the series’ next showrunner?

I haven’t been asked. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know why. I would love to. But I would struggle with the idea of actually running it, though. I’d have to consider it. It’s like being asked to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. It’s a position of monumental importance, but so much of it is a business. It’d be like running TARDIS Ltd. I don’t know if I’d be able to maintain the necessary focus. Most of the time I struggle to get to the end of my own sentences. 

Have you ever gone to a sci-fi convention? Or are you worried you might like it?

I haven’t been to one. I probably would like it if I did. People are mostly quite nice, really.

BLACK MIRROR returns to Channel 4 on Monday 11th February at 10pm.

For our full interview with Charlie Brooker, check out STARBURST issue 386, on sale Feb 15th.

Find your local Starburst Magazine stockist HERE, or buy direct from us HERE. Our issues are also available as fully interactive iPad editions, loaded with multimedia, and can be downloaded via Apple HERE.

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