Feature Category: Interviews

With Avengers Assemble finally hitting home video on September 17th, Starburst sat down for a chat with fan favourite Clark Gregg, better known for his role as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil Coulson…

Starburst: What part, if any, did comic books play in your youth?

Clark Gregg: I was a Marvel Comics fan. I was a fan of Tony Stark and Iron Man. I liked Daredevil. In the 1970s, during the era of Bruce Lee – I’m dating myself – I was a fan of a guy named Iron Fist who was spectacular. And there was one that was a little bit more surreal that definitely connects to some of the things that we see here and he was called Warlock. I spent way too much time drawing these things in my notebooks when I should have been doing my lessons. Which is probably why I’m here doing this today. So I definitely felt like a sweepstakes winner when I got called to be in Iron Man.

How did the experience of working on Avengers Assemble differ from the other Phase One movies?

The origin movies were a little bit smaller, they were not at the very high extreme of expensive movies and I guess it says something about Joss’s script that it felt very human. From time to time it did feel like Chekhov in spandex, although thankfully I was not in spandex. The expectation was built over four or five years and for the comic book fans and the movie geek fans of this universe it became clear that this was leading toward The Avengers. So they gave themselves an impossibly high platform to dive off from. And I think it is quite miraculous and quite a testament to Joss and to the folks at Marvel and the cast that the movie splashes so perfectly into the water.

Is it difficult acting in a film with so many SFX?

I’ve only done some of this, mostly in these movies and there were things in Thor that I was reacting to that I wasn’t really seeing. There are movies when you are reacting when someone is yelling at you that it is the scariest alien you’ve ever seen. Oh it looks like Orson Welles, it’s horrible! But in this film so much of it was there. There was this incredible Helicarrier and Tom Hiddleston is kinda scary when he has his antlers on. There was not as much to imagine as one would think.

How collaborative was Joss Whedon?

The script was pretty spectacular. I thought Agent Coulson would be handing The Hulk a sweatshirt when he returned to his normal size and that would be the extent of his duties. So I was so thrilled how integral each of the characters – including Agent Coulson – were in the script. There was a thing early on when he said I was changing the words of a line. I apologised and he said not to worry because the way I was saying it was better.

Having directed in the past (2008’s Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke), would you like to be at the helm of this scale of film?

The stuff that has interested me has been dark, comic, character driven pieces. It is hard to make the jump from a sex addicted, colonial theme park worker from the world of Chuck Palahniuk to super hero version of Marvel. But I’ve come to feel the resonance of these themes. There is something about the spectacular nature and the child-like matinee nature of this and the science fiction element that makes such an interesting forum to look at us from a different angle. I have started trying to figure out a way to convince the guys at Marvel to trust me with a budget that was one millionth of what these other movies would be. But I’d want to take it in steps.

So if they said yes to it, which Marvel character would you have it feature? 

I wouldn’t mind making a movie about Black Widow – Scarlett’s character talks about this tremendous moral debt that she’s carrying because of what went on in Budapest. So I think there is a prequel movie about who these people are at S.H.I.E.L.D. It could a cross between the nastiest Hong Kong shoot ’em up and Men In Black that I’d be very interested in. Black Widow – The Bad But Very Sexy Years!

Sold! With so much merch being made, and with so much love for your character, how come there’s no Phil Coulson action figure yet?

Hasbro has not been forthcoming with the Agent Coulson action figure, despite passionate requests from literally dozens of my fans.

What do you do in your downtime when you’re not either acting, writing and/or directing? 

I play a ridiculous amount of basketball for a man my age and I’m basically tortured by my daughter and I torture her back. I like to take her out in public and dance – just because of what that does to her!

MARVEL AVENGERS ASSEMBLE is released to own on DVD/Blu-ray from September 17th.

Dana Ashbrook is an actor perhaps known best for his role as Twin Peaks’ troubled quarterback Bobby Briggs. He began his career early, following in the footsteps of his sisters Daphne and Taylor Ashbrook with appearances in a number of TV shows. In 1990 he got his big break after being cast in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal TV series.

Since Twin Peaks Ashbrook has racked up a number of roles in both film and television. His latest role as a put upon hit man in Steven C.Miller’s fantastic film The Aggression Scale is perhaps his best role in years. Whip thin and greying, Ashbrook cuts an impressively menacing figure throughout the film working again with Twin Peaks alum Ray Wise.

We got to grill the actor about The Aggression Scale as well as Twin Peaks, it was an enjoyably candid chat and Ashbrook has little in the way of pretension which made for an amusing interview…

*Warning – Minor spoilers for The Aggression Scale follow.

Starburst: Let’s talk about The Aggression Scale first, if we may – your role as Lloyd is one of the two pivotal performances in the film, how did you come to be involved?

Dana Ashbrook: Well they actually offered the movie to me, I was just kind of sitting around doing nothing and they came and gave me the script which I really liked. I was in New York and they were shooting the movie in Upstate New York so it wasn’t that far for me to go and it was great. I was looking at the part of either the husband or of Lloyd and I really responded to the part of Lloyd, it’s more fun to be the guy who is beating on people than the guy who is being beat up in general, just as a rule of thumb, and so when I talked to the makers on the phone they were great and it was one of the fastest things that I’ve done. We shot it so fast and it came out so good and was one of those things that could have gone either way.

What kind of preparation did you do for the role?

Well, y’know, I spent a few months being a hitman and all that but no I didn’t prepare that much. I got it a week before I went to the set so I just kind of developed the character on my own and did my own thing. The way I work is within the parameters of the script and then try and use my imagination, that’s how I prepared.

Apart from your role, there is the other major role of Owen (played by Ryan Hartwig) as this represents such a young kid doing such incredible acts of violence were you concerned going in at all? Was the screenplay darker at all than it ended up on screen?

Wow, y’know that’s really interesting, the first time I read it I remember telling my girlfriend that it seemed like Home Alone where this kid, instead of throwing paint cans, he’s into guns and ammo and making real booby traps and fucking guys up. That to me was interesting and I found it to be justified because they killed his dad; when someone kills your dad you can pretty much kill who you want right? At least in the movies (laughs). Yeah it is a violent movie; it starts off that way from the first scene. I steered clear of violent movies for a long time but it doesn’t bother me, If I go to a movie and there is violence then I can leave, know what I mean? I just saw Killer Joe, and it’s pretty violent against women man, I mean Gina Gershon takes a beating, at times in that I thought it was too much but it doesn’t offend me or anything as it’s art I guess.

One of the things that stood out for us watching The Aggression Scale was how confident everything about it was from the first frame onwards, the music and the editing just tell you this is going to an incredibly fun ride, how was it working with Steven C.Miller as director?

He’s great I think he is the reason it came out as good as it did. It was actually a pretty cool little group, it was a really small crew and we had the writer Ben (Powell) with us and we had a good producer Travis (Stevens) and also the people who were acting in the film. It was a really fast situation and it was shooting and moving very fast. I come from TV world so it wasn’t that big a deal to do a lot of pages (of script) a day but we were doing action sequences that fast and the guys were totally great. I trusted Steven as he had everything under control always from the first day I got there. The day I arrived was the day that Fabianne (Therese) put her hand through the window, I don’t know if you know that part of the movie? That really happened! She put her hand through the window and sliced her arm open so she had to play it out and they re-wrote the rest of the movie with her having this bandage on her arm. It was crazy and in a normal movie she probably would have been re-cast and it would have been re-shot but we just went with it (laughs). I credit Steven and Travis and that whole team that was working with it in making it good. These kind of movies they make tons of them, they make tons of genre movies that come out shitty, with a super low budget you never know, we just happened to have a cool script and there was a dynamic in there that was interesting and the fact that the girl was trying to work her own angle was kind of interesting. Yeah, it’s violent but it’s still got some cool twists and was still a cool movie.

On that point, looking through your filmography you don’t really have much involvement in horror films despite being in a couple fairly early on, was that intentional on your part? I imagine that every young actor in the business gets offered roles in horror films almost constantly.

No I just kind of stopped getting auditions for those kinds of movies. It wasn’t ever a conscious choice to stop doing any kind of genre it was just as an actor you audition for a lot of shitty shows on TV and if you get one then that is the path that your career is going to take, but if you get a good show then you are going to go that way. It’s like a crapshoot, it really is, because when you’re struggling then you’re auditioning for everything whether it’s a David Lynch show or a David Hasselhoff show, you know what I mean? Honestly when you’re young and hungry it’s like you need a job and you just get lucky. I got lucky as I happened to get a show with one of the better filmmakers of our time (laughs). It was just luck honestly.

How was it working with Ray Wise again on this film?

Great, and you know it’s actually the fourth time I’ve worked with Ray. I’ve worked with him more than any other guy in Hollywood. Twin Peaks was the first time and then I did Dawsons Creek with him; I did the Twin Peaks movie with him and then this. Ray is the best, he’s like my hero, he’s my idol if I could have anyone’s career it would be Ray Wise’s honestly. The guy works all the time and he does what he wants, he isn’t like a huge superstar and just does what he wants and he’s a great guy, a great actor. He’s done a ton of plays in New York and has a really great family. I met his daughter, we hung out when we did Psych. Oh, that’s the other thing I worked with him on, Psych, we did a Twin Peaks tribute episode!

That episode was called Dual Spires right?

Dual Spires yes (laughs). The guy who is on that show (Actor James Roday) is one of my best friends, he’s a huge Twin Peaks fan and he was trying to do an episode with me and Madchen (Amick, TP actress) anyway and it turned into this Twin Peaks tribute episode. He loved the show so he wrote a tribute episode (laughs).

If we can just talk about Twin Peaks for a while, when the show first came out it was a HUGE phenomenon worldwide, you literally couldn’t block it out if you tried, whilst all that was happening were you aware at all of how big it had become or were you too busy working on the show?

No way, not like today. I mean today it seems like everything gets blown up so huge so fast here. We did the pilot and then got picked up to do the next seven episodes before the pilot even aired, so we had started before anyone even knew what we were doing. So that was the purest form of doing it before any hype. After that came the hype during the summer and then we started the new season and it was what it was and it just became like this thing, I mean I was never able to travel to like Japan or when they went round the world promoting it, I was always working on something or whatever and didn’t end up going so I didn’t get the worldwide scope until much later when I would travel. I was in Bulgaria doing a movie and I found out that they would shut down the town of Sofia when Twin Peaks was on because everyone was watching it, it was insane and bizarre. Shit went on and I wouldn’t even know. Yeah I got a little vibe of it because it was easier to get jobs back then (laughs), that was one thing that was much easier for sure.

Bobby Briggs is kind of the high school jock gone incredibly bad but also has a goofy side to him, like in the scene where he first shows up at the high school and the girl tells him the principal wants to see him and he does this crazy little walk… how much of that was in the script and how much did you bring to the role?

It didn’t say in the script that he shuffles out backwards or anything like that. I was just goofing around but I really don’t remember, I know it wasn’t in the script though. At some point I was shuffling backwards and then when I went through the door I turned around like I was going to the principal’s office. I know that David (Lynch’s) idea was then that I do it backwards, like don’t stop and turn and keep going backwards through the door which was funny I thought and bizarre and kooky. It was his idea for me to walk in and put my hands up in the victory stance like I was so great too but I don’t know if that stuff was in the script or if it was his idea on the set. I can’t remember but y’know he was awesome with ideas, you could throw stuff at him and if he didn’t like it he would shoot it down but if he did he would go with it.

You have a wonderful chemistry with Madchen Amick who played Shelly on the show, was that there off camera and how did the two of you get that going?

No actually I met her only at dinner once before, when we got cast in LA I had never met her. I had a meeting with David Lynch and Mark Frost and Johanna Ray the casting director and I just talked to them about stuff and then I went in for a rehearsal, it wasn’t called an audition it was a rehearsal and it was me and some girl who was playing Shelly and the next thing I knew I was testing and I never saw that girl again and I don’t remember her name. Madchen got cast from the other auditions they had and then we tested and that was it, so I only met her once before up in Seattle at a dinner and the chemistry we had was due to us being friends, we still are friends and she is just a great girl. She had a boyfriend at the time and they ended up married and had kids, she is still married to him and she is just an awesome person and we were both young, she was 19 and I was 22 and it just worked.

Throughout Twin Peaks, chronologically from the prequel film onwards, you get the sense that Bobby was going off the rails spectacularly and he kind of almost gets stopped in his tracks by Laura’s death and redeems himself somewhat come the ending. Whilst in production were you aware of the massive arc this character is on? 

No I don’t know, honestly I don’t know if anyone knew if we had anything like that planned for Bobby (laughs). I mean they would write for me and they would soften my character up as time went on and that was their choice. When you are on serious television they will use your personality and incorporate it into the character. Even on something as great as Twin Peaks I think they will do that when you get to know the writers and get friendly with them and they see your work and see you act in a social setting, they start to think of you when they are writing and they might try and lean more towards what they think is your strong points or whatever. They try and use a little more of your personality.

What is your opinion of the final episode of Twin Peaks?

I don’t even know the last time I saw it, maybe ten years ago! I have no idea, I don’t know what was going on there. I know that the scene we shot in the Diner which was a repeat of the scene in the pilot we had shot for a Japanese coffee commercial, the German’s are always on time thing, there were two Japanese actors in the same scene as well it was really funny. I couldn’t tell you though, I don’t know man, I have no idea. I’ll leave it up to the people that watch it, the fans.

There is always talk online that Twin Peaks is going to return in some form or another, if this were to happen would you want to be involved and how would you want to see it come back?

Of course I would want to be involved but I just can’t see it happening, not in a million years. I mean what would they do thirty years later? I don’t ever see it happening because I don’t think David wants to fuck with it. Why would you want to fuck with it? I mean they are making musicals out of every old TV show, they bring back 90210, they bring back every old series like Hawaii Five-O. I mean what are they going to do, remake it? Can’t it just be what it was and good? Feels like it would kind of cheapen it. I mean Arrested Development is back in production and I’m all for it, it was awesome and I love that show and I can’t wait to see what they do but that’s a different show and a way different vibe, know what I mean? And so many people have moved on and passed on and I would work with David on anything, don’t get me wrong, I mean if he wanted me to read the phone book in Times Square I’d do it every step.

The Aggression Scale is out now on DVD, and is reviewed HERE.

Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston are no strangers to the horror genre having collaborated on the hugely popular Feast and Saw series. With their latest film, Piranha 3DD now released on DVD/Blu-ray, we caught up with the duo to talk about the sequel, their careers, and their upcoming projects…

Starburst: Horror seems to be a genre the two of you know very well. Why do you think people are attracted to it?

Patrick Melton: Horror’s success comes from the desire to be scared. Say that you’re having a bad day, you go to the theater, pay your admission and sit down in a darkened room with your soda and popcorn to watch a horror movie. No matter how bad your day is, the character or group of characters day is a lot worse. 

Marcus Dunston: It’s a form of escapism. An emotional, boundless roller coaster when you’re watching these films. Everyone likes to be scared in one way or another.

PM: I have kids and they love the Bubbles show. They also love to be scared. My wife makes a tent in their room with blankets and tells scary stories with just a flashlight under the covers. They love every minute of it! In a movie theater, we have this group experience of fear. When we were kids, we would go see horror films when we could and when we were able to sneak in and see an R rated film, even more so.

SB: The Saw films you collaborated on, how did you come up with all those inventive torture set-pieces?

MD: A lot of it deals with the psyche of people that have everything and take it for granted. What if they had something they cherished, but deep down inside, didn’t actually care about? What would they do in a situation that was dependent or whether they lived or died? How would they choose?

PM: When I was going to the university of Iowa, there was a guy who had everything going for him, but went off on a racist rant at this taco stand I was at. I thought, what if someone like this was caught in the moment in a serious life or death horror situation and that scene was taken one step forward, exaggerated to the extreme, what kind of decisions would he make to get him out of it?

MD: So, we would create a character and create a mechanized horror for him or her in an exaggerated scenario.

SB: Tell us about The Outer Limits movie script you wrote.

MD: We wrote that during the old MGM regime. It consisted of five stories like Go or Pulp Fiction that were interwoven about a family during an alien invasion of Earth.

PM: Sadly, our script was shelved as the new MGM decided that they wanted a single story instead.

SB: Piranha 3DD. John (Gulager, director) told us about the original water park location that you had in Baton Rouge, Louisiana…

PM: Yes. We originally went down there and found this amazing water park called Blue Bayou. All kinds of slides and fun things like that that the piranha could swim through looking for their prey. We left there, wrote the script in Shreveport, Louisiana, then came back and presented it to the owners.

MD: They didn’t have a problem with the violence in Piranha 3DD, but we had to cut out all the swearing and nudity!

PM: But we said that was part of the story. The bottom line was, they didn’t go for it. Zombieland was to shoot there as well, but they had the same problem and they ending up shooting the amusement park scenes at Magic Mountain in Valencia. We ended up shooting at another location. We also wrote several celebrity lifeguard scenes in the film that were to feature Carmen Elektra and Rick Astley to name a few, but it got cut down to David ‘The Hoff’ Hasslehoff. A lot of people would have gotten the in-jokes with the casting, but the rest of the world probably wouldn’t have been aware of the other performers.

SB: You’re also working on the video game adaptation God of War, how’s that going?

PM: For first time visitors this will be extremely exciting for them to enter that world. We have a fresh powder keg of ideas and can’t wait to unleash them on this universe.

MD: Kratos is a Spartan warrior in the services of the Gods. He’s a man of action, but goes through his quest in fearful and life threatening situations. He knows he must prevail and the underlying horror elements that present themselves in those situations help the story.

PM: You understand what kind of man he is and how eventually he allows the beast inside him take over.

SB: The Collection is the upcoming sequel to your 2009 movie The Collector, what can you tell us about the that?

MD: The budget was five times the amount we filmed the first one, on so expect a lot of excitement. We’ll be showing it at Fantastic Fest and Scream Fest before its released. November 30th is when it hits US theatres.

PM: Arkin escapes, but a girl named Elena is captured. As Arkin recuperates in the hospital from his ordeal, he’s kidnapped by mercenaries hired by Elena’s wealthy father and blackmailed as he joins forces with the mercenaries to find the Collector’s booby-trapped warehouse and rescue her. The last film was a puppy. This is a wolf and it’s coming!

Piranha 3DD is out now on DVD/Blu-ray.

To read our interview with Director John Gulager, go HERE.

With his latest movie, Piranha 3DD, hitting DVD/Blu-ray, we sat down with cult filmmaker John Gulager to talk about carnivorous fish, Feast, family and the future…

Starburst: You come from a long lineage of entertainers dating back to your grandfather, whom you were named after, that worked with the late, great George M Cohan. Do you feel that this legacy influenced you to continue the family tradition in the movie business?

John Gulager: Yes. It’s the only thing our family knows. Some families don’t encourage their siblings to work in show business. They know it’s a tough business and they only want the best for their sons and daughters telling them to pursue another career.  My family encouraged it. There were feast and famine times, as people who work in this industry know. My father would take an acting job and with what money we had left over after paying bills, would invest it in film projects. Some that came to fruition, some that didn’t. There were some good times and there were some bad times, like having our car almost repossessed… three times.

When working on independent films such as Feast as compared to studio productions what have you learned?

It’s all shocking when you first get into the studio system. You encounter things that have never happened before on any indie production. When making your own film, you have more control over the direction of your movie and where you want it to go as opposed to a studio film where you encounter interference. On Piranha 3DD, we were worried about the MPAA giving us a hard R rating because of the gore, amount of blood, mutilations, gratuitous nudity, etc. in the film and had to do some heavy editing. Because it was considered a comedy they looked at it differently and we were able to keep the film as it is. A lot of people give me hell for the finished project, but it is what it is. I set out to make a fun movie you could invite your friends over, have some beers and have a good time. Its not a dissertation on the election here in the U.S. nor is it Citizen Kane. It’s just pure fun.

Will Season 3 of Project Greenlight ever be released on DVD? It’s the only one still unavailable.

Probably not. We shot the DVD commentary out at Raliegh Studios for it, but when the Weinsteins and Miramax were split up and Disney got the Miramax films, that was part of the package. They released the Survivor series on DVD and it tanked, so hopes of getting Project Greenlight out there were finished.  Feast didn’t do that well at the box office theatrically, but it did find a cult audience in the DVD market and that was enough to spawn two other sequels. I’ve had people come up to me and tell me that they teach my Project Greenlight episodes in film schools across the nation showing what to do and not to do.

What if Disney packaged all three Feast films and they threw on Project Greenlight as a bonus?

That would be a good idea. I think they’d find an audience for it.

Tell us about casting for Piranha 3DD.

We approached the original actors from the Corman movie; the ones that are still alive and they all opted not to do it. However, we did get David Hasslehoff to do a small part and Ving Rhames called me out of the blue and wanted to be in the film. He’s a great actor and we had a good time working together. We shot the movie in North Carolina as the original location was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but they turned us down after reading the script because of the profanity and nudity in it, yet the heavy violence didn’t bother them at all.

You mean because of the gratuitous use of bodacious ta-tas, in the film?

That’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a long time! Nice Russ Meyer reference! We did a lot of local casting from ahem… strip clubs… ahem, for some of the more scenic imagery featuring bodacious ta-tas as well as regular casting.

What do you have lined up next?

I have a several scripts I’m looking at and a film noir and a western I’d really like to do. There’s also a biography on Tex Watson, but that would be a film that would be financed totally independently. I don’t think any studio would touch it because of the subject matter.

One last question; tell us about the rabbit suit…

Yes, the infamous rabbit suit. I have this rabbit suit from way back that I’ve always wanted to wear on Hollywood Blvd. doing cover songs from the Ramones with a cup out in front of me. What money I would make, I’d use that towards making a film. For Halloween, I got one of those foot long rubber penises you get at the adult stores, glued it on the front and walked around all night with it. I haven’t been able to get it off since. When my niece and nephew come over to visit, I have to hide the costume so that they don’t see it.

Ahh, just paint it orange and tell them it’s his carrot.

Now, that’s funny!

Piranha 3DD is out now on DVD/Blu-ray.

Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds may lead Canada’s assault on Hollywood currently, but they are following in the illustrious footsteps of Donald Sutherland, the original Canadian cinematic trailblazer. Now 76 and a movie star since 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, Sutherland shows no sign of slowing, with The Hunger Games, the first installment of a film franchise based on Suzanne Collins’ famed futuristic trilogy of novels, enjoying global box office success. With the film hitting home video September 3rd, Starburst caught up Sutherland to talk about his role as President Snow and his career so far…

Starburst: You’ve played a judge, general, captain and a priest, but only an animated President (in 2009’s Astro Boy). Were you eager to play a human President?

Donald Sutherland: No! I couldn’t give a shit.

Fair play.

I was sent this script by director Gary Ross. I read it and immediately wrote a letter to my agent because I came away from it with my mind terribly stimulated, extraordinarily impressed.

So the film more than lived up to your expectations then?

I am overwhelmed by it. It almost makes me weep. I just loved it; it’s important for this fragmented society that we live in. And it’s not just the United States but the world in general. And I do so hope Barack Obama gets re-elected.

It’s almost as if The Hunger Games could end up being the ultimate reality show, for real.

Oh yes, because movies can make a difference. One afternoon 55 years ago, when I was at the University of Toronto, I went in and saw Fellini’s classic 1954 film La Strada and I came out with such bliss. I was so in love with going to movies that I went back in and bought another ticket for Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. I came out of that film and my life had literally changed.

Were you studying drama at University?

I never studied it! I don’t think they even had a course in drama and if they had, I wouldn’t have taken it! I did go to LAMDA in London, but I didn’t study there either. I left as quickly as I could, it was maybe nine months.

Why did you leave?

Oh, they were horrible, they were evil. They hated me and I was gullible enough not to hate them for nine months.  But I do now, I made up for it. They were ruinous. The then principal said, “Your voice is too deep for the English theatre”. She tried to raise it an octave and I went along with her, stupidly. I couldn’t even speak for a couple of months. Then she said I should be driving a truck and I said, “Well if I do, don’t walk on the street”. So I left and got a job in repertory theater.

Didn’t you work in radio as a teenager?

Yes, in my little town of 5,000 people, by accident, not because I wanted to. I went in to apologise for something and the guy said, “Oh, we need an announcer and I like your voice. Can you do it?” I was happy to do it. I was 14 and that was the start of my “voiceover” career.

How did your parents react when you said you wanted to be an actor?

Well, he didn’t say, “That’s the stupidest thing in the world”. He just said, “Okay, but you should go and get a degree in engineering”. The University actually had a theatre but I was too shy to audition so I made a bet with someone that I wouldn’t get the part. I went, and got the part – it was a play called The Male Animal by James Thurber – and on the opening night, the audience laughed all through my first scene and the next scene. Then when I left, they applauded. Then I came on to take my curtain call and they applauded and stood up. I have never had it so good since. It was incredible, and I was happier than I’d ever been.

You worked with a very young cast in this film. Were they in awe of you?

Well, I don’t really work with them in this one unfortunately, but all the actors I’ve worked with have been so nice and mind-bogglingly respectful. Maybe it’s just because I’m old and enthusiastic.

How do the general public react when they spot you?

With incredible courtesy, except periodically with the Internet now and photographs on it. You do have to be really careful because people try and make it look like you’re their best friend, so you try and avoid that. If I see people taking pictures with their telephones, I try and turn away but, other than that, the people who actually come up and say hello are terrific and that is very much appreciated actually cause you know, it’s that they are just nice.

Do you have a proudest moment?

One of them is certainly carrying the Canadian flag at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. As I was walking along, the only thing that went through my head was, “Oh gosh, I wish my mother could see me now.” She had been dead for 27 years. Can you imagine that! I am very much still a Canadian.

The Hunger Games is out now on 2 disc Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Download.

Starburst caught up with actor, writer, producer and director Glenn McQuaid, one of the madmen filmmakers responsible for the brilliant horror anthology V/H/S…

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Starburst: What were your influences when working in the visual effects and title design field?

Glenn McQuaid: As a kid, I was very much enticed by horror movies. Hammer horror films really grabbed me. I was drawn to escapism and got to be scared at the same time. After graduating college, majoring in graphic design animation, I began working in the advertising world. After a while, I left that behind me as I decided I wanted to work in film.

Visual effects and titles have come a long way since the days of the optical printer where everything is computer driven now. Where do you think this is headed with future filmmakers?

Younger generations now refer to the older films for references. Earlier optical imaged films and titles have a certain quality that computers don’t have. Computers have been around long enough and by looking at older films, shot on actual film, you learn a lot. So, in a way, it’s come full circle.

Film has a certain depth to itself that a computer generated image doesn’t.

Yes. I just finished Hellbenders which was a film shot on video where I took that footage working with it to give it that film look for the titles. People know what computer generated effects and titles look like and I wanted to give it that filmed, theatrical look.

I Sell the Dead is a terrific send-up on the Burke and Hare, body snatcher-type story. A black comedy with everyone turning in a top notch performance. The scene with the alien is pure genius coming out of left field and it totally works in the film. How did you come up with that?

I made a short film called The Resurrection, about a young boy who took to grave robbing to support himself. The story grew from there and I decided to make I Sell the Dead funny with a sense of dark humor. The alien scene came to me one night and I thought, why not put it in?

You wrote and directed your own segment of V/H/S, ‘Tuesday the 17th’. Let’s talk about that…

I have to thank Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner for this project. The producers approached me to make a slasher-type film segment. It’s not my element, but we talked a lot about ideas of what we could do with it. I looked at films such as Jason Lives on how to shape the story, but in a lighthearted sense that included the archetypical stereotypes – the geek, the jock, the cheerleader, the Goth girl… that type of genre. It’s a celebration of escape through fantasy. We shot my segment in two days and then I went to edit it. I wasn’t satisfied with what I shot, so we went back with the entire cast and reshot it. 80% of the second shoot made it into the film. What you see on the screen really worked better the second time around.

Collaborating with the other directors must have been interesting. What were your production meetings like?

Actually, David Bruckner and the collective deserve all the credit as well as Radio Silence. They did a great production job. Everybody involved I had never worked with before except for doing the title work on Ti West’s The Innkeepers. None of the directors knew what the other was up to.

What’s next on the horizon for you?

I’ve written a script with Ted Gagen about a group of traveling vampires from around the world going to America that are fascinated by the early days of cinema called The Damned and the Dangerous. They come from all over roaming the American countryside so, as we get to know their characters, we explore their mythology from the different countries. You have your European vampires, African vampire, Asian vampire, etc. We’re going to turn it into a comic book first.

V/H/S is available in the US now via VOD and will receive a theatrical run from October 5th. A UK release is scheduled for early next year.

Read our V/H/S interview HERE.

Manimal Attraction

by Robin Pierce

Long time Starburst readers will remember Melody Anderson. Not only did she appear on our cover way back in issue 28, but she has also starred in Dead and Buried (1981), Flash Gordon (1980) and the Manimal TV series of 1983, now available on DVD. We recently caught up with Melody to discuss her career.

Starburst: You were no stranger to science fiction when you came to Manimal. You had appeared in episodes of Logan’s Run and Battlestar Galactica. What are your memories of working on those two series?

Melody Anderson: Logan’s Run was the first job I ever had. I was very nervous at the time, nervous about remembering my lines. At times, I didn’t do as well as I wanted to and I came home convinced I was never going to work in Hollywood again (laughs).

Battlestar Galactica was the most expensive TV series of its time. What were the differences between the two productions from an actor’s point of view?

It’s interesting because Manimal was a Glan Larson series, as was Battlestar Galactica. You’re on set from about five or six in the morning and you go until six or seven o’clock at night and for me, it was just a regular job. The money was in and I got to drive, was it a Lanborghini or a Ferrari, inside the big Universal rehearsal hall and the sound stage. The sets were incredible. A lot of work went into them. But it was a wonderful cast. It was a pleasure working with Dirk (Benedict). To me, when I think of sci-fi, I was growing up at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and sci-fi was much more escapist and more in the Flash Gordon mould. I was always fascinated with science and astronomy and I always had the hope and the belief that sci-fi showed a better place and what this world was. We were growing up being told to duck and cover under our desks, as if that would do any good (laughs).

There was a lot of fear about the future and that’s what made Star Trek so exciting too, because that was very much about tolerance and allowing people to do what they’re doing without judgement. It was the time of civil disobedience and Martin Luther King. Writers like Ray Bradbury, whom I met, said there had to be something better.

I had to laugh. I was watching Flash Gordon the other night with some friends and there’s that line Dale says to Princess Aura, because we can cry that’s what makes us better than the people on the planet Mongo.

I see Manimal in that kind of context, where we can recede dark forces by employing certain elements, whether it’s the way of the hawk, or the way of the panther, whatever and we can escape and destroy evil through these shifts in our mindsets. As a therapist today, I can say that actually people do find freedom when they shift their mindsets away from hopelessness and powerlessness.

Flash Gordon was a huge hit when it was released. Did you think at that point that it would be a phenomenal cult hit some thirty years later?

You never have any idea, but the fact that it has this following and it’s still around, that it’s a family movie and has so many different levels that it works at…There are loads of double entendres in there. It’s wonderful. We worked very hard, fourteen hours a day in these cold airplane hangars, especially in the flying scenes. They had these big fans. Topol and I would be hanging onto harnesses and people would take their coffee breaks (laughs). But to us, it was a job. You go in hoping to do a good job and that people like your character.

It reminded us a lot of the sixties Batman series, where the kids could follow the heroic action and the adults could tie into the wry humour.

Absolutely. I think Mike Hodges, the director, had a brilliant touch in combining those two elements.

It’s surprising there wasn’t a sequel to that.

Well there was going to be. The ending was totally a set up for a sequel and there were politics, probably far beyond what I could’ve understood, but there was supposed to be a sequel.

How did your involvement in Manimal come about?

I had worked with Glen Larson before and so they came to me with it. Personally, I love animals and the fact that I would get to work with all these amazing animals every week, honestly that was my big draw. That decided me. I loved the character. She was a spirited girl. She was a semi-romantic interest. She was a career girl and there were similarities with Dale Arden, that feistiness.

I remember in one episode your character thought that the cobra in front of her was the Manimal character, but he was standing behind you. Did you do that for real?

Oh I did all that stuff myself. I’m fascinated by all animals. I was lucky enough to get down to the Amazon in Peru and going to the jungle to see the spiders and tarantulas, I’m just fascinated by animals, so I had no fear of snakes. Nothing whatsoever. In fact, it was a very friendly little cobra.

If you pet them right behind the back of their skulls, they become very calm, so I had no problem. In fact, in one scene when Simon McCorkindale became a panther, I got to put the panther’s head in my lap and pet this incredible animal. There were all these amazing animals and I also knew it’d be a good family show.

We had a really wonderful cast. Simon McCorkindale, who sadly passed away, really epitomised the concept of the English professor. I got to work with Ursula Andress. No matter how old she gets, she’s still unbelievably gorgeous.

Now it’s finally out on DVD, how do you think Manimal will play to today’s audience?

Well, the styles were a little different back then. We had big hair and blue eye shadow (laughs), but I think the transformations of Simon into different animals is still as exciting as it was back then. There were no computer generated effects and I think it’s still fascinating how they do it, and we have to credit Stan Winston for that. It’s a show of good against evil with problem solving and crime solving.

We had very high hopes for the series, but things happen. ABC was very supportive of the series and I don’t know whether it was the time or the placement, but there were just not the numbers they thought they would get. But I think it was incredibly entertaining. It’s a great show for families to watch together, even if it’s just to make fun of some of the stuff (laughs).

You’ve been missing from our screens since 1995 and you’ve undertaken a radical career change, can you tell us about that?

When you’re an actress you reach the subtext. You play all these different roles and as a therapist, which I am now, I specialise in family treatment of addiction and trauma and I’m also with clients where I have to take different kinds of presentations for each client. Everyone responds differently. A soft glove or a hard hand in a soft glove, so in a way with the adaptability there’s really not that much difference from acting.

As I’m already getting older and greyer, I get more respect as a therapist than I get as an actress who’s ageing. One of the reasons I chose this was that I wanted a career that would take me to my sixties and seventies if I needed to work. I’ve always been a learner and this is a career that can keep feeding me intellectually, which is very important for my physical and mental health.

I love acting, but the reality of working steadily enough and sustaining a regular income… Every time I’d finish a job, I’d have to be thinking of the next one. I am actually making some forays into acting again because I really miss it, so parts here and there that wouldn’t interfere very much with the work I’m doing now, so I’m hoping to get back on the screen very soon.

Manimal: The Complete Series is out now on DVD.

Starburst caught up with actor, writer, producer and director Joe Swanberg, one of the madmen filmmakers responsible for the brilliant horror anthology V/H/S…

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Starburst: You were a web designer first; how did that lead into filmmaking?

Joe Swanberg: I went to film school; at the Southern University of Illinois, Carbondale. Film is my passion, but I thought I should learn something that would make me money to finance movies I wanted to make, so I studied web design. I spent two years doing web design for a really great company and it was here that I was able to finance my first and second film. I also was the travel coordinator at the Chicago International Film Festival. I never had any experience in doing this job, but I learned quick.

How did you get involved in V/H/S?

I owe a lot to Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard who championed me for the film. I really had no prior experience in horror movies, but they convinced the producers that I was the right choice for the segment I did.

Could you tell us a little what it’s about?

Emily and her boyfriend are attending different colleges and communicate via Skype. She suspects that there’s a ghost of a long dead boy in her room and she sets out prove that he exists. Emily is an interesting character. She’s not afraid of him, but searches the ghost out wanting to talk to him trying to find out happened and who he is. There’s kind of a romantic angle to it.

Do you think that being an actor first helps you as a director, producer and cinematographer?

Yes. I learn more by how other directors work when I act. There’s something different to see each time especially with camera set-ups, lighting, the entire on set production arm of it. Its a very visual position to learn from and how to treat actors when I’m behind the camera. 

Your dream project – what would it be?

I would say I just completed it and I’m very proud of the results. Very content. Its called Drinking Buddies and it’s about two friends that start a micro brewery. I wanted to show how the whole process of beer making comes about. Hops, barley, the stainless steel drums, fermintation… it’s an interesting process. Olivia Wilde plays the love interest and she was terrific to work with. There aren’t too many films about beer out there, so I thought it would be fun to do. Plus I like beer.

V/H/S is available in the US now via VOD and will receive a theatrical run from October 5th. A UK release is scheduled for early next year.

Read our V/H/S interview HERE.

With an anticipated release date of February 2013, Pawn Shop has just joined the select group of unconventional graphic novels that have found their funding on Kickstarter, where fans invest their own hard earned cash in books they want to read. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Pawn Shop scribe and IGN Comics Editor Joey Esposito, writer of Footprints and a recent backup feature for Image Comics’ Grim Leaper, “Drive Time Commute.”

Starburst: We read the preview pages of Pawn Shop on the Kickstarter site and it looks great so far. What’s particularly interesting is that you took the slice of life route with the story… what inspired you to tell a story like Pawn Shop?

Joey Esposito: Well, first and foremost it’s simply that those are the stories I really identify with and the ones that made me want to be a writer in the first place. I love the idea of exploring our seemingly “mundane” existence, because it’s really anything but. Our every day lives are so much more complicated and interesting than anything that superheroes or genre stories deal with. So out of a desire to explore those ideas and work out some personal issues (what writer isn’t?) and out of a need to try something very different after Footprints, Pawn Shop was born.

So, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Yeah, exactly. There’s so much to examine, even in a seemingly banal routine.

Why New York?

As for New York, I mean, part of it is just the magic of the city in general. There’s no other American city, in my opinion, that captures what NYC does. So much variation and so much character that literally changes block by block. It’s a city that always offers something new, no matter how many times you walk its streets. But for me personally, I left New York when I had to move to LA for work. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t take full advantage of living in New York and so Pawn Shop, in part, is sort of a love/apology letter to the city that I never let grab me like it should. I spent a lot of time there, obviously, working and playing in a band and stuff, but in the end I was pre-occupied with trying to move ahead in my life that I guess I never really took advantage of the city like I should have.

What can readers expect from Pawn Shop?

So, as you can see on the Kickstarter page, Chapter 1 follows a widower named Harold. He’s lived in Manhattan all of his life, up until his wife passes away and he moves out to Long Island. Yet, he finds himself traveling back to the city every day, retracing their old haunts, unable to let go. In the move out to the Island, the movers misplaced this old antique mannequin that was his wife’s, and that sort of serves as Harold’s motivation for this story, hunting down that old mannequin as though it’s all that remains of their memories together. It’s all very depressing. But it’s sweet too, I hope, because I think having that sort of a commitment to somebody is just the most spectacular thing I can imagine.

Can you tell us about some of the other characters and where they fit into your vision of NYC?

I don’t want to say too much about the other characters and how the stories intertwine, but I can say that all the characters will appear in each chapter. The goal is to make your second read of the book a different experience – hopefully each character will provide a new perspective of various events and scenes. The other characters are Josh, a home care nurse, Lilly, an LIRR conductor, and Jen, a teenager that’s sort of in with the wrong kind of crowd. She’s brilliant but confused. They’ve all got ties to the city in different ways, but they’re all tied to one another through this one block that the pawn shop sits on.

You currently live in LA. Any plans on triumphantly returning to the city in which Pawn Shop is set?

Not in a permanent capacity, not right now, anyway… For now, I’m living vicariously through Pawn Shop!

And therein lies the power of art… to transport us to where we’d rather be. Speaking of art, you’re working with renowned escapologist Sean Von Gorman, right?

I am indeed. He’s quite the character.

Out of all the comic Kickstarter rewards I’ve seen, I don’t think I’ve ever come across one that involved a straight jacket (contributors who pledge $250 or more have the opportunity to experience Sean Von Gorman’s escape act in person).

Yeah. His skill set has been a boon to not just Pawn Shop, but the books he works on in general. He’s a fantastic artist, but his mentality for self-promotion and innovative marketing really go a long way, particularly in the independent scene.

So, every creative team has their own unique process… can you tell me a bit about working with Sean on art?

Well, we’ve never met in person, so thus far it’s really just a lot of e-mails back and forth. We talked a lot before starting the project, where we were sort of feeling each other out, I think. When I sent him the script, Sean read it and gave me his thoughts, we talked about it a little more, and then ultimately decided to move forward. As soon as he sent me the first character designs for Harold, I knew we were good to go. I loved what he was doing. From there, the pages began coming in. In general, when I work with an artist, I want it to be a collaboration. If there’s something that really doesn’t work, we’ll talk about it, but in general he’s the artist and knows better than I do what he can do in the space of a panel and all that. I imagine as we get further on the project I’ll be able to write more to his strengths and interests and hopefully the final product will be all the better for it.

How much influence do you have in the look and feel of the book? Some writers can be very prescriptive and others have a more laissez faire attitude towards the visual side of things. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

I write the panel descriptions and everything, and I get pretty detailed in them but I’m not super attached to what I write. Any excessive description is less for the artist to render verbatim and more to describe the tone of the scene, if that makes sense. I want the artist to be engaged while reading the script, rather than having it read like a step-by-step instruction manual, so that their excitement and understanding of what I’m going for ends up on the page. But like I said, I want it to be a collaboration, so if there’s anything I’ve written that the artist takes issue with, I’m more than happy to talk it out.

So with its slice of life narrative, Pawn Shop steers well clear of comic book convention in a way we don’t really see often enough, considering the limitless potential of the medium. Do you think Kickstarter is influencing the types of books writers and artists are interested in creating and readers are interesting in buying?

Oh yeah, for sure. We only pitched this book to one publisher, who politely declined, before we took it to Kickstarter. I don’t blame them, honestly, because the market hasn’t exactly suggested that a book like this will be a smashing sales success. But with Kickstarter, I think it lets comic fans literally vote with their dollars on the kind of books they want to see, which is why you’re finding more and more established pros turning to crowdfunding for their passion projects. Creator-owned work comes with great financial sacrifice – not only for production, but also in time spent away from doing paying work. Kickstarter lets creators take more risks without having to worry so heavily about how the direct market will receive it. More importantly, I think Kickstarter opens up comics in general to new fans. People that might not know that anything outside of superheroes exist in comics, you know? I think Kickstarter is a great way to find a whole new audience for the medium in general.

Do you think the popularity of projects that are picking up speed on Kickstarter has the potential to create a sort of shift in the publishing world? Perhaps people are looking at what readers are, as you say, voting for with their own dollars and seeing that there is a place for the books they’ve been ignoring?

I really hope so. I mean, we’re already seeing publishers themselves use Kickstarter – like Top Cow just did with Cyber Force. I think that’s a really fascinating experiment, to find out what readers are willing to support like that. But more generally speaking, I think it’ll take a long, long period of huge successes on Kickstarter for the bigger comic book publishers to start taking a cue from that. After all, Marvel and DC, for all intents and purposes, are sort of a ground zero for multimedia properties at this point. Their publishing division is more or less a slave to the more profitable areas – movies, TV, games – that they are taking less risks in really branching out in genre. And when they do – things like the New 52’s war titles, for instance, they don’t really do all that well. To that end, I think the independents are the place you’ll have to go for real innovation and variety in the medium, and with Kickstarter, I think that idea of having a known publisher’s logo on your book is slowly becoming less important. We still live in a world where being published by an established company somewhat guarantees a certain level of quality. And certainly, self-publishing, even if it’s supported by thousands of dollars in Kickstarter pledges, can churn out some garbage. But just like anything else, if the work is quality and you can get it in front of people, then there’s no reason you can’t find success on your own terms.

Pawn Shop is worlds apart from your previous series with artist Jonathan Moore, Footprints. How did you, as a writer, get from something like Footprints to something like Pawn Shop?

Really it all comes from the same place, which is having something to say with those characters. It’s just a different way of expressing it, I guess. Footprints, while a fun monster/detective story and all of that, has a larger message about our world and the way we treat it. That sounds kind of silly, saying it out loud, because it’s a book about Bigfoot. But that’s where the thematic elements come from, which I think is what makes it work beyond just the gimmick of “Bigfoot as a PI.” I mean, hopefully it does. But in terms of the themes I wanted to explore with Footprints, using that genre approach was the best way, given my particular skill set and interests, to do so. And with Pawn Shop, it comes from the angle of wanting to explore the seemingly mundane, like I mentioned earlier. The easiest and most direct way to do that is just to do a story about real people; people you’ve probably bumped elbows with on the subway. But as a writer, I’m still very early in my career, and one thing I wanted to do right away was establish versatility. I don’t want to be pinned down as a guy that does a particular type of story. Maybe that’ll be inevitable anyway, who knows, but at least I can say I tried to keep some variety in my projects. I think exploring different genres and themes is exciting for a writer.

Anything else you’d like to say about Pawn Shop?

I guess I would just conclude by saying that I hope anyone reading this will take a look at our Kickstarter and help us surpass our goal. We’ve only got about a week left, but we’ve got some great incentives for hitting our stretch goals. At $13K, for instance, we’re going to have a photography series commissioned, done by a photographer friend of mine, that will be a series of real NYC pawn shops, put together in a really lovely art book. So if you love NYC, alternative comics, or just stories about regular people, I hope you’ll give Pawn Shop a look.

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Though Joey Esposito and Sean Von Gorman have already reached their minimum goal to ensure that Pawn Shop meets the light of day, the Kickstarter funding period for the book is still open. Contribution information and preview pages can be found here.

Madeline Ashby is a Toronto based academic, science fiction writer and futurist who’s debut novel, vN is set in a future where lines are being drawn between human beings and their robotic creations. We caught up and asked her some awkward questions.

Starburst: vN is your debut novel. Is it the book you always wanted to write, and if so, why? If not, what is the story you really want to tell?

Madeline Ashby: I don’t have a story I’m that obsessed with. I’ve been telling stories since I could talk. Seriously. I used to wander around my room talking in funny voices, rehearsing the same scenes over and over between people I’d made up. Eventually I’d nail my own private performance, or write it down, and then I’d be finished. So when you’ve been doing that your whole life, you tend to look at a single magnum opus as something of a quagmire.

I learned this aphorism from the design community: Perfect is the enemy of Good. It’s all too easy to spend all your time on something you never allow to be good enough. It means you never have to work up the gumption to show it to anybody or let it fail. But it’s a trap.

You wrote a Master’s thesis on Anime and Cyborg culture at York; how has that influenced vN, and what anime do you watch again and again?

A lot of my thesis focused on how anime figures the body, and how that can be read through the lens of cyborg theory. So I spent a lot of my time thinking about replication, reproduction, ownership, autonomy, and personal freedom. For me, those are all themes within vN. But I’ve had other people tell me that how I depict bodies in motion is drawn from anime, and how I depict violence, too. For my own part, I know I was thinking a lot about how Bleach depicts a darker self slowly taking over, and how Fullmetal Alchemist talks about wanting to undo a childish mistake and setting off on the road to do just that.

As for the series I return to again and again: I really love how Cowboy Bebop depicts the future. It’s a fine-grain vision that’s internally consistent down to the tiniest detail. It’s also some of the best-written television out there, period. The characterization is deep, but subtle. When I think about how to telegraph meaning within dialogue, or how to illustrate meaning with a single powerful image, I think of Cowboy Bebop. I also go back and watch Evangelion pretty regularly. Not because it makes any sense, but because I can’t get enough of the savagery of those robot battles. I tried to incorporate a bit of that into vN, but on a much smaller scale. There are days when I love Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex a lot more than the material that inspired it. I think it just tells more interesting stories about more interesting people. It’s also pretty brilliant in how it depicts the ramifications and implications of changing technology. I just finished watching Another and Madoka, and I’ll probably watch them again. Right now I’m watching Shangri-la and Kids on the Slope. I have high hopes for both.

Do you imagine that the technological singularity will happen in your lifetime, and will it bring Mankind the peace that we claim to crave?

I have a second degree in strategic foresight and am employed as a futurist, so I actually answer this question a lot. I don’t believe in the Singularity any more than I believe in the Rapture. And even if the former were to occur, I doubt that we’d have a single event that was recognizable as “The Singularity”. Annalee Newitz once wrote that we’ve had several Singularity events, in the form of penicillin and the birth control pill and the Internet, and I agree with her. The people who think the future happens too quickly are the people who don’t pay attention to science or technology journalism, who don’t know how long it takes to get projects funded, who don’t understand that both design and scientific endeavour are iterative processes defined by repeated failure. I think the yearning for a Singularity is the same as yearning for a Rapture, and ultimately that’s the same as yearning for a weight loss pill that actually works. We all want one definitive event that will change everything forever. We don’t want to do the slow, hard, constant work that actually improves things.

So what I hope for is a plurality of singularities. I think it’s absurd that we still need things like braces to straighten human teeth. I think it’s absurd that conditions like depression are treated with drugs whose side effects include suicidal ideation. I think it’s absurd that we haven’t figured out a global standard and practise for carbon capture. If we treated carbon the way we do nuclear material, we wouldn’t be kissing the Northwest Passage goodbye. But solving those problems is slow, hard, constant work, and it doesn’t fit into the messianic narrative we use as historical scaffolding.

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

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Or maybe one of his short story collections. My favourite is After the Quake. But the sentiment and message of the former is so affirming, moreover so affirming in the face of such anxiety and pain, that I think I’d need it. Otherwise, I’d pick The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I fell in love with that book when I was fourteen years old. I re-read it every once in a while to remind myself how plain and workmanlike my own prose is by comparison.

What fictional worlds inspire you? Which Authors are your influences?

The first fictional environment I fell in love with was Brian Jacques’ Redwall. I wanted to live in Redwall. I wanted to eat the food served in Redwall. Then later, I very much wanted to live in Gotham City – the Bruce Timm animated version. The last world-sized environment I fell for were the four nations of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (The animated television series, not the execrable live-action film adaptation.) I also really like what Tite Kubo has done with the cosmology of Bleach. Each environment, no matter how surreal, feels as though it has its own rules. But in general, fiction-wise, I’m drawn to worlds that are like ours, but just a little bit different. Or rather, worlds where it’s possible to peel back layers of reality and discover something unexpected pulsing beneath. I think David Lynch has built a career on that. His films have such a sense of place, and they’re almost always about how the places and people we think are “normal” or even boring simply aren’t. I’m a big fan of environments like that, like Twin Peaks, or ’Salem’s Lot, or Hinamizawa. I think sometimes you can tell a richer story about a smaller place, because you’re not busy expositing a whole world.

In terms of who influences me, it’s a long list. I had the great fortune to meet Ursula K. LeGuin in person when I was graduating university and needing some inspiration. I was also lucky enough to make it to Toronto, where I auditioned for a spot in a genre writers’ workshop started years ago by Judith Merril. It’s the same workshop Cory Doctorow was once a part of, and that’s how I met him and his works. It’s also home to a bunch of other very successful writers, and they’ve had a huge impact on who I am as a writer and how I approach the game. I met my partner David Nickle there, and he’s the one I speak to daily about fiction. He writes horror, and I write SF. Our place is like a constant panel discussion at a genre convention.

If you could erase a single thing from existence, in such a way that it never existed at all (and never would again) what would it be?

A thing, and not an event? Because there are plenty of events I would erase. And people, for that matter. But since you asked about things, like New Coke or Windows Vista, I would have to say… tarantulas. Tarantulas, or asbestos. But probably the former.

What can we expect from future novels in the Machine Dynasty series?

Well, the sequel to vN is tentatively titled iD. It takes place shortly after vN ends, and it’s from the perspective of Javier, a supporting character in vN. Javier is a self-replicating humanoid, and he’s had a rough go of it for most of his life. Because he’s programmed to never hurt human beings, he’s slept through most of his problems with them. But he’s also incredibly resourceful, intelligent, and charming – a sort of non-violent Hispanic James Bond or Dean Winchester, who also happens to be a machine. iD puts him on a quest for redemption and revenge, and he has to call on all his old skills for a new purpose, and figure out who he’s become along the way. That means digging more deeply into the world that made the vN possible. Javier will have to deal with the people at New Eden Ministries, with DARPA researchers, with a Stepford-style community of humans and vN. Oh, and pirates.

Simpsons or Futurama?

Futurama.

Ebooks or Paperbacks?

Ebooks. Anyone who’s immigrated will tell you the same. If they don’t, they’re masochists.

Battle Angel Alita or Cameron from the Terminator TV series?

Alita. She’s survived more.

Truth or Beauty?

Truth.

Tom Baker or Matt Smith?

Smith.

Robert Downey Junior or Benedict Cumberbatch?

Oh, that’s tough. Downey. He looks more like David. He’d be my first Republican, too. You might as well find some strange when you’re finding some strange.

vN is out now from Angry Robot Books and is reviewed HERE.