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CONFESSIONS
05/18/2001

Transcribed by Kelly Shaw

Lost Souls: The first question is from Andrea Winchester. She has some questions about painting. For your illustrations do you ever pencil in your ideas on the canvas directly or do you begin with paint? And what do you recommend for beginning artists?
Clive Barker: I never put pencil, I shouldn’t say never, once out of 100 paintings I might put pencil to canvas before I put paint on. But it is much more likely that if I am trying to work out a relationship problem, a design relationship problem, I would more likely work that out on a separate sheet of paper that is roughly the same proportion of the canvas that I’m gonna use, before I actually get to the canvas. Part of that is, of course, personal choice. I wouldn’t ever advise pencil, I would advise charcoal for
making the mark or a very, very, very diluted form of the color that you’re going to use in the painting itself. If you are going to use oil color then a very very light orange works for me if you want to rough something in, or a very light brown works very well. I just don’t think pencil works very well, because pencil slides over the canvas making it very hard to get an accurate line.

LS: Do you recommend acrylics before oil?
CB: I don’t recommend either; it is a completely different technique. Acryllics dry very very quickly, and within a minute or two. Oil paints take, well they recommend you varnish a painting between 3-6 months after you finish it, which is why it is completely dry until 6 months or 3 months, at least 3 months after you finish it. It certainly stays malleable for many days afterward. And, as you learn to play with oils you find that it is actually kind of fun as you can play with them for a long time after you initially put the marks down. Acryllics are more unforgiving. If you put the marks, it is dry in 2 minutes flat. I don’t like acryllics, I find them kind of hard, and, hard in the sense of being rather stark. Now that might be the effect somebody wanted. I know people who work in acryllics, particularly those who work in a kind of mathematically exact kind of painting, who find acryllic very useful, because you can get very accurate lines as it dries quickly. I’m trying to use my imagination to evoke dream images and I find oil painting a lot more gentle and maleable, thus just more friendlier for somebody who is doing what I am doing.

LS: This is from Sarah and Phil of Revelations. You’ve said in the past that the desire to be subversive drives you to remain one step ahead of populism. As your writing has matured are you now more concerned with the message you are giving than the response the message evokes?
CB: There is an old line used on Broadway, “If I wanted to send a message I’d use Western Union .” And I believe that. I don’t believe any artist has any business messing himself up with messages. Messages are things that you can speak clearly and probably can be reduced to a couple of sentences. My books are, conversely, huge narratives, which contain many messages, contradictory often. I have no desire to be a message carrier and I never have from the very beginning. You look at the early plays, look at something like “The History of the Devil,” I think it would be very hard to come out with a simple message of what that play means. Now there are some readers and film goers and play goers who find that frustrating and wish that I would keep things simpler, “what does this mean,” well it means what it means to you. And what it means to you may not be what it means to your wife, or your lover, or your daughter. And the great thing about storytelling is that it can actually carry a great freight of meaning, I say meaning rather than message, a great freight of meaning which will be very different depending on the nature of the recipient.

Kelly Shaw: Mark Tallen from England asks if there is any truth to the rumor of an Illustrated “Imajica”?
CB: There is going to be an Illustrated “Imajica.” A modestly illustrated one but an illustrated one nevertheless. The same edition will also have a very extensive appendix created by Hans Rueffert who did the “Imajica” game which will be a kind of guide to “Imajica.” I’m getting it today so I am very excited to see it. It will make for a whole new edition, so yes there is complete truth to that rumor.
KS: Is there any tentative release date on that yet?
CB: I think it is somtime early in 2003 but it might be late in 2002. But to be perfectly honest I am not sure.

KS: Cemetery Dance is releasing a new collection of short stories entitled “Mondo Zombie,” claiming to have a story by
you. Is this story a reprint or something new?
CB: It is something I don’t know about (laughs). I think it may very well be the John Skpp edited collection of zombie stories which are a sort of follow on George Romero’s “Day of the Dead.” And I had created a story which Steve Niles had actually written. So that’s what it may be but the story is actually written by Steve Niles.

KS: Could you talk about some of your upcoming books and prjects?
CB: “Coldheart Canyon” is finished, edited, comes out on the 4th of October in the U.S., and it comes out at the end of August in England. It is a ghost story set in Hollywood, as I have said many times before, and we are getting great feedback on it. So I am very excited about that. That is first up. “The Abarat Quartet,” the first book of that series of books is about half way finished and I will deliver it to my publishers in September for publication the following autumn. At the end of the year I will also
deliver to Harper Collins a collection of short stories which will collect up a bunch of stuff that has been floating around for a while, there’s a Harry D’amour story which had been published a long time ago, which has not been collected.
KS: “Lost Souls”?
CB: Exactly. There is about 5 or 6 stories which are already around which have not been collected. There is also about 70 or 80 thousand words of new material, which will include, and most importantly actually, the novella, “The Scarlet Gospels,” which is giving the title to the book. The novella “The Scarlet Gospels” which will be the end once and for all of the Hellraiser mythology because I am killing Pinhead. So I am delivering that the end of this year for autumn the following year. So next year will be the re-issues of “The Thief of Always” with a superb new cover which is being painted by a man called Dan Craig, it’s amazing. It will see the publication of the first book of “Abarat,” it will see the publication of “The Scarlet Gospels,” it will see the publication of “Coldheart Canyon” in paperback. Busy year next year.
KS: 2002 that will be in?
CB: 2002. Exactly. And meanwhile we have a deal pending with the Sci-Fi channel for the “Saint Sinner” series, well actually the first episode is being written. We’re just waiting on notes from them, hopefully we’ll get the green light and make that. “The Damnation Game” is presently being written by a superb writer named John Heffernan, who is writing it for a company called Phoenix, and that will be a 35 million dollar movie when we get it rolling, which will hopefully be this year. And the “Abarat” stuff will start to happen from Disney once I turn in the first book. It is busy movie wise and it is busy book wise.

KS: Do you have any information on the possible DVD director’s cut of “Nightbreed”?
CB: That came and went, it hasn’t gone away it’s just I haven’t been focusing on it. The company approached me, I said, “Yes, I want to do it,” and I haven’t heard exactly when it is going to be done. I know they are releasing a regular edition and then they were hoping to do the re-constructed edition for next year.
KS: Could you talk about some of the books and movies that you’ve enjoyed lately?
CB: A wonderful book called “The Mummy Congress,” which I’d completely recommend to people interested in the science of
mummification by a lady called Heather Pringle: “Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead,” a great book. There is a lovely new German book out about Tim Burton, it is only a small book, it is written by a man called Helmet Merschnann. I just picked it up because I love Tim Burton films, for no other reason than that. And on page 94, he goes into a detailed analysis into why “Beetlejuice” is an elaborate parody of the first “Hellraiser” picture.
LS: I never thought of that.
CB: It is very interesting. That was an interesting thing to look at. Move wise, I haven’t actually been to the movies recently. I did not like the second “Mummy” movie at all.
LS: I wanted to go see that (laughs).
CB: Well, it’s sorry shit (laughs). Okey, it’s fine, it’s fine (laughs again). Sorry I spoiled it. I’m looking forward to “Atlantis” from Disney, I’m looking forward to “Pearl Harbor” immensely. I think it’s going to be a good summer for movies.
KS: Tim Burton’s new movie “Planet of the Apes.”
CB: “Planet of the Apes” is going to be great. I’ve seen some pictures and material from that and it looks just fucking amazing.

KS: Next I’ll move onto some questions about “Coldheart Canyon.” I thought it was amazing.
CB: Thank you.
KS: And I thought it contained all of your trademarks, from your metaphysical musings, bold eroticism, to perverse violence. And when you wrote about the excesses in The Devil’s Country or during the orgies, I found a similarity in imaginative fecundity to “Fellini’s Satyricon.”
CB: Oh, I love that. One of my huge pleasures of my recent DVD days is that “Fellini’s Satyricon” has just been released, a beautiful looking print, so I was able to look at it and admire it again. I am a huge fan of that movie, thank you for saying that, that’s a great point of reference and what was fun for me about the book was being able to mingle all those things. The things you just mentioned, the metaphysical stuff, the horror, the eroticism, but also packaging that as it were in with a vision of the city that I live and the community which I live, which as you know from reading the book, I have very mixed feelings about. I mean it is a book which I think, again going back to the question about messages, I don’t think it would be very easy to work out from the book whether I love or hate Hollywood, and I think the book is very ambiguous about that. And that’s because I am very ambiguous about it. There are things I love about the city and there are things I despise about it. There is a passage a little way in, where it is Oscar night, and Todd Pickett, our hero or anti-hero depending on your point of view, is sitting at home on Oscar
night, unable to go out, for reasons that I don’t want to give away, and he thinks bout the horrors of Oscar night. And having been a visitor to Oscar night, when we won the Oscar for “Gods and Monsters,” David and I went and were sitting there applauding Bill Condon when he won his Oscar. And all of that was just taken from that experience, all the stuff about the way this town works, I have in one sense or other experienced it. That is a kind of new thing to add to the mix, I will never write about this town again, I don’t think, so I wanted to put as much as possible about it into the book.

KS: Throughout the book, by knowing some of the things you’ve gone through in the past few years, with “Gods and Monsters” and your father’s passing, the book seemed to have a more direct voice, a voice to Clive Barker the person.
CB: I think that is right. And, interestingly, the American edition will have a photograph of me on the cover. [The picture on the American edition cover will be the same picture from the Advanced Reader’s Copy cover.] And that was very brave thing for Harper Collins to do. What they are essentially saying, I think, by putting that cover on, is exactly what you are saying. That you should identify Barker as being a voice in this, not a player, but a voice. And I feel as though, yeah I wanted to write quite directly about this place, my feelings are very clear about it all. And I wanted to set them down in a pretty elaborate narrative, but a narrative that’s really, despite the scenes in The Devil’s Country, is basically set in the here and now. And when we travel off into The Devil’s Country we travel off in the company of people who basically live in the here and now. So even the fantasy sections of the book are tinged with Hollywood.

KS: You mentioned The Devil’s Country, which is your newest mythology. It contains numerous visions that are not fully explored in the book, is there a possibility that it could show up in any of your future books?
CB: Oh I think so. I don’t think I am done with The Devil’s Country. I wanted to make sure that the balance of the book
stayed where it was, that it wasn’t over burdened with fantastical elements. But I can see myself going back and writing a piece that is completely set in The Devil’s Country. You can feel, I think, my imagination taking flight when I come to those sectons.
KS: It seems liberated.
CB: Exactly. But at the same time I wanted to make sure that I teased people, I didn’t want the book to be overwhelmed by the fantastic. It’s essentially a book about the human condition in Hollywood, not the human condition in The Devil’s Country. Can I conceive of a book down the line simply called The Devil’s Country, yes absolutely!

KS: Passages I re-read due to their imaginative breath were when you first introduced The Devil’s Country. There are about 6 or 7 pages that seem as if you are exploring every nook and cranny of your imagination, feeling very much like a paint brush with words sweeping over a canvas.
CB: Right. Part of the fun there was I knew that I wasn’t going to go back to that world for a while in the narrative, so I wanted it to be fixed very strongly in the audiences’ heads. So the reader says, “Wow, I can’t wait to get back there.” And I thoroughly enjoyed writing that stuff, it is outrageous stuff. Some of the sexual stuff is really outrageous. This is the first time any publisher ever said to me, “this is too strong.” Interestingly, I was asked to tone down a couple things, and actually they thought the changes were stronger than the original stuff. But by that time they kind of realized that’s what I was doing, so the stronger stuff stayed in. So the book became stronger and more sexual through its various drafts. I think it is a pretty outrageous book, but you know Hollywood is an outrageous place, and one of the things I had to change were a few names of stars that I had to take out. But I wanted to leave enough clues so anybody who wanted to really look at the book with an eye of who is who would be able to find out. Interestingly, my publicist, who has worked in Hollywood for a very long time--she represents Michael Bay and Tim Burton and a whole bunch of other people--my publicist recognized everybody instantly. So it is fun; you
don’t need to know who these people are to enjoy the book, but it is another level of fun if you want to investigate who these people are.

KS: We talked about the book’s excesses, which are probably some of the greatest in your whole canon of literature.
CB: (gives a wicked laugh)
KS: But also, the book seems one of your most sympathetic, almost lighter books.
CB: Right.
KS: For instance: the narrative isn’t pushed along by The Devil’s Country, but by the questions of life you arise and the character’s poignant emotional struggles.
CB: You know this is a book that has room for a visit to the animal hospital, it is not all about Hollywood parties, it also shows the otherside. We lost a dog this year and Charlie’s death is faithfully reported in the book in the form of Dempsey’s death, Dempsey being Todd Pickett’s dog. And that whole episode of having to have the dog put down, which is not lighter, but is certainly more emotional than anything in “The Books of Blood,” which I think were a lot more hard hearted; I think this is a very empathic book, I think audiences will find it quite easy to get into the lives of the characters who are on the page. Even though many of those characters are pricks and monsters and egotistical monsters, I hope they will have fun with them. Because I sort of have fun with some of the more egotistical people I meet in this town, and there are a lot of them you know. If you see it in the right frame of mind then it can sort of be fun.

KS: When you take the Hollywood producer, Epstatz, into The Devil’s Country, your playful lampooning of these “Hollywood
pricks” becomes transparent.
CB: Absolutely
KS: And Epstatz’s whole myopic view of life is really reflected by The Devil’s Country.
CB: Yeah, blown open wide. And that’s part of the fun of the book, in taking a bunch of characters who...when I wrote“Weaveworld” the people who enter the Weave are essentially sympathetic to the visions that lie before them...the people that enter The Devil’s Country are resisting it very often, and that was fun to watch and observe and see how that worked. And I’ve also got this, I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ve got Lilith who is the Queen of Hell, and I’ve also got her kid, her offspring, who is very much one of the most extreme characters I think I’ve ever written.
KS: And comical.
CB: And very comical, I hope so. Yeah, he is very fun, he was just such fun to write. There were days where I thought, “yeah, okey good, I get to write him, cool.”
KS: Your disgust for the business side of Hollywood comes out clearly in the book. But your view of actors is very ambiguous, since, by the finale you show compassion for them.
CB: There is a conversation between Katya and Todd early on, in which Todd talks about how much he needs love and how much he is trained to need the approbation of audiences, and if he doesn’t get it how empty he feels. And the problem is, it doesn’t matter how much love he gets, how many audiences love him, there is never enough love for him. And I’ve seen that in actors. I’ve seen actors who are so hungry and needy for worship, I don’t even mean love I mean a little devotion, that it made them into monsters. And really I think the real monsters in this book are the human beings, by comparison to Maxine and Epstatz or Todd, Lilith is a rather sympathetic character. I think, I hope this is going to be a big summer read, where people on the beach are going to be passing it back and forth going, “hey, check this out,” and then saying, “I wonder who the hell this is.”
I had a great time writing it, and I think that comes across when you read it.

KS: Someone asked you this question a number of years ago, but I am curious to see how your answer has changed. If you
were allowed only 3 books and 3 movies to take with you after you die, what would they be?
CB: I’m sure they have changed. I’m assuming I won’t need the Bible because I’ve gone to Heaven anyway. So, I’m gonna
take “Moby Dick”--I’ve probably had that in the first version right?
KS: Yes, you did.
CB: “Peter Pan.” And, I need a really really funny book, because Heaven can get dull once in a while, “Three Men In A Boat,” by Jerome K. Jerome, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. And movies: I think St. Pete might need a shock once in a while, so I think “The Exorcist” is still good for that. “Fantasia” remains a movie that still gives me boundless joy. I look at that movie, probably once a month. Not the whole thing from beginning to end, but just pieces. What have I like recently? I’ll choose something local and recent: “Best In Show.” Did you see it?
KS: Yeah, I’ve seen it.
CB: Oh God, that made me laugh. It’s not as good as “Waiting For Guffman” which I consider a masterpiece but it is a great movie nevertheless.
KS: Christopher Guest is hilarious.
CB: He is wonderful isn’t he!

CF: Vickey Lopez asks, if there was one thing to share with your audience what would it be?
CB: That I am completely insecure about everything I have done to date.
KS: So that pushes you to perfection, right?
CB: I suppose it does, it makes me stay up nights worrying. I am speaking from the bottom of my heart, that is the honest answer. I think people think that I’ve been working for a long time now and that I’m probably confident about all my stuff, but not at all. I am really insecure. When Kelly said he liked the book, my heart lept. And you know its good that that is still the case. I would not like to be one of those people who was so confident in their own genius that they didn’t care about other people’s opinions. I care very much about people’s opinions and I don’t write books for myself, I write them for the people who read them. I know it may sound like the obvious thing to say, but you actually find a lot of people who say, “I write my books for myself.” I don’t. I write my books imagining that this is gonna make people feel a little hot under the collar, or feel a twinge of fear, or get a laugh from people. There were sections of the book[“Coldheart Canyon”], like the erotic sections, where I was just squirming with anticipation of how much fun this would be for other people. So I don’t feel confident or finished, or even faintly finished, or satisfied. I feel as though I am working constantly toward some goal which isn’t even vaguely in sight. Does that make sense?
KS: Orson Welles suffered from the same problem, he wouldn’t even watch “Citizen Kane.”
CB: Right. His real problem was that he made his great work of genius at the age of 25. And he actually said about himself that he lived his life in reverse. And, he really should have made that movie when he was 70, at the climax of his career. As it was his career ran down. That’s one of the reasons I am challenging myself with “Abarat” and doing all these paintings. I brought somebody in to look at the paintings a couple days ago, and they said, “Oh my God, you really are an obsessive”! (laughs)

CF: Are you still doing paintings for “Abarat”?
CB: Oh yeah. I still have another 150. But I finished one last night, and I’ll finish another tonight. So, I’ll start painting in an hour and I’ll have about 4 or 5 hours of it tonight. It is going to be visually quite a great experience.
CF: One last question. When they release “Coldheart Canyon,” are you planning on a signing tour?
CB: No. They don’t want me on tour. Harper Collins is not touring authors this year. They’ve taken me to the bookstores, to the heads of the stores, of Borders, of Waldenbooks, to meet with the buyers, but they want to save the touring for “Abarat.” Because “Abarat” is going to be such an extraordinary book, and I can’t help thinking that if we are going to have a huge turn out for things, let it be “Abarat.” Then people can bring their copies of “Coldheart Canyon,” and you know me, I never turn down a second a third or a fourth book for me to sign. So, even if people don’t get their copies of “Coldheart Canyon” signed,
they’ll certainly be able to get them signed next year when I’m on the extensive, big tour, for “Abarat.”

CF: You can always come do a signing in Milwaukee!?
CB: I want to go to as many places that I haven’t been to before, so make sure that Harper Collins knows.