Broken Frontier

With books collecting essays on topics as diverse as the Legion of Super-Heroes, the X-Men film trilogy and December’s Gotham City: 14 Miles about the 1960s Batman TV series, it’s clear that SequArt are an organization who clearly live up to their “Advancing Comics As Art” motto. With a scholarly focus and a healthy respect for the medium, their next project looks set to raise as much interest as their previous efforts.

Directed by Patrick Meaney, Talking With Gods is a film with an interesting focus: Grant Morrison. The Scottish writer is known as much for his beliefs in dreams and spirituality, and everything in between, as much as his impressive work on titles such as WE3, All Star Superman and The Invisibles. Currently screening around America, the 80 minute DVD is released on October 25 and is distributed by Halo-8 Entertainment.

BROKEN FRONTIER: How did you come to work with SequArt on this project?

PATRICK MEANEY: A few years back, Sequart published a book by Tim Callahan called Grant Morrison: The Early Years, which was discussed as the first part of a loose trilogy to be followed by Grant Morrison: The Psychedelic Years. However, Tim felt like he couldn't do justice to The Invisibles, and I had just done a series of blog posts covering the entire Invisibles series in depth, issue by issue. So, at New York Comic Con, I met Mike and Julian from Sequart and they pitched me on the idea of turning those posts into a book, which became Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

I did that, then as we were winding things down on the book, we were planning to do an interview with Grant. I'm a filmmaker, so I wanted to film the interview and from there, I jumped to the idea of doing a full documentary on Grant. We pitched the idea to Grant and his wife Kristan, they liked it and we rolled from there.

BF: Did it take much convincing for Grant to allow you to follow him with a camera?

PM: We didn't exactly follow him around with a camera that much. But in terms of getting him to agree to do the project, I basically wrote up a pitch with three options for the scale of the project, one would just be filming an interview, the second would be a small scale DVD focusing on The Invisibles, and the third would be a full documentary about his whole life, and that's the one they chose.

BF: How much access did you actually have? Did you literally follow him everywhere for months on end?

PM: No, we didn't do that exactly, there is some following Grant around stuff shot in San Diego Comic-Con and around his house, but generally, Grant spends most of his time working on comics, and following him around would mean sitting in his office for fourteen hours a day as he writes. I think during the 90s, that kind of verite doc could have been really cool, but in this case, it seemed more illuminating to hear him talk and convey his ideas through interviews than just see him doing stuff.

I think we had a huge amount of access in the sense that we did interview him much, much more than anyone ever has before, we went to his house in Scotland, we went to his apartment in California, all over. And the thing about Grant is that he's very open in interviews, there was no question he didn't answer and we got a lot of really personal, relevant insight. I think the film really gets underneath the surface of Grant and reveals a side he hasn't shown to the public before.

BF: Does Grant see the film as an outlet to reveal more of himself and quash any outlandish rumors about his life?

PM: I do think that's part of it. As we were finishing shooting with him, he talked about how, since this is the most extended document of his life, it's his chance to show the world a different side of himself and create his legacy. In the same way that the Disinfocon speech led people to think of Grant as a drug-fueled wild man, I think this film will force people to think differently about him and see a more nuanced, layered person. He talked explicitly about wanting to tell the truth, even if it meant some of the wilder, fun legends about him died.

BF: Did Grant reveal what his favorite work of his own is?

PM: I never asked him that straight out. He mentioned that he saw All Star Superman as the 'best,' but thought Flex Mentallo was the best encapsulation of everything that he's into and why he does what he does.

BF: Can you give us a summary of the interviewees who share their experiences with Grant in the film?

PM: We talked to a wide variety of people, both collaborators in comics and people outside comics. In comics, it's pretty much anyone you can think of, Frank Quitely, Karen Berger, Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Jill Thompson, Phil Jimenez, Cameron Stewart, Frazer Irving, Warren Ellis, Dez Skinn, JH Williams III, and a lot more. Outside of comics, we spoke to Douglas Rushkoff, Richard Metzger, Amber Benson and Grant's family friend and Echo and the Bunnymen guitarist Gordy Goudie.

BF: Who has the funniest story to tell?

PM: Mark Waid told a funny story about him and Grant creating Hypertime on the back of a napkin. Warren Ellis also had a great story about his and Grant's trip to Australia.

BF: Will the DVD have any intriguing extras?

PM: We were right up to the deadline for finishing the film, so there wasn't much time to properly process stuff for the DVD release. There is a commentary with co-producer/director of photography Jordan Rennert, but not too much else. There may be a supplemental release at some point down the line, which would be released in a 2 disc version of the film and also as a standalone piece.

BF: What do you think viewers will be most surprised by in the film?

PM: I think people have a lot of preconceptions of Grant that aren't really true to the person he is now. They've seen a small piece of him, but the full picture is a lot more complex. That's not to say that this film shows the whole of who he is, but I think it's more than he's ever revealed to the public before. I think even people skeptical of his ideas about magic or the universe will walk away thinking that maybe they don't totally agree, but at least he's coming from a reasoned, thought out place.

And, on a filmmaking side, I'm hoping they'll be surprised by how much it's not just a collection of interviews, but a fully realized film with a lot of immersive visuals and music to make it a real experience.

BF: Did you get Grant to autograph your issues of The Invisibles or was it easy to put away your fan hat and just get on with the task at hand?

PM: I actually met Grant as a fan a couple of times previous, so I've already got a few Invisibles issues and a copy of Zatanna #4 signed by him. So, I was able to keep it professional, but there were definitely moments where I was in disbelief that I was sitting in Grant Morrison's house, or Grant Morrison laughed at my joke. Strangely enough, Grant actually asked me to sign a copy of Our Sentence is Up for him, which was absolutely wild.

BF: How do you describe The Third Age series to curious viewers and what have you got planned for season two?

PM: The Third Age is a 'dreamatic' webseries created by myself and Jordan Rennert. I use the term dreamatic because it's a show that's using surreal visuals and genre elements in the service of a grounded, character based story. Basically, it's about various people caught up in an eternal war between good and evil waged on the streets of New York City.

If you're into comics, I think this is one of the most comic book-like films out there now. There's a lot of comic book-based movies, but I've seen very little in film or television that captures the casual surrealism that Grant, Jack Kirby or Alan Moore have used in their writing, the way that wild concepts can find their way into the everyday world and no one blinks at it. So, if you're into that kind of storytelling, give it a look. The entire first season is available at http://thethirdagebegins.com  In terms of season two, I just posted a trailer recently, which you can see here: http://blip.tv/file/4196083 Season one ended on a "things fall apart" kind of cliffhanger, and season two is about looking at all the characters trapped in various prisons, either of guilt, delusion, illusion or a literal prison! And, it's about people struggling to get out of those prisons and reclaim control of their life. Some people will succeed, some won't. I think it's a more ambitious, technically experimental and challenging piece than season one and will hopefully be a big success!

BF: Have you shown The Third Age to Grant?

PM: I mentioned it to him, and he may have checked it out, but we haven't discussed it further. I didn't want to get too bogged down in plugging stuff, since he is really busy and doesn't have much downtime.

BF: I know you like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Can you see greater parallels in storytelling between comics and TV shows in the last few years?

PM: I think that's definitely true. I know back in the late 90s when I started reading longform comics like Sandman or Preacher, I was so refreshed by the level of continuity across a work, as opposed to something like The X-Files which often seemed to forget what happened the previous week.

I think you can trace the rise of more complex stories with single continuous narratives in comics to the rise of the trade paperback, which made comics less of a disposable form and more of a permanent thing. Sandman was a pioneer there, and now many more people have read it after its initial publication than during. The same kind of thing happened in TV with the rise of TV on DVD, and now sites like Hulu and DVR. TV isn't a disposable thing, shows are permanent statements, and each individual piece is part of a larger tapestry.

Both media have made a massive jump in terms of creative freedom and sophistication recently, and that's great for readers/viewers.

BF: Next up is your Warren Ellis doco. How will that differ from Talking With Gods?

PM: That's a question I asked myself, and we're coming at it from a totally different approach. Talking With Gods has a lot of surreal flourishes and unusual techniques, but at heart is a biography, it's Grant Morrison telling his life story, and that works because of the material we had and the fact that the life he's led is so intertwined with his comics. With Ellis, that's not quite the case. So, I'm coming at it from a slightly more schizophrenic structure, jumping from concept to concept, idea to idea, in the same way that his comics do. I want it to have a cynical, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing surface, and a core of real warmth, just like his comics.

BF: If you could sum up your experience of making Talking With Gods with a single quote, or moment what would it be?

PM: It was a really easy film to make. I had no real oversight or creative restriction, and the only person we had to worry about pleasing was Grant, and his wife Kristan, who gave us some great notes. But, throughout, things just ran really smoothly and it was a lot of fun to make.

I think the coolest moment for me was shooting with Grant in Glasgow. The night before, Jordan, producer Amber and I were having an argument about magic, and whether Grant's magic worldview was useful and 'real,' or if it was just a superfluous explanation for what's really just hard work. The next day, I brought up the argument to Grant and we talked about it, and he said that it didn't matter if it was magic or hard work, they're just different ways of viewing the same thing, and that either way, it brought us there, to make that film and travel the world and that's real.

More information about Talking With Gods can be found at www.Sequart.org. Patrick Meaney’s web series The Third Age can be found at www.thethirdagebegins.com. Talking With Gods is released on Region 1 on October 25.