NightbreedOn The Set With Clive Barker
Listen up! Clive Barker's Nightbreed is due out sometime around August. The film marks the return of Barker as both writer and director. If you don't know by now, it's based on Clive's hot little number that popped up on the bookshelves last year: "Cabal". The tale is centered around the strife between 2 monsters and a young woman who will relinquish all for the man she loves. The man with a dark shadow over his soul.
Director David Cronenberg plays Dr. Decker. Although it's his biggest acting credit yet, it isn't his first (quickies in Into The Night and his own Fly flick). Craig Sheffer plays Boone, and Anne Bobby plays Lori, Boone's girlfriend. Doug Bradley, Pinhead in Hellraiser 1&2, plays Lylesburg. This time he has gill-like slits along his cheeks.
After Stephen Jones (publicist extraordinaire) caught me up on the current activities and rain delays, we headed over to the Pinewood Studios Commissary, where the crews from Batman, James Bond and Nightbreed were all milling around. Off in a corner sat Batman director Tim Burton. When someone inquired how things were going, Burton shrugged his shoulders and replied "Okay... I guess..." Make of it what you want.
From there, we made our way over to the Nightbreed set. My attention was directed to the filming underway on the far side of the sound stage. Baphomet's chamber, the asylum of the lord and master of the Breed. Bob Keen's design has captured an indescribable hallowness and mystery within the place of worship.
We eventually made our way over to Bob Keen's shop, now a permanent fixture on the Pinewood Studios lots. Bob put down his glue gun to give me a quick tour. Over 130 individual monstrosities were in existence to date, with more still in the fetal position on the drawing board. But no pictures allowed, at least, not yet. For now you'll have to be patient and satisfy yourself with the colorful words of Clive.
SH: How's it feel to be back behind the camera?
Clive Barker: Very good, very different. Last I remember (about directing) we were shooting in a very small environment, in a house. We got onto what was laughingly called a sound stage in the final weeks of the shoot. This time, we have massive sets where we can float walls and drop debris from great heights and explode things. Fun stuff like that.
SH: How have you grown as a director, since Hellraiser?
Clive Barker: Since we're only 3 weeks into shooting, it would be presumptuous to say I've grown. I've stumbled into adolescence. The possibilities on this film are so much larger, that I find I'm just tring to be the equal of them. Obviously, it's a very different kind of story than Hellraiser, which was very enclosed and very violent. Though not as violent as I think people remember it being, curiously. It's just that people come away remembering these scenes, in the same way that people remember the exploding head in Scanners. What we have in Nightbreed is a lot more action. In terms of narrative, it's a lot busier.
I don't think that it's going to disappoint the people who went to Hellraiser. There is a noticeable absence of splatter in it, but it is deeply weird. It's much more radical in terms of moral structure. Hellraiser's morality underpinning was very conventional. Sleep with your brothers wife, and boy do you get into deep shit! And Pandora's box, which you shouldn't open. The moral structure of Nightbreed is very flopped. The priests, the analysts, and the cops are unrepentantly and repeatedly bad. The ugly half dead things that live in the earth, and feed on blood, they have children, dogs, kittens and cannibalistic tendencies.
There's this little girl, Babette, who changes back and forth into a creature. It was wonderful playing a scene with her where she's in her little, white Victorian gown, in the skull chamber; a chamber lined with the dead, with kittens playing around her feet. I thought that the sheer perversity of it was just great.
Hellraiser was much more up front when it was perverse. The S & M ramifications were obvious. There was a wonderful magazine, "Skin Two", that reviewed it saying, "this movie will give you good ideas for your dungeon."
SH: How will the Nightbreed movie differ from the book?
Clive Barker: In the book, the (descriptions of the) Breed are very impressionistic. Lori goes through Midian, sees a whole bunch of things. The specific Breed are described in detail, but the grandeur scale, the background if you will, is very impressionistic. In a movie, you can't be impressionistic. Bob Keen asks Well what does this character look like? You can't say well Bob, it's sort of blue. You have to say what it looks like in plain terms, because somebody has to sculpt it, paint it, and so on.
For me, it's a massive compensation to have the pleasure of being specific. Of being able to say, okay, this is exactly what I want it to look like. This is the number of eyes its got. Then seeing these things turned out in latex and fur, strutting their stuff in front of you. I love that! We had some trouble with the initial design for Baphomet, the great god of Midian. I had a dream about it, and the next morning I drew it. Jeff took it from there. That is fabulous! It's made this movie very Bochian. I mean, it sort of brims and overflows with visual ideas of various kinds. In that sense, the book and the movie will be complimentary. There will be things that you get from the movie that you won't get from the book, and visa versa.
SH: How did Cronenberg come into the project?
Clive Barker: A call to Toronto. I tentatively pitched the idea to Morgan Creek, and it found favor. So I called him up. He said yes, over the phone. The first thing we shot with him was his death scene. Great death scene. The guy dies so gracefully.
SH: What's up after Nightbreed?
Clive: I've just signed a contract that will take me through to the age of 42. It's fun having people want your work. I find the emotional reinforcement helps my creativity. I mean, the fact that sommeone is waiting for a book, or a movie, is an immense... I was going to say a rod to my back, but that sounds too negative, and this isn't an unpleasurable profession.
A Harry D' Mour movie waits in the wings. After this film, I'll finish "Cabal 2", which will become Nightbreed 2, which has been plotted, and picks up where the first book finishes. Then the sequel to The Great Secret Show, which is the second book of "The Art".
I delivered The Great Secret Show, the first book of "The Art", 4 days before we started principle photography. I wouldn't like to cut it that fine again.
After "The Art 2", will come "Cabal 3", and then "The Art 3", which will finish those trilogies. Universal approached me to do the remake of The Mummy, which might be kind of fun. There's also Son Of Celluloid, which is part of this deal we've made with Morgan Creek. That's as far as I can think, at the moment.
But the place to be is always a different place than the place that you were last time. I didn't make the sequel to Hellraiser, and I wouldn't want to make the third. I may very well make the sequel to Nightbreed, if there is one, simply because it will not resemble this one.
SH: If you croaked, what would you want placed on your headstone?
Clive Barker: "oh, fuck me," probably. No, no. Something about imagination. There's a quote at the beginning of "Cabal". "We are all imagined animals."
SH: Why?
Clive Barker: I would like to feel that I'm not just celebrating my own imagination, but celebrating what I do, a tradition of imagining. That's why I'm so hot on literary tradition and all of that. I think that the tradition of the fantastic is horribly misrepresented, simply because the mainstream has repeatedly snatched great chunks of the fantastical tradition for itself. What it leaves, is often the genre's weakest brethren. I want to be able to reinstate the fantastic.
I think the only way I can validate myself is to see myself belonging to a very straightforward and simple tradition of the story teller, who is plugged into Jungian stuff. It's not really a question of echoing, but really advancing the stories. There is a revisionist folklore. That is plausible. You can come at those forms and flip them around.
It's important to be modern. I don't think that just echoing the old forms is good enough. It may be entertainment, but it may end up being nothing more than that. Willow, to take a case in point, echoes the old forms. You can check them off down the line. We owe the tradition more than that. We owe the tradition constant injections of originality. Trying to find new ways to tell the old stories, or ways in which the old stories can be made fresh by actually changing something about their subtext. I can validate myself within that system.
That becomes a very simple mental process for me. So, if at the end of my life they say, "He added a few more of those story forms, or twists on those story forms to the cannon," then that will be just fine. I love that idea.
~Slaughterhouse, Issue #4, 1989~
~ transcribed by baphomette@halfeatencorpse.com ~
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