Lights, camera, inaction

I spoke to Philippa, my agent, yesterday. It was the Bolgna Children's Book Fair last week and she was catching up. She had the rather exciting news that a film production company had expressed an interest in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror.

The movies! Hollywood! The big time.

Well, not quite. Expressing an interest is free and is therefore quite popular. I once had an excited phone call from my previous agents telling me that Sam Rami was interested in my book - Death and the Arrow was the one I had out at that time. Within seconds of the phone call I was picturing myself living some strangely 1960s version of the high life, driving along the Italian Riviera in an open topped white Mercedes sports car.

Then I got another phone call. There had been a mistake. Sam Rami wasn't interested in my book at all. He was interested in Christopher Priest's book. He was with the same agent and some frantic fingering on the Rolodex had resulted in a call to me and not him. Damn you Christopher Priest and your freakishly similar name!

So expressions of interest need to be taken with a pinch of salt. They may - if you are lucky - result in an option being taken out on a book. This means that the interested production company pays the writer an amount to secure the book for a fixed period, during which they may or may not do something with it.

What was most interesting about this nibble from the film world was that it came from a production company with an interesting track record and with an inquiry as to whether I might be interested in scripting the movie myself.

The answer to which is - yes, I most definitely am.

Reject.

I went to collect the work not chosen for the Eastern Open today. This is the downside of entering competitive open exhibitions - there is the very real chance of failure. I was lucky. I had at least got one of the three painting I entered into the exhibition, and better than that, they had chosen my personal favourite of the three.

The exhibition will be at the Arts Centre in King's Lynn in Norfolk. We lived nearby for thirteen years. I got married in the beautiful Guildhall and my son was born in the Queen Elizabeth hospital one starry night in 1997, the Hale-Bopp comet hovering overhead.

I'm not sure we have been back to King's Lynn since we had we had our meetings with the solicitor finalising the sale of our lovely house. It will seem very strange to go back after four years. I went to King's Lynn every week for the whole time we lived in Norfolk and yet the thing that comes most readily to mind is my son waddling down the pedestrianised areas not long after he had learned to walk, head down, watching his feet, crashing into passers by and arbitrarily wandering into any shop that took his fancy. It took forever to get anywhere.

Happy days.

Wonders of the solar system.

And speaking of sci-fi, I am really enjoying the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System. I realise that it is science-fact rather than science-fiction, but frankly the facts are often so bizarre that it feels like fiction.

The programme is presented with wide-eyed and contagious enthusiasm by ex pop star Professor Brian Cox. At least it says he is a professor, but he actually looks like a slightly dippy newly qualified teacher with a an evangelical desire to make physics fun. He is perfect for this though. He knows his stuff and is quietly radical in his championing of a rational view of the cosmos, but he is also young enough to be still connected with his boyhood fascination with space.

It was a fascination I shared. When I was a boy we lived for a few years in Gibraltar. My father was in the army and we were stationed there. My father had actually been stationed there in WWII for a while. We had an apartment with a balcony that overlooked the Mediterranean and had views out across to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

The night sky was often crystal clear. This was the 1960s and the space race between the US and the USSR was full on. I'm not sure there was a child anywhere at the time who was not caught up in the excitement of it. It is certainly no accident that the first piece of writing I did that ended up in print was a short story called Journey to the Moon. It was entered into a competition (by my parents? My teacher?) run by the local paper, El Calpense. The story was published in the newspaper.

I won a medal. I still have it.

Moon

Finally got round to watching Moon on DVD. For those of you who haven't seen it, this is a pretty rare cinematic excursion into old-fashioned sci-fi and is hugely enjoyable. It is directed by David Bowie's son, who for understandable reasons has ditched the name Zowie Bowie in favour of Duncan Jones (Bowie's real name being Jones of course).

It is the story of a man - very well played by Sam Rockwell - who appears to be going a little mad as he reaches the end of his seven year stint on a mining station on the moon. There is an accident aboard one of the vehicles and he wakes up in the infirmary to discover that there now seems to be a slightly younger, fitter and angrier version of himself in the building. Any more information would ruin the movie for you.

It reminded me a little of John Carpenter's Dark Star, but with a little 2001 A Space Odyssey thrown in. Maybe there is also a little Alien in there too, with the outside shots and the sinister corporation. The computer at the lunar station certainly seemed like a cousin of HAL from 2001. And the computer was the only issue for me really. If they had the technology to make empathetic computers that could think imaginatively, then why have humans up there at all? Aren't they a bit messy and unpredictable?

But none of that spoils the movie. In fact it reminded me how much I enjoyed science fiction as teenager. I read 'hard' sci-fi with wonderful Chris Foss covers, and I read the more lyrical wing with writers like Bradbury and Le Guin. It is more than a genre really. It is rather like fantasy in the way that the name of the genre is just a signal for you to expect the unexpected. It superficially seems to have the future as its concern, but it is often a commentary on the present and almost always concerned about the human condition. Its scope is almost limitless.

Why is there not more sci-fi literature for children I wonder?

Mon oncle

We watched this movie at Christmas. I had been meaning to buy it for ages because I felt sure that my son would like it. But the nearer we got to watching it, the more I worried that he would be bored by it. I had not seen it as a child. I first saw it at the Everyman in Hampstead if memory serves. Would it work for a 12 year-old?

Once again this is a movie has children at its heart whilst not being actually for them. I suppose this could be classed as a family film, but it is possibly a little too sophisticated for that classification to be a perfect fit.

The main example of the way in which it doe not try hard enough to keep younger viewers on board, is in the pacing of the gags. This is not a criticism by the way. I get so tired of the idea that everything has to be traveling at full pelt to be engaging, particularly to children.

It takes nerve to slow things down. There is a running gag about a street sweeper who never seems to actually get round to sweeping. It is not pushed forward and then discarded as it would be in a contemporary comedy. It is savoured. It is allowed time. A similar indulgence is given to the sight gag of Tati entering and leaving his apartment. It is almost painfully slow. But brilliant because of it.

It was already a nostalgic movie when it came out and is more so now of course. But its attack on modern living still seems to work. Tati saw the ridiculous side of people willingly becoming slaves to their machines - he would have had even more material now of course. But mainly it is a hymn to mess, to accident, to childhood and to free spirit.

And did my son think I was mad for showing it to him? Thankfully no. He loved it. I think he laughed as much at this movie as any comedy he's seen.

Go and buy a copy of this movie immediately. If you haven't seen it you are in for a treat. If you have, remind yourself of how good it is. It is wonderful. And the closing credits are astonishingly beautiful. Who could have thought a net curtain blowing in the breeze could look so lovely?

Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth was another DVD that sat on my shelf for a long time before we finally got round to watching it. I had been forewarned from reviews in newspapers and from friends that it contained some fairly disturbing images and though it may seem a strange thing coming from a writer of horror fiction, I am pretty squeamish.

In fact I always feel a bit of a fraud when I am introduced as a horror writer. Horror suggests gore to me, and though there is gore in my books (and I do love that word) I tend not to dwell on it. It is certainly never the point for me. Gore doesn't interest me as a destination.

Neither, to be fair, is gore the main ingredient of Pan's Labyrinth. It is a movie that deals with horror, but there is so much more going on. It is a fairy story set against the real horrors of the Spanish Civil War and like many fairy stories and myths, it has a child as the protagonist.

There are obvious similarities with Alice in Wonderland but it is much more grim - and Grimm. It also has more than a touch of the Persephone myth. Ofelia, the main character is beset by dangers wherever she goes, in our world, and the strange underworld she visits. As with his Hellboy movies, you get the impression that del Toro has a soft spot for monsters.

As for human beings - that's a different matter.

Pan's Labyrinth does have shocking moments of violence but it is actually no more violent than many folk tales (in the original form) or myths. If you were to film Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella as they were originally told no child would be allowed to see them.

I find Guillermo del Toro's inventiveness very inspiring. His Hellboy movies are great and he is to direct The Hobbit for Peter Jackson soon I gather. I also read that he is going to be involved in movies of both Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde.

There is nothing particular in Pan's Labyrinth that is directly relevant to my work as a writer. But I remember that I just had a feeling when I had finished watching it that I needed to up my game.

It was - like all good art - a kind of call to arms.

Night of the hunter

I have blogged about Night of the Hunter before, but I make no apologies for doing so again. I did not watch Night of the Hunter with my son. Although it has a '12' rating here in the UK I was not sure what he would make of it. I can still remember the first time I saw it. It had a massive effect on me and has haunted me ever since. I think my son should wait.

Again - this is almost a children's story. It is a kind of fairy tale - a brother and sister cast adrift in a cruel world, a hidden treasure and a terrible pursuing demon. It has the feeling of a myth transposed into Depression-era America - but no myth that you can actually recall.

The movie is based on a 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb that I keep meaning to read but never get round to. I suspect this is some kind of reluctance on my part to interfere with the images from the movie. The book is supposed to be very good though.

The Night of the Hunter is always in my mind somewhere, mostly way back in the darkness. But whenever I feel dissatisfied about my writing and feel there is something lacking - it is invariably Night of the Hunter that seems to come closest to evoking the element that is absent.

This may seem odd. Night of the Hunter is an intensely visual movie. One of its stars - Lillian Gish - was a huge star of the silent era and its director Charles Laughton seems to be using a visual style that owes as much to German Expressionist cinema as it does to anything around at the time. But despite all the visual trickery and showmanship, it never becomes a cold experiment. Robert Mitchum's performance is bizarre, but intentionally so, and his character is all the more nightmarish because of it. The story-telling is very contrived, but I like contrivance. It is pretentious, but I see nothing wrong with pretentiousness anyway?

For me Night of the Hunter is a talismanic piece. It is just another reminder to me that I loathe safety in art. None of us want to fail in the way that Laughton failed - critics panned the movie and he never made another - and that can often be the excuse for taking the easiest option. I don't see Laughton's failure as a warning. I see it more as a reminder that something can be good and not appreciated. As a writer, painter, film-maker, you simply have to go with your own judgment and hope for the best.