Who are your writing influences?
I think like any writer, my influences are too many to count. How do I limit them, so I can talk about them? I'm influenced by watching people in the world around me interacting. Influenced watching excellent TV and movies and books, wishing I could do a work half as well. Influenced by rubbish art, which I want to pick up and re-write until they aren't quite so stupid.
Music has a tremendous influence on my writing, and my way of thinking. Nightwish and Alice Cooper have had a great effect on how I work. Alice Cooper, particularly, has been shaping how I view myself as a working artist since I was thirteen years old or so. And then there are other bands like My Chemical Romance and Thea Gilmore. Listening to intelligent music sometimes leads to intelligent stories. Sometimes it just leads to me being annoying and singing around the house.
I read a great deal. Listing authors who have an effect on me would be unbearable, the list would just go on for ages. My short story work is strongly influenced by Joe Hill -- who reprogrammed how I wrote, when I read 20th Century Ghosts and realized I could do longer, slower, more literary stories that still had a fantastic and horror element to them. The book found me at the right time. Recently, I've just discovered Margaret Atwood and John Irving and gone "Oh, I can work like that if I want..." Whenever I'm bogged down, I turn to Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison, whose work I not only love but who convince me to just...get on with it.
All of that said...I think every artist has what I think of as patron saints, little angels and devils sitting on their shoulders. Artists whose presence is indelibly on everything they do. For me, it's Alan Moore -- who has had a tremendous effect on my writing, my work ethic, my politics, my interest in the occult and what I'm willing to believe, my approach to day-to-day life, and my tendency to look rather hairy. And also Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animator, who has just as big an effect on my life, work, beliefs, and politics as Alan Moore does.
Boy, thank goodness I kept that answer short, eh?
How do you manage to maintain your writing output with two boys in the house?
To be perfectly frank...I don't. I don't know how people do it, those people who have several kids and still manage to get work done, keep up on the dishes, and stay in shape and also be well-groomed. Particularly as the boys get older, I find it nearly impossible to do any sort of writing work when they're awake. And when they go to bed, I oftentimes either nod off myself, or just sit on the couch and vibrate gently as the tension of the day radiates off me. I work slower than I ever have. But I am still working. One big trick is that I keep agreeing to things. Deadlines and actual Grown Ups expecting work from you is a huge motivator to get your ass in gear.
Are you working on anything right now?
Indeedy. I sporadically write book reviews and articles for SFSignal.com and for The Future Fire magazine. I have two or three short stories in various stages of completion. The one taking up all my time right now is called Frost at the moment and is set in the Sahara desert. Unlike the Montana road I mentioned above, for this story I'm being very precise about location. It's a pretty solitary little road through the Sahara and it serves me well to pay attention to it. Google Earth is a gem.
I'm also writing a novel (who isn't?) very slowly. I'm not a natural novelist. Short stories are more my area. It comes along slowly, though. It's called The Man on the Shore, has three characters and one small boat and is the sort of novel that Misery or Cujo kind of is. But I don't want to say too much, because it might all collapse.
Where might we find more of your work?
For ease of use, I try to keep a running bibliography of my work on my web-site, www.peterdamien.com ...although I need to be better about updating it. I also spend far, far too much time on Twitter (@peterdamien ) so I suppose someone could always go on there and say "Hey turkey! What else ya got!" and I'd send them links. The links would probably just go to rude pictures, though, so that might not work out...
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11/22/63 by Stephen King
Book Review by Deon van Heerden
Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
PB 752 pages
RRP £9.00 (Kindle £9.99)
When I heard that Stephen King was releasing a time-travel novel, I found myself excited and apprehensive in equal measure; time-travel novels are pretty much the multi-disc concept albums of the literary world, and even the finest authors can easily stumble and embarrass themselves when traversing this uneven, but well-trod, ground. And yet, somehow, 11/22/63 manages to be almost impossibly good, a historical-fantasy-thriller-romance novel, which excels at every one of these.
The premise is simple: Jake Epping, a present-day English teacher, is presented with the opportunity to travel back in time through a wormhole to stop the John F. Kennedy assassination. There are, of course, a number of complicating factors, and the novel’s various conceits are elegant and well-considered. King’s treatment of the past, its contradictions and paradoxes – and, oh so thrillingly, its character - is virtuosic, a delicate and beautiful house of cards which puts pretty much any comparable book to shame.
After an extremely entertaining and wildly suspenseful first 250 pages or so, King eases off the throttle for a while, immersing us in a surprisingly sweet and understated love story. We get to know the (uncharacteristically small) cast and, in time, we come to love them. I tend to scoff at people who criticize King's books for being overly long, but, in all fairness, this part of the novel does suffer from pacing issues. Sandwiched as it is between one of the finest introductions and one of the greatest climaxes in the King oeuvre, however, I don’t see how it could have felt anything but a little plodding. And the payoff from our emotional investment in the characters during the book’s final 200 pages - an absolute frenzy of tension too agonizing to read, but too hypnotic to put down – makes any feelings of impatience more than worthwhile.
The historical detail King crams in is exceedingly impressive, but never overwhelming, and he convincingly captures the zeitgeist of the late 50s and early 60s. It is often through the smallest, subtlest details that King succeeds in imbuing the past with the sort of immediacy which very few authors can match. His characterization of various historical figures is superb; their depth and detail, complimented as they are by an almost banal normalcy, is a triumph of artistic integrity. King has managed to capture and weave together the disparate elements of the events around Kennedy's assassination in a manner which manages to be at once compelling and - crucially - supremely objective; an incredible feat considering how emotionally charged the issues in question remain after almost 50 years.
In short, despite its fantastical premise, there's a core of emotional, uniquely visceral plausibility to this work, representing, as it does, the finest elements of all the genres from which it draws. It proves, ultimately, to be a sophisticated love story as beautiful as it is harrowing, as touching as it is deeply thrilling and as viscerally disturbing as it is uplifting. Read it.
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FEATURE INTERVIEW: Brandon Auret
by Joe Vaz
Many, many years ago Brandon Auret and I spent most of our days studying drama at Pretoria University of Technology, and most of our nights either rehearsing for plays, performing them or playing guitar and singing covers in bars and restaurants all over Pretoria, sometimes getting paid in pizzas and beer. Hey, what else did we need?
Initially our careers were pretty closely matched; we both had our first professional break in Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat, we both made our television debuts as costumed characters in children’s shows and we even shared the stage in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story in 1998/99.
But that’s where our paths parted. Brandon went on to make his name as the fan-favourite character Leon du Plessis, in the South African television daily drama Isidingo, and I went to London to starve to death.
For eight years Brandon graced our television screens before moving on to bigger
things.
A brief appearance in District 9 lead to a friendship with director Neill Blomkamp, which has led to him being cast in Blomkamp’s new movie, Elysium, currently in post-production.
Brandon’s latest film, Rancid, is set to open in the US on 200 screens - not bad for a low-budget South African movie.
Your latest movie, Rancid, is apparently getting a 200-screen theatrical release in the States. Is that right?
The director told us two weeks ago that he'd signed a deal with an overseas distributor and that they'd like us to go over there and be part of the publicity tour for 200 cinemas. It'll be a six-week tour.
That's amazing. So you'll be doing premieres and red-carpets and all that?
Oh, I hope so.
[laughs]Let's face it, it is the only glamorous part of this job, isn't it?
I want to know if it's worth it. I want to walk down there and just go, "Oh, so this is what those okes experience. Awesome."
Tell us a bit about Rancid.
The story is about a company that's busy designing some kind of wonder drug and they have these participants come in who all have different diseases and different personality disorders. They all sign their lives away for the next four days, take these tablets and wake up four days later, alone in a hospital. There are these creatures running around and they are, slowly but surely, turning into something of the sorts. That's what the story is about, and yeah - there's a nice little twist at the end as well.
Sounds like a 28 Days Later, that takes place inside the hospital.
Pretty much like that, that's a very good way to describe it. It was also shot on a Canon 7D and the director and the DOP… Just they way they shot it, because it was a very small crew, there was only one cameraman, and one focus-puller and the cameraman did his own lighting. But because it's such a small camera they were able to get some really, really interesting shots in the movie, you know it's shot really beautifully and it's edited really cleverly.
I've watched the trailer, and it looks fantastic. It also looks extremely messy.
Yeah, there's a lot of blood and guts in it. A lot, a lot. And you know what, it's amazing, this is how small the crew was - the girl who did the make-up was also the girl who did special effects and also did special effects make-up and did costume and did food and everything like that.
[laughs] It really was a skeleton crew that we worked with. But you know it was all about the end product, and the end product looks amazing. I think that's why the Americans bought into it, because I don't think they believed that Alastair [Orr] was able to shoot a movie of that quality on that budget, if you know what I mean. In our terms, I think it was a R380 000 movie. Which is low, low, low budget, but for the Americans it works out to about $70 000, which is ridiculous, I mean, that's not even the budget for a pilot.
That's like a student film budget.
Ja. So for them to realise that they can make their money back by distributing this film all over the world, flight it in 200 cinemas, invite some of the actors over there for six weeks and do, what I suppose at the end of the day we want all our movies to achieve, and that is have the appreciation of the people that go to watch it.
Which brings me to my next point. That's the problem in this country [South Africa]. The problem is not our filmmakers or our films; the problem is our filmgoers. And it's a cultural thing, it's easy for them to go and watch a Leon Schuster movie or a Bakgat or whatever, but the minute you label something South African, they're like, "Hmm, we don't really know about it, we'll wait for it to go to DVD." But the minute something in South Africa gets international approval then all of a sudden their ears get perked and they're like, "What? So it's a South African movie, and it's good? Wow."
We've been saying the same thing about South African books. There has been a wonderful bout of local genre fiction writers...
They're not writing movies for the South African market, which is the way to go. Screw the South African market if they’re not going to support us, we know that the rest of the world does. Because to the rest of the world, South Africa is a honey pot.
Absolutely. We have the worst view of ourselves than anyone in the world. If you tell someone you're South African people go, "Wow, that's awesome," but we're embarrassed to say that.
And the enlightenment comes, and you've experienced it yourself: when you go overseas and work on an international movie, your race, country, religion, or wherever your loyalties are, doesn't really make a difference. You're seen as 'the talent' and you're treated as such. You're not a worse talent because you're South African, you know, you're as important as the next talent.
Absolutely. Cast is cast - you're all there doing the same job.
Exactly. It's important to them and I think in this country that's the biggest problem - that we do undersell ourselves and accept mediocrity, and I think that's where the bullshit lies and we've gotta stop that. At some point it has to stop because somebody has got to realise that there is a real business out there. Somebody needs to sort it out, because who ever is running our film industry and our distribution industry, really don't have any idea what they're doing.
But let's get back to Rancid. You play a character called William Hunter, is that correct?
Yes.
And are you one of the test subjects?
Yeah, he is. You get introduced to the test subjects one –by –one. There are four of them, and, once again, I think that's my calling, I kind of offset everybody's worst nightmares. But you know, with it being a horror genre, things always, without giving too much away, they don't always turn out to be what you think they are. But maybe it is.
It's a very well-written script. And that's the problem, a lot of times people see "low-budget" and they don't go and audition for it. But it was a really well-written script and it unfolds beautifully on screen. He's an interesting character, I enjoyed playing him. He has a lot of anger, a lot of anger issues.
Yeah, there's a shot in the trailer of you chucking a bunk bed against a wall.
[laughs] I won't explain why.
So when does Rancid release?
It releases in the US in May.
You started out on Isidingo? Was that was your first gig?
No. Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat.
Aah, but that was on stage. You did Joseph? When did you do Joseph?
With Mark Sykes, at the Theatre on the Track.
Oh, so six months after me. Right, that was '94.
Yeah, Philip Godawa was the director. That was my first gig.
But you really came to the public eye in Isidingo as the character Leon du Plessis (Dup).
Well I did a lot of stage and a lot of musicals. I didn't really get on TV until '97. Up until that point I'd done basically musicals, stage shows, rockumentaries and tribute shows, stuff like that. But I knew what I wanted to do, which was get into film. I kind of left it in destiny's hand, but, as actors do, we do what we need to survive.
Absolutely, especially here. How long were you on Isidingo?
Long time, eight years.
You played a single character for eight years, and obviously you got to know the other cast members, so it must've been a bit of a family there. So what was it like leaving that and going back out on your own again?
I think the choice was easy, but dealing with the aftermath of leaving was hard. The reason I left was because I'd only played one character for eight years. I was getting tired of it and it was becoming mundane and boring and my artistic integrity was taking a bit of a dive because it became like a sausage factory, you know what I mean? It became a job.
But the problem is you get stuck on a TV programme that long, you kind of carry that label with you. I've been out of it now for almost eight years and people still call me Dup, you know.
And that's, I don't know, I see it as a compliment, because it means somewhere down the line my character embedded himself into the viewers minds, but the problem is that directors and producers a
nd big companies that are busy getting their ads cast, they see that and they go, "You know you'd be great for this ad, but you're Dup."Or: "We'd like to cast you in this TV series, Brandon, but... you're Dup."
[laughs] I did Angel's Song, and I did One Way after that, but then for about three years I, phew, hey dude - I can't even remember how I survived. Thank God for my credit card, it kind of got me through some hard times, because people were just not... they were not seeing past the Dup character. So I went on a massive diet, lost a shitload of weight, cut my hair all off, and then I landed my first movie role, which was minor, in an international movie, Catch a Fire.
Something Wicked #19 (March 2012) Page 7