Sharing this great interview because I can! Thank you to Deadline for tracking down the elusive elf lord, Alan Moore!
As the maker of Watchmen, V For Vendetta and a lot more highly commended comic arrangements, Alan Moore is one of the business’ greatest names, however his often icey relationship with the film adaptations of his works has been publicly recorded. After some extremely open disappointment with past undertakings (see The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen), he presently will not allow his name to be connected with any such activities, in any event, declining to benefit from the big-screen manifestations, a choice that he appraises has cost him millions.
Presently, Moore is endeavoring to break into the film business on his own terms with unique undertaking The Show. Featuring Tom Burke and coordinated by Mitch Jenkins, the fantastical experience, set in Moore’s old neighborhood of Northampton, follows a man’s quest for a taken curio, an excursion that drives him into a strange universe of wrongdoing and secrets!
Moore, who will in general dodge the spotlight, gave an uncommon meeting this week to examine The Show, which has been something of a purposeful venture for the essayist. Him and his makers have kept it free at all times, holding imaginative control and rights to their own IP. In the wake of making a few shorts and now this component, Moore has plans for a TV arrangement dependent on similar characters and has just worked out 4 – 5 seasons worth of material, he advised.
The interviewer took the chance to ask him about retiring from comics in 2018, which his followers will be disappointed to hear he seems firmly set on, as well as his take on the current world of blockbuster superhero films, which he has been an inadvertent factor in. Safe to say, he is not a fan. He’s also not a fan of the current UK or U.S. political regimes, particularly Donald Trump, or “National Socialist satsuma”, as Moore refers to him.
The Show would have premiered at SXSW earlier this year, but following the Austin event’s cancellation it is headed to Spanish genre festival Sitges where it will debut online October 8 before a physical screening on October 12. Protagonist Pictures is handling world sales.
All credit to DEADLINE for this interview:
DEADLINE: Hi Alan, what’s your lockdown experience in Northampton been like?
ALAN MOORE: Me and my wife Melinda are still effectively living in late February — it’s about the same temperature. We are ignoring all advice from the government because we don’t think they have our best interests at heart, we’re just doing what we think is the most sensible thing, we’re maintaining distancing, having our stuff delivered. We haven’t seen or touched anybody in the last six months.
On the other hand, we’re finding that we’re closer to people even though we haven’t seen them in the flesh for ages. We’re spending a lot more time calling up and reading stories to our grandchildren, which is a lot of fun. Things that we didn’t find the time for back when the world was trundling ahead. Yes we miss everybody, but at the same time I can see different sorts of bonds forming. We will keep informed by listening to proper doctor and scientists.
DEADLINE: You retired from comics after finishing The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2018, any thoughts on getting back in the saddle?
MOORE: I’m not so interested in comics anymore, I don’t want anything to do with them.
I had been doing comics for 40-something years when I finally retired. When I entered the comics industry, the big attraction was that this was a medium that was vulgar, it had been created to entertain working class people, particularly children. The way that the industry has changed, it’s ‘graphic novels’ now, it’s entirely priced for an audience of middle class people. I have nothing against middle class people but it wasn’t meant to be a medium for middle aged hobbyists. It was meant to be a medium for people who haven’t got much money.
Most people equate comics with superhero movies now. That adds another layer of difficulty for me. I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree. Several years ago I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood. That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population.
This may be entirely coincidence but in 2016 when the American people elected a National Socialist satsuma and the UK voted to leave the European Union, six of the top 12 highest grossing films were superhero movies. Not to say that one causes the other but I think they’re both symptoms of the same thing — a denial of reality and an urge for simplistic and sensational solutions.
DEADLINE: You said you feel responsible for how comics have changed, why?
MOORE: It was largely my work that attracted an adult audience, it was the way that was commercialized by the comics industry, there were tons of headlines saying that comics had ‘grown up’. But other than a couple of particular individual comics they really hadn’t.
This thing happened with graphic novels in the 1980s. People wanted to carry on reading comics as they always had, and they could now do it in public and still feel sophisticated because they weren’t reading a children’s comic, it wasn’t seen as subnormal. You didn’t get the huge advances in adult comic books that I was thinking we might have. As witnessed by the endless superhero films…
DEADLINE: What’s your take on the comics industry now?
MOORE: I doubt the major companies will be coming out of lockdown in any shape at all. The mainstream comics industry is about 80 years old and it has lots of pre-existing health conditions. It wasn’t looking that great before COVID happened.
Most of our entertainment industries have been a bit top heavy for a while. The huge corporations, business interests, have so much money they can produce these gigantic blockbusters of one sort or another that will dominate their markets. I can see that changing, and perhaps for the better. It’s too early to make optimistic predictions but you might hope that the bigger interests will find it more difficult to manoeuvre in this new landscape, whereas the smaller independent concerns might find that they are a bit more adapted. These times might be an opportunity for genuinely radical and new voices to come to the fore in the absence of yesteryear.
DEADLINE: The economic realties, and lack of support for the arts, could hamper that.
MOORE: That is undeniable. I am talking in the long-term. There is going to be an awful lot of economic pain for everybody before this is over. I’m not even sure it ever will technically be over, until we’ve reached a better stage of equilibrium, whatever that turns out to be. When that was attained I hope we might see a very different landscape culturally.
DEADLINE: Do you watch no superhero movies at all? What about something a bit offbeat, like Joker? You wrote a key Batman comic book…
MOORE: Oh christ no I don’t watch any of them. All of these characters have been stolen from their original creators, all of them. They have a long line of ghosts standing behind them. In the case of Marvel films, Jack Kirby [the Marvel artist and writer]. I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.
I’ve been told the Joker film wouldn’t exist without my Joker story (1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke), but three months after I’d written that I was disowning it, it was far too violent — it was Batman for christ’s sake, it’s a guy dressed as a bat. Increasingly I think the best version of Batman was Adam West, which didn’t take it at all seriously. We have a kind of superhero character in The Show but if we get the chance to develop them more then people will be able to see all of the characters have quite unusual aspects to them.
DEADLINE: Hasn’t cinema always been a form of escapism, to an extent?
MOORE: Sometimes it was, all art-forms are potentially. But they can be used for something other than escapism. Think of all the films that have really challenged assumptions, films that have been difficult to take on board, disturbing in their messages. The same goes for literature. But these superhero films are too often escapism.
With regards to The Show, I think it’s an interesting case in point. I am known, perhaps a bit unfairly, for creating dystopias — I think I’ve done one or two but the rest are just my reflections on the world as I see it. With The Show, it could very well be argued that it is actually set in a dystopia, in that Northampton is the first British town in something like 35 years to collapse into an economic blackhole. We went into special measures in the early months of 2018. We can only afford skeleton services. They’re now talking about breaking it up into two different voting areas, which I imagine will make it Conservative until the end of time. There are a lot of failed social visions, mismanagement, but the imaginary life of the town… it has odd little pockets of surrealism and bizarreness that are still there, same as they’ve ever been, that are coming to the fore as Northampton’s waking reality has been so disjointed. The Show is an observed fantasy on a number of levels, but an awful lot of it is true. The town really is that odd-looking.
