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Home ¦ Features ¦ Brendan McCarthy interview part 4

17th October 05

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Reboot

BMC: By the time Rogan Gosh and Skin came out, the big comic boom was starting to peak. I got out of comics basically because of one thing: Image comics. Once the market started going that way, you knew the show was over. It was like indie music had been replaced by disco. I just wasn’t interested in Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee and to this day I have no interest in them.

Also, coincidentally, at that time I got asked to do storyboards for a pop video by a director at that time called Steve Barron who was pretty much the leading director at that time. A lot of these pop video directors went onto feature films and they asked me – would you like to come to Hollywood and do, say, Coneheads. I thought – why not? So I’d spent 10 years in a room drawing comics and I was bored and I’d done it. The market had changed and I wouldn’t even be able to get work like Rogan Gosh or Skin out now. What was selling was steroid superheroes like Supreme. I realised that my time was up and my era was over.

I got this chance to go to Hollywood, which was a completely new experience for me. It wasn’t sitting in a room, it was interacting with people and I was meeting all these guys like Dan Aykroyd and the guys from Seinfeld and suddenly it was an interesting way of approaching things. Although I loved films, I didn’t know about how films were made. I was being paid a very reasonable amount of money to learn a new craft. Just one movie led to another and I’ve spend the last 10 years working in Hollywood.

Reboot

The most exciting thing of all was working on the CGI stuff before CGI came big – before Toy Story or Shrek all that stuff. I was workling with Mainframe. These were they guys who, along with John Lassiter who went onto do Pixar, did the Dire Straits video Money for Nothing. You look at it now and it’s so crude but, at the time, it was as good as you could go. It was pushing the envelope. Those guys managed to sell a series to ABC in America called Reboot and they hired me as a production designer. As soon as you saw it you knew this was something brand new. Games had hardly even taken off then. I spent 5 years working in CGI and I had a great time. CGI led to more writing and design in that field and Reboot weirdly led to doing Mad Max and Mad Max led to doing my own CGI feature film which I’ll be writing and directing.

GH: On that note, can you tell us more about Mad Max and is it in any way similar to Freakwave?

BMC: No, it’s not even like Freakwave – it’s not aquatic. I can’t say too much about Fury Road because number one, I’m legally obligated not to talk about it in any specific way.

The only thing I can say is that the whole thing is written – I spent over 2 years co- writing it with the original guy, George Miller, and I designed it as well. As we went along, we approached how we wrote the movie like animation where you get a rough draft of the script and you start storyboarding it. You get the storyboards and put them into what’s known as a story reel where we scan all the storyboard frames and put them into sequence – so that you actually have motion and duration of time. And gradually we built the whole movie through still pictures with a little bit of panning and stuff, just like an animatic.

Enemy Mine

GH: Moving right to the present with your book, Swimini Purpose – how did that come about and how would you describe it to the audience here?

I sold a movie in Hollywood a couple of years ago and made a decent amount of money, more money than I’d ever made before. I decided that what I really wanted to do was put a book of my work out on my own terms that I would design by computer and everything. I had about 200 pages of unpublished material – some on film design but also my own drawings and other stuff. All my other stuff like Mirkin the Mystik and Paradax are scattered everywhere – I wanted to bring it all together as an anthology.

So, because I had this money, I decided to take a year off and that’s how long the book took. I spent ages scanning stuff, cutting down the art. I hired Steve Cook as a designer, I did a version of the book before this one, in order to get a publisher and I got turned down by every publisher. Eventually DC were going to do it. But, if you’ve ever worked with DC you’ll know they are just ridiculously untogether. After wasting nearly a year with publishers (because the book was ready nearly a year ago) I just thought fuck it, I’m going to do it myself and I printed up a limited artist edition of 500.

I decided to make it the size of the American comic book so that you could stick it next to Watchmen and stuff like that. I wanted to make a statement that I wanted it to come out of comics – even though some of it comes out of the comics field. It’s a visual autobiography and that’s how I would describe it in that it’s not a graphic novel. But I don’t think we have to do graphic novels. I can do something that has words and pictures in it that has that shape and that size that gives you the experience of turning pages and having a narrative but isn’t a graphic novel. Sort of a hybrid. I thought that it might be an interesting experience. I didn’t know if anyone would buy it. I thought I would try 500 and probably be left with 480 of them. But I sold all the stock in 2 weeks and now I’m thinking about how to get out a more mass market edition.

Mirkin the Mystic

GH: What’s coming up next for you? Would you ever consider going back to comics? I was also asked to ask you if Mirkin the Mystik would ever utterly utter once more?

BMC: Mirkin is probably one of my favourite characters. If you know him, he was sort of a psychedelic Oscar Wilde crossed with Doctor Strange who thought that everything was such a bore, darling. But it was really funny – Pete Milligan wrote a fantastic script. It was one of those characters that had a bit of magic about him.

I’ve written a lot of more film material and I have a contract with George Miller. I’ve written and designed a CGI feature film called Fur Brigade which is the Dirty Dozen with teddy bears. I think it’s a fantastic script – I’ve spent nearly 2 years working on it and it’s gone through about 17 drafts and I’m hoping it’s going to go into production next year. I’ve got about 4 new film projects that I’ve written.

I was actually going to do something for 2000AD recently called Shimura – but I actually had to bail out of the job because the work I was doing just wasn’t up to par. It’s not because I have lost it or anything it’s just that I didn’t realise how hard it would be to go back to drawing Judge Dredd and all that stuff – all those elbow pads and everything. I realise I couldn’t do it any more and had to give it back to them. Robbie Morrison had written a very nice script. I would like to do something – but where’s the venue to do something different? There’s only 2000AD otherwise you wither self publish like Viz and spend a lot of time and don’t make very much money.

Just before we go – I’ve got 2 copies of Swimini Purpose with me here – so if there’s anyone here with an interesting question – you get a copy. So this young lady here…

Pabba Vane

BMC: Erm, the crime? Ah, you’re referring to Pabba Vane. This was a project that was going to be a photo comic strip – with a picture of me as a homicidal maniac. The photograph is by Steve Cook, Robocook as some of you might remember him. The idea was to do a photo comic like a David Lynch Eraserhead thing. The crime that Pabba Vane had done was that he had killed his twin in the womb. You’ve definitely earned a book for that – now one more…

Sprout: You worked a lot with Brett Ewins in the early days - between the two of you, who would win in a fight?

BMC: Sort of a “is the Hulk stronger than the Thing?” Brett was more prone to mean muthas with big guns like Kano and Johnny Nemo, wheras my stuff was a bit more fey.

So Brett would probably win physically and I would win sarcastically…

Thanks to Brendan McCarthy for taking part in the interview. Thanks also to Ed Berridge who provided much ot the research/questions, as well as Leigh Shepherd, Steven l'enfant terrible, Xenoclast and more for suggesting questions.

Swimini Purpose is sold out, but you might be lucky to find a copy if you look really hard - and we'll keep you up to date if there's any news on a 2nd printing. In the meantime, check out the official Swimini Purpose site, the Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy and our review of Swimini Purpose.

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