The View from the Cheap Seats (19 page)

I
've never been to Sundance before, and I certainly didn't expect to be at Sundance with
MirrorMask,
but here I am anyway. It's not that
MirrorMask
isn't a good film, or even that it's not an independent film—it was made by hand by artist-director Dave McKean with a tiny amount of money and a handful of art-school graduates—but it's a film for kids of all ages (I'd call it a family film if that wasn't some kind of code that tells you it's not actually for families, just like adult film doesn't mean a film for adults). But we have distribution, through Sony, even if they don't seem quite clear what it is, or who would want to see it. Still, the Jim Henson Company submitted the film to Sundance, and Sundance accepted it. So we're here.

I get in on the Friday evening. My friend producer-director Matthew Vaughn is having a party on Main Street for his film
Layer Cake,
and I head down to Main Street. The street is a mad crush, thronged with people celebrity spotting, which makes me feel sort of useless, mostly because even if I was issued with a Handy Guide to Celebrities and a pair of binoculars, I'd still be celebrity-blind. It seems like there's a party behind every door—I get into three lines before I wind up in the
Layer Cake
party. I find myself part of a tiny entourage, and soon Matthew and I and a few managers and assistants are the only people in the VIP area of a party bar. “What's this party for?” asks Matthew of a publicist, but nobody seems to
know. His film premiered that afternoon. It's a party. I'm introduced to studio VIPs.

I decide that if this is Sundance, I don't like it.

I meet my director the following day on Main Street. I'm a bit worried. A few days before leaving, Dave showed the completed film to the cast and crew, and is now convinced that it's the worst film that anyone has ever made. If he had the money, he'd buy the film back, bury it, and make a different film. One that he was happier with. Still, he seems pleased to see me. We're about to chat when a video crew calls my name, and in moments I find I'm being interviewed on the street about
MirrorMask
.

Sunday begins with a brunch from Adobe (I don't know why) and then a choice: I can go and see The Dresden Dolls play at the Music Café, or offer moral support to Dave McKean and
MirrorMask
producer Lisa Henson, on a panel on animation. They all tell me to go and see The Dresden Dolls, but duty (and a desire to see our trailer on a big screen) wins out. All the people on the panel except for us are from Big Movies—
The Lord of the Rings, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Shrek 2, The Polar Express,
and so on, and I'm not quite sure how this relates to Sundance until Yair Landau from Sony points out that the software that makes hundred-million-dollar movies is the software that, a couple of years later, will be making low-budget movies, and I reflect that that's certainly true in our case.

People in red with clipboards stop me every few feet on Main Street, ask what movies I've seen that I liked. They are finding out what has
buzz
.

That evening we go and see the premiere of
The Jacket
. A man immediately behind us, narrating the events of the day into his cell phone, helpfully starts telling the friend what he can see: “There's Adrien Brody . . . nice suit . . . and I can see Keira Knightley . . .” This is very useful, and makes me wish we'd brought some of our stars over with us. It's all very glam,
and
The Jacket
is a very slick film, with proper stars and a
Twilight Zone
plot.

I really don't like Sundance. And then it's midnight and Dave and Lisa Henson and I are standing in a chilly alley, waiting to get in to see David Slade's
Hard Candy,
and I notice that none of the people in the line are even slightly glamorous. The glamorous people are at parties. These are the festival rats, shivering at midnight to see a new movie. It helps that the film is sharp and small, essentially a grim and grueling two-hander. I start to realize that there are more Sundances than I had previously noticed.

Our film doesn't premiere until the end of the festival, but our first screening is in Salt Lake City for an audience of high school kids. We arrive for the last twenty minutes. Dave McKean is too worried to go in, but I do. I'm watching the magical imagery of
MirrorMask
on a big screen. Up until now I've only seen it in various stages of completion tiny on my laptop screen. This is something else.

The audience claps. The lights come up. A fifteen-year-old girl near me turns to her friend and says, “That was soooo amaaaaaaaaazing,” and I breathe out. It's like I've been holding my breath for eighteen months. Our first review. Dave and I answer questions, then we sign things for the teens. One girl gets us to sign her arms: she has no idea who we are, but we made that film and it made her happy.

Dave appears to be cheering up.

We go and see a film that looked good from the Sundance program, and it's mediocre in most of the ways a film can be—poorly acted, badly shot, and the plot again has been lifted from an old
Twilight Zone
episode. Oddly, this also cheers us up. Our film may not be perfect, but it was better than that. No teenage girls are asking the director to sign their limbs.

The interviews start. Some in person, some over the phone. Nobody's seen the film yet. We could tell them anything. I
see—and, to my surprise, love—
Kung Fu Hustle
. It's like a gift from Sundance. Utterly fun, and nothing Rod Serling would have found in any way familiar.

Wednesday morning, we go and see my friend Penn Jillette's film
The Aristocrats,
directed by Paul Provenza. I'm prepared to be polite about it, in the way you have to be when you know it's a film by a friend about a hundred comedians discussing one, not very funny, dirty joke. Instead Dave and I find ourselves transfixed and delighted. It's an incredibly funny, filthy, and peculiarly cathartic film about art and why we make it. We tell the filmmakers how much we liked their film, and they tell us they want to come and see
MirrorMask
. We tell them that they probably don't want to, and that it doesn't have any swearing in it, but they insist. Penn has altitude sickness (“Pretty f——g ironic for a guy who's six foot seven,” says Paul Provenza) and will be going home early.

Wednesday afternoon we get the
Hollywood Reporter
review of
MirrorMask
.
“If ‘The Wizard of Oz' were reborn in the 21st century, it might look a lot like ‘MirrorMask,'”
it begins, and after describing the film as
“endlessly inventive with creativity to burn”
continues in similar vein for several enthusiastic columns. That afternoon a reporter asks Dave if it was worth the eighteen months of toil and sweat, and he blinks and says, “Well, up until now I didn't think it was. But yes, it was.”

We show
MirrorMask
to another enthusiastic audience of high school kids; to a couple of audiences of paying customers in Salt Lake City. I find myself getting into each screening, caring for nothing except the audience reactions: why does one audience laugh at one line and not at another? It's the same film each time, isn't it?

I go to a selection of short films. There are some duds, but the best of them, Brett Simon's
The Sailor's Girl,
is as good as anything I can remember. Everyone left takes the shuttle buses. I'm turning into a festival rat.

Back on Main Street, the festival's still going but the crowds have gone. All the frenzied buying has been done, the celebrity swag has been looted. Our film officially premieres on Friday. I stop and talk to a couple of the buzz-people in red with clipboards, and they tell me they leave on Thursday. Our film can then, by definition, not have buzz. I don't really mind. We got the
Hollywood Reporter
. We show
MirrorMask
to a packed premiere house and I have no idea whether anyone's enjoying it or not. The audience is almost too respectful. I wish we'd been able to bring some of our cast in, particularly Stephanie Leonidas, our star. I wish the sound had been remixed for simple stereo and not crushed down from Dolby 5.1, burying several lines of dialogue. I wish that there were more kids in the audience. The questions are limp (“Did you make this film under hallucinogenics?”) and I find myself missing the high school audiences.

Afterwards, I drag my son to a sold-out midnight screening of
The Aristocrats,
on the basis that it's the sort of film you ought to take your son to, then Dave McKean and I give up our seats so that Steve Buscemi can get in. We don't mind. We go to the bar next door and start to discuss what our next film will be like.

The festival rats and the real people and the filmmakers are the only ones left at the tail end of Sundance.

Saturday afternoon's the final
MirrorMask
screening. There are people in the wait list line for five hours. Some of them were at the premiere the night before. Some were also at the Salt Lake City showings. This audience seems to love it, laughing at the jokes, cheering and clapping. The questions they ask at the end are appreciative and smart.

If this is Sundance,
I think, as it ends,
I could get to like it
.

This was first published in 2005 in
Look Magazine
.

I wrote this a few years before the brilliant Russell T. Davies and his cohorts brought the Doctor back onto our screens and into our lives.

T
he years pass, and the arguments go back and forth over whether watched fiction actually has an effect on the reader or the viewer. Does violent fiction make a reader violent? Does frightening fiction create a watcher who is frightened, or desensitized to fear?

It's not a yes, or a no. It's a
yes but
.

The complaint about
Doctor Who
from adults was always, when I was small, that it was too frightening. This missed, I think, the much more dangerous effect of
Doctor Who:
that it was viral.

Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched the good bits from behind the sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the cliffhanger in the final moments. But that had, as far as I can tell, no effect on me at all, as I grew, the fear. The real complaint, the thing that the adults should have been afraid of and complaining about, was what it did to the
inside of my head. How it painted my interior landscape. When I was three, making Daleks out of the little school milk bottles, with the rest of the kids at Mrs. Pepper's Nursery School, I was in trouble and I didn't know it. The virus was already at work.

Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest. But I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea-time serial.

For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away. And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.

And that was only the start of it. The books helped with the infection—the
Dalek World
one, and the various hardcovered
Doctor Who
annuals. They contained the first written SF stories I had encountered. They left me wondering if there was anything else like that out there . . .

But the greatest damage was still to come.

It's this: the shape of reality—the way I perceive the world—exists only because of
Doctor Who
. Specifically, from
The War Games
in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton's swan song.

This is what remains to me of
The War Games
as I look back on it, over three decades after I saw it: The Doctor and his assistants find themselves in a place where armies fight: an interminable World War One battlefield, in which armies from the whole of time have been stolen from their original spatio-temporal location and made to fight each other. Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones. Travel between the time zones is possible, using a boxlike structure approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or Mons or Waterloo. Only you don't come out in Waterloo, as
you're really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the mists of time.

The boxes were called SIDRATs. Even at the age of eight I figured that one out.

Finally, having no other option, and unable to resolve the story in any other way, the Doctor—who we learned now was a fugitive—summoned the Time Lords, his people, to sort the whole thing out. And was, himself, captured and punished.

It was a great ending for an eight-year old. There were ironies I relished. It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go back and watch
The War Games
now. It's too late anyway; the damage has been done. It redefined reality. The virus was now solidly in place.

These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with blank walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous—evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.

I do not confuse what has not happened with what cannot happen, and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable, frangible.

Let me make some more admissions.

In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick Troughton. All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors. The rest of them, even Peter Cushing, were faking it.

In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable—primal forces who cannot be named, only described: the Master, the Doctor, and so on. All depictions of the home of the Time
Lords are, in my head, utterly non-canonical. The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because it is beyond imagining: a cold place that only exists in black and white.

It's probably a good thing that I've never actually got my hands on the Doctor. I would have unhappened so much.

A final
Doctor Who
connection—again, from the baggy-trousered Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me—showed itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series,
Neverwhere
.

Not in the obvious places—the BBC decision that
Neverwhere
had to be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example. Not even in the character of the Marquis de Carabas, whom I wrote—and Paterson Joseph performed—as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky as the William Hartnell incarnation. But in the idea that there are worlds under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas was something, author and critic Kim Newman pointed out to me, while
Neverwhere
was screening, that I probably took from a Troughton-era story called “The Web of Fear.” And as he said it, I knew he was spot-on, remembering people with torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness. The knowledge that there were worlds underneath . . . yes, that was where I got it, all right. Having caught the virus, I was now, I realized with horror, infecting others.

Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of
Doctor Who
. It doesn't die, no matter what. It's still serious, and it's still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.

You don't have to believe me. Not now. But I'll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors
open, you'll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they're going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full-service pleasure dome at the galactic core . . .

That's when you'll discover that you're infected too.

And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you'll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand . . .

Taken from the introduction to Paul McCauley's 2003 Doctor Who novella,
Eye of the Tyger,
back when prose was pretty much the only way to get your
Doctor Who
fix.