Sunday Herald - The Magical Approach To Making it in Hollywood

Originally published in the Sunday Herald, March 12 2000

THE MAGICAL APPROACH TO MAKING IT IN HOLLYWOOD

by Teddy Jamieson

GRANT MORRISON is teaching me magic. "You reduce a desire to abstraction, then you project it and you get the desire. You write down 'my desire is to ' You take out all the vowels and you take out all the repeated letters so that you are left with a string of consonants which you suppress down and switch around until you have got a magical-looking symbol, and then you project that desire which is now a completely abstract desire and you always get what you want."

Morrison gives a very good impression of being totally serious. He tells me he has cured cancers in his cats through this process, and herpes in people. "I really think that we have a suppressed technology on our hands and that we can do amazing things. This is like me being Timothy Leary with acid. I want to see everyone doing this. I want to see what the world is like if everyone's doing magic."

Conversations with Morrison - Glaswegian, long-time comic book writer, one-time playwright, soon to be novelist, possible Hollywood scriptwriter - are never dull. He sits in the cafe of Glasgow's Lighthouse, hair shaved to nothing, whippet-thin in a black polo neck covered in cat hair and fires off wild ideas, opinions and theories. In just under an hour he ranges over globalisation, corporate culture, the rise of anarchism, the return of the punk spirit, William Burroughs, Elizabethan thaumaturge John Dee and the magic inherent in writing ("why do you think it's called spelling?"), and the possibilities of multiple personalities as a lifestyle option.

There's more, and stranger. Much stranger. We are here to talk about the release of his latest graphic novel this coming week called Kissing Mr Quimper, the fourth volume in his Invisibles saga - which relates the battle between the forces of insectile, authoritarian control and the forces of anarchism as represented by a group of magicians, assassins, transvestites and lesbian terrorists. Coincidentally, the last issue of the comic from which the graphic novels are drawn also appears in the same week, ending a six-year- run and leaving Morrison free to concentrate on his first novel and some screen play ideas.

I ask him what was the inspiration for The Invisibles six years back. The answer was unexpected. "I went to Katmandu and had this experience which was like an alien abduction. I was on a roof and these entities appeared, silver blobs. The short version is they took me outside time and space and showed me that time and space is an object and that it exists inside a higher dimensional fluid. And the higher system is an information menstruum. They told me that the universe is a developing larvae and that it is becoming more and more self-conscious."

It wasn't an alien abduction really, he explains. "I've come to believe it's some kind of structure in the brain that a lot of people have been experiencing, especially during the 90s. There's been a huge wave of it. I think it's just a thing that's been happening to people in the way that at aged seven you can see perspective and at age six you cannot."

How to take this? Morrison has something of a reputation for winding up gullible journalists, yet if that's what this is, he is very good at it. Sounds like a drug experience, I suggest. "I have been taking drugs for a long, long time and I know the difference," he counters. "I can take a load of drugs and go to the Garage and it's still the Garage. This experience had nothing to do with drugs."

He goes on to cite physicist Michael Grady's new theory, mooted in New Scientist - favourite reading chez Morrison - in which Grady suggests that space time is a crystal suspended in a five- dimensional informational fluid, and that time is just the leading edge, "which is so like what I've got that I have to think something's happening."

The best way to take Morrison's thinking on board is probably to read the comics themselves. The Invisibles is a wild, disorientating, surreal adventure which splices big screen thrills to situationist philosophising .

And Hollywood certainly seems to have reading. Morrison recently went public on the debt that the Warchowski Brothers' hit movie The Matrix owes to his comic - in everything from the concept to the close. "I thought they were dishonourable for not mentioning their sources," Morrison suggests. "But it seemed uncool to sue them. Still, I wanted to shame them in public."

That said, a welcome corollary maybe that the publicity surrounding the originality or otherwise of The Matrix might help open doors in LA to the Scottish writer. He is back on the American West Coast in a couple of weeks to see if his recent pitches - including one for a new Batman movie - have been successful.

"Yeh, I've been trying to do the Hollywood thing and I found it was easy. I expected to go there and be grilled by Louis B Mayer, but I found it's just a bunch of 26-year-olds who are the vice presidents of production and they grew up reading comics. That's what they are in to."

And it's obvious, he suggests, when you look at what they make. "You are seeing things like Buffy The Vampire Slayer. They are all comic book ideas. Buffy would have only been a comic 20 years ago, but now you've got the special effects capable of rendering those kinds of images. So I think the comics might have migrated onto the screen because the screen has become capable of what only an artist could do at one time."

Morrison therefore is happy to have put aside the monthly deadlines and is now on the verge of finishing his first novel, entitled The IF - a tale of a group of terrorists who, among other things, hijack Albania and demand: "Take this country into the 21st century."

When we finish he is off to work on a chapter entitled "Hold Still Children While We Shoot The Paedophile." He relates this with some relish - thrilled by its wilful offensiveness.

The last time he was at the Lighthouse, he tells me, was for a talk on Glasgow's future. The discussion started quite tentatively and the guy who was organising it said come on, let's get weird. "That was my cue," Morrison says. As if he needed an excuse.