Read the whole thing, but here are some great quotes:
"Alan Moore, the king of comics, is at his home in Northampton, England. He's been working on a new story called "Lost Girls." Actually he's been working on it for the last 16 years, but now it's done and due out this summer as a graphic novel, illustrated by his fiancee, the artist Melinda Gebbe. It's a wild tale, even by the 52-year-old Moore's standards: Three heroines of classic children's literature — Alice from "Alice in Wonderland," Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz" and Wendy from "Peter Pan" — meet up in London in 1913 and realize that their respective stories are actually metaphors for sexual awakening. Very erotic. Or, as Moore prefers to think of it, very pornographic.I can't even tell you how disappointed I was with LXG. It was a GREAT book, and a horrible movie (though Peta Wilson was YUMMY and Sean Connery was well... Sean Connery).
The sex-filled "Lost Girls" may be a little too scary for Hollywood, which has heretofore adored Moore's work and turned three of his creations (the graphic novels "From Hell" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," as well as the supernatural investigator John Constantine) into very bad movies. "
An extended quote from Alan:
And another:
"I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, "How would you make a film of 'Watchmen'?" And I said, "Don't." I think he eventually came to agree with me that it was a film better unmade.
In Hollywood you're going to have the producers and the backers putting in their ... well, I don't want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but ... having their input, shall we say. You're going to get actors who'll say they don't want to say this line or play this character like that. I mean the police inspector in "From Hell," Fred Abberline, was based on real life: He was an unassuming man in middle age who was not a heavy drinker and who, as far as I know, remained faithful to his wife throughout his entire life. Johnny Depp saw fit to play this character as an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers.
On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain [in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"], this was true to the [original] character — he showed a fondness for drugs on several occasions. But Sean Connery didn't want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain's character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor. I don't have these problems in comics."
"V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.Why is it that all my favorite comic book creators are raging leftists... anyway, he's at least a SMART and funny and passionate guy; and what he says about comics in the movies is brilliant.
Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?"
Plus, "The Lost Girls" sounds like a frikking brilliant idea. Can't wait to see it on paper.
HT: JohnOC
