We’re all familiar with Captain America from the comic books but what does writing him teach you about the character?

Christopher Markus: It’s teaches you that it’s very hard and sometimes beside the point to try and give him an arc. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, like we just let him run around. But he is a guy that history revolves around, and in some ways he does not always have the biggest change. The biggest change in his life was when they injected him full of super soldier serum. And it was a physical change – morally, intellectually, he was the same guy when he was 90 lbs. It runs counter to screenwriting logic, because we always want to take a character, arc them and have them changed at the end of the movie. It’s how you structure these things. And he resists that. He’s like a statue that stands there during all four seasons – everything happens and at the end of it he’s like “Nope, still here, sorry!”

People really responded to the political thriller style of The Winter Soldier . Did you guys create a story to fit that specific tone, or did the tone grow organically out of the story that you wanted to tell?

Stephen McFeely: Good question. I don’t know if I can chicken and egg that…

CM: I think it’s more the latter. I know at some point Kevin Feige suggested “Well, why don’t we just take down SHIELD? And have Cap have a hand in it?” He’s one man versus this giant organisation – you’re not going to have him drive in with a tank so there’s going to be some underhandedness. And suddenly it begins to suggest a political conspiracy. If you put that 1940s man into present day geo-politics everything is going to seem like a conspiracy. It’s just going to seem dirty and underhanded and shifty, and people won’t be telling the truth. I have a tendency to believe that it was exactly the same way in 1945 but it’s not how we view it. It becomes a political conspiracy simply by putting 1945 Steve Rogers in present day America.

SM: We so wanted to avoid iPod jokes but we wanted Cap to adjust to the new world, so it was about emotions, it was about ethics, it was about morality. It’s “How far have we come since you went into the ice?” not “How short have the skirts become?”

Do you think that kind of grounded political tone will continue into the third film – or could you create something as different as The Winter Soldier was from The First Avenger ?

CM: Well, that’s the challenge! But we are working on something that I think is an amalgalm.

SM: When we hit upon the Brubaker run of the comic book, we all said that, with certain exceptions, that ’s the tone of Cap’s modern franchise. And you can imagine that with us back, with the Russos back, then if you like Winter Soldier you’ll hopefully like the third one, if we do it right!

You say it’s an amalgalm of the first two. Could you also be bringing in a new flavour, too?

CM: Well, you never know…

CM: I don’t know if there’s anybody that we had in the wings that we couldn’t pull off. There are people that I’m always wanting to bring in. I want to put Modok into something, but you can’t just drop a giant floating head in! It’s not like “Oh, we have to go talk to this guy – there’s something I should tell you about him first…” [laughs]. Suddenly the whole movie needs to take on that structure in order to accommodate him. I never win that fight!

SM: But you will never rest.

CM: There were actually drafts where we had Hawkeye in it, but he didn’t have enough to do and suddenly it seemed like we were giving him short shrift. Hey, it’s a cameo!

SM: Natasha was doing a lot of that work for us.

Obviously you’ve drawn on the Brubaker material. Were there any ‘70s Captain America comics that fed into The Winter Soldier ? It seemed to have a touch of their sensibility…

CM: There’s one story where he’s going up against the Secret Empire and it eventually turns out to be Richard Nixon, although you never see his face! That certainly laid the groundwork for us saying “Are we crazy for doing this? For having a conspiracy?” No, they’ve been doing it for years! And there are other bits and pieces. The ship at the beginning was originally a big tanker and came from a run where Mr Hyde and Batroc are going to ram Manhattan with this giant gas tanker. I liked the dynamic of that big, slow moving thing. And then that evolved into a satellite launching vessel!

We’ve just heard that the Falcon is taking over Cap’s role in the comic books. Do you think the movies can accommodate these kind of shake-ups or do they need to stay faithful to the big, familiar icons?

SM: We tend to stay on the sidelines when it comes to the comics. We wait and see what we’ll steal from in three or four years from now! [laughs].

CM: I think the movies can accommodate almost anything, if there’s a need. I think there is a much greater need to shake things up in the comics because that’s a narrative that’s been going on for 60 or 70 years, so you’re going to wind up having to do things to it. Ours has only been off the ground for five or so. So it’s not quite time to start changing things up yet. Plus I can’t figure out how he’s going to have the wings and the shield at the same time. Isn’t it going to get all crammed up on the wing? I don’t know… When those things happen in the comics you also have a tendency, perhaps cynically, to go “Yeah, but he’s going to be Steve Rogers in two months…” He’s going to wake up out of cryo-stasis or whatever it is and it’s going to be like “Oh, I need the shield back”. [laughs].

SM: We’re all so cynical.

You said you went back to some of the ‘70s source material. Is it daunting seeing just how many Marvel stories there have been, simply because there’s so much stuff to cherrypick?

SM: Yes. And you definitely want to read them in colour. When you get the bound black and white ones they’re…

CM: Heartbreaking.

I grew up reading the black and white British reprints…

CM: We wound up reading I don’t even know how many years’ worth of Cap in black and white. And the thing that becomes clear is that colour is the only thing that differentiates most of the villains! Just looking at these people you’re like “It’s a guy… in a stripy costume… who shoots some kind of energy out of himself…” It’s all gotten across by colour. I feel terrible for you there in Britain!

I was very jealous of your colour. And your Twinkies.

CM: But you have Hob-Nobs, right? [laughs]

Nick Setchfield

Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be released on DVD, Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray and digital download on Monday 18 ^th August

The post EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Screenwriters Talk Winter Soldier And Captain America 3 appeared first on Game News.

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SFX: The final episode aired last week. Did you watch it live, have a get together, anything like that?
Karla Crome: No, I didn’t. I’ve been watching it a bit sporadically. I wasn’t keen on watching it until at least next year actually, but because we went to the screening at the start of the series I started watching it and so I just carried on. I watched the last episode online a few days before it aired. I just watched it on my own.

How did you feel after watching the last episode?
I was a little bit sad. It’s the end of an era and I had such a great time doing it. And it seems to have all been filmed and edited and come together so quickly and then just finished. You spend six months filming, which is a lot of time, a lot of long hours, and for it to finish so quickly is quite bizarre. It was a little bit sad, but I really liked the last episode. Wayne [Yip] gave us brilliant direction on it, and it was a nice episode for Jess actually. It was an episode for her that she hasn’t really had before. The only one I can think of is the one where evil Rudy turns up and they had a bit of a thing, but that was more about Rudy, so it was nice for the spotlight to end on her.

Was there a sense when you were filming this series that the show was back on track?
I am a notorious and constant worrier. I’m worried if I’m not worried. I find it difficult to be comfortable with anything for the same reasons that anyone gets nervous about something – because they want it to be good and they don’t want to let anyone down. The other actors seemed a lot more comfortable this time round with the work we were producing, and that was apparent from day dot. I remember having conversations with the boys and them being like, “Yeah, I feel this is a lot stronger.” I definitely had an inclination to agree with them at the beginning because the scripts were in a much stronger place and the actors were in a much stronger place, but I can never shake the feeling of concern until I see the finished product. That’s not just for Misfits, that’s for anything that I do. But by the end I couldn’t have been happier, in terms of Misfits .

Do you think Jess made the right choice settling down with Rudy?
You know when I said I see where I went wrong in the first series? Something they taught us at drama school, and it’s taken me a long time to realise it’s true through practice, is that you can’t put judgments on a character you’re playing, especially while you’re doing it. So you can’t sit there and go, “I think it’s a good idea that they do this, that or the other,” because it’s not helpful for creating the work. I don’t know the answer to that question, whether Jess should have settled down with Rudy or not, that’s just the way it was.

Jess didn’t use her power all that much, would you like to play a proper superhero at some point?
Yeah! I thought it was a shame she didn’t use her powers more. There were particular times when I thought, “Hang on, why doesn’t she just use her power?” Like looking through the door waiting for Alex to come along with a nail gun. I can see the point of dramatic tension, but I thought she could save herself an eyeball here if she just used her power! But it’s about the story and it wouldn’t have served that. I love the fantasy genre, I’d love to be a member of the X-Men. Or, you know what I’d really like, I’d love to play Buffy in a reboot or something. I would certainly like the opportunity to do a bit more of that, or maybe a bit of action, something I really had to beef up for and stop eating junk for so I could go and kick people’s arses. That would be really fun.

It seemed every character got their moment of utter humiliation this series, Jess more so than most. When you read Jess’ toilet scene in the script were you dreading the moment you’d actually have to act that out?
No, not at all. I couldn’t wait! I really couldn’t wait to do it and I was really glad I got the opportunity to. As you can probably tell I’m the kind of person who likes to sit around and mouth off about how things are morally. I’m very much not like Jess, it’s not a problem for me to talk toilet humour or burp in front of my friends or say things that are quite crass or recount stories about myself that are rude because I’ve never been much of a girly girl. I was always really envious of Joe getting to do these quite base, horrible things as Rudy, so I relished the opportunity for her to go and do something that was a bit gross really, because girls do and it’s not represented enough on telly. Jess is presented like… I’ll go in and get my make-up and hair done for hours and hours and that’s not me, that’s not what I look like and I know that’s not what a lot of girls look like. But guess what? Girls do shit and it’s nice to be able to do that for once.

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Do you have a highlight from your time on the show?
Getting the part was a highlight because I was a massive fan of the show and I felt really privileged and really excited. But I guess it’s the friends I’ve made. I’m in communication with Tash and Matt and Joe and Nathan at least once a week, whether that’s a phone call or meeting up for a drink. I see them and hear from them regularly. They are really good friends of mine I can’t imagine my life without them now. And it’s not just them, it’s costume, make-up, other people that I’ve met who I’m going to be friends with forever, which is lovely, because what are the chances of going into a job and getting on with everybody? I think they’re pretty low, but somehow we managed it. I don’t know if I’ll have another job like it.

What will we see you in next?
I don’t have anything lined up, but I’m writing a play. We’ve got a director and one of the actors ready. It’s very, very different to Misfits . It’s about a Jewish couple and it’s basically a romance, a love story. It’s quite tender and small scale, so I’m working on writing that at the moment and getting funding together for it, so that’s my focus for a while. I’ve always been into my writing but fortunately work’s been quite constant in terms of acting over the last couple of years, this is the first time I’ve been able to take a breather. I’m trying to choose my auditions and my projects quite carefully at the moment and really try between now and Easter to concentrate on this play, so that’s my main focus.

Misfits series 5 is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray now.

The post Misfits Karla Crome Interview appeared first on Game News.

You’re sat here in full costume and make-up, looking uncannily like Carole Ann Ford in 1963. Are people freaking out when they see you?

I think I freaked out! My agent rang me – first of all she really wanted me to get it because her grandfather is William Hartnell! So when she rang it was like “No pressure!” So then, obviously, I googled Carole Ann Ford, and I thought “Oh, this is kind of weird…” My hair was long, but I could definitely see such a clear comparison between the two of us. So it was kind of freaky, but exciting because I was like “I really should get this because I really look like her!”

Have you met her?

Yeah, I met her at the readthrough. She looks great, she’s very glamorous. That was the first time I met her, so I was quite nervous, because not only were there 40 people in the room but she was there in my eyeline watching me every time I delivered a line! But she was lovely. She’s very supportive and she wants me to do well.

How do you think she felt about you playing her?

It must have been quite strange for her. She hasn’t actually vocalised what she thought of my performance or anything like that but she’s been very supportive. She was at a similar stage in her career as I am – well, she’d done more work than me – but I think she can kind of identify with me. She’s really rooting for me, which is lovely.

How have you approached the part?

Basically I’ve watched everything that she’s done. The first thing I had to try and get to grips with was her voice, because it’s much higher than mine, and it’s very particular – I’d never heard a voice like that before. It’s quite breathy, and the accent’s unusual.

It’s almost Welsh, isn’t it?

Some people say South African… I think it probably comes from having elocution lessons and stuff like that. So that was the first thing that I approached, because for me if I can find the voice then I can find it in the body and everything else. It’s just constantly watching her over and over again, to clarify her intonation, her accent… I break it down into phonetics and all sorts of stuff. I’m quite good at accents, and if I can break it down phonetically then even if it starts off sounding really weird the more and more I practice it the better it gets.

How much did you know about Doctor Who before you started on this?

I’d dipped in and out from childhood, but I didn’t know that much about it. Now, obviously, researching it and getting into it I suddenly realised what a massive fanbase it has. And I’ve suddenly realised that so many friends of mine are massive Doctor Who fans. They find out I’m playing Carole Ann Ford and they’re like “Oh, wow!” Someone wrote me a message on Facebook saying “Did you know that she’s only got an e on her name because the BBC wrote it wrong in a press release? And she had a child? And she was married?” And I was like “Oh my god!” (laughs)

Nick Setchfield

An Adventure In Space And Time is on BBC Two on November 21st at 9.00 pm

The post An Adventure In Space And Time – Claudia Grant Interviewed appeared first on Game News.

You’re telling the story of the birth of Doctor Who but what’s the focus of the drama?

It really is William Hartnell’s story. It’s the story of the first Doctor and his journey. He becomes a kind of Willy Loman character, so there is that wonderful human condition/everyman thing. We can all relate to it being either our dad or us. We’re all replaceable in life – if anyone thinks they’re not then they’re mistaken. You have your day and then it’s time to move on. It’s a great universal story, so what we hope is that if you don’t really care about Doctor Who , if you’re not a Doctor Who fan, in the way that you may not have cared about rowing but you still loved watching Bert And Dickie , this is the same thing. We hope that it’s a universal story about a man’s journey, towards the end of his life, in a Death Of A Salesman kind of way. In that way we hope we get a really broad audience. But we’ve got lots of lovely things in for real fans, lots of little nods.

How faithful have you been to the historical facts?

What we’ve had to do for dramatic purposes is amalgamate a lot of people. In Delia Derbyshire we’ve combined a number of characters – although she ran the Radiophonic Workshop there was Ron Grainer who composed the music and then there was Brian Hodgson who was the guy who brought in his mother’s house keys and ran them up and down the back of a piano to create the TARDIS sound. We kind of amalgamated certain details. The original Doctor Who was a committee commission – there were so many people involved that we couldn’t possibly dramatise so we’ve condensed it all down to a few key characters, and then made Sydney Newman the driving force. He was the guy who brought the idea of doing a science fiction show, and he was an ideas man.

We know this is a passion project for Mark Gatiss…

Mark’s had the idea to do this for 15 or 20 years. He even did a spoof sketch where he played Sydney Newman. For years he’s been a huge fan, and then he started researching, so he’s had primary source interviews with everybody who’s still alive that you can get hold of. Tons and tons of documentation – the first script that he delivered had everything in it. We’ve had to rationalise it and pare it back and pare it back, but a lot of detail in the script comes from one on one first hand interviews with surviving people. And then at our readthrough we were very lucky to have Mark Eden who played Marco Polo, Bill Russell who played Ian Chesterton and Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan – and they’re in it, as well. Bill Russell plays Harry, who’s an old school BBC commissionaire, dressed in the pseudo-military uniform they used to wear, going “You can’t come in here without a pass, sir!” The first time we meet Sydney Newman is with William Russell. Carole Ann is blink and you’ll miss it. We didn’t want to be a bit cheesey and do an obvious cameo, so there’s a lovely scene in a 1960s street where the camera pans into a house window and a 1960s family is sitting around the telly watching Doctor Who … As we pan through a grandmother comes out and goes “David! Martin! It’s time for your tea! And that show you like’s on!” And she beckons them in, and you just catch a moment of her – it’s Carole Ann Ford dressed as an old lady. It’s just a little taste of her. And Mark Eden, who was Marco Polo, so lost forever, is playing the head of the BBC, Donald Baverstock.

How did the old members of the team feel when they saw their past being recreated like this?

It was quite emotional at the readthrough. We went around the table, as you normally do on a table read – “Hi,I’m so and so and I’m playing such and such,” – and when it came to “I’m William Russell and I’m playing Harry” and “I’m Carole Ann Ford and I’m playing Joyce” the whole room just cheered. It really was quite moving. I think it was quite weird for the actors playing them, because on one hand it’s great to meet the person you’re playing and on the other hand it’s actually incredibly daunting, and a bit scary. So it was a two-edged kind of thing, especially for the wonderful Sacha, who’s playing Waris Hussein, because Waris is still very vibrant and working and amazing for his age – well, he’s not that old, he’s 75, but you’d think he was 55. He’s had quite a few meetings with him, and I think that was really useful to get the intonation of Waris’ voice, but also quite daunting for him because he feels a great responsibility, because Waris is still very much with us. It’s been lovely to be able to include a couple of cast members from the first ever episode. I think that really means that it becomes slightly timeless.

Are you a Who fan yourself?

I grew up watching it. My Doctor was Tom Baker and then Peter Davison. I’m a huge Peter Davison fan. I remember the 20 ^th anniversary being “The Five Doctors” and Richard Hurndall playing the part of the original. And I’m a fan of the reboot as well. I really love what Russell and now Steven have done with it. I was doing Misfits so I quite like that kind of science fiction/fantasy thing anyway. When I was asked to do this it was wonderful, a dream come true, but I never thought we’d be able to do it on this scale. What we’ve managed to do, given that it is a tight budget – budgets always are these days – is create a cinematic experience. We’re really trying for it to punch slightly above its weight. What we really wanted to do was get a sense of the ‘60s, so we are looking at the grade of things like The Ladykillers . We want to bring out that Technicolor 60s whereas The Hour has a very 50s sepia look and The Girl had a very Hollywood bubblegum look, the blues and the pinks. We’re going for the mauves and the greens, the green corduroy suits, those kind of reds and greens, Routemaster bus interior, things that pop. We really wanted to get a sense of cinema and we’ve been blessed to get Terry McDonough who most recently has been having a big career in America doing Breaking Bad and Hell On Wheels and those kind of things. He’s brought a real cinematic flair to it. John Pardue is our director of photography and John lit The Girl with Toby Jones.

What does David Bradley bring to the part of William Hartnell?

He’s so amazingly, beautifully talented. What he’s able to do is take Bill from this quite irascible character, who is quite grumpy and a bit like the Doctor that you see, and show the way it changes him. And his changing relationship we play through his granddaughter, who’s called Judy. We show how in fact he did become Pied Piper-ish, and felt a real duty to the children, so when he was out in real life kids would follow him and the Doctor became this huge character. David has the range – he’s heartbreaking. You take this grumpy actor who’s not being recognised properly, he feels he’s been typecast as army types… If you look back at Brighton Rock or This Sporting Life he’s a wonderful film actor but he’d got stuck in a rut, and he was very snippy about taking the role of the Doctor, because it was perceived as children’s television. But by the end he didn’t want to go. David is just magical as that.

Has Jessica Carney, William Hartnell’s granddaughter, been involved?

Very much so. All through the script, when Bill talks he calls his wife and his granddaughter love – “Alright, love, I’ll be home in a minute,” – and she called us and said he never called anybody love, he called everybody darling, he was that theatrical even at home. So little details like that we’ve managed to bring into the script. She has the original astrakhan hat and the original emerald ring, so she brought those to set – we’re not using them because they’re too precious!

Nick Setchfield

An Adventure In Space And Time will be on BBC Two on November 21st at 9 pm

Correction: a glitch crept into our feature in SFX 242, where we incorrectly state Matt Strevens is the director of An Adventure In Space And Time . He’s the producer, of course – Terry McDonough is the director. Our brains were clearly nibbled by Zarbi.

The post Producer Matt Strevens Talks An Adventure In Space And Time appeared first on Game News.

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What’s worse than living through the apocalypse? How about being constantly hit on by the antichrist. That’s what poor Anna Kendrick is forced to deal with in the latest end-of-the-world comedy Rapture-Palooza. She plays the mild-mannered Lindsey who, along with her loyal boyfriend Ben ( Bones ’ John Francis Daley), must endure blood rain, foul-mouthed insects and a very horny Devil played by The Office’ s Craig Robinson, in his second armageddon-themed comedy of the year after This Is The End . Heaven knows how she’ll cope…

“It’s the apocalypse at the end of your driveway,” explains director Paul Middleditch. “The world doesn’t end, it continues in a remarkably domestic way. The antichrist has a problem child, he has a problem wife, even though he’s ruling the world he deals with the banalities of life. He’s a remarkably underwhelming ultimate figure of evil. Lindsey and Ben are these two ludicrously stupid optimists who feel they have the opportunity to vanquish the antichrist by locking him away. They’re bumbling their way through a moment of religious significance that they have no understanding of.”

Scriptwriter and Bill and Ted mastermind Chris Matheson scoured the bible for tongue-in-cheek rapture inspiration. In their quest to stop the devil, Lindsey and Ben have to dodge sweary birds, undead neighbours and weed obsessed wraiths. “Chris looked through the Book of Revelation in quite a lot of detail and all that stuff is in there,” explains Middleditch. “I think one of the Apostles wrote it. He must have had some ’shrooms or something because where does this stuff come from? It’s the sort of film that you’d hope would become cult, where guys would be smoking joints and watching this thing on a Saturday night. There’s just something so wonderfully underwhelming about the end of religion as we know it.”
Simon Bland

Rapture-Palooza is released on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 28 October, courtesy of Lionsgate.

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The post Rapture-Palooza Director Interview appeared first on Game News.

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Author Simon Clark has given SFX more details of a Doctor Who story he was commissioned to write a decade ago.

Back in July 2003, the news broke that finally, the BBC were making new Doctor Who , with the casting of an official Ninth Doctor announced… no, not Christopher Eccleston, but Richard E Grant.

Created to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary, “Scream Of The Shalka” (which is getting a DVD release on 16 September) was a Flash animation (six episodes, each of 15 minutes), hosted on the Beeb’s Doctor Who website. By the time the first instalment went live in November, it had been rather undercut by the announcement, in September, of the series’ imminent return to our TV screens.

Further animations were being planned, and since it took a while for the producers of the television version to put the kibosh on all that, for a while work continued on a second story: “Blood Of The Robots”, another six-parter, written by horror novelist Simon Clark. It was a dream job for the author, who’s a life-long fan of the series.

“ Doctor Who has been the video track of my life,” Clarke explains. “I was five when the first episode aired and I’ve seen every episode since. Somewhere emblazoned on my neurons must be memories of all those mythic lost episodes. When I was five or six I wrote to the BBC asking them to send me a Dalek. They didn’t, but they did send me a signed photograph of Bill Hartnell, which I still have on my shelf beside me.”

Clark suspects that he was approached back in 2003 because around that time he was writing The Dalek Factor , a Doctor Who novella for Telos Publishing.

“Perhaps the producers got wind of this. I was told about the animated Doctor Who , and asked to submit a very brief outline. They liked what they saw and I was then asked to submit a more detailed synopsis. On the basis of this I was given a contract to write the scripts.”

The synopsis Clark used in his first script gives a good flavour of what the finished story would have been like:

“A blend of adventure, drama and humour. The Doctor arrives to find a world full of intelligent, sensitive robots that have been abandoned by their human owners, who are too squeamish to ‘kill’ them when they’re obsolete. Now ruthless salvage squads are hunting the robots in order to make room for human settlers forced to migrate from their dangerously over-crowded home planet.”

“There would have been some frightening elements, and a dash of gruesomeness too,” the writer explains. “I’d planned shocks for the viewer, too, as it struck me that, back then, people watching a drama on a computer would mean they were sitting much closer to the screen than a TV, so there could be exciting ways of creating a much more intense impact.”

“There was also scope to have things happen in the animated Doctor Who that couldn’t have been done in the classic TV episodes. For example, one of the robots dumped on the scrapyard planet was a Funeralbot. He’d been junked because his pneumatics were at fault and instead of gently lowering the coffin into the grave it always ended up flipping the coffin high into the air and out of the cemetery. My little homage to Robot Wars !”

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Clark knew which actors had been cast in the lead roles, and was particularly excited to be writing for Derek Jacobi, who in “Scream Of The Shalka” played a version of the Master whose consciousness now resides in a robot body, confined to the TARDIS.

“I’ve been in awe of Jacobi since I saw him in I, Claudius ,” Clark says. “He has such a wonderful melodic voice. Right from the start, I thought of having the Master talking about his favourite tipples, just so I could have the great actor voicing the words Merlot, Amontillado and so on in such a resonant way.”

Clark’s work was quite advanced by the time the axe finally fell.

“The entire storyline was complete, and I’d written three scripts and started on the fourth when I got the call that sent my heart dropping like a stone.”

So, is there any chance of the story emerging in some other form some day?

“I don’t know,” says Clark. “I guess that isn’t in my hands, but the detailed storyline and three scripts are complete. It would just be a case of blowing away an accumulation of interstellar dust and work could begin on completing ‘Blood Of The Robots.’”

Ian Berriman twitter.com/ianberriman

Read about the recovery of a Doctor Who “The Tenth Planet” script .
Read our Doctor Who “The Ice Warriors” DVD review .

The post Doctor Who: The Simon Clark Story That Never Was appeared first on Game News.

Out this Wednesday, the Judge Dredd Megazine features a new story featuring Judge Dan Francisco. Originally created by John Wagner and Rufus Dayglo, Francisco presented a reality show in which he tackled crime live on air. Becoming Chief Judge, his tenure was cut short by the events of Chaos Day, and he resigned. Now, he returns to the streets, haunted by guilt… It’s illustrated by Paul Marshall and written by Seattle-based Arthur Wyatt , more famous for penning many 2000 AD Future Shocks. We caught up with him to ask about entering the Judge Dredd universe:

SFX : How do you find writing for the Judge Dredd universe?
Arthur Wyatt: It feels surprisingly natural! I guess that comes from having grown up reading 2000 AD and Judge Dredd – there’s defiantly things that feel “right” for Mega-City One and Dredd that are part of its character that has built up over time. The citizens will always have some new craze, Dredd will always be sternly disapproving, there will always be criminals with odd anachronistic ’70s punk fashions.

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SFX : How is Dan Francisco different to Dredd?
Wyatt: He’s not as grim – nobody matches Dredd for grimness, of course. And Dan’s a bit of a showman. He was introduced as a media figure, a Judge with his own COPS -style TV show, and so even if it’s just him and a camera drone he’s going to be compulsively giving an explanation of what he’s doing and why, on a mission to inform and guide the citizens of Mega City One.

But he’s been through a lot. He reached the rank of Chief Judge through the machinations of others and while he held that office a terrible disaster occurred that destroyed most of the city, something that he felt responsible for, rightly or wrongly. So now he’s stepped down and he’s back to his old life as a TV Judge – but can he really do that? The city has changed, he has changed, everything is different now, and pretending that he can put the pieces back together isn’t going to work.

So maybe not as grim as Dredd, but not entirely un-grim.

SFX : Will there be moping?
Wyatt: There may be a tiny amount of moping. But fear not! The Judge Dredd Megazine is an action adventure comic , and all episodes of Dan Francisco will have enough of both that he barely has time to mope.

SFX : How do you feel about following in the footsteps of John Wagner?
Wyatt: It’s a little daunting, especially as this story directly continues on from “Day Of Chaos”, which has established itself as one of the all time great Dredd mega-epics up there with “The Cursed Earth” and “The Apocalypse War”.

Of course I’m not alone in that challenge – other writers have been picking up the post-“Day Of Chaos” story of Mega-City One, most notably Mike Carrol whose done a great job of showing a city shattered by disaster, and the epic “Trifecta” storyline by Al Ewing, Simon Spurrier and Rob Williams. Hopefully “The Streets Of Dan Francisco” will live up to those as well.

I did already wrote a Dredd story, “Inversion”, which was set after “Day Of Chaos”, but it wasn’t tied in so directly. And while it featured Dredd, who is a character foremost associated with John Wagner plenty of other people had a crack at him – with “Streets” I’m picking up the story of a character no-one else has written and directly following the story Wagner has told with him, from his creation in the one off “The Streets Of Dan Francisco” (I stole the title), through his rise to Chief Judge in “Tour Of Duty” (an epic that almost matches “Day Of Chaos”) to his resignation after the city was near destroyed on his watch. It’s amazing to have an opportunity to do something like that but it is a little scary.

SFX : Has writing so many Future Shocks helped writing longer stories?
Wyatt: 2000 AD ‘s one-off stories, the Future Shocks and Terror Tales and more exotic variants like Past Imperfects and Time Twisters have been a great traditional proving ground for writers. It’s only four or five pages, but you need to tell a complete story in those stories, something that stands up on its own and not just as a build up to a twist ending. In a way their shortness is quite deceptive when it comes to how hard they are to pull off – you need to compress the hell out of everything, to borrow a phrase of Andy Diggle’s they have to be shot glass of rocket fuel.

In a way going from that to longer stories is easier, as a little more page count gives you room to breathe and tell stories in less compressed ways, in other ways it can be quite tricky to shake off the habits you’ve learned from doing a lot of them – I think my first few attempts at longer works tried to cram too much in and had pacing problems as a result. And of course you’re building to a twist ending, you’re telling an ongoing story, one that you hope will keep people coming back to it.

And while going from the Future Shocks and other one offs to longer can be seen as a bit of a graduation I really want to keep doing them, as it’s a form I love along with all short fiction. Ideally I’d love to do one of each of them. Time Twisters seem to have come back into fashion so getting one of those under my belt would be a matter of coming up with a good new time travel story with a fresh twist, persuading The Mighty Tharg that there is need for a new Walter’s Robo-Tale or Pulp Sci-Fi would be trickier. I suspect a new Dragon Tale would be right out.

SFX : What are you working on next?
Wyatt: A very exciting project, with one of my favourite artists! Unfortunately I can’t say more than that yet.

SFX: Thanks Arthur!

Look out for The Judge Dredd Megazine #335 in print and online this Wednesday. Find out more at www.2000adonline.com .

The post INTERVIEW Judge Dredd Megazine appeared first on Game News.

This is a question I’ve never had a chance to ask anybody before: what’s it like being on a stamp?

It’s a great privilege that the nation will be licking the backs of our heads. It’s an amazing thing – I’m really proud to be part of it. It’s cool. it’s something that I can show my grandkids.

Would you feel a bit self-conscious, sticking it on a gas bill?

No, absolutely not. Take that, gas man! And give me some money off!

It was very exciting. I am innately very clumsy, and my mother has always forbidden me from getting a motorbike. I’ve driven mopeds before, abroad and stuff, without her knowing – well, now she knows. But that’s like a big old Harley looking bike, and I wouldn’t know where to begin… It was amazing filming those scenes. It was on a rig, and we got to sort of travel round London. Car rigs are different because you’re in a car, but being on a bike it’s like you’re on a sort of fairground ride. It was a really crisp, sunny day and we kept going around Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge and Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge and it was just one of those days where you think ‘This is a very privileged place to be for a day at work.’

You’ve got Jenna joining as Clara. What new colours does she bring out of your Doctor?

I think that essentially she allows him to complete his grieving period, as it were, over the Ponds. Not that he’ll ever forget the Ponds but she gives him his mojo back somehow, and his spirit of adventure, and allows him to go right, you’ve got to look forward. Importantly, she gives him something to be curious about, because she is this impossible girl and he doesn’t really understand how or why or what context she exists in. I think she ignites his curiosity. And with the Doctor that’s the thing that keeps him flying around.

Jenna told us you recommended some Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn films for her to watch. Do you see the relationship in that kind of screwball comedy tradition?

If you look at those movies you get a real sense of teamwork on screen, and chemistry, and so much of the show is about teamwork that leads to chemistry. I just thought it was a good point of reference, really. Yeah, I think there is a degree of that screwbally thing – we flirt, we don’t flirt, we love each other, we don’t love each other, I’m strange, you’re in control, actually I’m really in control… it flips and flops around all the time, and I think those movies really land and deliver on the double act thing, and obviously that’s where we needed to get to. It’s a strange process, the whole Doctor/companion thing. Everyone expects you to have this immediate firework chemistry but that wasn’t the case with me and Karen – you work at these things, and it’s the same with me and Jenna. You have to work at these chemistries, and the detail and the layers and everything. And that’s what we did, and it was an enjoyable process. She’s cracking.

Was there a specific moment when the two of you clicked and you found that rhythm?

You might find it twice in a day, you might find it ten times in a day, you might find it fifteen times in a day, you might find it once in a day. It’s the nature of making this show; so much of it moves so quickly, and you just keep trying to prepare as thoroughly and in as much detail that you find the moments of magic. If you take an instance like the kiss at Christmas – there’s a good chemistry to that scene, it has balance and it has an interesting point of view for both of us. It’s just about understanding the story and where you fit into it.

Your costume’s had a bit of a shake-up. There’s a bit of a teddy boy vibe going on there…

Is there? I don’t know… Well, I always said that the costume would evolve, and I always wanted something purple, a la Pertwee. And so now I’ve got purple tweed, and cool purpley boots and a cool purpley waistcoat and a purple bowtie and purple lining. I’ve got my purple wish.

[Not quite catching] Sorry, your purple what?

My purple wish!

I thought you said whisk…

A purple whisk would be even more exciting! Yeah, I’m going to ask for one of those!

That would be brilliant. A sonic whisk…

Yes, a sonic whisk! That’d be great, wouldn’t it? That’s it – chocolate and Guinness cake in a second! Butterfly cakes from space!

So the costume’s evolved…

If you look at it, it has sort of slightly evolved, bits and bobs, each year. With the departure of the Ponds and the new title sequence and all that, we thought why not, let’s shake it up a little. And here we are. Do you like it?

I do like it – I quite like the teddy boy thing. It’s a different silhouette with the longer coat.

Yeah, it is a slightly different silhouette, isn’t it? My big concern with changing the costume is that I didn’t want him to lose the sense of the silly. There’s something silly about tweed and a bow-tie, so I was keen that it never dipped into trying to be too cool. I don’t think he’s someone who dresses to be cool. I think he dresses practically and he just happens to think bow-ties are cool.

Rematerialise on the next page for Matt’s thoughts on Ice Warriors, Neil Gaiman, the 50th anniversary special and which old monster he wants his Doctor to meet…

The Ice Warriors are back in episode three. What did you make of them?

Well, I was very excited, of course. Being a useless… I don’t even know how to pronounce it… a Whohistorian, or a Whostorian… I hadn’t come across them. I mean I knew what they were, but I hadn’t come across them in any detail.

Did you go back to the original Patrick Troughton stories?

Yeah, yeah, of course – which is great, as always with Troughton. And because it was a Troughton monster I was kind of excited, because I really love Troughton. And then Mark [Gatiss, writer of episode three] was really excited about them because I think Mark really loves Troughton as well. I think it’s always great to get the monsters that the fans love and can hark back to from the classic Who series. It’s always nice to see them have a little revamp. It’s like seeing the car in James Bond. When it comes up you go “Ah, there she is – there’s the Aston!” We meet them on a submarine, which is even more exciting for the five year old in you, because they built the submarine, and they just literally flood it and fill it with water. It was great fun to film.

And quite claustrophobic, I imagine…

It’s a full length submarine, so it was really claustrophobic – and bearing in mind there’s a film crew in there, and an Ice Warrior, played by a guy who’s nearly seven foot tall! You couldn’t swing a cat in there, let alone Jenna-Louise Coleman. And it was filled with water up to your knees, sometimes up to your chest. It was great fun, though. It was a right old laugh.

I tell you what I quite like – I like that sort of big, huge robot. I think it was in a Tom Baker episode. He’s kind of fun. I’d like to meet him. There’s a new monster at the end of this season which I think will be a real classic. I’m always quite excited by the new monsters as well. They always tickle me.

You’ve got Neil Gaiman back, writing episode seven.

Yes!

What do you respond to in Neil’s writing?

His head! The idea. It’s always the central idea which is mad and inventive and brilliant, and you go oh, of course, that’s why he did American Gods and Coraline and all this stuff, and there’s a central idea that is undeniably only ever his. And that’s just wonderful. He’s just got a vast, vivid imagination and it fits the notion of the show and it fits the idea of the character in the show. Yeah, I’m thrilled to work with Neil – and you know what, I really like him. He’s a real good guy. He’s a funny dude. He makes me laugh. I see him in America sometimes. I like Neil, he’s cool.

So, the 50 ^th anniversary special, then. Is Steven still locked in a room writing it? Is he still sane?

Yes, he is still sane – well, as sane as the Moff is, generally. I’ve read the first draft. I think the whole of this season leads brilliantly up to what will be the biggest event in the history of the show. I say that with no hesitation, really. He’s on top form and has delivered a thoroughly exciting, epic, vast science fiction script. It’s really exciting. We start shooting that very soon, and there’ll be a lot of surprises coming your way, let me tell you. A lot. It’s one of those scripts that you read and you go “Whoa, here we go… what’s he done? What has he done with it?” You wouldn’t really want anyone else writing it, would you? He’s a proper fan, and, to my mind, one of the greatest science fiction writers around.

How does it feel to be celebrating the big 50th on your watch as the Doctor?

I feel very proud, actually. It’s about looking back and forward at the same time, a bit like the Doctor does. It’s about celebrating everyone that’s been involved with it, all the wonderful actors that have taken part before me, and it’s also about looking forward and saying “What can we do next? Where can we take it?” I feel in a very privileged position, having had people like David and Chris, Tom, Patrick, Jon, William Hartnell… great, great actors behind me. And to be part of a show that’s still going, that has an audience of about 77 million now worldwide. I love this show, and I’m really honoured, actually, without sounding too [luvvie voice] ‘Oh, how important, what an amazing thing, I am the incumbent Doctor, what a privilege, rah!’ I mean it genuinely. It inspires a humility, I suppose, because it’s about all of us who got it here, do you know what I mean? Yes! Fifty years!

Nick Setchfield

Doctor Who returns to BBC One on Saturday 30 March

The post EXCLUSIVE – Matt Smith Talks New Doctor Who Series And 50th Anniversary Special! appeared first on Game News.

To whet your appetite, here’s an exclusive extract from the interview:

Two things united the first run of three nightmarish stories. Firstly, they were all technology-related. Secondly, they were all suffused with dread: the rising sense that something truly terrible was about to happen very soon. This year, the balance isn’t quite the same.

“We’re trying something slightly different,” Brooker explains. “I didn’t want them to all just be bleakly depressing. One of them doesn’t have that much dread in it, and one of them has more dread than you’ve ever seen, so we’ve portioned out the dread in slightly different quantities! Last time there was always a point where someone smashes everything up in a rage, and they don’t all reach that point this time around. A couple of them are slightly more delicate, and then there’s one that’s a right old fist in the face!”

On season one, Brooker co-wrote one episode with his wife, Konnie Huq, while another instalment was scripted by Peep Show ’s Jesse Armstrong. This year, all three are all his own work. The series kicks off with “Be Right Back”. Starring Captain America star Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson ( Harry Potter ’s Bill Weasley), it’s a more tender and personal piece than anything we’ve seen thus far.

”It’s much more of a love story between two people, which is something we haven’t done before,” says Brooker. “The sci-fi idea in it is there’s a service, initially a software service, which will emulate people’s personalities after they’re dead. So it will go through your tweets, emails and Facebook status updates and pretend to be you, for grieving relatives – much like the service mediums offer. Increasingly, in this day and age, there’s people you only communicate with via Twitter or Facebook, and I just thought, ‘Well, what if they were dead? If it’s somebody you’re not meeting in the flesh, what would happen if they continued to apparently exist in the online world?’ So that was the starting point.”

To read the full interview, check out the SFX 232, on sale Wednesday 6 February.

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The post Charlie Brooker Talks Black Mirror Series 2 appeared first on Game News.

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The universally-acclaimed and brilliantly inventive time travel movie Looper , starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the same man (one of them has to assassinate the other) is out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 28 January. SFX managed to grab a chat with the film’s visual effects supervisor, Karen Goluekas, who has a long list of big budget movies to her name ( The Day After Tomorrow , Spider-Man , Green Lantern ) but for whom this low budget project turned out to be a whole new exciting experience for her.

These days when we go and see a science-fiction film and the credits come up, you see of like a million names for special effect. You’re credited on Looper as “Visual Effects Supervisor” but what exactly does that mean? Are you in charge of everybody else in the list?

“Yeah that’s the reason I get the main title credit. It’s funny actually; you’re picking up on an actual bone of contention amongst special effects supervisors that are on the production side of a film as opposed to the guys working on the facility side. Because if you think about it, you only ever have one production designer credited and then a few of art directors, so there’s no question about who was in control. But with visual effects the facility supervisors for each facility also take a ‘Visual Effects Supervisor’ credit, so it gets really confusing. You can have, say, on The Day After Tomorrow 13 of us, and I’d go to some interview and they’d go, ‘Yeah, well how do we know you were in charge?’ and it’s like. ‘Cos I had the main title credit’ – but then loads of other people had the same credit. It’s funny – that’s why some supervisors started to use ‘Visual Effects Designer’ to kinda separate ’em, but then some of the facility supervisors started calling themselves ‘Visual Effects Designers’ as well. So, there you go.”

But you are in the overall driving seat?

“Yeah, yeah, I hired all those other facilities, and I contacted them daily and gave them direction.”

Now Looper is a fascinating film FX wise, because while there are some things that are obviously FX – the flying bikes and the bloke exploding – I get the feeling that the film is probably full of lot of “invisible effects” that we don’t even notice.

“ Yeah I mean definitely all the city stuff. I mean we shot in New Orleans so we grunged up New Orleans. We added lots of buildings, destroyed buildings all in the background, and then you know, added all the signs. Of course for Shanghai we totally futurised that . There were about 400 shots, all told.

And how does that compare with, say, Spider-Man which you worked on in the past?

“It’s funny. Back when I did Godzilla it was 400 shots and that was like considered a huge show. These days you can have 1,500 shots, that’s probably something more like what Green Lantern had. I don’t remember what Spider-Man had – maybe seven or eight hundred? You know so it’s deceiving. I mean even The Day After Tomorrow only had about 400. It felt like a lot more because they were all big shots.

“I’d say with Looper , probably about 100 of the shots were simple comps, and then the rest of them was stuff I really had to hire A-list vendors to achieve. I think for me, that’s the biggest key – even if it’s low budget you still need A-lister vendors to do it. Because Ryan Johnson came into this not a fan of visual effects. In fact he kept telling me that all visual effects look like cartoons. But you know I said, ‘No, it’s just the bad stuff you’re noticing.’ Finally I got really good vendors in, and at the end Ryan was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, not all effects look like cartoons.’ I’m always happy when I can make a convert out of somebody that comes at it at an angle of, ‘It’s all horrible.’”

It’s very slick-looking for a low-budget film

“I got really lucky because like I said, I came into this and I knew how low the budget was. and I had a director who said all visual effects were cartoon-y. The only companies that were coming in that could hit the price were what I would call the B-companies and I was like, ‘This is not going to work!’ I mean, they say, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ to the work, but it doesn’t end up looking photo-real. And I knew I was going to doing the really easy work using vendors in Nepal and Beijing. But… ‘Oh shit! What am I going to do about the hard stuff?’ I mean like the city stuff, the guy with bits of his body disappearing, the highway confrontation and then, of course, the finale sequence.

“And I got super lucky because in like a two-day period both Hydraulx and Scanline called me and they were like, ‘Karen, what the hell, why aren’t you letting us on Looper ?’ and I was like, ‘I can’t afford you guys on this one.’ And they said, ‘Try us, we’ve got some artists on overhead and we want to keep them, so we may as well have them working on some cool stuff instead.’ And they were able to work with us on the prices.

“And then Atomic Fiction – some guys who had worked with me on The Day After Tomorrow – they called me and said, ‘Hey we’re starting a new company, can we come show you our work?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And they came down and they had this amazing portfolio of city extensions and futuristic paintings, and one of the artists had done tons of matte painting work, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what Ryan’s going to want.’ They weren’t approaching it like… you know, some people still want to just paint flat 2D paintings and of course I’m dead against that. It needs to be a combination of 3D buildings, two-and-a-half D camera projections and then 2D for the distance stuff. And after talking to those guys I knew that that’s totally the way they work. They also gave us low prices because they were a new company at the time. So I mean it was really just a matter of luck and timing, because I consider all three of those companies A-listers. I mean just luck and timing really.”

This was your first time in charge of the FX on a low budget movie. Was it more or less fun to work on than a blockbuster?

“It was a fun shoot. The thing that was cool about Ryan was that he knew exactly what he wanted. So what was really nice about that, even thought he was new to visual effects, I would have him come in every day to look at the shots, and he didn’t waiver and go round and round in circles. We’d show him a concept from Atomic Fiction and he’d go, ‘Yeah, I like this part, I don’t like this part, I’d rather see X,’ you know. And he was like that on set, you know. He knew exactly what he wanted to shoot. He didn’t shoot a million iterations ’cos he knew what he wanted. So it was really, it was very nice working with somebody who wasn’t flip-flopping all over the place.”

So how quickly did you convince him not to mistrust FX?

“Not until post. So there were many times when shooting when we were like… for instance when we’re on the highway confrontation between Seth and Joe and you know, there’s the big dust cloud that he shoots up. I was saying, ‘Don’t even waste your time shooting it practical ’cos there’s not going to be continuity amongst shots if there’s wind. But he wasn’t comfortable with that. So we shot it practically with the dust on set, and then also shot a clean plate without dust, and then – of course – we used the clean plate and did the effect digitally. I say ‘of course’ but it’s just, you know… it’s very difficult to control those kinds of things.”

What was the single biggest challenge on this film?

“Well the most difficult shot is the shot when the old guy crashes into the telephone pole and gets out of the car and then his legs disappear because that was a really tough shot and after talking with Hydraulx and going back and forth we decided that we had to digitally replace him from the waist down. So he was all CG from the waist down once he got out of the car. And I remember the look on Ryan’s face when I told him that that’s what we’re going to do – it was just like a look of horror. And I was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s Hydraulx, it’s going to be good.’ I don’t think anyone would ever know that we did that digitally.”

“It came out really well. I mean, I’m always nervous when we’re doing city extensions and future stuff because so much of that stuff looks like really bad video games when you go to the theatre, but again we got lucky because Ryan very early nailed the concepts which gave us a lot of time to really beat it into looking photo-real. And the Atomic guys were just as interested as we were as making it look so people couldn’t tell what we had added or removed. But those can be horribly troublesome shots, I mean, you look at some movies and you’re just taken right out of the movie by bad map paintings.

Is there anything that was planned that at the end of the day just didn’t happen for time or resources reasons?

“No, actually on this one. I mean, we got Ryan everything he wanted, I didn’t walk away feeling like, ‘Ugh I hate that shot,’ and neither did he, and a lot of times you do. It happens, you run out of time and you’re stuck with some real clunkers. No, on this one we were both really happy with the end result. It’s basically everything we asked for from the vendors and everybody was able to deliver. I mean it was just a fun show to work on and everybody was totally collaborative and into it.”

It sometimes feels that you all get better work out of people if they actually love the film that they’re working on. That seems to be what happened here.

“Yeah totally. I mean the interest was working with Ryan Johnson, and of course Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s a big draw. I mean I’m working with him now on his directorial debut – Don Jon’s Addiction – that he’s starring in and doing and he’s just awesome to work with. I’ve got a lot of the same people from Looper , even though I was telling them, ‘Guys, this one has even less money!’ everybody jumped in and said, ‘Hey, you know, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directing a movie, that’s totally cool!’

“So it’s a lot of fun. I mean these are my first indies, and they’re really fun. I mean with Looper , in post we had an assistant editor, me, a producer and a co-ordinator, and Ryan came in once a day and the producer came in maybe once a week to say hi, see how we were doing. Other than that, we felt like four college kids. We had the music cranked up, and all day downloading, giving notes and talking to people around the world. I mean it was a blast!”

When you go to see another film you haven’t worked on – a big special effects film – can you switch off or are you analysing the effects all the time?

“No. You know what? If the effects are good I’m not even really paying attention, I’m just watching the movie. But when they’re bad, oh man, it just ruins the show for me. I’m groaning the whole time, I mean, almost getting angry the effects are so bad, you know. And when stuff is really good… like, I remember being blown away by District 9 and I really thought they deserved to win the Oscar that year. I mean Avatar was amazing and it’s too bad they were up against an Avatar , but I was watching District 9 and the effects were so good that in some senses I was being distracted because I kept staring at it going, ‘Holy shit that doesn’t look CG at all!’ So it can be hard to separate completely. But like when a movie’s good, I don’t even think about it most of the time. If I went and saw Looper I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d just really enjoy it.”

The post Interview: The Special FX of Looper appeared first on Game News.