Faith Without Boundaries

“Where I used to be terrified, I think of those places as huge domes for imagination.”

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“Only flux is possible within the mapspace.”

Rich Weston was born Richard Martin Thompson on the 24^th of September, 1991. I know because I requested him, like a song on a jukebox. At three years old I was already bored and needed someone to hang out with, so my mum and dad obliged me. He basically owes his existence to me. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Despite all that he turned out to be a right cunt to yours truly: the usual formulation that one sibling gets the looks and the other the brains turned out to be true, except as well as looks he also got the talent, charisma, ambition, drive, more Facebook friends and the more interesting mental illnesses. And he ended up with brains, too.

These days, Rich is an actor and independent film director. His latest film, The Young, is his biggest project yet. Since he lives about 180 miles away from me at the moment, we sat down over IM for an hour-long conversation that could have run a lot longer if we hadn’t had our respective vices waiting independently for us.

As such, I’m typing this after ingesting far too much of certain things, but fortunately I edited the interview as early as my third glass of crappy cheap merlot, so it should somewhat accurately reflect what took place. It’s probably a bit headier than my previous interview, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.

Implicate Disorder: I’d like to start off with a question about The Young. What was it about the post-apocalyptic setting that made it a good format for the story you wanted to tell?

Richard Weston: I’ve always been obsessed with the Western, and I’ve often thought the premise of a post-apocalyptic world gives the same freedom. In the landscape, in the atmosphere. That feeling of sparsity.

ID: I got that impression from seeing the film. Does sparsity imply lawlessness, freedom, fear? And if so, do you think this has certain implications for the way human societies are now urban-orientated?

RW: With sparsity comes uncertainty. The further apart things are, both fear and freedom manifest. It’s an infant civilisation still teething and exploring what that space means. What’s different in the cities in the real world is how dense everything is. When you want something, you have to squeeze in and compete. If you come off the beaten path suddenly you’re hit with the truth of it all. I hate city centres.

ID: Was manipulation and implication of space something you consciously strove for? If so, was this a cinematographic concern?

RW: The films that captured me the best were those that explored landscapes, personifying them extensively. The Searchers and The Grapes Of Wrath are two of the best examples. The world depicted in The Young is quite barren, but I wanted to find beauty in the space left behind. I wanted to show people what would be left behind. So when the light came through so vividly, I hoped people would put a colour to it. Or when they’re moving through the forest and over all the deserted fields, people could get lost in it. The greyscale helped in that. So space was definitely something that needed to be manipulated.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)

The Young (Richard Weston, 2011)

ID: What interests me is that both Ford and yourself were raised Catholic. The utilisation of space, landscapes, emptiness, these things seem to lend an almost cathedral-esque quality to even the lighter scenes. Do you think this sort of filmic kenosis, which can also be found in Tarkovsky, has any kind of metaphysical influence, either consciously or subconsciously?

RW: It’s interesting because I remember being very scared in Paddy’s Wigwam in Liverpool for the first time. It was the new millenium and all the primary schools in there were singing the same song ‘Christ Be Our Light‘. I started crying during the song because it got me thinking about all the things I’d do to hurt Jesus accidentally. Where I used to be terrified, I think of those places as huge domes for imagination. I used to follow a set of strict rules and since then I’ve become an atheist. I did slip into verité quite a lot during the process, and a lot of the landscape is haunting. I suppose the complete lack of a creator is a force in itself, really. A sense of wanting. Trying to re-establish my own faith without boundaries.

ID: If The Young can be said to have a cosmology where god is absent, it’s telling that the event, the apocalypse, that might have meant the death of god, is also absent, at least in as much as it’s never explicitly stated. Is the Sears character demiurgic in that sense? Or Cael? Or am I reading too much into it?

RW: The name of the film came from Thatcher’s speech about the youth of today being the future of tomorrow. Because the people in the film are born into such a volatile habitat, there’s a lack of god. I was only just really getting into Blake during the writing of the film and maybe got a little obsessed with the mythology during it. Cael is a little like the anti-Albion, and Sears represents an inherent power. The place is pretty desolate and it’s a time for people to look for messiahs or similar figures to lead them. So for those in the “comfort” of the The Front they have Sears, and those in the wild see Cael. I suppose you could so far as to call the split in power the closest they come to religions. The authority and the lack of it.

ID: There’s a character in Jim Jarmusch’s acid(ish) western, Dead Man (which also has a grayscale aesthetic and is not unknown for its glacial landscape photography) called William Blake. Coincidental to The Young, or…?

RW: I don’t think Dead Man had a direct influence on the film but it certainly made a big impression on me. I wasn’t very happy with my reference to Blake in the latter stages of the film, because I originally set out to make it more of a background component. I think Dead Man was more involved in the imagery of Blake as opposed to something like the Four Zoas. Which I was more inclined towards.

ID: I suspected that might have been the case. Aside from Ford and Blake, what other influences were there on The Young and on your work in general? From film or literature, I mean.

RW: Tarkovsky is a huge influence, purely because it doesn’t write any rules but made some entirely new ones. I don’t mean by throwing out all film theory and all the foundations of how to make a scene, but the elaboration in the shots and their transitions. Mirror was a stream of consciousness. Because I played Cael and directed the film, a lot of the shots came from Cael’s view on the world. I think this is one of the reasons the character would be more suited to the title ‘the lead’ from the end product. El Topo is similar in that way, with Jodorowsky both master and commander. In terms of story and precedent, Peckinpah was hugely influential. The story of The Young is so similar to that of The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett. So quite a mixed bunch for different reasons.

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

The Young (Richard Weston, 2011)

ID: You’re also an actor, of course. What sort of practical theories have you gravitated towards, and what would you recommend in terms of reading material for younger actors starting out right now?

RW: I’ve gravitated towards a method, certainly. I find it very helpful to create improvisations based on memories of the characters both implicit and explicit in the script. I find this helps to move towards a character as opposed to establishing one straight away. Too often people set out how to play their character so early on, but I really do believe you never have the full story with someone unless you find the intricacies.

ID: More of an evolution than a set template?

RW: More of an evolution, yes. I think it is very important to make acting more practical than studied, so you’re not stuck in the actor’s mind for too long. But reading material I’d suggest is: “The Feeling Of What Happens” by Damasio for self study, and then anything from Jean Benedetti to start looking into dramatic theory. Training is almost certainly the best option, I think.

ID: One last question before we wrap up: what music have you been listening to lately?

RW: Lately I’ve been listening to Patti Smith, Cash and Ella Fitzgerald

ID: Richard Weston, thank you very much for your time.

RW: Cheers.

The Young is available to download here.

Bayonets at Dawn

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There’s still half an hour before I’m due to interview thriller writer Steven Hildreth, Jr., meaning that it’s half past one in the afternoon and I’m sitting on my bed with a frankly enormous jar of olives I picked up in Lidl for a quid. Olives are one of those things I fucking hate, like mushrooms or arguments on message boards, until I have one and can’t stop, until the point at which I can’t really say I hate them any more. In fact, I pretty much love them.

I’m like that with thrillers. There’s some deeply unpleasant aristocrat enfolded in a lithium prison somewhere in my brain that makes me want to sneer at all genre literature, and an equally disgusting Guardian-reader in the next cell muttering about the responsibility and potential consequences of any fiction that has an MI6 or CIA agent as its protagonist. But fuck it, I don’t care. I love Kingsley Amis, reactionary pulp writer that he could at times be. I adore Graham Greene, especially when he most resembled an adolescently agnostic Catholic. I grew up reading Ian Fleming, racist and rape-fantasist, and if anyone ever asked me to write a Bond script my cremaster gland would probably explode. Len Deighton, Joe R. Lansdale, James Ellroy, John le Carré… they’ll all do nicely, thanks.

What I can’t stand are the more recent spate of post-9/11 covert action novels that sup like mangy puppies at Tom Clancy’s shrivelled tits, with Glenn Beck acting as their Hitler (mental-) Youth version of Oprah. Vince Flynn, Brad Meltzer, Brad Thor (could you get a more white supremacist name than that, incidentally? I read about half of one of his books last year, and it was basically Storm Saxon for MMA hillbillies); all of them inevitably either involving the United States military-industrial complex as the hero or filthy Middle Easterners as the villain, or both.

So I approached The First Bayonet, Steven Hildreth’s spy novella set in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, with some trepidation. Hildreth and I have been banging heads over politics on a biweekly basis for the best part of a decade now. (And I know he reads Clancy and Flynn and Thor. I know it because I followed him onto Thor’s official Facebook fanpage and trolled it mercilessly). In addition, there’s always that risk when looking at a friend’s work that you become too critical, either out of overreaching for objectivity or simple jealousy.

But, damn it, The First Bayonet was good. And, as such, I swallowed whatever Cain-and-Abel complex I might have had and gave it a good review.

Could I maintain this positive air in the subsequent interview? Not wholly – I wanted to cover new ground, and there’s no way to do that by dick-sucking for sixty minutes. That said, there’s no point in trying to rile Hildreth: I’ve called him every name under the sun and some that aren’t, and he’s shrugged it off and continued to debate in a firm but respectful manner.

So, mouth crammed full of salty oleacean horribleness, I picked up my laptop and told myself to strike a fair balance (it was, after all, 6am for him, the morning before a PT test). But this isn’t easy when you only have an hour; for example, there was one question I had to apologise for afterwards.

Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it.

Implicate Disorder: Your novella, The First Bayonet, was e-published last year. What was it about mainstream publishing that caused you to take this route instead? Was there something inherent in the work that made it more suitable?

Steven Hildreth, Jr.: Well, I don’t think it was the content, in and of itself, that caused me to take the self-publishing route, though I’ve known a couple of authors who have done that for exactly that reason. Really, what it is is that the publishing industry has become something of a good old boy network. For ordinary people trying to break into the writing game, it’s an enormous catch-22: you can’t be published mainstream unless you’ve been published mainstream before. If you know somebody who knows somebody, then the doors open, but most people—myself included—don’t know those people. So, my options really became either to attempt to break mainstream and repeat the same action with hopes for a different result, or jump in on self-publishing.

ID: Did you attempt to find an industry publisher or agent, or opt for the e-pub route from the beginning?

SH: I opted for e-publishing from the onset. I’ve witnessed colleagues of mine trying to break mainstream and saw the struggle they had to go through to market their work. I was not looking to go through the same process. I circumvented that and figured I would find a way to make up for the lack of advertising later.

ID: Yeah, the disadvantages of this approach I assume speak for themselves – having to self-edit, self-promote and so forth. On the other hand, has there been anything about self-publishing you’ve found particularly advantageous, that wouldn’t be the case if you’d sought a more traditional route?

SH: It has afforded complete autonomy in just about everything—my pricing, my cover, my marketing scheme, and so on. That does come as a double-edged blade, as you mentioned, but it also serves as a hell of a learning experience, taking control of all aspects of the writing and publishing process. Also, it kept me from wasting time looking for a publisher, which allowed me to roll right onto other projects.

ID: We’ve spoken before about post-scarcity economics and I’ve been reading with some interest about algamics recently – as I understand them, newer, generally online economies that are roughly analogous with potlatch systems. Once you become more established, have you given any thought to going down the path of several e-publishers: getting a Creative Commons licence and distributing any of your work for free, as a way of generating interest in your name?

SH: I have considered that with the The First Bayonet, as well as some other novellas I have planned…I’ve considered selling them electronically for a period of time, then after that initial time period, releasing them under a Creative Commons License. I think it’s a sound strategy. Furthermore, if I was established enough to where I could live solely off of my writing, I would consider putting out novellas for free from the onset.

ID: I’d like to turn more in the direction of content, if I may. Now, your novella, The First Bayonet, concerns CIA action within Egypt and was written in light of the Arab Spring. In my view, your work differs from several writers in the contemporary, post-9/11 covert thriller field in that it doesn’t present a simplistic narrative of good, represented by the United States, versus evil, represented by Islamist terrorism. What do you see as the US’s future role in the Middle East, and was this a theme you wanted to play with in the book?

SH: I think the role of the United States in the Middle East will probably end up becoming one of attempting to mend fences and do business. While foreign policy mistakes on the scale of the Cold War have been avoided, there still has been plenty of mistakes made, by both administrations in the war, that will haunt the region for years to come. As far as The First Bayonet goes, I think the best way to touch on that theme would be the actions of the US government within. Without giving spoilers, the protagonist, Ben Williams, is left out in the cold due to misguided political agendas and questionable allegiances.

ID: I got that impression – it was as if it almost didn’t matter what Williams did, because the cunts upstairs would find a way to undo it. Was it difficult to avoid a nihilistic, Sisyphean tone with the novella, that good men are essentially banging their head against a brick wall when larger diplomatic forces get involved?

SH: I actually think that after a fashion, that is basically where Williams is at. That comes up during a conversation between Williams and his principal, Zaina Anwar. To paraphrase, they mention his participation in covert operations in El Salvador back in the 1980s, and she asks him why he continues to work for the government if he knows there will be people within it that will abuse their power and use the soldiers at their command as pawns in a crooked power game. What keeps Williams going is the men he commands. He wants to insulate them from the shenanigans on Capitol Hill and teach them to have a moral compass that is pure and unable to be diluted by war or by orders from higher.

ID: Williams is an agent and you were a soldier, but to what extent do you think this atmosphere was informed by your infantry experiences in Iraq?

SH: I would have to say my experiences in Iraq not so much pushed me in the direction of portraying Williams as a man stuck between what he feels is his duty and the marching orders from a bumbling, inept government apparatus, but more accurately gave me what I needed to provide the necessary gravity to that portrayal. And even despite his job title, at heart, Williams is very much a grunt and an operator, so when I write his reactions to what’s going on, I have my own experiences as an infantryman and the experiences of others who served in the infantry or in SOF to draw upon.

ID: Who are your literary influences? Do you generally tend to keep to the thriller genre?

SH: I do, mostly, though recently I have ventured into non-fiction in an attempt to expand my understanding of the special operations community. I’d have to say that my major influences are Doug Wojtowicz, who is a ghost writer for the Mack Bolan pulp action series and the man who taught me how to write; Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, David Mamet, and Andrew Britton, who was a thriller author starting to break it big before his tragic death at the age of twenty-seven. All of these authors have shown me a facet of writing that I incorporate into my work.

I should mention, though, that I have been trying to find the time to get into hardboiled detective fiction…that’s something I would like to try my hand at someday!

ID: Do you feel, as a soldier, a reader, and a writer, betrayed by the image of the United States that finds its apotheosis in the paperback thriller industry, or in contemporary TV or film that deals with foreign policy and armed combat?

SH: Well, I cannot speak as a soldier, and as a quick legal CYA, none of my views reflect the views of the US Army, past or present. Having said that—I think it is and it isn’t a little troubling at the same time. It is in that it suggests a disconnect in Washington between reality and fiction. However, there was a project initiated after 9/11 where the government contacted thriller writers and asked them to brainstorm possible scenarios where there might be terrorist attacks, done in coordination with terrorism experts. This kind of thing, I would not be opposed to, as it brings an outsider’s perspective to things and allows new ideas to be introduced and vetted by the experts. So, in that aspect, it can be a good thing. It all depends on how much the politicians want to run with it. When they model the National Counterterrorism Center off of 24′s CTU and Homeland Security calls a law enforcement program “Project Chloe,” then you know it just might be time for a temperature check.

ID: One last question before we wrap up. How is your current novel progressing, and will it pick up on any of the themes begun in The First Bayonet?

SH: The novel I’m currently working on is actually an unrelated prequel, and it focuses less on relevant politics. It is a LOT more personal for Williams than The First Bayonet. I think some might see slight similarity in themes, but that’s all I can say without giving away what the plot is. But it’s coming along, if not as fast as I would like, and hopefully, it’ll get done soon. This will actually be my first print novel, so the problems some have had with e-publishing will be circumvented.

ID: Steven Hildreth, Jr., thank you very much for your time.

SH: Thank you for having me…next time, let’s not wait eight or nine years between interviews, yeah?

 

The First Bayonet is available now from Barnes & Noble and Lulu.com.