Between the Dust and the Devil: An Interview with Richard Stanley

Abstract

In an interview, Richard Stanley, Cult filmmaker, talked about the production of Hardware. He said like most things in life it came about more or less accidentally. He'd been rattling about the lower depths of the biz for a couple of years and womped up the first Hardware draft in a fit of frustration after getting one thank you but no thank you letter too many. The script came together inside of a week during which time he remembers playing Iron Maiden's Flash of the Blade so many times and at such heroic volume his then girlfriend upped and walked on him. The Nephilim promos certainly helped me make the transition to the professional arena and crystallized what was to become the 'look' of the film. Running into Carl McCoy and his gang at that stage in our mutual careers was one of those 'meeting of minds' things that almost never happens in socalled 'real' life.

Cult filmmaker Richard Stanley's acclaimed sci-fi horror debut Hardware (1990) has recently been released as a special edition DVD by Optimum Home Entertainment: set in a post apocalyptic future, a nomadic Zone Tripper (Carl McCoy) finds the remains of a cyborg. Selling it for scrap, it comes into the hands of Mo Baxter (Dylan McDermott) who purchases it as a gift for his sculptress girlfriend, Jill (Stacey Travis). Unbeknown to them is that the cyborg - a prototype named Mark 13 -is a combat droid that is capable of reconstructing itself through the appropriation of any metal object and has one sole purpose, to kill. Inadvertently activating the cyborg, Mark 13 rebuilds itself and begins its violent assault upon Mo and Jill.

Prior to this cinematic debut, Stanley had directed a number of music videos for Fields of the Nephilim, a band fronted by McCoy that emerged with a strong following in the mid Eighties trend of Goth music. In these short films ' Stanley 's preoccupations with the image of The Man with No Name, strong women and weak men, myths, magic and rituals as well as the symbolic potential of barren, seemingly post-nuclear landscapes began to manifest themselves. These traits would find their place in Hardware and, in more explicit terms, in his second feature Dust Devil (1990). James Rose talks to Richard Stanley about these recurrent elements, exploring his early works alongside his two feature films and his more recent forays into documentary filmmaking.

Rose. How did the production of Hardware come about?

Stanley. Like most things in life it came about more or less accidentally. I'd been rattling about the lower depths of the biz for a couple of years and womped up the first Hardware draft in a fit of frustration after getting one thank you but no thank you letter too many. The script came together inside of a week during which time I remember playing Iron Maiden's Flash of the Blade so many times and at such heroic volume my then girlfriend upped and walked on me. I gave a copy of the draft to my friend, the late Barney Jeffrey (son of Peter Jeffrey who played Inspector Trout in The Abominable Dr. Phibes) who passed it on to his aspiring producer buddy Paul Trijbits who in turn handed it [to] his mate Trix (Trix Worrell the principal writer on the hit TV sitcom Desmonds) who apparently read part of it out loud in a nightclub to young Palace Films impresario Steve Woolley who happened to be on the lookout for low budget product akin to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead the film that had launched Palace's video arm back in the mid-eighties. Steve asked to see a copy and a few days later approached Paul Trijbits to try and option the material. This presented the young producer with certain problems. In order to sell the underlying rights he had to own them first which meant finding me. By now over a year had elapsed since penning the initial draft and despairing of making a go of being a writer director hyphenate I had not only given up on the film industry but western civilization in toto, dropping out to join a fundamentalist Afghan guerilla party under General Younis Khalis and throwing in my lot with the people of Kafiristan in their struggle against the Russians. Trix eventually managed to track me down to a Saudi Arabian Red Crescent hospital in Frontier Province then filling up with survivors from the siege of Jallalabad. At first I flatly didn't believe him and treated his claims with derision but after a few twists and turns relating to the fact that I had lost my passport and accordingly my identity during the most recent battle I came round to his point of view, allowing myself to be repatriated to Britain where I picked up the reigns and went straight into preproduction.

Rose. Prior to making Hardware you worked with Fields of the Nephilim on their promotional videos. Was this a valuable experience in terms of developing your filmmaking practice?

Stanley. The Nephilim promos certainly helped me make the transition to the professional arena and crystallized what was to become the 'look' of the film. Running into Carl McCoy and his gang at that stage in our mutual careers was one of those 'meeting of minds' things that almost never happens in so-called 'real' life. We were too young to realize how fortuitous it was at the time. We assumed everyone was just as obsessed as we were with Italian horror movies, 'spaghetti' westerns, radiation poisoning, shamanism and other esotérica and got on with it.

Rose. Is there a connection between the Preacher Man character personified by Carl McCoy in the Nephilim promos and the Zone Tripper character, also played by McCoy, who first obtains Mark 13's skull in Hardware ?

Stanley. They're both the same guy. No question. The archetypal Man with No Name reconfigured as false prophet or prairie Antichrist, the devil in Durango originals, an avatar of Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos in Cuban heels. He's probably related to the Biblical Asmodeus, the daemonic teacher of all occult knowledge who was cast out into the wasteland by King Solomon or some such. A traveling man. One who moves. We certainly didn't invent him. We simply tried to redefine him. You can find traces of the dude in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Stephen King's The Stand and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked this Way Comes and songs from Riders on the Storm through Bob Dylan's Man in the Long Black Coat and Nick Cave's Red Right Hand which itself seems to have been at least partly inspired by Dust Devil. I used to dream of him often back then, always with a storm following not far behind, nor was I the only one to have those sort of dreams but at the very least I think you can safely say we did our bit to help introduce long black coats to the nascent Goth scene.

Rose. Your films and documentaries tend to feature strong women - Jill in Hardware, Wendy in Dust Devil, Edelle in The White Darkness. There is also the female cowboy who reveals herself near the close of The Preacher Man promo. Why is this character prevalent in your work?

Stanley. My parents separated when I was four years old and I was raised by my mother and two older sisters. Accordingly women tend to dominate my life and work whereas guys tend to come off as schmucks and ne'er do wells. On a wider level you could say its representative of my undying faith in the restorative power of the Goddess over patriarchal order and the sort of repressive dogma espoused by the Holy Roman Church and the other monotheisms. The Goddess rules.

Rose. Can you tell us a little about your intentions for Jill's role in Hardware.

Stanley. Jill descends from a long line of embattled heroines, a combination of the 'last girl' of the slasher era and the lead character from a Super 8 movie I started shooting when I was fifteen. I saw her as a sort of 'everywoman' - hence her name which is drawn from Jill's America - the main theme on Morricone's Once Upon A Time In The West album - outsider artist, lover, big sister, 21st century cyber warrior and post technological cave girl all rolled into one. She was initially intended not only as the heroine of Hardware but as a continuing character in her own right.

Rose. Is there a specific reason why Jill is isolated in her room? She has seemingly barricaded herself inside her apartment with her only contact with the outside world through the television set and high-level security equipment.

Stanley . Considering the state of the world in Hardware it's hardly surprising Jill's turned into a bit of a techno hermit. The fact that she is more or less permanently stoned is another sign of her disengagement from society. None of the characters in Hardware ever question the status quo or seek to rebel against their circumstances, preferring to hide behind their sunglasses or spend most of their time off-world like Jill's neighbour Shades. In expressing her anxieties through her art Jill has customized her apartment to the point that it has actually become more nightmarish than the outside world. She's so unplugged that she initially mistakes the Mark 13 drone soldier for a TV show and reaches for her remote control to try and change channels when it attacks her. The events that follow provide the necessary catharsis that enables her to break out of her cocoon and take control of her destiny. This is signposted in the scene where the blazing 'droid plunges through her picture window, leaving a gaping hole in the wall and Jill is struck not by the violence of the act but by the beauty of the skyline revealed beyond. I hope to be able to return to her story some day but in the meantime if you want to know what happened next the unproduced sequel screenplay is available for free download from the unofficial fan site Between Death and the Devil.(\)

Rose. In respect of the above questions, the men in your films are often positioned as strong but ultimately unable to save the women from the narrative's threat - Mo is unable to save Jill, so she has to be resourceful and overcome Mark 13 by herself. Is there any particular reason for this?

Stanley. With all due respect to Jill and Mo the narrative threat in Hardware - the aforementioned Mark 13 cyborg - is defeated accidentally. Jill simply grabs hold of the shower faucet to try and get back on her feet. She has no idea what will happen next. This reflects not so much on gender politics as on my view that most things in life tend to happen by accident rather than design. On a symbolic level you might say the technological golem is laid low by wood and water, by the chaotic forces of good of Mother Nature.

Rose. Mark 13 is an interesting creation. Was it intended to be read in religious terms? I am referring here to its name as a biblical reference and its ability to resurrect itself. These qualities are potentially compounded in the robot's pentagram circuitry and its BAAL code.

Stanley. Absolutely. The parallel between Mark 13's serial number and the relevant Biblical chapter and verse was more or less a happy 'coincidence' at the time but the apocalyptic analogies run deep. Bear in mind that the film is not only set on Christmas Eve but that Mo and Jill just happen to be a childless couple with procreation issues - a subtext given greater emphasis in the deleted scenes included on the current DVD release. Other sequences draw parallels with the Tibetan Destroyer God and the multi-armed Goddess Kali of Hindu mythology, another avatar of Chaos - an idea we tossed around earlier.

Rose. Why was it decided to paint Mark 13's skull with a Stars and Stripes?

Stanley . Again this came about more or less by accident. In the script Jill painted night on one side of its face and day on the other. When it came to doing the final paintjob on the 'droid itself the stylized rays of the sun met the night sky to become the stars and bars. The crescent moon on the one side and the rising sun on the other recall militant Islam and Imperial Japan. I guess it's subconsciously getting at the same thing as the killer cowboy in Dust Devil - that the United States of America is probably going to end up killing us all. Not only that but they're gonna con us into not only going along with it but actively enjoying the experience. The development of drone soldiers was, I suppose, always inevitable and with the Pentagon's Joint Robotics Masterplan currently intending to replace up to a quarter of America's ground forces with fully 'battlefield responsive' war 'droids by 2020 the issue remains as much of a clear and present danger as it did in the early nineties. It would seem to me that the day of the 'droid is at hand and believe me, I ain't smilin' about it!

Rose. Am I right in saying that the documentary Voice of the Moon was made between Hardware and Dust Devil! How did this opportunity come about?

Stanley. Actually the footage was shot before Hardware but I didn't have the time or money to post produce Voice of the Moon until the feature was done and dusted. As ever the circumstances of its shooting came about by chance. Few people are aware of the fact that Islam only arrived in the Hindu Kush in 1910 when the indigenous pagan 'kafirs' were either converted by Abdur Rahman or put to the sword. Accordingly I was very interested in the mountainous heartland of Kafiristan where without written language or electrification news travels slowly and the myths, codes and customs of the past still prevail. I thought I might be happy in a world like that and being a keen reader of Robert E. Howard and suchlike wanted to try it on for myself. The chance came at the end of a particularly thankless music video shoot. I have a 'first on and last off policy as director and accordingly stayed to help pack up the vans. One of the drivers was bitching about the gears on the truck being as stiff as the shift on a BTR 60 which I knew to be a lightweight aluminum troop transporter deployed in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I enquired as to how my companion came to have driven one and swiftly learned he was a former jihadi, washed up in London and trying to work his way back to the war where he felt he belonged. I offered to pony up for his ticket, provided he took me along for the ride.

Rose. What were your experiences during the making of Moon!

Stanley. We crossed into Afghanistan with a UN flour convoy and having ingratiated ourselves to a branch of Hezbi Island under the command of General Younis 'Redbeard' Khalis returned with his guerillas on a second tour during which time I succeeded in penetrating some of those blank spots on the map that had first caught my eye back in London. Little white spaces accessible only by horse or donkey that were simply labeled 'relief data incomplete'. What I saw and experienced there can't be readily reduced to words or ably encapsulated within the scope of this interview. It was a world at once pre-technological and post-apocalyptic, a medieval feudal society where magic was commonplace and you could still buy boiled sweets, hashish, tracer rounds, chick peas, gasoline and plastic explosives under one roof at your local store. The outside world, the so-called 'real' world, exists only in stubborn shades of grey but at that altitude the colours really do seem brighter and the sunlight, unfiltered by the haze of smog that permeates the west, falls more sharply on the ochre walls and Saracen towers. The tastes, the grapes cooled in snowmelt, the green tea flavoured with cardamoms, seem more vivid even at a distance, the odours more pungent but at the end of the day how can I ever really tell you about the grumble and thunder of tanks, the contrail of a rocket or the smell of women ? It's twenty years later and I'm still trying to figure out how it felt to tum and see the provincial capital burning behind me or the light going out of a man's eyes as I rummaged about in his guts trying to hold him together. Experiences like that are so stupidly far off the scale it's like undergoing some sort of hysterical pregnancy. Your soul gets stretched so far out of shape that when the rest of the world shrinks back to normal you find you're left with the psychic equivalent of stretch marks. 'Survivor guilt'. 'Post-traumatic stress disorder'. Call it what you may. I know I was happy back then. What else can I say? That my heart and soul belong in the dark ages? I got more involved than I had initially intended and saw action in Kuz Kunar and later during the onset of the civil war that would eventually bring the Taliban to power but at least we helped defeat the Russians - which seemed like a big deal at the time, what with all that fuss and bother about the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall came down a few months later it felt good to know we had somehow been a part of it. One of my compadres from the siege of Jallalabad, Abu Zarqawi who later became the self-proclaimed 'head of al Qaida' in Iraq once told a journalist that he often wished he could have died in that battle because his soul would have "made it to heaven faster". The funny thing is I think I know what he means.

Rose. Do you consider your documentaries and genre films to be separate or both as part of a unified whole?

Stanley. Trying to separate fact from fiction is like trying to separate dream from reality or light from shadow. It simply can't be done. The one is the flip side of the other, the shadow side. All three documentaries ( Voice of the Moon, The White Darkness and The Secret Glory) incorporate mythological and folkloric material as well as the occasional outright lie whereas both dramatic features contain grains of truth. I took care to include images of real death in both Hardware and Dust Devil as a deliberate counterpoint to the 'splatstick' gore effects which tend to be played for laughs. On the whole the documentaries you could say, the three principal documentaries serve as rough sketches for epic feature films that could never be made, at least never sanely commissioned or distributed.

Rose. In relation to the above question, I am suggesting this because you have said in interview that there is no Good and Evil only Spirit and Matter. Is this a critical standpoint that informs all of your genre and documentary work? I am thinking here, in particular, of Dust Devil and The White Darkness, and I am curious to know if this opposition is evident in Hardware.

Stanley. Like I said, I've always been a medievalist at heart. It's no secret that I feel considerable empathy for the 'Cathars1 - the so-called 'heretics' who were largely exterminated by [the] Roman Church in the 13th century. Life back then was pretty nasty, brutish and short so it figures that folk needed to find some way of explaining it to themselves. Infinite goodness is incapable of creating evil hence as there is evil in the world it follows that this world cannot be the creation of some all wise all loving Christian God, at least not as he, she or it intended it. The creator of this paradigm either doesn't exist or is insane and does not necessarily love us nor mean the best for us. Although this force apparently has the power to torture our physical bodies, kill us or bum us to ashes, it has no power over our immortal souls, which according [to] the 'Cathars' were created by the true, good God and are eternal. Described in these terms life can be seen as a constant friction between our spiritual needs and the base, animal desires of the bodies we inhabit. As the man so succinctly puts it in Dust Devil - "there is no good or evil, only spirit and matter, only movement towards the light or away from it".

The Mark 13 cyborg in Hardware is in fact on a very weird spiritual journey all of its own. Being a 'borg' to begin with it follows that its wetware (living, artificially cultured brain tissue) imbues it with something perilously close to a soul, a tiny splinter of fallen light that blindly seeks redemption, imprisoned, as it is in its steel carapace, in the dense vibration of heavy metal. Lulfilling its primary function gives the drone soldier a primitive sense of fulfillment, a li'l endorphin rush deep within its biomechanical matrix but like a child or a clinical psychopath it has no conception of conventional morality. It simply follows its programming which compels it to hunt down and exterminate as many human-shaped heat blips as it can. Nonetheless, in its murderous way our cyber-pilgrim constantly seeks the light and hence it too can be redeemed. As Goethe puts it: "He who strives constantly upwards - him can we save!" In the end the drone finds inadvertent deliverance when it fatally mistakes the shower head for God - a seemingly infinite source of radiant energy - the nebulous image that tops and tails the film.

Rose. The desert, as a mythic and arcane space, features heavily in your work - why is this?

Stanley. It would seem what magic remains in our world tends to linger in those places where humans fear to tread, spaces that exist outside of our definition of 'consensus' reality. On the one hand the open desert provides a convenient metaphor for the inner moral and spiritual wasteland my characters tend to find themselves adrift in while at the same time it offers an ideal empty stage, a blank canvas that demands action or completion of a sort. On a practical level wastelands are a helluva lot cheaper and easier to work with than trying to pony up for a soundstage at Pinewood or work around the traffic in central London. I prefer to stay at as great a distance from the backers, agents and accompanying industry politics as humanly possible. I've never been particularly wild about human beings and, as Lawrence of Arabia puts it, the desert's 'clean'.

Rose. There also seems to be a great interest in cultural myths and magic in your work?

Stanley. That comes, no doubt, from being born and raised in Mother Africa. My own mother, Penny Miller, was an artist, an anthropologist and something of a proto-feminist although I was too young to recognize a political dimension to her work at the time. Her magnum opus was a colossal tome entitled Myths and Legends of Southern Africa, which, though long since out of print is still recognized as something of a classic in its field. Accordingly I did most of my growing up surrounded by storytellers, traditional healers and sangomas - what western folk refer to as 'witch doctors'. As a child it never occurred to me that there was any other way of explaining the world and as a young adult it came as something of a shock to realize how little currency magic and mythology had for my peers. Accordingly I found myself drawn towards the genre from an early age and the sort of faerytale imagery and frozen archetypes all too readily dismissed as 'cliches' by the wider critical community. If there's one theme I return to again and again it's the notion that mythology remains an active process in our present rather than being safely confined to the distant, immutable past. The myths of the future are being forged today, as we speak, and like it or not, we are all a part of that process.

Rose. Westerns clearly have a big influence on you. What do you take from them as a filmmaker?

Stanley . Westerns are amongst the most purely mythic of genres with their seemingly schematic plotlines serving as an active interrogation of exactly the sort of 'frozen archetypes' we discussed earlier. Besides they're good fun to watch - at least they used to be. A lot comes down, of course, to the sort of material I was exposed to as a child. Television didn't exist on the sub-continent in those days so my initial exposure to the medium came in the form of double bills at the Drive In or Saturday matinees at the local fleapit where 'spaghettis' were standard fare. They not only gave me a handle on the language of cinema and a way of dealing with the rugged, essentially inhuman landscapes that surrounded me but went a long way towards helping me form a nascent sense of ethics. I certainly didn't grow up according to the moral code handed down to me from my teachers or the corrupt apartheid era government but tried instead to live up to the example set by characters like Cheyenne in Once Upon a Time in the West or Mr. Judd in Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece Ride the High Country which remains one of my favourite fdms of all time. Most of my classmates matured into staid right wingers but Westerns, 70's horror comics and a penchant for smoking dope in the stalls made me into a long-haired, camera-toting liberal. In short they made me into what I am today...

Rose. Am I right in saying that Dust Devil started as a student fdm? How, if at all, did this screenplay/film differ from the released version?

Stanley. Dust Devil was conceived as the simplest story I could possibly put together under the circumstances, revolving around a man, a woman and a Volkswagen astray amidst the overwhelming vastness of the African landscape which of course came free of charge to us locals - sort of the equivalent of shooting a fdm in your own backyard. The first draft was vaguely inspired by a string of unexplained murders that were ongoing at the time and drew heavily on the sort of Western iconography I mentioned earlier. It was initially intended as a low budget feature and my cohorts and I succeeded in committing a good 45 minutes or so to Super 16mm before shooting broke down due to lack of funds and myself and the cameraman's forced conscription into the South African Defense Force and the then current Angolan Bush War. The saga of Wendy and the Walking Dude remained much the same, albeit somewhat streamlined by the modest budget - boy meets girl, boy kills girl and relates the whole story in flashback to an old man he meets between trains on a deserted railway siding - essentially the first take on Zake Mokae's Ben Mukurob character - conceived initially as an ageing linesman rather than the more conventional world-weary cop that he became in subsequent drafts. Ben hears the dude out before killing him with a fire axe, revealing himself in the process to be just as murderous as his unwitting prey. To some extent it's a stronger story than the one that eventually made it to the screen, albeit not a particularly 'commercial1 one.

Rose. Your commentary on the Subversive Cinema DVD release of Dust Devil suggests a number of biographical elements in your films - are there any instances of this in Hardware ?

Stanley. The first draft was penned in a squat in South London and reflects the kind of late eighties, post-punk industrial culture I was imbued in at the time. [The character of] Shades is an amalgam of myself and one of my friends, Anton Beebe (grandson of Flash Gordon director Ford Beebe) who first essayed the role on Super 8. Of course the fact that my first girlfriend was a scrap metal sculptress who had a penchant for setting her own work on fire might have had something to do with it and having a couple of wars under my belt by then didn't exactly hurt. Good for the work, they say. More than anything else Hardware relates to our fears of the future and a world we were terrified we'd end up living in unless folk got off their asses and did something about it. Sadly the future seems just as dark now as it did then, only more so! Some things never really seem to change...

Rose. Your experiences on The Island of Doctor Morecm are well-documented. What was your intention and vision for this film as it seems that this may well be one of the lost great films of the genre.

Stanley . You could say that the good doctor is one of the great, lost heroes of the genre, a seminal figure on a par with Dr. Frankenstein and the grand-daddy of every mad scientist working alone on an isolated tropical island from Boris and Bela to Jurassic Park and beyond but sadly, like Dr. Fu Manchu or Dr. Mabuse, Moreau's controversial and ground-breaking work has been allowed to slide into relative obscurity in recent years, largely as a result of the novel's failure to make an effective transition to the screen. The AIP version with Michael York and Burt Lancaster was one of the first flicks I can recall that made me so angry even as a child that I wanted my money back and probably planted the seed in my mind that I could make a better fist of it than Don fuckin' Taylor. Sadly events were to prove me wrong and the final cut turned in by New Line proved to be even more of a travesty than what had gone before, a total waste of time, talent and opportunity. Although my name is prominently flagged on the opening credits not one line or beat of my original screenplay survives to inform the miasma that follows. That initial, discarded shooting script has been widely posted over the internet in samizdat form, allowing the casual reader to appraise the damage for themselves.(2)

The screenplay was co-authored with Michael Herr (.Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket) and Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) and was one of the finest pieces of material to have ever passed through my hands. Given the chance I'd frankly still like to take a shot at it, although replacing Mr. Brando and Nelson de la Rosa, who are sadly no longer with us, wouldn't exactly be a pushover. Needless to say my initial conception hewed closely to the Wells' original, updating the events to the near future and the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange while retaining the novel's dramatic structure and more importantly remaining faithful to its overall tone and subtext. The principal difference between men and animals boils down to digits, opposable thumbs and in the case of the major primates - the simple matter of a larynx - a trifling difference when it comes to the miracles of biomechanics and the infinite plasticity of the living form. One of the cardinal errors in all three previous adaptations was to portray Moreau's 'beast folk' as lumbering monsters rather than humanized animals imbued with all the conflicting emotions, humour and pathos that implies. I mean imagine what would happen if your dog or your cat could not only address you in Queen's English but hold its own in conversation? It would open up a Pandora's box of possibilities. Now take on board the fact that given the current state of genetic engineering, such wonders and horrors are only a few years away. Already we have Day-Glo cats and mice and dogs cloned back from the grave. Moreau's island and all the challenges it presents to our cosy definition of'humanity' is not so far away as we might wish to think.

Rose. You recently co-wrote The Abandoned with Nacho Cerdà and Karim Hussain. This is a high quality piece of writing and filmmaking - how did this project come about?

Stanley. Los Abandonados started life as an original screenplay by Karim entitled 'The Bleeding Compass'. I like to think I might have been a vague influence on its inception having turned Karim on to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky to begin with but I guess that's another story. The first draft was set in French Quebec but when Nacho picked up the project he decided to move the action to Russia. He produced a second Spanish language draft entitled 'Blood Line' which was set up to shoot in Bulgaria starring a Czech leading man, Karel Rodin, and a British actress, Anastasia Hille, playing the ostensible American lead. Then it began to rain, the bridge washed away making it impossible to film the ending as written and budgetary and scheduling issues lead to a slew of other scenes going astray. So they dialed me in. I flew into Sophia approximately three weeks into production with a brief to try and make sense of what they had and essentially reshape the beast as we went along. It was grueling work including over a month of ADR back in Barcelona but from what you say the mission seems to have been a qualified success. My most effective contribution probably concerns the character of the off-screen daughter and the framing device that along with the new title effectively gives the whole film a new reason d'etre. My favourite memory was helping to train up those razorback hogs to attack human beings. The hogs were kept in a bam out in the woods and had been starved for a while to make 'em mean. We used to drive up there in the late afternoon in a convoy of four-wheeled-drive jeeps and feed 'em dummies stuffed with meat. All those burly east block crew guys standing about in their mirror shades made me feel like I'd strayed into an out-take from Hannibal. Funnily enough Nacho just called this afternoon. Apparently he's got another film on the go. Something to do with Nazis versus vampires. He asked if I felt like helping out and being a happy go lucky sort of guy I said I might. It wasn't so bad that I wouldn't go through it all again just for the hell of it.

Rose. Speaking of Nazis, how is The Secret Glory coming along?

Stanley. It's still coming, I'm afraid. It's been a journey to Hell and beyond with seemingly no end in sight, encapsulating some of the strangest events of my life. In point of fact much of what I have seen and experienced these last few years has been so fundamentally far-fetched that I've been forced to go to great lengths in amassing the necessary hard evidence to prove, to myself as much as to anyone else, that any of it actually happened. The initial feature-length documentary charting the life and work of the German Jewish Grail historian Otto Rahn and his Faustian pact with the SS mushroomed along the way into a broader examination of the so-called European esoteric tradition, the Fourth Reich, the EU and the revival of the 'Cathar' faith. The existing cut is still very much a 'work in progress' with the feature length version included on Subversive Cinema's Dust Devil boxkit suffering from patchy audio that at times wanders wildly out of synch as a result of a rinkydink PAL/NTSC transfer. I have plans to make an updated cut available over the net, either by mail order or direct download, within the next month or two via a new site devoted to the ongoing enigma and its unsettling implications for the broader public. Just getting the basic information out there should turn a few heads and shake things up a little. Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows will be on-line by Hallow'een so keep your eyes wide open and remember you heard about it here first! I wish I could tell you more right now but, as the man says: "To know is to die..."

Rose. Finally, do you have any feature projects in development?

Stanley. As a matter of fact I'm up to my eyeballs, bumin' the midnight oil on a li'l sci-fi action eco-thriller named Vacation. The plot concerns an average American couple, a former exotic dancer turned failing singer-songwriter and her East Coast stockbroker boyfriend, who are on [a] cut rate package holiday in north Africa catching a li'l late season sun when an unexpected solar cataclysm annihilates Western Europe and the United States. Cut off from their credit cards and any hope of returning home Carly and Bryce are forced to redefine their relationship in order to survive in a radical, post-technological Muslim culture that holds them responsible, wrongly or otherwise, for the world's pain. I like to think of it as a very black xenophobic comedy about sun, surf, casual sex and the reckless abuse of alcohol and automatic firearms, a lively, fun-filled romantic holocaust for two set against the wider backdrop of the downfall of the west and the incipient extinction of the human species. The project looks set to go before the cameras this autumn on a series of typically inhospitable locations in southern Morocco so keep your fingers and toes crossed. With luck and the grace of God, inshallah, it should be playing your local multiplex next summer, presuming you still have a local multiplex by then and there are still enough folk left alive to watch the damn thing. Considering the current state of the world I'm lucky to be working let alone to have my work in distribution but then chaos has always been kind to me.

Hardware: 2 Disc Special Edition DVD was released by Optimum Home Entertainment, June 2009. James Rose would like to thank Richard Stanley for taking the time to answer these questions. Thank you to Candy Vincent-Smith and John Scrafton at Optimum Releasing for facilitating this interview. Thanks also to Gareth Evans and Nancy Harrison for their support.

References

1. http://www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/write/hw2script.php

2. http ://www.everythingisundercontrol .org/nagtloper/write/moreauscript.php