About making films

Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins.

Excerpt from The Leeds International Film Festival Q & A event. Transcript by Hannah Means Shannon for Bleeding Cool.

Alan, we know you’ve been unhappy with previous film adaptations of your work. What inspired you to get into making films first hand?

Alan Moore: I did read a review that said I was the “human avatar of Grumpy Cat”. You’re all laughing because you know what grumpy cat is. I don’t. My feelings about the adaptation films, if you can call them that is that I don’t like adaptations generally. There’s always going to be a couple of things that go against that premise, but there are no exceptions in the films that have been made of my work. I have nothing against the film medium—it’s a great medium. But actually I don’t see much film these days.

When things switched over to digital, for some obscure reason, I stuck with analog, so it’s now a dead TV in the corner of the room. But I do have an affinity for cheap cinema. If you’ve got money, then you don’t need imagination, and if you’ve got imagination, then you don’t need money. The main thing that differs from comics is that you can be kind of sociopathic in comics. All the people you are putting in these terrible situations are made out of paper. The first time that was put to the test was when we made Act of Faith. Mitch asked me along to the shooting, and I said I’d rather not because I’d met Siobhan Hewlett and I thought “She’s a nice woman and I don’t want to see her choking in a wardrobe”. By the time we got to His Heavy Heart, with Darell D’Silva in physical pain, I was cold-hearted.

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