Alan Moore on The Prisoner

The Prisoner

Excerpt from Part one of the interview published on Paley Matters in August: Moore talks about The Prisoner and its huge impact on him and his work.

The complete interview is available here. Part 2, here. 

Alan Moore: [...] one of the things I learned was that one should preferably craft narratives that move towards a satisfying and meaningful conclusion. Another thing I learned was that it was possible to write stories that affected the audience on other levels than just the simple resolution of their plot elements; that there were levels of symbolism and association and self-reflexivity which could be built into a narrative that would enable the viewer or reader to enjoy the experience in a more intense and multileveled way. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that a creator should never be afraid to pitch their work high, without worrying about it going over the heads of the audience: in my experience, work that the audience already understands and is comfortable with will not teach them anything, and thus deprives them of that thrill-of-the-new that is, for me, the central pleasure and purpose of all art. I believe that art only happens at the interface of the artist and the audience, which is to say the work itself, and I further believe that if they don’t have to do any of that work, if they don’t have to stretch themselves a little in order to metabolise what they’re reading or watching, then the audience will not find the work as enjoyable as they might have done. So, The Prisoner taught me not to condescend to my audience or assume that they were any less intelligent than I was. It taught me to dare to be difficult, and eventually led me to a position where I feel that the most precious thing about art is its difficulty, and that difficulty’s overcoming.

[...] While all my work probably has the influence of The Prisoner in it somewhere, this would be entirely in how the story is told, rather than in its content or thematic elements. Practically every intelligent or informed person during that decade would have been expressing opinions about technology and nursing nuclear anxieties that were identical to McGoohan’s, and given that the 1980s were an even more perilous stretch of the Cold War than the 1960s had been, then it seemed an appropriate issue to make a part of Watchmen. I can’t think of any direct or indirect influence beyond that."

The complete Part 1 is available here. Part 2, here.