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This is the launch of the 'Doctor Strange' film interpretation of - in my view - a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists, and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity.
The work is different in the sense that I haven't had to travel round the world raising money, or work from the genesis of the project. But the collaboration feels clear always, it's sort of my drug, I'm in it for the conversation. The conversation's the most important part of it.
Well you know, the comic strip [Doctor Strange]... yeah, was an Asian man, in fact, a very ancient Tibetan man living on the top of a mountain. The film script that I was given wasn't an Asian man, so I wasn't asked to play an Asian man - I was asked to play an ancient Celtic person.
I was a professional gambler. When I lived in London, there were a couple of years when I didn't really earn money doing anything else. I mean, I did other things: like, I made work, and I was working with Derek Jarman at the time, but the way I made money was putting money on horses.
I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.
I remember when I first started to be photographed, people couldn't understand how it was possible to go around with no eyelashes, no eyebrows. Now it's much more accepted for people not to wear eyelashes or lipstick or whatever they do, but then it was quite freaky. Um, a kind of boiled look.
I'll tell you one thing, and this is banal to say because it just makes it sound like it's all planned, and nothing is planned at all. But one link is with The Deep End, and one link is that I'm making a film later on that revolves around the relationship between an innocent party and a dead body.
My whole relationship with Bowie started when I was 13, and I bought a copy of 'Aladdin Sane' when I didn't have a record player. I had this record for a year before I could play it, and it was the image - not the sound - that I was attracted to. I just saw this image and thought he was my cousin.
I spent a lot of time thinking that I was some kind of foundling, that I had been a changeling, that I had been found under a bush somewhere, and that I couldn't possibly be kin - but the more I live, the more I feel absolutely like I come out of my family. I'm a sort of strange natural progression.
For a lot of actors, there's a sort of code of honor around playing something other than yourself, which I just don't have. I love feeling like I'm - I won't even say acting out, but performing in some deep seam of my consciousness or my family's consciousness or my past. That's really amusing to me.
[My work] just develops and develops, and I'm very nicely served by the universe: just as I'm ready to take the conversation further with myself, some other individual pops up, like David McKenzie did, with this idea of making this film [Teknolust], and provides exactly the leap to the next adventure.
I'm amazed now whenever I go back to London. I'm like, 'Wow. I used to kind of swing up these streets when I knew how this machine worked.' And then when you don't, you lose that. You need to get your license back. I do know how to plant a garden and keep chickens, but I don't know how to do much else.
We also knew [ me and Ewan McGregor] that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film [Young Adam] - which there clearly had to be because sex is the meat and potatoes of the thing - it had to be varied for the audience, because it's important to keep the audience living in it.
The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.
In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?".
The only real struggle [in Doctor Strange] was casting spells - learning all these amazing things with fingers, and then remembering what to say at the same time. They would say, 'So you have to put your hands there, not there because the light is going to go [MAKES SOUND] so that kind of masks... but it was all good.
I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else.
I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them and up for the mayhem ahead. But at the same time, I remember noticing I was relieved this thing was present in me. And I hadn't realised there might be a doubt.
I'm a Marvel fan, and I think this particular world that 'Doctor Strange' goes into is really, really, really exciting. I'm really interested as both an actor and a fan to see what's done in this particular world. It's all about creativity. It's not about everything exploding at the end. It's about something very different.
I was talking recently with a friend of mine who's determined to never meet her heroes, and I have another friend who's been horribly disillusioned a couple of times. But I've had a wonderful ride with meeting people who have been my North Stars, and Bowie's definitely one of them. He feels like my cousin; like the cousin I never had.
I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.
I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.
The Ancient One, as you know, is the master, is the Sorcerer Supreme, and [Doctor] Strange comes to learn how to heal himself and The Ancient One has got the knowledge. And so what you're seeing today is a part of the whole training section when he's learning the moves and digging deep. So it's all about that, it's all about trying to push him to get there.
One of the things about Derek Jarman was that he was a painter who worked alone when he painted, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons he made films was for the company. He made filmmakers of all of us, that's the truth. I don't mean he necessarily made directors, but he made us filmmakers. Because we lived in a state of mutual responsibility for what we made.
There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.
There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that.
I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.
Do you want a list of what my dogs taught me? Patience, perspective, joy, loyalty, the simplicity and presence of their joy. That's a really great daily reminder, bad stuff happens, difficult stuff happens and you take them out onto the beach and you go "OK, now I see". You tell them the current political situation in the world and they go "should we go for a walk?" And you go, right, that's the correct answer.
Daily absorption in the physical actualities of nature is life as I need it to be: it means I am connected to such large things - sky, sea, hill, the vagaries of weather, the undeniable needs of animals - that I can disappear as a subject of interest, I can exist without self-consciousness. The city is a challenge for me, however thrilling a few days prove, for its insatiable overstimulation and the rarity of quiet. The city makes people bigger than they need to be.
Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".
That whole Deep End experience of finding yourself with the dead body: you know you didn't kill it, but you know if you're found with it, you're gonna be done for it, so you have to get rid of it. And that's a really important nub of Young Adam Joe knows for absolute certain that if someone comes around the corner, that's it. Nobody's ever going to believe what happened. So that has nothing to do with identity or sexuality, but that is a link. I'm just fascinated by it.
I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.
This film [Doctor Strange] kind of takes that everyday boring reality and really bursts it wide. So we talked a lot about that. In many ways there's something very practical about this world, the Kamar-Taj. It's - You know, we all look like samurai warriors, but actually there are iPads everywhere and there's a feeling that it's a practical possibility for this modern world that the Doctor Strange universe is functioning, and that we know it and it's around the corner for all of us.
Working with the editor on the set means that it is possible to keep track, at every moment, of the exact temperature of the trajectory of the scene - and know precisely what is required to continue, or precede, the action already shot. Like building a giant jigsaw puzzle. This is a freeing procedure because one is divested of all the options that might otherwise hamper one's choices. Clarity is possible. And that means one can relax into each shot, knowing the clear boundaries of where it might end or begin. And with relaxation, comes play.