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| Ian Watson. Photo by Adrià Guxens |
Ian
Watson is a man with a lot to talk about, and maybe because he’s a writer, he
talks very gracefully about anything; he is a man who will not let you do the
interview like you have planned, he will make you improvise; he is a man who
talks so much that you will need to ask the questions while he is puffing one
of the two cigarettes he’ll smoke during the interview; he is a man who talks
about things that are so incredible that will make you wonder if they are
entirely true and he is a man who will ask you to make him look wise, ironic
and with a dry sense of humour in the picture. At the Celsius 232 Festival Adria’s
News talks to Ian Watson, who has recently published El Inca de Marte and 50
Recetas con Nombre, to know why he thinks there are tides in the
Mediterranean, why he hasn’t read The
Lord of the Rings yet and, especially, to know how was working with Stanley
Kubrick to develop the story of Artificial
Intelligence, film that ended up being directed by Steven Spielberg.
When did you say: “I
want to become a writer”?
Well, I wanted to be a writer when I was about 10 or 11 years
old. However, I had various early ambitions because I lived in a very boring place
in the north of England. First of all, I wanted to be a cactus collector in the
Arizona desert because there were not a lot of shops full of cacti back then.
They were very rare and they seemed to me like the plants of an alien world
because they were so different from anything else. I also wanted to be a
chemist, but I was terrible at science. During a practical examination, there
was an experiment called titration where you suck a tube and mentholated spirit
comes and I accidentally swallowed half a litre of mentholated spirit and I
thought: “Fuck Chemistry!”.
Did you read science
fiction back then?
Yes, I was quite an early reader. Miraculously the public library
had the first editions of A. E. van Vogt, Asimov, Alfred Bester… they were in with
all the other books and I read those because the names of the authors seemed to
suggest wisdom to me, oddity… so I thought: “What could be there?” They were much
more interesting than names like Charles Dickens or Jane Austin, bah! Van Vogt!
Look at this name…
So the thing about the
names was what made you start reading science fiction…
And also, well… in 1956, I was thirteen at the time, we had
an intellectual radio station produced by the BBC which was called The Third Program or something like that.
One Sunday afternoon for three hours there was a dramatization of a science
fantasy novel that you would not have heard of: A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay. Now this is being
republished in English again and again. He was not a science fiction writer,
but he was a person of huge imagination. Basically, the beginning is quite
normal, but afterwards the characters get to the lighthouse and stare at the
star Arcturus. A little after, the characters are transported in a big metal
cylinder to the planet Arcturus, a world where each particular local
environment represents a different philosophy of life. It’s a book that, like
van Vogt, is either read beautifully or very badly and clumsily, so to hear
this for three and a half hours on the radio when I was thirteen was, you know?
Mind-blowing.
When did you realize
you had become a full time writer?
I did write about three very short novels while I was at
university, very pretentious and stylistic. Basically, I didn’t have enough
life experience in the slightest back then, but I tried to keep my style. I
wanted to write the perfect sentence, so anything I wrote back then wasn’t
published. However, I had the strong desire to be a writer, but I needed to
know what to write about.
Name “Science fiction writers have
names much more interesting than Charles Dickens or Jane Austin”
It is an important
thing.
Yes, it is. However, Oscar Wilde’s aunt said to him when he
was young: “Oscar what will you be when you grow up?” And he said: “I will be a
writer”. And she asked him: “What would you write about, Oscar?” And he replied:
“One does not write about things. One writes!” I was a little bit like that.
But then, after university I got a job in East Africa. This was because I did a
research degree, but I was not respected enough to get an academic job in
England, so I was pushed there.
First Africa, then to
Tokyo… They’re quite different, aren’t they?
Very much so. The thing about Africa that woke me up was the
non-western world, its alternative beliefs systems, its alternative landscapes
and history. There were great cities in Africa in the past. It was not OK that
the Europeans arrived to Africa to bring civilization when it was already
there! And Tokyo really woke me up to the future, because even in the late 1960s
Tokyo was a futuristic city. I was not very interested in the more elegant
forms of the Japanese culture, such as kabuki,
but I was very interested in the folk vulgarity and brightness of Shinto and
the Million Gate Gateways, where you think you are travelling through your own
bloodstream.
A nice intersection…
Yes, there was a perfect conjunction between this and robots, advertising. Also, at the time Tokyo was quite
polluted, you could only see Mount Fuji three days a year: during the New Year
Holidays, when nobody works and nobody drives. The trees had nutritious bottles
attached to keep them alive, 20.000 teachers got grout in the vocal cords
because of air pollution, there were industrial diseases, so there was a sense
of a disaster zone, the mixture between apocalypse, utopian future, and the
intersection of traditional Japanese folk beliefs. This is where I began
writing science fiction as a psychological survival mechanism while I was
living in Tokyo.
How was teaching
there?
The university where I taught hired too many staff members for
the first year, so I taught one class every week, and the rest of the time,
apart from a bit of administration, I played dots with an Indian car mechanic
and went swimming to look at the coral reefs… I arrived in Japan in 1967 and in
1970 the security treaty between the American and the Japanese was due for
renewal. So three years earlier the Japanese militant students went on strike
and they stayed on strike for two and a half years, during which, first of all,
me and the other Japanese professors walked through the student lines of
occupations to collect our brown envelopes of money and then, a year later, the
police seized the university and for another 18 months we walked through the
police lines to collect our envelopes of money. And during that time we had
five increases of salary. I walked around streets of Tokyo and went to Kyoto as
much as I could afford to and of course, I had time to write. These things all
intersected.
Tolkien “I prefer to read the Decadence
French writers from the XIX century to The Lord of the Rings”
I’ve heard you haven’t
read The Lord of the Rings…
No. I never did at the time. I was a student at Oxford.
Tolkien was still alive. I went to a lecture or two by Tolkien’s son,
Christopher Tolkien. I was forced to learn Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and Old
Norse, and Icelandic, and I was not very interested in the mythology and less
did I like the languages so for me The
Lord of the Rings was an extension of pain, and I prefer to read the Decadence
French writers from the 19th century. Now is far too late to read The Lord of the Rings.
How was getting the
call from Stanley Kubrick to develop the story for Artificial Intelligence with him?
Well, I was aware that Kubrick lived in England and that he
would not go anywhere by plane or move, and I was aware that a friend of mine
called Bob Shaw, an Irish science fiction writer, was working with Kubrick. In
fact, he lasted for six weeks because he was too nervous and you couldn’t work
with Stanley Kubrick if you were shivering. Bob used to arrive at ten o’clock
at the station instead of eleven to have whiskey to set himself up until
Kubrick’s chauffeur, Emilio D’Alessandro, became suspicious and went to the
train station an hour early. There, he saw what Bob was doing. Bob couldn’t
cope with the general stress of working with Kubrick. So I get a phone call and
it’s Kubrick’s assistant, who gives out very little information and says:
“Stanley Kubrick would like to meet you. We’ll send a car”. And I thought: “No,
I would be in control of this meeting”. So I said I would drive there, and so I
did.
How was the meeting? He
was a legend but he also was known for being a bit antisocial…
Yes, but he was very hospitable and had a dry sense of humour
and he was very, very, focused on what he was doing. Stanley and I shared a
Chinese take-away and he asked me to write a 12.000 word story. This was the
test. He told me: “I’ll pay you 20.000 dollars”. And I thought: “This sounds
rather good!” So I wrote the 12.000 words that will never be published because they
are owned by Warner Brothers. A little after sending this to Stanley he told me
to return. I walked in for another Chinese take-away and he told me: “OK, what
you wrote is no use for the project, but I liked the way you did it, so would
you work with me week by week?” And we were together for nine months.
Africa “It was not OK that the Europeans
arrive to Africa to bring civilization when it was already there!”
Weren’t you afraid of
getting get fired like Bob Shaw?
Well, my brain only turned into scrambled eggs twice during
this period but two things kept me alive. One of them was that I had pretty
much insisted on my own conditions: “Stanley I’m only gonna work on the mornings
and only during weekdays”, and of course he tried to encroach, and the secret
was not to be burned up by Stanley and not to be scared about being fired and
because I never, ever, believed it would be a movie. I actually survived this
kind of surrealistic adventure until I wrote my screen story. Stanley read it
and said: “Ian, I read it. I feel despondent. I think we should separate. I’m
sorry. Take care”. And I said: “Take care, Stanley”. I was one of the few
people privileged to be sacked by telephone personally by Stanley. Three month
later he phoned me again and said: “Ian, do you remember that thing you wrote
for me?” And I said: “Yes I do, Stanley…” And it continued.
How did you react when
you were told Spielberg would be the one to direct the movie?
Well, I was sorry that Stanley was dead. I mean, he broke
himself finalizing Eyes Wide Shut, and
if Stanley had not died he would probably still be working on the project today.
I mean Stanley already told me that he had asked Spielberg if he would direct
the movie.
Did you like his
version?
It was not Spielberg’s version. It was the film Stanley
wanted to make, made pretty faithfully by Spielberg, although still with a few
intrusions, such as… I think we see a bicycle that wasn’t there. I was asked this
question by a Professor at the Moscow University who was writing a PhD about
the difference between Stanley’s original version and Spielberg’s. And I said: “Basically,
there is no difference”. And he sent me an email saying: “This is unfortunate;
all the other people said the same thing. Bye-bye PhD”. In the last twenty
minutes of the film, he thought it was some sort of Spielberg’s sentimentalism,
but it was exactly what I wrote filmed by him.
Were you happy with
the credit “story by Ian Watson”, or you think you deserved more?
I was quite happy about that.
Why didn’t you want to
write the screenplay?
Number one, I’m not a screenwriter. Number two, I think
Spielberg hoped to get an Oscar nomination for this because it was the second
time he had written a screenplay at least for a science fiction movie. No such
thing happened, partly because the film was much more intelligent and poetical
than the Americans were capable of understanding. It was the fourth highest grossing
film worldwide that year. Also, Spielberg found things that I had written which
I had forgotten about and Stanley told me to exclude from the story.
Artificial Intelligence “A. I. was much more intelligent and poetical than the Americans were capable
of understanding”
You have recently
published your novel The Martian Inca
in Spain, translated as El Inca de Marte.
Why Mars? Why the Incan Empire?
Hum… I don’t know if I
chose Mars or the Incas first. The thing is I wasn’t very interested in the
Mayans and people were beginning to get excited about that calendar, but it was
banal, and nobody was bothering about the Quechua people. Except that, by
coincidence, the same year my book was published Star Wars came out, and in the famous bar scene they are talking in
Quechua because this was so little known that it was perfect as an alien language.
And they didn’t have things as typical as blood rituals and gods named with
very strange names, such as Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl…
And then you have the
water story…
Oh, God! At first, I said that there was water in Mars, but
then I did all my research and I discovered scientifically that it didn’t, like
ordinary people would have thought. I had to correct my mistake in the same
number of spaces, letters and characters as the version of the novel that had Mars
with water. But then, I got my copy of New Scientist magazine. The headline: “Water raises on Mars”. Fuck. If I had
not bothered to do correct research I would have been correct! Nothing about my
book has yet proved to be complete nonsense, which after forty years it’s quite
pleasing, so that may still be true!
Talking about water, I
heard another story related to this, but it also involves the South of Spain
and swimming.
Oh, yes! Well, I stopped swimming forever. This was a beach
in Almeria and within about a hundred meters of the shore there was a nice
sandbank, so I stood there and looked around.
And it only was one meter further down that I went into pre-drowning
panic, “glu, glu, glu”. This proved to me that there are tides in the
Mediterranean. I read a book by Stephen Baxter called Flood, about how subsurface water comes welling up higher and
higher and finally it covers Everest, and this had a bad effect on my brain. So
I wrote a short story in which the reverse happens, in which a significant
amount of water drains down, closing the Mediterranean. I sent the story to Nature magazine, which is the mecca of
real scientists, but which published a short science fiction story in the last
page, and my friend who was editing that section told me there are no tides in
the Mediterranean and I said: “What is it that advances up the beaches twice a
day and then goes back down again?” Anyway, I triumphed over the scientific
orthodoxy of Nature and I published
it, but I’m not going to the sea again.
Unemployment “I was one of the few people
privileged to be sacked by telephone personally by Stanley Kubrick”
You are married to
Cristina Macía, the Spanish translator of Gameof Thrones. I have to ask, do you like the books?
“I adore Game of
Thrones”, unquote. I haven’t read it [Whispering], I adore the HBO series.
I don’t normally like heroic fantasy; I prefer science fiction, so I have not
actually read it any more that I have read The
Lord of the Rings, but I absolutely adore the TV Show. I mean, I like a lot
of George R.R. Martin’s other things, which I have read. For example, when his
first novel was published, Dying of the Light, I read it almost immediately with admiration and bla bla bla…
Cristina and you have
recently written a book together: 50 Recetas con Nombre.
I researched and wrote the stories, Cristina did the recipes,
and somebody else translated my stories. We had an enormous amount of fun
because I was discovering so many strange facts of history, and after a while
they were beginning to join up so it seems there was a secret history in the
middle of the 19th Century from the point of view of gastronomy. A
lot of events were driven by gastronomy. For example the Duke that threw the
British out of Mallorca discovered mayonnaise in Maó and, therefore, it was
carried back to France and developed. And a French chef called Olivier carried mayonnaise
to Russia and he was the creator of “Russian Salad”, which in Russia is called
“Olivier Salad”. In Spain, Russian Salad was very popular, but the name had to
be changed to National Salad because of the Franco Regime.
What is your favourite
me al in the book?
Chicken Marengo, because there are so many lies about that.
Napoleon used the untrue story of the battle of Marengo, and the untrue story
used the meal to aggrandize Napoleon, but it became terribly identified with
this military success and he almost lost the battle of Marengo.
Kubrick “I never, ever, believed Artificial Intelligence would become a movie”
- Interview with George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire).
- Interview with Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicle).
- Interview with Neil Gaiman (American Gods).
- Interview with Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn)
- Interview with Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates).
- Interview with Joe Abercrombie (The First Law series).
- Interview with Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen).
- Interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky (Shadows of the Apt).
- Interview with Dmitry Glukhovsky (Metro 2033).
- Interview with Lisa Tuttle (Windhaven).
- Interview with David Simon (The Wire).
- Interview with Christopher Priest (The Prestige).
- Interview with Ian Watson (Artificial Intelligence).
- Interview with Robert J. Sawyer (FlashForward).
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