We’re very pleased at SFFWorld to have the chance to catch-up with M.R. (Mike) Carey.
He’s been one of our favourites here for a long time, first with his work on X-Men, Constantine and Lucifer but also when he branched out into the brilliant Felix Castor urban supernatural books, which have been a favourite in the SFFWorld Forums.
Most recently Mike has become famous for his best-selling novel, The Girl With All the Gifts, which is now about to be released as a major movie, starring Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton.
Here we had chance to talk of all of these things, and his new book Fellside, which threatens to creep us all out again.
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Hello Mike! Many thanks for joining us at SFFWorld. As I type this, we’re about to get the UK premiere of the movie of The Girl With All the Gifts. Congratulations!
Thanks! It’s hard to believe our baby is finally going to be out in the world…
I’d like to start with that, if I may. How much involvement, if any, have you had with the film?
Well, I wrote the screenplay. And it was based on a story that I’d already written – a story that I was simultaneously developing as a novel. There was a lot of synchronicity going on, and it was incredibly exciting to ride that wave. From a very early stage I was working alongside director Colm McCarthy and producer Camille Gatin to work up the outline and then to develop the screenplay. We were very much on the same wavelength throughout. We’d have page-turn meetings that went on for six or seven hours, all taking turns to finish each other’s sentences.
And now, with the film due, are you nervous, excited or worried? (Or all three?)
Excitement definitely predominates. I’m nervous too, of course. I’m always nervous, even when I have far less excuse. I’m the sort of person who goes back inside the house to check whether I turned the gas off – and then I fret all day about whether I remembered to lock the door when I went out the second time.
But yeah, mostly excited at this point.
I’m assuming you’ve seen the finished movie?
Many times – and always with the same sense of wonder and delight. These things are always subjective, but I feel like Colm has done a perfect job of bringing to life the world that was in my head. And the performances were awesome. You’d expect that from Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine, from Fisayo Akinade and Antony Welsh – but Sennia Nanua was a revelation as Melanie. The entire movie depends on her and she’s onscreen pretty much the whole time. That’s a lot to ask of a twelve-year-old actor in her first feature, but she just took it and ran with it.
Simon Dennis’s cinematography is also wonderful, as are the design and the effects. There really isn’t anything I’m even a little bit unhappy with. Well, maybe that one or two scenes I was fond of didn’t make the final cut – but they’ll be on the DVD.
I was once told by a well-known author that once you hand over your book to a film production, you pretty much accept that what the film people do is different. Has that been the experience for yourself?
No, my experience was pretty much the opposite of that. I was kept in the loop throughout the prep process, and actually went on the tech recce when we were scouting locations in the Midlands. Then I was on set for a lot of the time, watching the shoot and occasionally contributing rewrites. Only very small rewrites, I should add. The film stays incredibly close to the final draft script. And the changes that were made were made collaboratively. I’m aware that all these things can work very differently. I was very lucky to be working with Poison Chef and with Colm.
You have had success before, of course, but were you surprised by the reaction to Girl With All the Gifts?
Yes and no. I’ve been surprised and delighted by the scale of it – by how popular the book has been, and then by how quickly the movie has come together – but I knew I was onto something with this one. The short story came to me in a flash after months of noodling and procrastination. I wrote it in four days and sent it in. Job done. Except that I knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about the world and the characters, especially Melanie herself. I knew there was more to her, more to her story. So I set about trying to persuade a whole bunch of people to humour me and let me go back to the story in one medium or another. And it turned out to be a good call. I was meant to be writing a near-future thriller about mindswaps, which I couldn’t in the end get excited or inspired about.I’m so glad I had the courage to ditch that novel unfinished and switch to Girl.
And now we have Fellside. What can you tell us about it?
It’s a ghost story set in a women’s prison. On the principle of “write what you know”.
The core narrative, though, is about addiction and the things it leads people to do. And it’s about a character trying to find redemption for something so terrible it can’t ever be forgiven even by herself.
Especially by herself.
And we have another female lead, in the shape of Jess Moulson. What do you like about writing female lead characters?
I can’t really answer that. I went through a phase of writing mostly male leads – Lucifer, Felix Castor, John Constantine. Then when I started to write X-Men I had the experience of looking at a fictional landscape that was kind of overloaded with alpha males, and I decided to focus more on the female characters in the X-verse, who to various extents had been overlooked or under-used. Rogue, Mystique, Omega Sentinel, Lady Mastermind, Ariel, Husk, Blindfold et al… All great characters who nobody else seemed to have dibs or designs on, so I purloined them and built stories around them.
But the other thing that was happening in my life right then was that I was collaborating with two female writers – my wife Linda and our daughter Louise. I came out of that experience with a different voice, as you always do after a successful collaboration, and I wanted very much to keep experimenting with it. To some extent that may have shaped my choice of protagonists.
The Girl with All the Gifts showed us that as a writer you can take some traditional genre tropes and write us something fresh and different. How is Fellside different from other books you’ve written?
I think it’s a fusion of opposites. I tried hard to make the prison itself, and its inmates and officers, feel as real and authentic as I could make them. There’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s just about that – the experience of being in prison, the compromises and the ordeals and the accommodations. But then within that world there’s another world that opens up, a world in which dreamers and the dead can co-exist. I think that’s the most unusual aspect of the book – that it’s aiming to be fantastic and grimly realistic at the same time.
What do you think was the greatest challenge for you in writing Fellside? Did you have to do much research to get the prison material right?
The research has been a big thing, and it still is as I work towards the first draft of the screenplay (which I’m developing with the same creative team that produced The Girl With All the Gifts). Some permissions took a long time in coming through, but we have now visited three actual prisons. We’ve talked to current and former inmates and to the teams who handle drug rehab for prisoners. We’ve even had a guided tour of Holloway a few weeks after it finally closed, having just failed to get in while it was still operating. And of course there’s been a lot of secondary research too – books and papers and journalism.
But the biggest challenge was probably what I described earlier, making the two sides of the story cohere so there’s no jolt or discontinuity (hopefully) when the big reveals kick in and you realise you’re not necessarily reading the book you thought you were.
You are an extraordinarily busy man. What’s next?
I’ve just handed in the next novel, which is set in the same world as The Girl With All the Gifts but about ten years earlier and with a completely different cast of characters. I’m also working on the movie screenplay for Fellside, and on another movie that’s also a ghost story, but in a different vein. In fact screenwriting has come to be a bigger and bigger part of my slate over the past year or so, and that’s been really exciting – but also challenging, because the rhythms and life cycles of TV and movie projects are so different from those of books and comics.
Which is not to say that I’m giving up books and comics. One of the other things I’m currently working on is a new series of graphic novels with Peter Gross, my collaborator on Lucifer and The Unwritten. It’s called Highest House, and the first volume is going to be released in January of 2017 from French publisher Editions Glenat.
Lastly: I’ve got to ask this one, partly because you know I’m a fan but also because we have people on the site ask: what are the chances of seeing Felix Castor again?
I’m optimistic! I’ve had the sixth novel planned out for a long time, but other things kept intervening. I think I’m getting close to the point where I can free the time and make it happen – although it may happen in a slightly different form than originally envisaged.
That is wonderful news. Many thanks for your time, Mike. Obviously we wish you all the best, and look forward to a possible movie of Fellside!
Thanks! I hope you enjoy the movie…
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Fellside is out now in paperback, from Orbit UK.
The movie, The Girl With All the Gifts, is due for UK Nationwide release on 23rd September 2016.
Many thanks to Nazia at Orbit UK for helping with this one.
