MONDAY BLOG: GARLAND, WILLIAMS AND A Q&A REQUEST

Happy Monday, gang.

Good weekend?

Not much to report here. We watched that Robbie Williams biopic Better Man yesterday – and it was unexpectedly really REALLY good. The direction and effects were jaw-dropping.

I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Williams. I know he annoys a lot of people, but he has done some great songs over the years, and I appreciate his vulnerability and self-depreciation. He strikes me as someone far smarter and more talented than most of the world has ever given him credit for. He’s also a bit of an over-sharer like me, so he feels like a kindred spirit in that respect.

On Saturday, Sanja was doing a uni visit with our youngest, so I watched a film I knew she’d have no interest in: Warfare, the most recent one from Alex Garland.

Some of you may know that Alex and I go back a long way. He was a Digitiser fan, and in the final days of Digi we'd sort of struck up a close friendship. We’d see each other regularly, usually for lunch.  

The first thing to know about Alex is he’s very intense. I’d come away from seeing him exhausted most of the time, feeling like I’d been interrogated. I mean, SO intense. Like laser-focused. I’d say something in passing and he’d hone in on it and want to know precisely what I meant. I always enjoyed seeing him, but... man... it could be a lot of work sometimes!

He’s been successful for decades, but his real success has been since he moved into directing. He seems to have had written and directed a movie a year for the last few years, and I’m beyond pleased for him. He deserves every bit of his success.

Truth is, we’ve not spoken since around the time Found Footage came out. I sent him Trojan Arse Protocol, and he enjoyed it and told me I needed to direct a movie. It felt like my frame of reference and his were kind of at odds. I didn’t make it because I wanted to direct a movie. I just wanted to make a silly thing I enjoyed making and thought I’d share it with him, but I'm not sure he could wrap his head around it.

The few years before that our contact was sort of erratic. That’s all on me. When I split up with my ex, Alex didn’t really seem to understand why, and a few things were said, and then gradually I stopped replying to his calls. That has never festered though, like some hurt does. I just felt misunderstood, I guess.

But… Alex was, and I’m sure still is, a properly good person. He was always pushing me to move into writing films, and tried to give me a leg up, but for whatever reason… it never stuck. I was never ambitious enough, and you need to want it badly to make it in that world. People without ambition in film or TV are sort of outliers; my agent never understood why I was happy just earning a living in kids' TV. I think she despaired, to be honest.

The last time I saw Alex, he’d just been nominated for an Oscar. We went out for lunch and he brought Peter Serafinowicz with him – another alleged Digi fan of old.

It all felt a bit weird though. I felt a bit weird. Again, it’s all on me, I just felt outside of all the industry talk, and the success those two have had. It wasn’t jealousy… just a feeling that they existed in a different world to me, and that my stuff, my concerns, my creativity, my drive (or lack of) was alien to them. I felt apart.

It was a feeling I’d had many times in my career; that I didn’t really belong, being surrounded by wildly ambitious people. And I guess then I got wary of going for lunch to find he’d brought Keanu Reeves or someone with him, shading my relatively limited achievements and ambition in even starker shades. It's not a feeling of failure - I've done fine, as far as I'm concerned - more that I never lived up to the potential others saw in me... but I now realise they were viewing my potential through their own prism and values.

I admit, Warfare wasn't really for me. It’s technically brilliant, but is essentially just one long battle scene. No real connection with the characters, no real story beyond depicting real events, and I kind of need that in my films.

It’s very much a Call of Duty deathmatch for real (and I’m pretty certain this was part of the inspiration, because Alex and I used to play each other on CoD; his next film is the Elden Ring adaptation). But, as a piece of filmmaking, it’s visceral. I just found it kind of cold and lacking emotion, and felt the final message was kind of a tad Imperialist.

But anyway. I won’t tell him. When I saw the first cut of Dredd I told him it needed to be funnier and he didn’t talk to me for a year.

OTHER STUFF

So. Back to my tiny little world and limited horizons.

New vid has done… okay. It started strong, but has kind of bottomed-out a bit. Sanja’s optimistic, but I admit I’m a tad disappointed. It’s fine. It’s at around 4,500 views in four days, which is better than we used to do. It’s hard not to feel that this one deserves more though…!

We’re still toying with uploading stuff to a new channel – the algorithm just doesn’t seem to know where to push us these days. We’re not rushing though. Our gut is telling us to do it, but… it’s scary, y’know. It’s starting afresh.

Next video will be a Q&A – we’ve not done one in a year, so we thought it’d be a good chance to catch up, take a breather, and answer some of your questions. Please post them below – we’ll answer anything!

After that comes the one we’re already working on. Each video we make informs the next – and is a kind of reaction to it. Keep them feeling distinct from one another, while also remaining in the ballpark of exploring that weird intersection between history/science/the unexplained/conspiracies. This is another big idea, but very different.

Again, if any of you have had experience with glitches, please send us a short video to digitiser2000@gmail.com

The research is doing my head in, frankly – it’s SO confusing - but I live for that sort of stuff, figuring out how to get it across in ways that aren’t too dry or difficult or off-putting.

There’ll be a new Bubblegun up tomorrow for the masses. It’s the ASMR one, which I appreciate most of you have heard, but we’ll be setting up to record in the next few days, and you’ll get at least one exclusive pod in the next week or so.

There are also a couple of exclusive, higher-tiers, Patreon-only vids on the way from our Doggerland epic – the full ‘therapy’ session with Stuart, and the full visit to the Rotunda Museum in Scarborough. Should be a full and bounteous month.

And we’ll be doing the all-Patreon Zoom (in addition to a Biffo’s Brain). We’ve got a busy month with family stuff, so we’re just trying to find a date that we can stick to.

Right. Work to do. Speak soon.

Paul