Grant Morrison. He's one of the best comic book writers currently in the business. He's also one of the most fabled, being the subject of stories of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, alien abductions, and hallucinatory experiences of enlightenment. Filmmaker and comic book fan Patrick Meaney decided that such an individual would be prime material for a documentary (go figure, right?). I recently spoke with Meaney about the film, entitled Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods. Here is what he had to say:

Sci-Fi Block: There are probably some obvious answers here, but what do you find so interesting about Grant Morrison that makes him documentary-worthy?

Patrick Meaney: Morrison is one of the most respected writers in comics and, over thirty years of writing, has built up a body of work that stands up to and demands scrutiny. So, you've got Morrison the writer who can move from something as esoteric as The Filth to something as big as Final Crisis or Batman without ever compromising his storytelling, and on top of that you've got Morrison the person, a practicing chaos magician who's been abducted by aliens, has played in rock bands and has the reputation as a crazy rockgod of comics. For me, it's the intersection between his actual life and the work that's so interesting to explore, to show how events in his life were reflected in the comics and how he used the comics as a way to rewrite his own life. I have great respect for a lot of writers' work, but I don't think there's anyone who's blended fiction and reality to turn writing into a magical act in the way that Morrison has.

On top of that, I always loved reading his interviews, but there's very little video of him, making him the perfect subject for a documentary.

SFB: Morrison has a different outlook on the world from most people. Can you try to explain to us his understanding of the world?

Meaney: Morrison's worldview has two major components. His thoughts on the cosmology of the planet and life as a whole came out of an experience he had in Kathmandu in the 'nineties, in which he was "abducted by aliens," or came into contact with a higher intelligence. He was shown a glimpse of the world as seen from outside time and realized that when you look at the world that way, all life is one organism, tracing from you back in time to your mother, to her mother, and so on back to the first bacterial life on the planet. His comic book series in the 'nineties became a way for him to explore his own feelings about that experience and figure out what it meant.

Concurrent with that are more groundlevel ideas about the way that people can reinvent themselves and the way that fiction can influence reality. In his worldview, the belief of something makes it real, so if you change your clothes and your behavior, you can become someone else. That's what he's done several times over his life, and particularly during the 1990s he used his comics as a way to both record events that happened to him in real life and to write things that he wanted to happen, in the hopes of making them real.

SFB: There are stories of Morrison having had a wild life of sex and drugs. Can you give as an example of just how wild things have been for him?

Meaney: Morrison does have a reputation for being quite crazy, most of which comes from the 1990s. He didn't actually do any drugs until he was thirty, but in the 'nineties he sampled basically every drug out there. Perhaps the apex of this was his appearance at the DisinfoCon in 2000, where he gave a forty-five-minute account of his abduction experience while getting progressively drunker and drunker in front of an audience of several thousand people. There's a bunch of stories like this, but at the same time, many people talk about how that reputation is exaggerated, and he himself emphasizes that it was only one period of his life. This is all explored in detail in the documentary, and perhaps most interesting are Morrison's own thoughts on that reputation.

SFB: So, it sounds like you see him as more eccentric than wild, though perhaps one temporary component of his eccentricity was wildness. Would that be accurate?

Meaney: I think the wild period was a specific moment in his life, part of an experiment in reinventing himself that most people would consider pretty eccentric. And, I suppose even now a lot of his ideas and views on the world would be considered eccentric, but, at least based on what I've seen, his day-to-day life isn't that crazy. He seems to be more focused on work now, and just writing and telling stories.

SFB: What do you think is the most interesting thing about Morrison: his work or his life?

Meaney: That's hard to say because they're so intertwined. One of the recurring things he discusses in the doc is the idea that both clearly personal works like The Invisibles and seemingly more universal works like All-Star Superman draw influence and feeling from events he's going through at the time. So, his work is his life, and always has been.

SFB: Can you elaborate on the interdependence of his life and work?

Meaney: Exploring that question is the mission of the documentary. As I said, you can see elements of his personal experience in virtually every book he's done. The Invisibles was a kind of diary, chronicling the events of his life in that period. Doom Patrol was a superheroic representation of the artists and bohemians he was hanging out with in the late 'eighties. The three major periods of his work, the early Outsider years, the 'nineties psychedelic pop years, and the darker '00s years all reflect his personal experiences at the time he's writing them.

SFB: Which of Morrison's comics do you think most exemplifies him as a writer?

Meaney: There's two that I'd argue are the keys to understanding his work, both of which contain important elements of his mission. If I had to choose one, it'd be The Invisibles, which is a record of Grant's transformation over the course of the 'nineties from the low key guy who appeared to Buddy at the end of Animal Man into the comic book rock star he became in the 'nineties. It's the work that details his personal philosophy, and the concepts and ideas he introduces there recur in books that follow it, like Seven Soldiers, The Filth, or Final Crisis.

The other key work is the unfortunately out of print Flex Mentallo. People might wonder why someone who's done so much personal work writes so many superhero comics, and Flex is a manifesto about the importance of superheroes and how the idea of superheroes can be a powerful inspiration, spurring people on to a better world. It features a mix of surreal epic storytelling with some deeply personal intimate moments, something that he does better than almost anyone else.

Morrison meditating.

SFB: What was something unexpected you learned about Morrison while making this documentary?

Meaney: One unexpected thing I found was that Grant is a great impressionist, and when we were setting up to film, he'd do impressions of people ranging from Sean Connery to Donald Duck to King Mob. He's a really funny guy, and a lot more low key than I expected.

SFB: Any chance we'll get to see some of those impressions in the final product?

Meaney: The impressions will be included as DVD bonus stuff, except for King Mob, which will be in the film.

SFB: Was it difficult making this documentary? It seems, from the teaser footage you’ve released so far, that Morrison is a nice, obliging guy, but was he difficult to keep up with?

Meaney: Grant's a busy guy, but he and his wife Kristan have given us a lot of time, and we've got enough footage with Grant to put together a miniseries version of this documentary. We filmed our initial interview with him over the course of several days and he said that it was the longest interview he'd ever done and, on top of that, we'll be filming with him more in Scotland next month, so there's plenty of material there. And, when we were filming, he was up for pretty much anything. The funniest moment for me was when we had Grant stand in his bathroom, and we waved lights over him to get an interesting lighting effect. And, thankfully, he didn't question the absurdity of that.

SFB: "Miniseries"? By that do you mean a smaller preliminary version, or is the documentary going to be split up into sections?

Meaney: No, there won't actually be a minseries, we're targeting ninety minutes for the finished film. I meant more that we've got so much good material from shooting with Grant, and with many others, that we could do a miniseries-length film. What we are planning on doing is issuing a DVD that will have a lot of the material that was cut out of the film, so that if you feel like there wasn't enough of Grant talking about, say, Doom Patrol or New X-Men, you can jump over to the extra features after seeing the film and find him talking more in depth about all his works, as well as some general philosophical stuff as well.

SFB: Your film debuts at San Diego Comic Con this year. Do you know when more people are going to get the chance to see it?

Meaney: The target now is to screen at SDCC and then debut on DVD/Blu-ray for New York Comic Con in October, and go out to stores then. But, it's still tentative, pending completing everything on time. We're also most likely going to be doing a panel at C2E2 in Chicago in April, where we'll screen about twenty minutes of the film.

SFB: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your documentary?

Meaney: One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that in addition to Grant, we've got about twenty-five other people in the film, all of whom give their own perspective on a lot of the stories Grant tells and further illuminate his life and work. One of my favorite segments in the film is where about twelve artists who've worked with Grant all give their take on the workflow with him, and every one of them has a different approach. A short list of the people we interviewed includes Karen Berger, Geoff Johns, Dan Didio, Phil Jimenez, Cameron Stewart, Chris Weston, Jill Thompson, Frazer Irving, Douglas Rushkoff, Richard Metzger, JG Jones, and many more, with a few really big interviews still to come.

SFB: Thank you, Patrick. Looking forward to seeing your film.