- Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' -- people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.
- Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans -- the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.
- That John Boorman movie Hope and Glory (1987) is actually very similar to my own life. You grow up in ruins. You grow up in a very malleable landscape that was constantly changing. Something would be gone, but at the same time that opened up vistas of new landscape, so you were constantly getting these very peculiar changes of environment. The Chaos stuff in 'Stormbringer' is very much the way it felt, but it didn't feel weird because it's all you knew.
- [on Robert Fuest's film of "The Final Programme, 1973]: It was finally agreed that Fuest would use my script, and Fuest didn't like this, but he said, "Super! Marvellous! We're all very excited here, Michael." And off he went. And when I went down to watch when he started shooting, it began to dawn on me that he was using his original script - he'd actually chucked mine and was using his own script. The result was that he ended up with about three hours of film, two hours of which were primarily reaction shots - all the stuff I'd crossed out with a pen was back in there.
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