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Seeing Red
Cult comic book icon Warren Ellis is documented in the documentary Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts by filmmaker Patrick Meaney.
Following on from his Grant Morrison documentary Talking With Gods, which screened at the Sydney Opera House last August as part of the Graphic Festival, Patrick Meaney has delivered yet another documentary on a divisive comic book industry personality - British writer Warren Ellis. Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts features interviews with the querulous Ellis himself - shown guzzling Red Bull and puffing furiously on cigarettes throughout with a mad gleam in his eye - as well as a mixture of film industry personas such as Joss Whedon, Will Wheaton, Dame Helen Mirren (who starred in an adaptation of the comic RED) and comic industry stalwarts Garth Ennis and Colleen Doran, among many others.
Director Patrick Meaney not only includes interviews with people who claim to have been directly influenced by Ellis, from philosopher Steven Shaviro to adult movie star Stoya, but also adds a number of invented sequences illustrating moments from the writer's fiction, with several of his characters appearing on screen played by actors. "We had done some small filmed sequences in Talking With Gods," Meaney explains, "but there, I was very hesitant about doing anything too on the nose. Those sequences seemed to go over well, so I decided to give it a shot and do more elaborate filmed sequences. I definitely wanted to break up the talking heads, and try other visual approaches."
Unlike many other comic book characters, Ellis' creations are slightly less outlandish in appearance, often wearing business suits or ordinary street clothes. As such, the filmed sequences add to the notion of the writer's work being just a slightly more skewed take on the world around us. Ellis' own public persona is for the most part performance, his garrulous online behaviour used to attract fans to his work. "Warren freely admits that the persona he uses on Twitter and his website is a construction, a persona he created because it's more interesting and fun to read than his normal, everyday self," says Meaney."I think that between the interviews with Warren himself, and the interviews with other people, you get a good sense of how Warren perceives himself, and also the amazing guy that his friends see him as. I think this is a closer representation of Warren than anything we've seen before, and he doesn't seem like the kind of person likely to write a biography down the line, so it's probably as close as we're going to get."
It's this simultaneous fictionalisation of his own self, added to his boundless efforts to promote creators and ideas that he is interested in, that has earned Ellis the moniker of ‘internet jesus'. He is credited with being one of the most successful adopters of the internet as a promotional tool, creating the Warren Ellis Forum in the ‘90s in order to discuss his own work with fans and create a community of shared ideas. "I think Warren's biggest impact in comics is actually his support for comics activism and changes in the way that people promote and position comics," argues Meaney. The director credits the discussions started by Ellis with the successes of books like Scott Pilgrim and The Walking Dead, produced by more market-savvy independent creators. "I think the reason for that is that the WEF [Warren Ellis Forum] was really empowering. I was on there in the early 2000s and I remember getting the sense that you could do this, you could go out there and make comics, and that you should. If you look at the current roster of Marvel creators, it really is amazing how many people started out as fans on the WEF."
When comparing Captured Ghosts with his documentary debut Talking With Gods, Meaney found that the latter film had a much more obvious structure, with the mercurial Grant Morrison's rise in popular culture easier to chart. Ellis, by contrast, keeps his public and private selves separate and is more focused on producing commercially viable work, something which is more difficult to engage with in a documentary narrative. "I had to figure out a different approach," the director admits, stating that the idea to include interludes with Ellis reading his own prose came after an initial false start. "We decided to make the film more about Warren's ideas and used him reading excerpts from his comics or prose writing as a way to keep things structured. Then, as we interviewed more and more people, the structure of the film became clearer. It's largely about contrasting Warren's own perceptions of himself and his career with the perceptions of his friends and collaborators."
Captured Ghosts debuted in the States at the Napa Valley Film Festival, with Ellis himself in attendance for the Q&A sessions. Some attendees had unexpected reactions to the film - "One woman seemed incredibly concerned about Warren's well-being, due to his constant drinking and smoking" - but the response overall has been great Meaney reports, with laughs at all the right places.
Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts premieres in Australia at the Drawn to Screen festival being held at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art from January 6 to March 4, 2012. For more information go here.
