Rocker exposing his style to cameras

FLINT JOURNAL COLUMN

FLINT

THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION

Friday, February 20, 2004

By Doug Pullen
JOURNAL COLUMNIST

With his fuchsia-dyed hair, sculpted body and a sound that fuses '80s electronica with 21st century rage rock, you can see why Celldweller frontman Klayton approaches music "from a different angle."

Certainly, he'll approach tonight's show at the Machine Shop from a few different angles as up to 11 cameras capture Celldweller's unique style of performance for a future concert DVD. Doors open at 7 p.m. Die Symphony and Behind Every Smile will open.

Klayton is a native New Yorker who moved to Grand Blanc Township two years ago after working on the first Celldweller CD nearby with Grant Mohrman, the former Full on the Mouth and Lost Tribe guitarist from Grand Blanc who now runs a studio in Clarkston.

He recruited guitarist Dale and bassist Kemiikal, both local musicians, last year and debuted the band Aug. 29 last year at the Machine Shop. The group also played there in November.

Klayton (first name only, please) says his off-center approach to music stems from his strict Christian upbringing. The oldest of four children, he "was sheltered from many things my schoolmates were allowed to do. It was meant to protect me from the world, but in the long run it skewed my views of a few things."

He didn't listen to rock music until his teens, then started playing drums. Eventually, he added guitar and keyboards to his repertoire.

Klayton paints his heavy music canvasses with a broader brush than most. His music is colored by the darker, heavier rock of metal's Slayer and electronica's Skinny Puppy, with a big glob of European techno variants and a dash of classical thrown in.

A Celldweller concert is meant to be mentally stimulating and visually arresting, with, as an homage to Skinny Puppy, video footage that is synchronized to the music.

"The show itself is constantly being updated," he says, noting that tonight's perfomance will look, sound and feel much different from previous Machine Shop stops. "I have personally started shooting and editing my own video for the show, and there are quite a few new visual elements and some new musical elements."

Plus, he says, the band has been touring for nearly six months, so it's tighter than during that first show last summer.

The DVD is a natural extension of the band's visual nature. It's also a keepsake for the group's growing national fanbase, which "spans the entire country," according to Jimmy Rhodes, who manages the group's 8,200-member mailing list and 1,000-member street team (fans, who call themselves Cellmates, often discuss the band's virtues on its Web site, celldweller.com).

The group has a good local following, too. "Celldweller goes over real well at the Shop," says proprietor Kevin Zink. "Always a good turnout. People love them."

The 30-ish Klayton has built this through hard work, with a tight budget and no major label support. He'd love to have some backing, but relishes his artistic freedom.

"Though I'm relatively broke, compared to my counterparts, I have the freedom a lot of those people don't have," he says.

He plans to move west eventually; Hollywood seems to have taken an interest in his music. The song "Switchback" (set to be the first video from the CD) has been heard in the TV trailer for the movie "Timeline," and will be used in trailers for the upcoming "The Punisher" and "Constantine" (with Keanu Reeves).

"I've never been a sit-around-and-wait-for-it-to-come-to-me kind of guy," Klayton says.

William Gibson: 'Squinting at the present'

By David Hiltbrand
Philadelphia Inquirer

It takes several calls to reach sci-fi legend William Gibson at home in Vancouver, British Columbia, because his phone is on the fritz and he can't hear it ring.

It's not the type of glitch you expect from the Orwell of the Internet, the Vasco da Gama of cyberspace, the man who virtually predicted virtual reality.

The presumption is that the reclusive author, who will speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library tonight, lives huddled in some digital aerie bristling with the type of hardware Bill Gates would kill to get his hands on.

The reality is that Gibson, 55, is so far behind the curve, he'd need binoculars to see its wake.

"Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer," he says. "I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."

That's a shocking admission from the author who has painted such a vivid and chilling portrait of our microprocessed future. Beginning with Neuromancer in 1984 - the only novel ever to win sci-fi's Triple Crown of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards - Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace. The Washington Post called it "an amazing virtuoso performance."

His fiction inspired a generation of sci-fi writers - including Neal Stephenson, Jack Womack, Rudy Rucker and Lucius Shepard - and established the genre known as cyberpunk.

His sole Hollywood foray came when he adapted one of his short stories, "Johnny Mnemonic," into a 1995 film of that name starring Keanu Reeves. Although none of Gibson's novels has been adapted as a movie, his influence is evident in any number of futuristic films, particularly the Matrix trilogy.

"It's relatively easy," Gibson points out, "to make movies that are quite a lot like my fiction without having to buy the film rights from me."

He doesn't spend much time worrying about spin-offs. "I regard the novel as the artifact itself and any films or action figures as peripheral activities that I'm usually not going to be involved in creatively," he says.

Gibson owes his remarkable career to a bus-stop epiphany.

"I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. I didn't know anything about it technologically. I just thought if it's that small and that nicely styled, everything is changing."

Gibson is often described as prescient, as if in imagining his books he had somehow hacked directly into the future. He finds the notion ridiculous.

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

By any measure, his most recent novel, Pattern Recognition, from which he'll read tonight, is a departure, in that it is his first novel set in the present. Although the book was published a year ago, Gibson is only now venturing out to promote it - in the paperback version.

"I've always taken it for granted that the publisher makes their money on the mass-market edition and not the hardcover," he says. "The hardcover is the 'Let's get a lot of quotes and get on the New York Times best-seller list' tool. They always send you back out to advertise the actual product."

Given his retiring nature, Gibson looks upon these book tours as something of a necessary evil. "It can run the whole gamut from absolutely wonderful and brilliantly affirming to being really depressing. I have a surprisingly sane fan base... he said, fingers crossed."

Writing is a profession Gibson stumbled into. He was 6 when his father died during a business trip, and was raised by his mother in a small Virginia town. "My memories of growing up there in the '50s look to me like the '30s."

After three years at a boarding school in Arizona, Gibson followed the Vietnam-era migration of young people to Canada - but not to avoid the war. "I never got called up," he says. "The people in the actual draft-evader community in Canada were really politicized. I was there to have fun."

He met his future wife, Deborah, in Toronto during the Summer of Love. They eventually moved to her hometown of Vancouver, where he lived the life of a professional student, eventually earning an English degree at the University of British Columbia in 1977. "I had no career goals. When I started writing [after graduation], I thought, 'If this doesn't work out I'm going to spend the rest of my life at a cat-food factory.' "

His inspiration was the subversive sci-fi paperbacks he devoured in his teens.

"The art form I loved as a kid had gone completely flat. I realized no one had tried to write a science-fiction novel as if Lou Reed and David Bowie were writing it."

To his surprise, Neuromancer turned into a overwhelming literary sensation. For the next 20 years, Gibson continued to mine the bleak dystopia he had imagined.

The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." That explains why his nine books, all of which are still in print, have appeared at unpredictable intervals. "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder." He's now grumpily contemplating his next novel, another present-day tale.

Pattern Recognition represents a personal challenge for the author.

"It started as an attempt to prove that I could write a book set right now that would feel very much like the rest of my stuff," he says.

The novel's contemporary time frame also dictated a change of focus. Through protagonist Cayce Pollard, a "cool-hunter" who ferrets out developing consumer trends, Gibson explores the insidious effects of marketing and branding.

"The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff."

It's a topic Gibson approaches gingerly.

"In my own life I'm much more gleefully complicit than Cayce would ever be happy being," he says. "I don't mind the extent to which William Gibson is a brand as well as being me. It makes for an interesting life."

SET VISIT: Keanu Reeves Talks Constantine!

Source: Warner Bros. Pictures Thursday, February 19, 2004

Superhero Hype! correspondent Brian Carroll visited the set of Warner Bros.' upcoming Constantine, directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, Shia LaBeouf and Jesse Ramirez. Based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer, the film tells the story of irreverent supernatural detective John Constantine (Reeves), who has literally been to hell and back. When Constantine teams up with skeptical policewoman Angela Dodson (Weisz) to solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister (also played by Weisz), their investigation takes them through the world of demons and angels that exists just beneath the landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Caught in a catastrophic series of otherworldy events, the two become inextricably involved and seek to find their own peace at whatever cost. Brian reports...

We took the limo down to Compton south of L.A. and parked in a vacant lot filled with trucks and trailers. We then walked a block to Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, built in 1928. The architecture was modeled after Moorish middle eastern architecture with domed roofs and columns. Inside one of three buildings sitting around a courtyard was the set for Midnite's reliquary, a long hallway with plenty of intricate stonework on the walls. The hall was filled with religious icons and other objects, including a huge wooden cross, religious statuary, a dusty jukebox, a vintage machine gun, brains in jars, vases and more.

We watched Keanu (dressed in a black coat, pants and tie and white shirt and holding a strange golden gun, known in the film as the Holy Shotgun) and Djimon (pimped out in a red hat and velour coat) walk down the hall six times for the scene in which they walk to Midnite's electric chair. When we first came in, Keanu must have sensed us looking down from the floor above because he looked up and gave us a little wave.

And now a little background on John Constantine: John first showed up in DC's "The Saga of the Swamp Thing" # 37, as a mysterious fellow (modeled after the rock star Sting in appearance), who uses a worldwide network of contacts and operatives to keep up with what's going on in the supernatural world. He leads Swamp Thing through a number of adventures to prepare him to avert a supernatural disaster. The character's popularity got him his own book, called "Hellblazer," which debuted in 1987 and continues to this day. Hellblazer has attracted some of comicdom's most successful writers, sometimes for just one issue (Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison) or for a more extended stay, like Warren Ellis, Brian Azzarello, and Garth Ennis, who was responsible for the storyline, "Dangerous Habits," that the movie is based on.

Brian got a chance to talk to Keanu Reeves on the set and here is the interview which does contain some story spoilers, so proceed with caution.

Could you talk about some of the changes you've made from the comic and how your character may be different?

What changes are you talking about?

For example, in the comic, your character is British and blond.

I think that's about the only change we've made.

Did you have any desire to play it British?

We spoke about it, but then it seemed in terms of the platform that we were using which became Los Angeles, kind of like the world in terms of heaven, hell and Los Angeles seemed to be attractive and make sense. We're kind of doing a hard boiled kind of take on the piece, so we kind of went this way. Kind of a more Gothic aspect.

He's known for having a devilish sense of humor. Is that reflected in the dialogue?

It's serious and hopefully funny at the same time. Again, go back to that hard boiled motif. Constantine in this film is in a hospital and he finds out he's dying of lung cancer, lights a cigarette up inside the doctor's office. She says, "That's a good idea." He gets into an elevator and this character comes by and the elevator doors closing and the person says, "Going down?" and he says, "Not if I can help it." The next scene is he's in bed with a half breed demon drinking whiskey with scratches on his back and the scene ends with her tail kind of swishing underneath the sheets laughing, going, "Lung cancer? Ha! That's funny, John!" So hopefully we have the spirit of the Constantinian factor. I'm always asking, "Is that Constantinian enough?" I think I need more Constantine in my Constantine.

How is the story hard boiled?

In terms of that kind of dialogue.

But don't you mean noir, like Bogart?

Well, there is that kind of aspect to it, but I'd say more kind of Californian noir from a literature standpoint. So there's light and shadow. There's a couple of shots of Constantine just smoking in a doorway. You see the smoke rising behind him. It's bright outside, but it's dark in the hall and there's a stairs going up before he does his first exorcism, so there's that kind of cinematic motif.

Does that come out in the dialogue too?

Yeah, that short, clipped kind of thing. There's that thing where he's with that character of Ellie, the half-breed demon that he's just had sex with right after he's found out he's got terminal cancer. She's like laughing. "Terminal cancer, that's funny, John. I bet he can't wait to get his hands on you after all the half-breeds you've sent back. He's really going to have fun with you. He's going to rip you apart. You're the only soul the man himself would come up to collect." And John's like, "Yeah."

What are the burns on your shirt?

Oh, there's a character, Midnite, and I want to use the chair to surf the ether and he doesn't want me to, so he digs his hands into me and it burns, so I beg him.

This is a dark story with a sense of humor. Is that what attracted you to the project?

Yeah, that's something I find is fun to play and I find it enjoyable, that kind of mixture of extreme circumstances with humor, so that's fun.

Is it nice to do a movie with horror elements where you don't yell and scream but get to play it cool?

Well, Constantine gets his ass whupped a lot in this movie, but he keeps coming. And we got some fun stuff. We've got some Ceplavites, some kind of demon aspects and they fight. Demons are coming up onto our plane, which isn't supposed to be happening. So yeah, there's elements where he does play it cool, but he also gets thrown on his back and choked and thrown against walls and hit and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

So is it physical?

Yeah, there's certain elements that are physical, yeah, but I think it's part of the hero journey that you gotta go through. You gotta run and jump and get hit and kind of pull yourself back together again and shake it off and keep going.

You've mentioned that the character has an ambiguous morality that you found attractive.

Yeah. Well, I mean he's not the nicest guy all the time. I don't know if he's immoral, but it's something that he's negotiating with.

There's a lot of CG stuff in this. Have you seen any concept art of the demons?

They're really cool actually. They've got half their skull cut off, so they've taken out kind of the seat of the soul, and with that, no eyes and the skull is open and yet they have these long limbs and they're quite humanoid and yet the whole seat of the soul has been removed and yet they have this・the Ceplavites themselves can fly and they can kind of smell and attack and they're part of the motif of devouring the damned and yet they have no feet. So they can fly but they can't rest and so even the demons are tortured and they have nothing but their desire. So that's a cool kind of concept, I thought.

Can you describe the scene you're shooting today?

Right now I've asked the character Midnite to use the chair which turns out to be the electric chair from Sing Sine and right now this is his reliquary where he's collected all of these objects, religious icons and things like that. So right now we're walking toward the chair where John is going to get electrocuted.

What are those glasses he's collected?

Those are some kind of nice kind of pinup girls with months on them, so I think again this is illustrated the kind of humor that you have all of these religious iconography and he's also collecting high ball glasses with girls on them.

Why is John using the chair?

He's trying to find out the・supposedly the dark side has the Spear of Destiny and so I'm trying to find out who has it, so he uses the chair. What's going to happen is they're playing with an aspect of time. You've seen this kind of scavenger character who's found the Spear at the beginning of the movie and every time you see this character, he looks like he looks over his shoulder like he's being watched, and ultimately John goes and it's kind of tying in time. We play with time oftentimes and it turns out that John was a guy who saw this the whole time. It's in the future. When John crosses over, he crosses over into hell a couple of times and we play with time so that when he does do that, time in the real world slows down or almost stops and so we can go off to these other places and then come back and almost nothing has happened.

Had you read "Hellblazer" before you got the part?

I was not familiar with the material before reading the script.

Were you just looking for this kind of movie?

I was looking for a good script and this kind of came my way and I really liked the writing and the character itself and what happened in the piece and ultimately there's a line in it where Constantine says, "God has a plan for all of us. I had to die twice just to figure that out. Some people like it, some people don't."

He's always been a user in the comic. Is he nicer in the film?

No. Not really.

What is Francis Lawrence like as a director?

He's great. He's really inventive. He's got a real fresh feel to his cinema. He's really great with storytelling and the camera. He's great to work with. He's a great collaborator and yet has a strong voice. He's got good taste. With actors, he knows what he's looking at and he knows what to ask to make it better or to help you kind of discover the scene. It's great.

Is Constantine more vulnerable than Neo?

I don't know. I thought Neo was a very vulnerable character.

Well, he became a superhero in the last movie?

In what way?

Well, he's flying.

Yeah, but he's also full of doubts. He doesn't win. He has to lose his life. That's not very invulnerable. Constantine, there's an element of the greatness, the great Constantine is kind of faded. He's in a vulnerable state and this character Djimon is playing, Midnite, he has a line where he's like・because I'm asking him for help and he's saying I'm neutral. I don't work on any side of the balance. I have this place, this club where half-breeds can come and be themselves and "before you were a bartender, you were one witch doctor against thirty Askar and I was・ and he goes, "You were John Constantine. The John Constantine once. Times change. Balances shift and I have always been a businessman, John. You know that."

What does Hell look like?

Yeah, this one is orangey. There's dust in the air, a charcoal kind of dust. There's a real strong soundscape to this film, so there's a real strong soundscape. One of the things that we came up with and you'll see this a couple of times is that when someone dies and they go to hell, part of hell is just at the moment when they die and I guess you're seeking release, these soldier demons, scavenger demons come in and they just eat you. Part of these empty skull folks is that they have these really huge maws with teeth and so instead of getting release, you get consumed and then instantly you're back to just about where you were going to die again and then come in and get you again. And so there's one element where I walk out onto a hell freeway, coming out of this character's apartment where it transforms from a real world to a hell apartment and that is just basically, you know, there's rubble and decay. Everything's broken down. Cars on the freeway have almost melted and there's just these demons with these people screaming being consumed and then they're back and then screaming and consumed and screaming and consumed.

Are you ever in makeup in the movie?

No, but there's some cool elaborate makeups in this film. They're really kind of doing a nice mixture of having in camera effects or makeups and then having CGI supported, so there's a cool mixture with that. I always find that works best instead of just pure CGI because it becomes kind of flat, though it's getting much better.

What about Rachel Weisz?

She's been great. She's adding a real strength and sensitivity at the same time to her role. It's enjoyable working with her.

Stay tuned to Superhero Hype! for more interviews with stars from the set!

KEIRA'S QUEEN OF LOLLYWOOD

Hot new talent topping the takings charts

By Toby Mcdonald

MOVE over Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and J-Lo the new queen of Hollywood is British teenager Keira Knightley.

Keira, 18, is the biggest female star at the US box-office, with her films making £238.6 million last year.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl, Love Actually and footballing tale Bend It Like Beck ham kicked the usual A-listers off the top spot.

Hollywood expert Michael Bodey said: ''Stars can't just sleepwalk their way through a film any more.

''The audience is a lot more fickle than in the days when they went to the next Schwarznegger or Stall one film just because it was Sly or Arnie.''

Relative newcomers Carrie-Anne Moss and the late Gloria Foster from the Matrix movies, along with X Men 2 star Kelly Hu also make the top five.

Gloria died of diabetes-related illness in 2001 after her scenes for the Matrix Reloaded had been filmed. Oscar winner Halle Berry, at No.4, is the only established member of Hollywood royalty in the top five.

The success of The Matrix and Pirates has also seen top male stars such as Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Russell Crowe sink without trace.

While Keanu was the star of The Matrix series, Hugo Weaving's supporting role and his part in Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King ensured he is The One to top the takings chart, with £386.3 million.

Finding Nemo star Geoffrey Rush found his way to No.2 and Orlando Bloom's role in Pirates proved a treasure trove for movie bosses, helping him reach third place in the chart.

Michael Bodey added: ''Who needs Tom Cruise or Russell Crowe when you have eye-popping special effects or just a great story?

''What we have seen in the last couple of years is actors who have never been real box office stars before but are now climbing the list because of supporting roles in successful franchises.''

But it is the spectacular rise of newcomer Knightley that has taken most Hollywood observers by surprise.

Keira, the daughter of English actor Will Knightley and Scottish playwright Sh arm an MacDonald, first found fame playing Natalie Portman's double in Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace. But she became a star in her own right with 2002 film Bend It Like Beck ham released in America last year.

She is now filming The Jacket, produced by George Clooney and Steven Sodbergh in West Lothian.

The £20 million Gulf war drama is due to be completed by the end of March.

During filming, Keira has been seen going on intimate dates in Glasgow with co-star Adrian Brody.

She has also just finished filming King Arthur, playing Guinevere opposite Clive Owens' King Arthur.

Later this year she will appear in Tulip Fever and she is expected to star alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom in the sequel to Pirates.

mail file TOP FIVE WOMEN AND MEN AT US BOX OFFICE IN 2003

1. Keira Knightley: Pirates, Bend it Like Beck ham, Love Actually. TOTAL £238.6m 2. Carrie-Anne Moss: The Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions TOTAL £228m 3. Gloria Foster The Matrix Reloaded. TOTAL £153m 4. Halle Berry: X-men 2, Gothika. TOTAL £148.9m 5. Kelly Hu: X-Men 2, Cradle 2 the Grave. TOTAL £135.6m Weaving Moss

1. Hugo Weaving: Return of the King, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions. TOTAL £386.2m 2. Geoffrey Rush: Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean, Intolerable Cruelty. TOTAL £369.9m 3. Orlando Bloom: Pirates of the Caribbean, Return of the King. TOTAL £324m 4. Bruce Spence: Finding Nemo, Matrix, Peter Pan TOTAL £278.5m 5. Ian McKellen: R/ King, X-Men 2. TOTAL £274.7