UVC out-takes: Kyle Baker (part 1)

So the new issue of UVC is out now, and included with it is my interview with Kyle Baker. Thing is, though, Kyle gave me a lot of stuff. A lot of great stuff. It was very difficult to decide what to leave on the cutting room floor, so to speak, and after I finished the article, I found I still wanted to present this material somewhere. What better place, then, than here? So over the course of the next few weeks, I’m gonna bring you material (uncensored) from my interview with Kyle that did not make the final cut in my UVC article. Hope you find it interesting.

This time out, here’s a section where Kyle goes into further depth about Nat Turner.

“I like learning stuff… Like King David was a good opportunity to do research on that historical period. Or even Classics Illustrated – like I did Cyrano, I did ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ Because I wouldn’t have read those books otherwise. I’ve always been interested in Nat Turner, so this was an opportunity to do some research.

“I really thought the dialect would be confusing. Again, like with King David – the idea behind the King David book is [that] those Bible stories are pretty interesting but they’re really hard to read because they’re in gobbledygook. So I took the gobbledygook and turned it into English, and so you look at it and go ‘Oh, that’s what that book’s about. I didn’t know it was about him cheating on his wife and all that stuff; that’s cool!’ You know what I mean? I tell people, oh, I’m doing a Bible comic, they’re like huh? And I’m like no, man, on every page somebody’s getting killed or fucked! You just can’t read it because of all those fancy words, y’know?

“Even today, ‘cause I’m working on Nat Turner, I was listening to recordings of interviews with slaves. You ever hear any of this stuff? That’s what I did on most of my research, actually, ‘cause I didn’t want anyone to call me a liar. I made sure I wasn’t gonna have anything in these books that didn’t actually happen for real… You read books about slavery, very few of them are published by black people. [laughs] …Most of these books you read, they say great things like, ‘Yeah, they branded them, but it didn’t hurt!’ [laughs] I’m reading this and I can’t trust that stuff! So I listened to the WPA interviews when Roosevelt was trying to make work. They had hired all these out-of-work reporters and stuff to go talk to slaves that were still alive, all about 100 years old and stuff, and just tell their stories. These are awful stories. And I hope that people when they read Nat Turner will do their research because no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse! It’s amazing, y’know what I mean?…

“I didn’t want to cover the same ground as Amistad. You just don’t wanna do the same things somebody else did. I hadn’t seen the movie, but I had to go and buy it because they had the boats and I needed the pictures, so I actually watched this thing. When I was doing the research, my biggest worry was gosh, I hope nobody’s done the sharks. Steven Spielberg, he’s got to know about the sharks – and his whole reputation is based on sharks [laughs], y’know? So now I’m really worried that I gotta top Steven Spielberg and sharks. And I look at the movie [and] there’s no sharks in the movie. And that movie was just as disappointing as Cry Freedom. That’s the one with Denzel Washington as Steven Biko, and he’s in it for about five minutes because they decided that Kevin Kline is more interesting – some reporter that [Biko] knew? [Amistad] is not about Cinque. That guy was interesting. I’m watching this movie – five minutes in, this guy’s got a sword and he’s beating up these guys and he’s cool, and I’m like whoa, I wanna see this movie! This guy’s cool! I wanna watch this guy for two hours! [laughs] But the movie’s about John Quincy Adams and Matthew McConaghey! [laughs] Who gives a shit? This is Spielberg; the guy knows better. The guy knows how to wring the most drama out of a situation.

“And I saw that time and again and I kept thinking, [like] when you see something like Maus or any Holocaust kind of movie – they’re going to repeat themselves, because the stories are all pretty much the same: the gas, and the ovens, and how many ways can you show gas? So they all have the same parts, whether it’s the Roberto Benigni movie [Life is Beautiful] or any of these movies that have the same scene in prison, and the showers – which I’m not knocking; my point is, that’s what I was afraid of. Like, aw, shit, I hope this thing isn’t gonna look like Glory.

“So I was watching Amistad and all these movies and I didn’t have to worry; they all just completely, deliberately missed the boat. I mean, there’s gotta be a thing where whenever you’re adapting a real-life story, you’re looking for the most dramatic episode. If I’m doing Lawrence of Arabia, you’re gonna pick the most dramatic parts of his life, with the most action, the biggest fights of his life, right? That’s what he’s famous for: ‘Oh, I hear he blew up a train! Oh, you gotta put that in the movie; that’s gonna be a good movie!’ So you have people reading these stories and somebody goes, ‘Hey, sharks were following the boats.’ ‘Oh, we better not put that in.’ [laughs]“