I wanted to look like the most diverse writer in comics! Spy genre, space genre, crime genre, and then you realize that it's all actually the same thing.
When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?"
The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.
If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you're telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.
I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.
Sure, it can happen that the director sees you in a particular genre, and they like your work in that genre; they tend to think that you can only do well in that genre.
Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.
I genre-hop quite a lot. I love manipulating genre and deconstructing it and making it irrelevant. Genreless music is great because it means you get to write in any genre that you like.
The funny thing about me is I move from genre to genre, but I essentially shoot all the movies the same way.
At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies.
My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
I do love science fiction, but it's not really a genre unto itself; it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done, I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.
When we started with 'Big Brother' and created the reality genre, no one could ever foresee that there was so much space in the genre that it could deliver so many formats. There will be periods where there is not enough new stuff to keep the genre alive. But it will never die.
I love the horror genre. I consider myself a genre filmmaker. I love genre, but I think there's a certain amount of complacency that comes with watching a genre film; people know what the devices are. They know what the tropes are. They know the conventions.
There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work.