You’ve also been involved with Ultramarines, the new film being made.
I have, yes.
And you wrote the script?
I did.
Can you talk a little about the film?
In a very limited sense, I’m actually being told not to say too much because they’re releasing information about it as it builds up. I’ve written the script, I was picked to write it because of my association with 40k and the fact that I seem to know my way around it, and I have enormous faith in what they’re doing. I think Games Workshop held off for a long time because the danger was that they’d find someone who was enthusiastic about making a film, but not respect the source material enough, which would be pointless because it would instantly alienate the gamers and the readership. And I think what they’re doing with this – which is going to be very exciting from the bits I’ve seen so far – is as true as anybody could hope to what 40k would be in movie form.
Do you know if it’s going to be a direct-to-DVD release?
I don’t yet know, I don’t know the answer to those questions. People who are particularly interested can follow the release of information on the Ultramarines site, because as information becomes official they put a press release up. I think there’s a particularly juicy press release about to come along. I probably shouldn’t say any more than that.
Without meaning to provoke the snipers on the roof, can you give us a vague idea of what sort of races are going to be involved?
I can’t even do that. That’s why God made NDAs [Non-Disclosure Agreements]. One thing that I think they have done very well, and I will say this much, is that they’ve allowed me to stay informed about what they’re doing, and when they are releasing a piece of a information they’ll ask me for my opinion and I’ll write something on what I think of the cast or whatever, and that will become a short blog post on their website. So rather than me being completely out of the loop I’m allowed to come along from the point of view of the fans and say ‘I’ve just seen this and I think it’s pretty good, this is my experience of it.’
So did you enjoy writing for film? Is it something you’d like to do more of in the future?
Yes, very much. And it’s a great opportunity, to do something like this, and afterwards you can say ‘Hey, I’ve written a movie’. Like all these things, it’s a great learning curve, there was so much about it that was in common with writing comics, for obvious reasons, and yet there were so many things that were not like writing comics. It was almost disconcerting. One thing I liked about it that I didn’t think I would was the fine-tuning element. Nobody likes to have their work picked away at and fired away at and chipped away at, but in fact, with a movie that’s absolutely essential because it’s such a group activity, and that was fascinating. The initial horror was that somebody needed to change things, and then you understood why and got involved in that organic process. Watching my screenplay be revised so much was an interesting thing to watch from beginning to end.
So did you have the director say ‘Well, we can’t do this because of that’ and similar types of redrafting?
Yes, there were obviously restrictions where they said that we simply couldn’t do that, or technical restrictions in what was possible with the animation that they’re doing. They’re walking a very thin line between making it accessible to the widest possible audience and you don’t need to know 40k to watch it, and balancing that with keeping it so fans don’t go ‘Well, that’s just ridiculous, why did you have to spoon feed us that?’
In terms of comics, can you give us an idea of what you have coming up? There’s Insurrection for the [2000AD] Megazine, of course…
I’m still regularly contributing to Sinister Dexter and Kingdom at the moment in 2000AD, both strips I’m very involved with and enjoy. Insurrection’s a great thing, working on a story in the [Judge] Dredd universe from the other side of the coin, because these people really are anti-Judge. Colin [MacNeil] is just one of the best artists in the business, he’s amazing and a great storyteller. So it’s not like you send a script off to him and it comes back with nice art, there’s a sort of combined process where some of the storytelling is decided by the way that Colin can visualise things, which is rare. Sometimes comics are more collaborative than others, and there’s nothing wrong with it when it’s a question of there being a script and the artist has drawn it. But when you can work with somebody panel by panel to get a story going with great ideas – when we first started, Colin sent me pages and pages saying ‘I’ve drawn some robots, I’ve drawn some giant apes!’ And I was saying ‘Great, well we’ll have to put him in,’ characters were there drawn before written and the story sort of evolved around them. It was a great way of doing it.
Have you been pleased with its reception so far?
Yes, it’s done very well, and I think it’s put the wind up people as well. I think because it’s sort of anti-Dredd, I’m not personally anti-Dredd, but it’s anti-Dredd universe. Dredd is a wonderful satirical entity, the idea of this Megacity and ruling everyone’s lives, you buy into that when you read the story and you relish it. And then we come along and say ‘Actually, we’re going to do it from the other side now’. It’s quite fun.
You’ve also written two books inside the Doctor Who universe recently, one for Torchwood and Doctor Who, and you were on the comic series for a long time of course. Do you have any plans to explore that setting further in the future?
I’d love to. That’s the sort of thing where you get asked to do it, which is very nice. Most of my Doctor Who stuff recently has been for BBC Audio, writing original audio. I did one with David Tennant reading just before… I think it came out in the first week of January. And before that it was one that Catherine Tate read, and a Torchwood one as well. It’s great because again, it’s yet another way of exploring how you can write a story. It’s not a simple case of writing a short story; there are all sorts of things that you have to bear in mind because it’s going to be read out. There are other parameters. And it’s lovely to write Doctor Who, which I’ve been a fan of since forever. But it’s great fun to be pushed into a slightly different discipline – how can I do this? How can I write this for someone who’s going to read it out loud and for someone who’s going to want to listen to it?
It must have been a bit of a culture shock, given that you have an extensive background in comics and suddenly, you lose that visual medium?
It is. There are literal limitations – the last thing you want to do is have the assistant say ‘Doctor, look at the huge green three-eyed thing coming towards me’. As I was saying earlier, you don’t want that exposition moment on what is effectively a radio play, so you have to find ways of delivering the information in hopefully subtle manners and finding ways to subvert it so you can supply someone with the visual quality without those really crass moments of over-description from someone who should really just be screaming and running away. And I found that very interesting, because as you say, going from comics to that couldn’t have been more of a change in pace.
Dan Abnett’s personal website can be found at http://www.danabnett.com
Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie Special Edition Collector’s Set is available now for pre-order exclusively from http://www.ultramarinesthemovie.com
