Clive Barker's Jericho, developed by Mercury Steam and published by Codemasters

In Part III of our Q&A with Clive Barker, whose videogame Jericho is now in stores, we spoke at length about the past, present and future of the horror movie. In today's final entry, Barker explains why he's so optimistic about the future of videogames, and offers some advice--as one cultural outlaw speaking to another--to the folks at Rockstar Games in the wake of the British Board of Film Classification's ban of Manhunt 2.

I'm guessing that most of your peer group doesn't play videogames?

Yes, that's true with this--not proviso, but with this addition: when they do it's always the unlikeliest ones.

Okay. So why were you so drawn to videogames? And why are you so optimistic about where the medium can go in the future?

I think it's a damn fool artist who doesn't walk in all the media that are available to him or her and see whether there's something they can contribute to the process. And for me it's also a way of-[Jericho] would not make a good novel. It's way too complex for a movie, in terms of the intricacies of it: how do you really get five civilizations into a picture? You can't do it. It's out of the question. Though I don't think we're very far off the point when you'll be able to do it. With cinema driven by CGI pushing in one direction and games pushed by a hunger for reality in another, eventually then they're going to meet.

In the next five years it's going to be impossible to tell which is which. It's like the scene at the end of "Animal Farm":  They looked from man to pig and pig to man, and couldn't tell one from the other. It's going to be the same. We are going to be have such visually sophisticated games and movies that are so dependent upon a spectacle that only CGI can supply.

The other thing is that television is now also telling incredibly long stories. I'm just being provocative saying this, but the best American novel of the last few years has been "The Sopranos." Honestly, that isn't even a radical thing to say, actually. It's almost a commonplace. It certainly reached the kind of audiences that Dickens reached, given its DVD life and so on. It's had an immense complexity of character, even if it did in the end leave us wondering what the f--k that was about. [Laughs.]

I think the love of the game, the love of visuals, the love of character and big ideas is always going to have me looking for new places to play. I got into comics as somebody who could be a creator, and I was rather happy to do so. Not because comics make a huge amount of money--though there's certainly been a bunch of people who have made a lot of money from comics--for me it was just the freedom. Man, I could do anything.

Well, it's like you've got a two hundred million dollar budget every day of the week.

Right, exactly. Every other page.

Last question: I was struck by something you said about, you know, dealing with [former Motion Picture Association of America] president Jack Valenti on "Hellraiser" and stuff like that. So in your own way you're a veteran of the culture wars.

Yeah, yeah.

What would your advice be to Rockstar? Not legally--whatever is going to happen with this game is going to happen. But as someone who's been through something like that and gone forward what's your advice to them about what they're trying to do?

This is going to sound perverse, but never explain, never apologize. Anything you say in defense of your own reasons to create will be used against you. It's no use kidding yourself that you could ever intellectually convince these folks that what you're doing comes from some place deeper in yourself than your pocketbook.

The truth of the matter is almost all art forms are f--king difficult. They're not only even particularly pleasant to do. [Director Martin] Scorsese always says he's always glad when the film is over because now he can get to the stuff he really enjoys. Nobody likes to get up at four o'clock in the f--king morning. Everybody is standing around in the cold and now I've got to go in and ask the actress whether she'll go topless. I mean, it's just like so many things not to like.

I'm personally somebody who likes the painting process for its non-intellectual simulation; the writing for its intellectual stimulation; for the fact that I can marry everything that I--every kind of information. "Moby Dick" is my favorite novel simply because Melville is so naked about the way that he says, "Okay, I'm not gonna try and gently, subtly turn the conversation to a scientific breakdown of the whale population. I'm just going to have a whole chapter about it and that's what it's going to be." And there's something nice and raw and simple about that.

Right.

Art forms, in the beginning of their lives--and certainly American novels in the beginning of their life with Melville--have their own charms. You know, there are really bad Lucio Fulci movies; "Zombie," for instance, which is a superb piece of--very well-crafted, vicious, nasty horror-making. Are you familiar with that movie, the one with the girl having her eye impaled on the sliver of wood from the door?

No.

This is a movie to watch, my friend. This is a movie to watch. "Zombie," by Lucio Fulci who's passed away now; he was a pal of mine, and he and I got on like a house on fire. He was just a great guy. [Dario] Argento. Boy, there's so many reasons to say that this guy is making horror art, you know? I would defend "Suspiria" as a piece of horror art just as quickly as I would defend "Apocalypse Now" or "The Godfather."

Now, I didn't pick those both because they're Coppola pictures, just because they're huge, classics of cinematic art. And if you're going to say that, then man, I demand you leave room for John Carpenter's "The Thing" or "Assault on Precinct 13." And I'm sure Francis [Ford Coppola] would be in full agreement with that. I mean, he would have been one of the first people to make sure that was true. After all, this is a guy who made--his first movie was "Dementia 13," a very crude little number.

So to me, the exciting thing is watching trajectories of all these media crossing, and watching them all go their merry ways is very, very interesting. I feel like we've only begun. I'm thinking about the way books are published now and the way they were 20 years ago when I first came in. The way that comics are held now, the regard with which comics are held. How much of cinema--commercial cinema--is dependent upon our comics. That astonishes me. There was a time when you couldn't get a comic book on a screen for neither love nor money. Now, it seems like something that's had a two-issue run is legitimate fodder for somebody somewhere. So I think we've got a lot of very interesting collisions coming, and I'm glad to be sitting at the crossroads as the various media race towards the same spot, each from a different direction.

Clive, thanks very much for your time. Appreciate it.

Hey, my pleasure, man.

For Part I of our Q&A with Barker, click here. For Part II, click here. For Part III, click here.