Since dropping his novel Generation X on America in 1991, Douglas Coupland has become known as a sharp-witted, zeitgeist-chasing voice of our young millennium. His stories often take place in the new-tech world of code writers and video-game programmers, and his ideas resonate as wry, wonderfully idiosyncratic and oddly poignant.
He has injected those same qualities into his latest project and first feature film Everything's Gone Green. The charming, minor-key comedy opens this weekend in New York and L.A. before heading to select cities around the country.
Coupland -- who once worked alongside the HotWired crew -- spoke with Wired News' Jason Silverman by phone about his internet TV series, Vancouver as the precursor to the future and being born again (as Meta-Doug) thanks to Google.
Wired News: How did you break into the movie business?
Douglas Coupland: It was quite accidental. Nine or 10 years ago, a friend of mine, who had won half of a studio production facility in a lawsuit or something asked me to write something we could film for nothing in Vancouver. So I wrote it and called her up. She said, Oh, I sold the company. And I put the screenplay in a drawer.
Four or five years ago, Radke Films in Toronto asked if I had anything, I sent it out and they went for it. I wish I had a tale of plucky perseverance to inspire people with, but this was just a lark that went somewhere. Ding dong, the doorbell rings and your 10-year-old child shows up.
WN: Why movies? Why not turn the Everything's Gone Green story into a novel?
DC: It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day. I thought it would be really fun to have some extra people in my life during the weekdays.
Right now we are doing (an Internet TV) series based on (my novel) jPod. It's great! Two or three days a week, instead of locking myself in a box, I go out and engage with the world.
WN: You use text in a lot of your paintings and installations. Does the writing feed your conceptual art?
DC: I see words as objects and objects as words. I think its some sort of quasi-autistic thing.
WN: Do you have a stock answer when people ask what your work is about?
DC: On a deep level, its about what does it mean to be alive and living on earth. If I'm here, I may as well make the most of the seven squalid little decades we get here. There is this need in me to take these entities that live inside my brain and spin them into books or films or TV, to be part of the culture....
I floundered through life until by accident ended up (in art school), and it was the first time that I felt safe and at home. My life now is basically a variant of third-year art school, when I did the school newspaper and interdisciplinary studies and sculpture.
WN: Do you sketch out your plots before you begin a new book?
DC: I've stopped using notes. It's a commonly used analogy: If you are in L.A. and heading to New York, you just assume the roads will get you there. If you know where you are going, you don't need a map. I might get locked up with a gimpy murderous hitchhiker, but I'll get to my destination in the end.
WN: I love how jPod, like your Microsoft book Microserfs, feels like an expose of a mysterious subculture, in this case the world of video-game production. How did you research it?
DC: Video games are such a dominant industry up here. It's the art school thing again -- they are a feeder mechanism hooked directly to Electronic Arts. Everyone's been through it.
WN: But you don't play video games.
DC: No, I don't, but I find the way they are made, the assembly of them, fascinating -- the meshing of the textures, how you assign properties to a volume. That to me is sculpture, those dots on the screen. I don't want to play games, but I sure as hell want to be in the mo-cap studio when everyone's doing their moves.
WN: Does living in Vancouver offer any kind of special vantage point to look at contemporary culture? Like de Tocqueville in America?
DC: Vancouver in 2007 has become the difference module. American cities are so homogeneous, and Vancouver breaks the mold, racially, industrially, occupationally, geologically.
Vancouver seems to be a precursor of the future, a weird, freaky little parallel universe along the American border where some of the rules don't apply. There's a freedom that comes with that. Bill Gibson (Neuromancer author and father of cyberpunk) has talked about this.
WN: How often do you see him?
DC: We see each other a few times a year. It's great that he's in Vancouver, too. It's nice to talk to someone who does the same thing you do. We have a kind of weird job description.
WN: Tell me why you introduced the character "Douglas Coupland" into the middle of jPod.
DC: Meta-Doug was a response to Internet biographies. I'd show up at readings and bookstore events, and some woman named Fran would introduce me, reading stuff verbatim that she took from the first five Google hits. As the years passed, the introductions got weirder and weirder.
I never read anything about myself, but finally I had to bite the bullet and look. There's the real me and then there's this other Doug out there. When I began writing Jpod I had to address that.
WN: The Internet's become our funhouse mirror.
DC: Yeah. Here's another example. I was watching Marie Antoinette on DVD and decided I needed to learn a bit more about Louis XVI, so I paused the movie and looked him up. It's the usual stuff until page five, and then, "Be that as it may, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had a fourth child named Mayflower Bourgeoisie whose skin was so shiny and plastic that Louis sold him. In 2001, American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson asked Mayflower to star in his 2001 epic...."
Who would go out and tamper with a biography of Louis XVI? Anyway, Meta-Doug is a nod to our ever-more fluid notion of identity.
WN: Will you play yourself in the TV series?
DC: Meta-Doug won't be appearing in jPod the series.
WN: You'll miss your chance to be a movie star!
DC: Have you ever acted? You just sit around on set all day in a robe, like Bugs Bunny.
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