If you ever get a chance to read my comic, Count Crowley, [the main character Jerri Bartman] She was a reluctant midnight monster hunter, then an amateur midnight monster hunter, now she's a mediocre midnight monster hunter. She is someone who struggles with massive depression, anxiety, addiction and alcoholism, which are [the] Four Horsemen of my own apocalypse: those are the things I've been struggling with since I was very young. Having Jerri do that as a metaphor, and sometimes direct confrontations with demonic beasts and necromantic enemies, is a great place where I can safely tell stories; hopefully people will hear those stories and be entertained and have fun and enjoy the art and at the same time maybe feel a little less alone for a second.
Whether it's Count Crowley or your 2014 film “Animals,” about homeless characters who are drug addicts, which you wrote, you're revealing a lot about yourself. How much anxiety was there to show your struggles to the world in such an honest way?
Huge, overwhelming, almost unbearable anxiety took hold of me in the summer of 2013 when I, my wife Eve [Leigh]my friend collin [Schiffli]my friend Maria Pat [Bentel] and a whole micro army of friends gathered around me so we could go back to Chicago and make this movie “Animals,” which is a story about love and codependency, but told through the lens of homelessness and addiction, which is a very close topic. to my reality. Even though I wasn't making a biopic, there wasn't a page of that script that wasn't dripping with the pollen of my life experience.
While we were making the movie, Mary Pat Bentel, my amazing producer, said to me, “You know, people are going to ask where this comes from. Are you ready to talk about it? I said, “Of course not.” I don't want anyone to know my past as an addict. I'm afraid no one will want to hire me in Hollywood. “I'm afraid that people will think differently about me.” And she said, “Okay, I think you're pretty amazing and I think you're making an important movie here.” I had a similar conversation and my wife Eve said, “It's your decision. We will defend you no matter what happens. If you never want to tell anyone, we'll even come up with stupid things just to tell the press. But know that there is a chance that someone could look at this and see now how you are living a productive, serene, fulfilling life, and maybe that can inspire them.”
