A candid interview (continued)

 EX: What books are you currently reading?

Sitting by my bed (futon actually) at this moment are Nicholas Negroponte's BEING DIGITAL, Neil Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE, Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE and Julia Cameron's THE ARTIST'S WAY: A SPIRITUAL PATH TO CREATIVITY. I just finished EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG which was a wonderful book.
Manga-wise, I have ANGEL ARM (Kinutani Yu), ANGEL SANCTUARY (Yuki Kaori), YUME KAMOSHIRENAI (Maybe it's a Dream (Hoshisato Mochiru)), FAM & IRI (Tanaka Kunihiko), and KURADHARMA (Masahiro Shibata).


 EX: Tell us about 'being shot at and running for your life' (this was taken from your 'resume'--being a courier from the Japanese to Chinese studios).

SF: I was in Hangzhou, China when the Tiananmen massacre happened and there was general chaos all over the country. The company I was working with decided that it would turn into a revolution and wanted to get me out of the country. I was supposed to be on a chartered flight out of Nanjing to Taiwan and we raced to get to the airport on time. When we got into the city, we had to clear some junk off the road so we could drive our pickup truck through and some soldiers way down the street opened fire on us. It sounded like hornets flying past and I got showered with debris from the wall near me and got nicked by something hot. (Cinderblock? Wood? Bullets? Still don't know.) I thought that it was all over for a minute. It was really scary!
Years later, I was in Bangkok when the democracy riots broke out. I had told the staff that if anybody wanted to go down and join the demonstrations that I would let them have the day off and a bunch of them came storming back to the company when everything went crazy. I sandbagged the front of the building and for the next 3 days sat in the office with utter silence, CompuServe and an H&K MP5K as my only companions. That wasn't quite so scary except for seeing some guys that had been shot in the head when we went out for groceries one morning.


EX: What is your favorite project you've worked on?

SF: TRANSCENDENCE and COMIC ON. It's a great feeling to do your own original work and work with amazingly creative, madly driven people!
For anime shows, I enjoyed working on GENOCYBER and MOLDIVER, which we did backgrounds for at TAO. Being at I.G. for the production of GHOST IN THE SHELL was a very valuable experience. Generally, I find it hard to fall in love with any show I work on because there are always complications during production that put big black marks next to it in the index in my head.


EX: You've met and worked with a lot of big names in the animation field. Is there anyone that you have not yet met and/or worked with but would like to?

SF: I guess Mutsumi Inomata and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. Working with Mamoru Oshii now is a 10 year dream come true.


 EX: Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

SF: Herding goats in Tibet, struggling with the language and the weird intestinal parasites.

Actually, I don't know. I gave up trying to guess where I will be because I always get chances to do exotic things that I would never have imagined before. (If you could go back in time to when I was a senior in high school and tell me that I would not only move to Japan to animate but own my own studio in Thailand and learn to speak a few languages, I would have laughed in your face.) Assuming that I can survive another ten years, I suspect that I will still be doing something animation and computer oriented.


EX: What do you do outside of animation to keep your sanity?

SF: Sleep! I don't really get much time off with all the jobs so what I get I try to spend relaxing, watching movies or shopping. I write a LOT of e-mail. I enjoy fiddling with new software but that can be considered part of work. I've been taking a lot of pictures recently too. (I don't consider what I am doing "photography" in any way. Neither would anybody else if they saw the pictures. "Wasting film" is more accurate but too harsh - mostly because I just bought an expensive new camera and don't want to get discouraged to the point where it ends up gathering dust!)
Hobbies and interests soon begin to consume me and they end up becoming jobs!


 EX: Finally, can you tell us what you're working on now, or what you've worked on that is about to be released?

SF: Ah! The hard one! I can tell you about some things...
I'm working on TRANSCENDENCE #2 for COMIC ON Volume 2, due in September (we think). I just finished doing work on an opening and ending for a game called MADOU MONOGATARI, but I don't know the release date. I.G. is doing the KENROU DENSETSU movie right now but I don't know what, if anything, I will do on that. (The manga was released as "Hellhounds" by Dark Horse.)
As for the "I am not at liberty to say the titles" section:
This month, I'm doing some work on an OVA which will be out in 3 months or so. I'm starting work on 3 other projects (a movie, OVA and a game) later on this summer and autumn. I can say that fandom will be very excited about the movie, which will be released worldwide next summer. It will have the very best animation talent in Japan working on it and deals with something that has proven quite popular before. The OVA will be something entirely new and unique (ground breaking!) that will enter an as-yet untouched region. (Don't you hate it when people say that?!!)
On the horizon, I also have 2 original short stories, one called COSMIC PANIC and the other with no final title, that will appear in COMIC ON in the future (whenever I get time to work on them) and a third original story that might become an OVA.

--Charles McCarter