(interview conducted for the www.mk1comics.co.nz website)

Many moons ago, back when Friday late night shopping was still a thing and I was still a counter jockey at our most esteemed comic book dispensary, I shared till duties with The Nicest Guy on the Planet…feller by the name ‘o Christian Pearce. As I’ve mentioned previously in some of my reviews, our Friday nights at MK1 were idled away with…I mean… were evenings of frenzied power selling (honest, Chris!), punctuated by (extremely short – honest, Chris!) profound pontification on a preponderance of subjects including comics, music, martial arts, religion, robots, and the number 42. As well as being the Nicest Guy on the Planet, Christian is also (as you’ll see) hilarious so I got to spend great nights at a great shop selling great comics to great customers in great company…and I got paid for it! (though the hourly (g)rate wasn’t).

Christian would sometimes show me his self-produced comics (of the black and white photocopied variety) mainly featuring big robots, or dinosaurs, or dinosaurs vs robots, or robot dinosaurs – pretty much awesome things drawn awesomely. I probably said something incredibly patronising like “these are cool – you should do something with them” and didn’t think too much more about it. I was super bummed when The Nicest Guy on the Planet announced he was leaving the Tron to move to Wellywood and I realised I would be losing my Friday night co-pilot but wished him well and off he went.

So anyway, Christian ended up working as a conceptual artist at a little company you might have heard of down there in Wellington called Weta Workshop. His movie credits include King Kong, Avatar, the Hobbit movies, District 9, Elysium, Chappie, Tintin, and the Thunderbirds TV series.

…still can’t believe he’d rather do that than work part time at MK1 and hang out with me on a Friday night but, you know, whatever.

I thought it would be great to catch up with Christian and talk about what he does at Weta and how he got there. Without any further rambling nostalgic interruption, let me introduce, Mr. Christian Pearce, Conceptual Designer (Weta Workshop), and the Nicest Guy on the Planet!

 

Have you always drawn? When did you start to think that art might be your thing?

Yip drawing almost from the get-go. When the doc slapped me I dropped my pencil. I was never very good though, I can only draw recognisable shapes and stuff now cos I’m very old and have done a lot of it. It was also a cheap way to have fun while I was unemployed.

Who were your first artistic influences and who influences you now?

Nothing’s changed much – comics, cartoons and people I know. Back then it was Wacky Races, Whizzer and Chips then 2000AD. A couple of guys in my class at school were amazing, so so so much more talented than I was. I couldn’t comprehend how they drew like that.

Now it’s the same except the comics are weird japanese ones and the school has been replaced by Weta Workshop. My workmates still give me the same sense of shame and failure as those talented kids did too

Have you had any formal art training or are you self-taught?

I did a media course at Waikato Polytech for a year. There wasn’t much about drawing in it though but there were a few things I learned that really stuck with me. I mainly went so I could get a huge student loan I could spend on burritos and drums. I always regret not doing any formal training, I still think it would be super beneficial. Learning by yourself kinda forces you to develop your own techniques and “style” I guess, for better or worse.

It took me 15 years to pay back that student loan by the way. D’oh.

Where does your love of robots and dinosaurs come from?

That comes from being a normal human being. Everyones loves that stuff! Right? Also not being very good at drawing people makes them even more appealing. No one really knows what a dinosaur or a futuristic space robot looks like so you can get away with much more.

Having grown up reading my uncle’s old commando comics I’m guessing the World War 1 and 2 stuff comes from something similar?

100%! I remember going to the supermarket with mum to get groceries and running straight to the magazine rack. They had Commando and I could read two issues before I had to help carry the bags to the car.

What other comics did you grow up reading (I’m going to take another guess and say 2000ad)?

Ha! Yeah I already admitted to that! You’d read whatever you could get though, spesh when I was real young. We were pretty isolated and there was only one book store in the town. Beano and Whizzer and Chips were my main things, odd British stuff. There was a short-lived comic called Scream that was a collection of horror stories that was a revelation. Everything changed once I discovered 200AD though, just like it did years later when my friend gave me Akira to read. Other real turning points were the original Tank Girl series, Masamune Shirow’s stuff  and Geof Darrow’s work, particularly his stuff with Frank Miller

Do you still read comics? What are you into at the moment?

Yeah I love ‘em. I love finding new weird stuff, oddly it’s often Japanese. There’s lots of quite shocking, gruesome stuff out there which still fascinates me. Gory horror stuff. Suehiro Maruo is an incredible illustrator. Junji Ito is lots of fun. Kazuo Umezu is creepily inventive. Taiyo Matsumoto is a genius. Katsuhiro Otomo is still the absolute master though, I read Akira every year. I enjoy finding new local stuff too, the Faction comic anthologies have been great for that. I’m reading Ant Sang’s Dharma Punks right now, a series I started reading when they were first happening but never finished. It’s still good too!

How did you go from self-publishing indie comic guy living in Hamilton to Super Ultra Design Dude at Weta?  (I think you should put that on your business cards – Christian Pearce: Super Ultra  Design Dude…actually maybe it should be more like Super Cool Ultra Design Dude because that’s SCUDD for short as opposed to SUDD… Missiles are cooler than soap, I think).

Missiles are cooler than soap, no question. If only we could replace warheads with shampoo though this world would be a happier, cleaner place. Less nuclear deterrents, more cleaner detergents

Man I really dunno. Very lucky. I was unemployed and took a punt moving to Wellington. My friend Greg did some illustrations for a little free magazine here called the Package and then I did some too. Doing stuff for that and a bunch of kid’s schoolbooks through Learning Media taught me how to work hard and deliver to a deadline. Greg got a job at Weta it sounded amazing, quite unbelievable. I had no idea how film making worked or what concept art was. He helped me get a job there, the first thing I worked on was Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I’ve been riding his coat tails ever since.

I reckon Conceptual Artists are like the Black Operatives of the movie world – you never know what they’ve been up to apart from the odd glimpse here and there, and most of what they do they can’t tell you about! Does it ever get frustrating that so much of what you create doesn’t get seen?

Yeah it’s kind of a drag, it doesn’t bother me so much now but it used to be pretty frustrating. Just know that every single piece of artwork I’ve done that you haven’t seen was totally AMAZING

What have been some of the highlights for you in terms of your movie work?

King Kong (1933) is the best film ever so drawing dinosaurs and monsters for Peter Jackson’s version was pretty fun. Obviously Fury Road was fantastic too…. Chappie was fun and it was awesome seeing the practical robots get built for that. He looked fantastic in that film. Godzilla was a real treat, that was really special. Although it’s not a movie I’m really enjoying Thunderbirds Are Go, always interesting new stuff to do on that show and the quick turnaround is quite refreshing.

Some of the properties you’ve worked on like Thunderbirds, Tintin, Mad Max are ones where the audience already has a very well defined sense of how the characters and world should look – is that difficult or limiting – or is there still fun to be found in creating something within those toyboxes?

Yip it can be tough but yip again there is fun to be had. You just don’t wanna stuff it up and wreck what was great about the original but then again there’s no point in making something the same as what you’ve already seen.

Your work has brought you in contact with some famous directors and movie types – do any particular people or encounters stand out? (I promise not to accuse you of being a name dropper!)

We get all kinds of people coming through Weta, it’s a pretty interesting place to visit if you’re famous enough to be let in the door haha. Dillinger Escape Plan came through the workshop today, they’re pretty rad!

…Name Dropper!

How does it work – do you generally show your concepts to the director…um…directly, or do they get filtered through an Art Director first?

We usually work directly with the directors. We are directly directed by directors. We’ll get specific notes about concepts we’ve submitted, either through emails or skype calls or in person if we’re lucky enough to have ’em near by, and will incorporate their notes in to the next round of designs. Often they’ll have very specific feedback, other times they just want you go out there and explore a buncha options.

Have the directors you’ve worked with generally had a strong sense of how things should look and try to get you to work within that space or do they look to you guys to spitball new ideas until they find something they like?

It varies a lot. Some of ‘em know exactly what they want and they basically just wait for you to illustrate it just right, others have very vague descriptions and want you to go and muck about with a bunch of ideas. Hopefully something you’ve done will give them a spark or an inspiration that you can develop with them

Could you describe an average work day in the life of Christian Pearce?

Wake up fall out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Find my way downstairs and drink a cup, I’ll look up and notice I am late. I pick one of my many rusty half-restored bicycles and ride to work. I’ll make a black coffee and chat with Salma Hayek, spend 10 hours doing perfect illustrations that never have any perspective problems and have a 100% success rate with every concept I pitch to a director, get a pay raise every day and then bench press 250kg easy as.

Kidding! I never brush my hair.

What’s the best thing about your job?

The delicious irony of getting in trouble if you are caught NOT doodling spaceships and robots

What are you working on at the moment (that you’re allowed to talk about)?

This amazing new film directed by *** ****** is looking ****ing fantastic, it’s about a **** who goes to ***** and *****s a whole bunch of ****. Incredibly, ****** ******** turns up at the end, ******s all the *** ******* then *******s out the goddamn *******! Haha it’s gonna blow your mind!

A lot of your own work that I’ve seen (e.g. Roboxer; the WW1 robots; your robot skater dude; and various monstrous city invasions) always makes me want to know more about who the characters are or what’s going on – do you usually have a story attached your pictures or are they just conceived as single images?

Huh! Cheers man, I kinda do have an idea of the worlds my more fully rendered stuff exists in. Most of my stuff is just totally mindless doodles though, goofing around with shapes and ideas

It’s been cool to see you do short comic stories in [New Zealand Comic Anthology] Faction and the Giant Killer Robots comic you did with Paul Tobin for Comicon (http://issuu.com/giantkillerrobots/docs/gkr_comic)  – are you working on anything else of your own at the moment?

Thanks! The GKR stuff has been really fun and I think we’ll be getting stuck into that stuff again really soon, flesh out the comic a bit more.

For my own stuff – most of my free time is going into these little plane sketches I’m working towards doing an exhibition of. I’m working on a videogame based around them too, all hand drawn sprite based stuff. It’s a heckuva lot of work but I’m quite excited about it, should have something to show of it really soon.

You play drums in a piece punk band with Greg Broadmore – do you like to hit things?

Greg makes you want to hit things, fortunately the drums usually get in the way. I blimmin love the drums to be honest. I want to be able to focus on learning to play better, I’ve been playing for nearly 30 years now and have realised how lazy and sloppy I am with my technique. I feel like I should start again, try and unlearn everything and actually get some lessons. It’s a tough instrument to practice though, the most anti-social and neighbourhood-enemy-making contraption in all musicdom

What do you remember about your time as a counter jockey at MK1?

I remember never figuring out how to use that consarned gosh-danged dad-blamed cash register! haha I remember you and Chris wondering how I could even dress myself. It was just too advanced for me.

I’d always be struggling to find new excuses to get one of you guys to ring up the sales, I think I even invented RSI as a reason to not push those buttons. That one really caught on, now everyone’s got it! My one true contribution and enduring legacy to the modern workplace.

I remember finding so many rad new comics and artists in my time working with you guys though, good memories!

Check out Christian’s work in the Faction Comics Anthology available in store or here on the website (http://store.mk1.co.nz/faction-presents-high-water.html)

If you prefer 0101010 to pigment on dead trees you can check out his spot de blog here: http://christianpearce.blogspot.co.nz/

or his gallery of virtual visionary virtuosity here:

http://cargocollective.com/christianpearce