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"From Hell," the Hughes Brothers' Jack the Ripper thriller starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, opens Friday in movie theaters across the country. But the story upon which the film is based started life in a very different medium--as a comic book by the genre's grand master, Alan Moore.
A native of England, Moore scripted such seminal 1980s comics as "The Watchmen" and "Miracleman." In the late 1980s, he stepped back from the superhero genre and started investigating the endless myths and theories that surround the Jack the Ripper killings. The result was "From Hell," which came out in 16 parts from 1990 to 1998.
Like his earlier works, it was not a typical comic. It was rendered completely in black and white, had no thought balloons or sound effects, and the complete paperback edition included 42 pages of exhaustive footnotes. Moore's goal, he said in an interview with NEWSWEEK's Brad Stone, was to explore the fascination with the century old murders.
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Alan Moore: I have a great deal of respect for the Hughes Brothers. They've done some really good films. Johnny Depp has done good films. And Heather Graham I didn't know much about until I remembered that she'd been in "Twin Peaks" as Annie Blackburn, agent Cooper's girlfriend. So with me she merits a particular kind of sainthood.
Not at all. I don't think that it will have any bearing upon my book. The best I can hope for is something like what "Blade Runner" did for [the Philip K. Dick short story] "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" It was not really an adaptation, not related other than superficially. But it was a very, very good film in its own right. I'm hoping that's the case with "From Hell."
Five murders is nothing, that's the thing that fascinated me. How could this crime have somehow blossomed into all these mythic dimensions, where [conspiracy theorists] have the royal family involved, the Freemasons, all these hints of dark supernatural forces? What is it about these crimes? One of the obvious things that distinguishes Jack the Ripper from other serial killers is that he was never caught. It was by escaping the noose that he also escaped history.
I was not at all interested in who Jack the Ripper was. That's Hardy Boys stuff. Nobody is ever going to find out. And playing amateur detective to a case that's over 100 years old seems very fruitless. It was the behavior of the culture that fascinates me and still does.
Like what?
Like when you go into Whitechapel, and you see the Ripper Tours. There's a long string, almost like a carnival dragon, of earnest-looking Japanese people who are photographing pictures of gutters. Jack the Ripper has almost sort of become property of English Heritage, which to me feels incredibly inappropriate.
There's no way anyone is going to know who Jack the Ripper was. I mean Eddie Campbell [the illustrator of "From Hell"] once said, "I think Jack the Ripper was just the guy who was holding the bread knife and standing closest to the asylum door when they left it unlocked one day." That is probably closest we'll ever get to the correct answer. But that's not what's interesting.
I have no idea if it was in any way connected to a royal plot. The most interesting thing is that we could believe that it might be. [Jack the Ripper] has a certain kind of unchallenged position in the annals of serial murder. He was kind of the first.
The William Gull figure is the culprit I came upon because he was the most interesting. Because he connected to a much bigger world than any of the others, so I could use him to explore all these kinds of mythical aspects of the Jack the Ripper story.
That would be nice. It depends on how much of a prostitute that [illustrator] Eddie [Campbell] can bear to think of himself as. I know that he is flirting with having pictures of Johnny Depp on one of the editions. But I think he is probably worried that I'll laugh at him.
Absolutely none.
No, no, no, I shied away from it. I mean they sent me photographs of the set. It looked spectacular. I believe it's the same guy who did the sets for "Shakespeare in Love" [production designer Martin Childs] and won an award for it. I do know Whitechapel very very well, and Christchurch Spitalfields. That's a particular junction I can see in my dreams, since I've been there so many times. The photograph that they sent me, if I didn't intellectually know that this was a facade somewhere in Prague I would have sworn that down to the last cobblestone it was an authentic reconstruction of Christchurch Spitalfields. They are doing a fantastic job on this.
For all the prostitutes in the film, I would have gone for British comedy actresses.
If left to my own devices, I wouldn't. I'm not really a big cinema guy, and I don't really like public appearances. I only signed up to be a writer. I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity. When I became a comic writer there was no more obscure job in the world. But my daughters, they've got some sort of plan that involves kidnapping Johnny Depp and giving him roofies. So I'd probably better be there.
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