I got the distinct pleasure of interviewing Eric Garcia, the brilliant mind behind the darkly humorous and gripping novel, Repo Men, (formerly called Repossession Mambo) and the basis for the movie of the same name that hits theatres this month (3/19/10). I was further delighted to find that I had run into someone else who doesn’t get derailed all the time, as they jump from topic to topic…because neither of us really spent much time on the track, to begin with, so we can’t be accused of derailing, since we weren’t “railed” in the first place. You, my occasionally gentle and gentile readers may take that as something of a warning, then; this interview is a bit nonlinear, just like Eric’s book; and is at turns funny, a little snarky, occasionally “adult” with language and themes; thoughtful and a bit graphic, also like Eric’s book. Some might even say we’re full of shite…but THAT would be where we’re not like Repo Men, the book. So, without further ado…or don’t….

Justine: I just want to get this out there, Eric. I loved the original title for your book, Repossession Mambo, even if it did initially put me in mind of a ghostly dancing class. So what gives? Why’d you switch up to Repo Men?

Eric: The story began in ’99 as The Telltale Pancreas, as a 13 page short story. I wrote the novel, and called it Repossession Mambo. Some people said that’s a weird title, some liked it – you get it when you read the book though – and once they had read it, they loved the title. Even our director, Miguel Sapochnik, said he had the script for about a month and didn’t read it because he hated the title. Then he read it and loved the title and became one of the biggest champions of the original title. But, when you throw down with Hollywood, you make concessions and one of them was the title. Marketing did a bazillion surveys and determined they needed to change the title. A friend of mine changes movie titles for marketing companies – he came up with American Gangster. I think it was originally True Blue, for the drug in the story. So, my friend, Dan, called to tell me he’d been contacted by Universal to rename Mambo.

Justine: There’s no elegance to the title, but it’s in your face, and there’s nothing ambiguous about it, I’ll give it that. But I liked the poetry of the original title, so in my head, it’s still Repossession Mambo. But I’ll get it right for our interview, I promise.

Justine: There are a lot of “moments” in the book, and the commercials/trailers seem to indicate that the movie may have those touches that take a mundane story to the next level of “damn, that’s good.” One that leapt out at me from the trailer, is the scene with the white room.

Eric: That’s the manufacturing floor.

Justine: I love the momentary pause as they run through the door. That look on Jude Law’s face sells it. He has that, “oh shit, we’re really not going to blend in, here,” look that is just perfect.

Eric: Jude nailed it. There are other small moments; we reference other small details, even an old Monty Python skit. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s one of those that happens in an elevator; it seems inconsequential, and goes fast, but it helps create that comedic counter to the story. They got a lot of those little details into the film.

Justine: Those are the things that will drive your fans and the hard core scifi/action geeks back to the theatre for a second and third watching, and make then go back to the book again and again, to cross check. I know I’m already thinking I’ll have to see it twice; once for the story, and a second time just to deliberately watch for those subtle details.

Eric: It has some of that same scifi absurdity of the movie Brazil. It’s a test for me, to see if people even know what I’m talking about, even if they haven’t seen it. It’s my favorite movie. If you haven’t seen it, it’s okay, thought, I understand, people have gaps in their education.

Justine: I’ve seen Brazil a few times, and loved it. It has that wonderful, deliberately absurd quality. You know it’s weird, you know it’s much weirder than a flick ought to be, but it’s just okay, because it all works so well. It’s not an easy platform for storytelling, but it’s great when it does work, and Terry Gilliam just seems to live in that space. Christopher Moore’s books often visit that space, too, so you’re in good company.

Eric: A lot of my books have that dark, deliberately absurd quality. The Rex books really take you there.

Justine: your Rex books were the basis for the…unfortunate series on SyFy, weren’t they?

Eric: Yes, but they had a hard time with the show. It comes down to this: SyFy Channel is ashamed of what they are and they don’t know what they want to do. In the world of TV, there are so many options, you can tuck in and specialize. Why wouldn’t you want to do that with scifi, because the fans will back you and stay loyal, if you represent what they are, too. With the Rex books, the dinosaurs have to put themselves into these absurd guises, to protect what they are, tucking tails away, wearing masks, it’s part of the deliberate absurdity. Then SyFy turned them into holograms and lost part of what the dinosaurs were, and lost part of the story. They turned it into this mostly serious, thoughtful show about dinosaurs. The humor and sense of the absurd was gone.

Justine: The obvious, to me, anyway, progression of the thought is that SyFy Channel is ashamed of their fan base, too, but I’d come to that conclusion on my own, a while ago. If they weren’t, why would they constantly be trying to reshape the idea and face of scifi – right down to literally changing the classic, accepted shortening of the genre name from SciFi to SyFy. I don’t know anyone who thought that was a good idea. When they put out the impression that they’re ashamed of who they are, and by extension, us geeks, that makes it hard to back them with your heart, your viewing time or your wallet.

Eric: You need to understand what you’re built for, and do it and they don’t get that. You could want to be a ballet dancer, you could want it with all your heart; but if you’re 5’10’’ & 280lb you won’t be a ballet dancer. But you can be a good tackle in a football game. So I know I’ll never be a ballet dancer, and I’m okay with that, too.

Justine: Do you have any plans to go back to the Rex world on either screen?

Eric: I just got the rights back, so I may do something with it, now.

Justine: Hey, Joss Whedon had that issue, too, so there’s precedent.

Eric: You mean the original Buffy movie? Yeah, he got to do it right when he took it to TV. Maybe I’ll do that, in reverse, and go from TV to the big screen.

Justine: I guess we should talk a bit more about your book and the movie, huh? I have to tell you, the recent marketing has been genius. The posters are wonderful. You get that sense of a very dark humor running through the story, already.

Eric: They’re plastering them around cities, like they used to do with the old movie and playbill posters. You can even scan the barcodes on the posters, if you have a bar code scanner app on your phone, and they’ll read as actual items. On The Union website there’s a phone number you can call – it’s 1-8776-THEUNION and you’ll hear my dulcet tones as the corporate voice of The Union.

Justine: The advertising posters remind me of the HBO True Blood posters, released before the show began, to whet viewers’ appetites for the show.

Eric: I have to admit, I haven’t watched it. I used to love vampires, but I’m over them. When my first Rex book came out, the second Harry Potter book also came out and sort of blew my sales out of the water, so when Twilight hit, and did the same thing with the vampires, it soured me on the vampires.

Justine: So, no sparkly vampires and teen angst for you? I can relate. I thought that Alan Ball’s interpretation of Charlaine Harris’ characters and the world she created, was inspired. I was able to enjoy the show as its own thing, separate from the books, because it’s a very different medium for storytelling. That leads me to another thought; as True Blood and the Twilight Saga are both taken from the pages of popular series of books. What do you think of the book to screen thing; does it work for you?

Eric: I can enjoy movies that are derivative of the books they’re based upon. With Repo Men, there are some similarities between the book and the film. A big one would be that the main character, Jude’s role, he’s not named, and you don’t know the city. The story takes place in a large urban sprawl. Did you catch that when you read the book?

Justine: I must admit, I got about half way through, was jotting down thoughts for your interview, and convinced myself I must have somehow missed it, so I went back and re-read the first 100 pages or so. This did allow me to confirm for myself that I had not, in fact, screwed up, but I was still annoyed with myself. So yes, I did notice it. I thought it was a great touch, since you really need him to be an “every man” to send home some of the salient points of the story.

Eric: For the script, we had to refer to him by something, though. We began to call him Remy. On set we almost had to point out that he has no name. Miguel would have to direct others, correct them, saying he has no name, and you can’t use Remy. At one point in the movie there’s a hospital tag on Jude; when you see his pink slip, the name is smudged. So anywhere you might have seen a name, it’s been smudged or obscured. Then, in one of the new commercials, they have a voice over of Jude Law saying, “my name is Remy,” so marketing sort of blew it, but he still has no name in the film.

Justine: Any other big changes fans of the book should watch for?

Eric: He loses wives from the book to the movie. He has 5 ex-wives in the book. In each version of the script he’d lose another ex-wife. Now, in the film he’s married to Carol, but it’s going poorly and the Bonnie character became Beth. He finds her 10 years after losing her. That’s one of the big themes of the story, finding something you’d lost. However, the main storyline is still the same. There’s he and Jake, and Frank.

Justine: I loved the ending of the book, the emotionally satisfying, bitter-sweetness of it, but I’m not expecting that to be the end of the film, because it’s sort of a quiet ending, too.

Eric: I loved the ending of the book, too, but I also love the ending of the movie. As we said with True Blood, it’s a different medium, but both can be entertaining. Matchstick Men was good, but marketing for Matchstick Men didn’t sell it the way they should have. I wasn’t writing the screenplay for Matchstick Men, either, like I did with Repo Men. I wrote it with Garrett Lerner. With the Rex books – they’re meant to be funny – deliberately absurd, so if you take it seriously, you’re fucked. Like I said, the SyFy Channel’s rendition was this serious, deep musing on dinosaurs, and wasn’t the book at all. Matchstick Men was huge, and I loved the actors, and the movie did keep the twist ending from my book. The book does end a little bleakly, dealing with the consequences of how the main character had lived his life, being a conman. Conmen fuck people over, and I didn’t want to let the character get away with it. With Repo Men, I’m very satisfied with the movie ending.

Justine: So what is it like, being a successful, respected novelist and now screenwriter?

Eric: I work from home,  and I go into LA once or twice a week for meetings. I can work from home or the library and I doesn’t have to wear pants. (Justine clarification note: Eric DID confirm he does wear pants in the library.) I didn’t want to grow up and wear a tie. My Dad wore suits and ties his whole life, and I didn’t want that. In TV you don’t have to wear ties, but you do have to get up, go in and spent 8, 10, 12 hours a day in the office. I don’t want that office life.

Justine: I work from home, too, so I can relate. I have the best dress code I’ve ever had, now that I have my own business. I love working in Happy Bunny or Mutts jammies.

Eric: I like to work in the library; it gets me away from the internet, because the wifi signal for my laptop is lousy in the library. But there is a guy at the library who wheels his whole desktop setup into the library, and he sits there for hours. He just surfs the web; that made me realize I am not the weirdest one there.

Justine: Library talk sort of makes me think of one of the pet peeves I hear a lot of authors complain about – even my own clients – the issue of online literary piracy. Do you have any strong feelings about it, one way or another?

Eric: I highly recommend the library for anyone who’d like to try my books; I don’t mind if you want to read it for free, if it’s from the library. Some people feel bad when they admit they read my book at the library, instead of buying it. I really have no problem with that, though.

Justine: Sort of the “first one is free” idea?

Eric: Yeah, essentially I’m a literary crack dealer – the first one is free. Studies show that when you release a free e-book, there’s a spike of sales for your other books. I haven’t had any real issue with people pirating my books that I know of, anyway. And to me, there’s a difference between a kid or a fan who essentially says I want this X Thing, now, and downloads it, and the ones who are making copies and selling them. Of course I’d rather people spend the money and do it properly. I do think they should figure this out, and put things in place to stop it.

Justine: It’s a slippery slope, the technically legal, versus morally correct thing. A lot of people consider literary or artistic theft a victimless crime. They have no idea that it really can, and often does, hurt the artist or writer, or singer, whatever.

Eric: Back in the day, we’d have to drive to Peaches, buy the album, for just one or two good songs. You might even remember Peaches, being a Florida girl.

Justine: I remember Peaches very fondly. I spent a lot of babysitting and weekend job money there. I don’t know how many of their wooden peach crates I had to store my records and cassettes, either. A lot.

Eric: So, yeah, the idea that you could download a song, try it out, and not spend your money on a potentially crap album is very tempting. But now, Apple figured that out, with iTunes, so you can do this legally; you can try out a singer or a band without having to buy the whole album. A lot of people may end up buying everything else, eventually, too, because they like the first inexpensive one.

Justine: I’ve heard some people say they just wanted to have it, NOW, and that they plan to buy it when it’s legally available. I wonder how many of those people actually do go back and buy the legal, official versions of whatever it is they got early, for free.

Eric: I recognize the need for people to get things in a sort of immediate manner, but I’d like to see it done in a way that people can be introduced to new literary treats without spending a ton of money up front. There is this tendency that people will think that if it’s in digital format, it can be copied, that it’s okay to copy it and share it with friends, or post it online. People need to have a way to try things, legally, for free or low cost, so they will come back and spend the money.

Justine: I seem to have led us down the soap box path, so I guess we should wander closer to the trail that leads to talking about your book, again. So, in a totally nonlinear fashion, let’s go back to before the beginning. How does one come up with the idea to write about lease to own replacement body parts and organs?

Eric: I wrote the original short story 13 years ago. On any given day, I’ll have 50 ideas for stories and usually all 50 suck – so they come, the leave and that’s fine. Every once in a while, one or two of the 50 will spark my interest, so I’ll think about it, then cut it. Every once in a while one of those do make the final cut and then I write a story; and a few of those do then make it as a book, or movie, etc.

Justine: So what sparked this idea for you?

Eric: We were driving in Miami, down around the pawn shops, and it was near Valentine’s Day. I’m originally from Miami. I saw a heart locket in a window and I made a joke to my wife about how now they’re selling used hearts and we kept joking about it.

Justine: One of the things about the book that does make it seem almost hyper real, and a bit scary, is that this idea of rent to own hearts isn’t all that farfetched. We have a less than wonderful economy right now, we still have a lot of people out of work, and a lot of people with no health insurance who have very few palatable alternatives if a medical emergency strikes. The suave, slick Union financial representative could easily be walking the halls of any hospital in the US, today, offering medical deals with the devil.

Eric: When I came up with the idea, our economy was in good shape. Now, sadly, our economy and the healthcare industry are in places where you’re right, this isn’t such a farfetched idea. The problem is that if you don’t have healthcare, you’re fucked. The people that need this help are the ones that pay the biggest price. If something bad happens, you have no choices, so you make the deal and then try to figure out how to make it work, later. It’s very easy to convince yourself that once you have the newest tech you need to keep getting the newest tech, and you can never go home again.

Eric: Beyond the initial idea, it’s hard to remember. I was also working on the Rex books back then. For a while I really didn’t remember, but people kept asking me where the story came from, so I started to make up different stories. I did finally remember, and now I just tells the real original origin. The guy I was working for, Bob, I showed him the 13 page short story and Bob thought it was the grounds for a good movie, but I felt it was a book. I wanted to know more about the main character, so I wrote his story.

Justine: When you find an author who is answering their own questions, there’s an honesty to the story, regardless of the style – scifi, fantasy, horror or chick lit.

Eric: I  wrote a chick lit book – Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Boys. It was based, loosely, on a friend of mine. I wanted to know more about this woman and why she would chain men up in her basement to make them better dates, and that led to Finishing School. Not that I’m saying my friend kidnapped and bound men in her basement. But she was driven, and she knew exactly what she wanted, and she went after it.

Justine: I noticed when I was reviewing your bibliography you sort of jump all over the genre map.

Eric: At the end of the day, I write stories I wants to tell, about characters that excite me. So I’m not pigeon holed into a genre. Maybe I’ll write a mystery about a guy with a gimpy leg and Alzheimer’s – see, I can’t even be normal when I’m trying to be normal.

Thanks to Eric Garcia for taking the time to ramble with me, and talk books. Thanks, too, to Pamela Spengler-Jaffee and Wendy Ho, with Avon/Harper Collins, for e-mailing me in the first place. Happy accidents often introduce readers to their next favorite book – friends give you a book, you win a free copy in a contest or publishers send it to you to review, and suddenly you have a new go-to author. I know I now have one, and if you pick up Repo Men, in stores with its movie tie-in cover, on March 9^th, you’ll have a new one, too.

If you want to be a real-life Repo Man, hunting fugitives on the run right now, submit your application to The Union today.