News > Interview: Mathias Malzieu, author
Mathias Malzieu pictured at the top of Arthur's Seat
One visit to Arthur's Seat inspired Mathias Malzieu to create a novel, an album and a film. Now he tells Chitra Ramaswamy why the capital is so magical
MATHIAS Malzieu has just walked up Arthur's Seat for the second time in his life. The first time had such a profound effect on this cult Parisian writer and musician – described by Iggy Pop as "François Truffaut with a rock'n'roll band" – that he ended up writing a novel beginning at the top of Edinburgh's "sleeping volcano set in blue quartz".
The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart is a lyrical gothic fable that has sold more than 100,000 copies in France and been optioned by Luc Besson. It opens in Edinburgh, 1874, on the coldest night the world has seen. In an old house on top of Arthur's Seat Dr Madeleine, a midwife who brings into the world the children of prostitutes, replaces the hero Little Jack's broken heart with a loudly ticking cuckoo-clock.
"It's strange," Malzieu admits in broken English with occasional prompts from his translator. "I feel so at home when I come here and climb this rock. It is like a relic of an ancient time, always keeping this city wild. I'd love to have this in Paris. I live in a house on a hill in Montmartre but it is not like this. Imagining a house at the top of Arthur's Seat was a dream for me from the moment I saw it, the dream of a hut in the wilderness where I can write."
It's been ten years since his last and only visit, following the death of his mother. Despite spending so little time here, Malzieu's Edinburgh is a wonderful creation of child-like wonder, a Tim Burton-esque city of shadows and ice where "the twisted maze of streets beckons like a lover" and "houses lean towards each other, shrinking the sky".
"I always wanted to come here," he says. "Eventually I came on my own and went across Scotland with my skateboard, hitchhiking to Skye, Aberdeen and Inverness. In Edinburgh I loved the separation between the Old Town and the New Town, like the worlds of the child and the adult, the unreal and the real. I like that the city is strong enough to withstand the cold and the winds but fragile enough to look like the buildings could topple over like a house of cards."
When Malzieu returned to Paris he wrote his first novel – yet to be translated – about a ghostly 150-year-old character called Giant Jack who is from Edinburgh and lives out his days on Skye. The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart is that novel's prequel, telling the tale of Little Jack's beginnings in Edinburgh, the moment when he falls in love with a mysterious singing girl Miss Acacia in the Old Town, and his escape to Paris (meeting Jack the Ripper along the way) where his clock heart is maintained by Georges Melies, a character based on the early cinema pioneer. "I had just lost my mother and I wanted to create a hero who would help me," explains Malzieu of Jack. " I felt a magic here in Edinburgh and when I lost her I really needed that. I wanted Jack to be like a monster of the night, dark but also comforting. He's a creation of my grief."
Ever since Malzieu finished his first book he has meant to return to Edinburgh. "I kept wanting to come back but I was always touring with my band. In a way that turned out to be a good thing because the filter of my imagination meant that my Edinburgh wasn't quite real. It's not historically or geographically accurate."
Malzieu has also made an album of songs, or as he puts it a soundtrack to The Boy With The Cuckoo Clock Heart. Malzieu performed some of these at the Edinburgh Book Festival with his girlfriend Olivia Ruiz, a French pop singer. Songs and stories have always come to him hand in hand. The first stories he wrote, growing up near Montpellier, were songs "that I made longer". Now when he writes novels, he hears music.
On the album Malzieu plays Jack, Ruiz plays Miss Acacia and a certain Eric Cantona plays Giant Jack. "I met him in a filmhouse in Paris where we were watching a very good arthouse film called The Saddest Music In The World," says Malzieu, whose band Dionysos has been going for 15 years in France. "When I was a kid I was very fond of Eric Cantona because of his poetic way with a ball and his charisma. At that film I saw he was passionate about films and art too. When I realised the character of Giant Jack, I sent the book to him and said 'one day if I make a film of this book will you play Giant Jack?' He said yes, of course."
And now that day has come, thanks to yet another serendipitous meeting. Malzieu was performing on a French TV show and one of the guests was Luc Besson. During the ad break they started chatting. "He said, 'Do you really want to make a movie of this?' says Malzieu. "I told him it was my dream, but I didn't really believe it would ever happen. He took a copy of the book and the album and a month later we met and he said okay, let's do it."
Besson is producing the film, a feature-length animation, and Malzieu has written the script and will co-direct with a collaborator who makes his band's music videos. The animation, both hand-drawn and computer-generated, is being done by a company that has worked with Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind). Cantona makes a brief appearance as the voice of Giant Jack.
"We're working with a lot of photos of Edinburgh and keeping the look of the architecture and the city but everything is more exaggerated, leaning over even more, darker," says Malzieu of the film, which is due out in 2011. "It's a very artistic way of working. This is a story about a boy with a clock for a heart, so we wanted to keep that handmade feel with the animation. We're using a lot of old drawings of Edinburgh for the backgrounds and I've been reading a lot of Edgar Allen Poe." It's hard to believe that a single trip to this city inspired so many meetings, a book, an album and now a film. Malzieu looks dazed when I ask him how he's feeling about it. "It's incredible," he says. "I'm finding it hard to sleep at the moment." v
The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart is published by Chatto and Windus, £9.99
