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| They're a perfect match! |
My guests to the site are none other than the amazingly gracious and kind actors/musicians Mrs. Ellen McLain and Mr. John Patrick Lowrie. They are famous the world over for their performances in the Valve Corporation games Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, DotA 2, and the Portal series. Mrs. McLain has also appeared in the stellar Hollywood Sci-Fi blockbuster film Pacific Rim as the voice of the Jeager A.I. Gypsy Danger and as the Fairy Godmother in the Youtube Original series Wish It Inc. Mr. Lowrie has lent his voice to multiple videogames over the years (such as The Matrix Online and Infamous) and has also written his own full length Sci-Fi novel Dancing with Eternity.
It isn't often I would say that I get to have a conversation with actual celebrities. I only happened upon this interview by pure luck if anything else. During my stay at the music and gaming festival (Magfest) at the Gaylord Hotel in the Maryland National Harbor I crossed paths with Mrs. McLain who was generous enough to grant me an interview with not only her, but also her husband Mr. Lowrie. What followed was an interview that progressively turned into more of a conversation by the end. This was perhaps one of the single most coolest moments of my life and I am forever grateful to this incredible couple for even entertaining the thought of doing an interview with a relative unknown like myself.
With that said, lets get this show on the road!
N8Dogg5k: What was it that attracted you to the voice acting industry or inspired you to pursue a career in acting altogether?
J. P. Lowrie: Actually for me, my voice never changed. I was born with a low voice. In first grade they cast me as the narrator in all of the Christmas shows because everyone said that I sounded like Walter Cronkite.
E. McLain: They wouldn't let him sing!
J. P. Lowrie: I sang two octaves lower than everybody else! Everyone told me that I should go into radio since I was a kid, and I got into Radio Club in high school. When I was working on my doctorate at Indiana University Ellen and I got jobs as DJs at the local NPR station.
E. McLain: WFIU!
J. P. Lowrie: Our first kind of voice acting gigs were doing commercials for those guys. Then we moved out to Seattle, I had just gotten an agent. My agent said you gotta do voice work because you've got a good voice for it. So I knew that I just always had the voice, and I had always been interested in acting since I was a kid too. Then getting into games I just started auditioning, and game companies just started sending auditions to my agent in like the mid '90s, and I just started getting hired. That's how that worked. How about you sweetie?
E. McLain: I first got into voice acting because of my husband: John Patrick Lowrie, author of his own book Dancing with Eternity!
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| Dancing with Eternity, now availible on Amazon! Get your copy today! |
E. McLain: In 2002 I was having somewhat of a lull in my career. Before that I said "Oh no! They only need men for voice work. They don't need women. I'll never get any work. I don't have the right kind of voice."
J. P. Lowrie: She's always whining.
E. McLain: Yes. I'm always whining. In 2002 John said "Hun, get a voice demo!" nothing else was happening, and so I went to the wonderful place of Veronica Weikel & Steve Mitchell and got a voice demo made! This is some nepotism, but John of course introduced me to his agent Jamie Lopez at the Actor's Group. Jamie liked my demo, took me on, and I started doing auditions. At that point auditions were done on your home computer, so John bought us a good microphone, I did my auditions and started getting work.
N8Dogg5k: Who would you say are your major influences going into your acting careers? Do you even have any influences?
E. McLain: Well for me it was Julie Andrews because I consider myself -not at this point, as I'm certainly just as much an actor as I am a singer- but I was interested in performing just as a singer. For a little girl born in the '50s there was nobody better than Julie Andrews.
J. P. Lowrie: I would say probably the actors that I admired most when I was first getting into the profession were Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. They're just two guys who I think have incredible chops, but really people like Johnathan Winters were a great inspiration for me when I was young. I liked the way that he used his voice and the way he came up with characters. As far as getting into voice acting, I would say that Johnathan Winters was a great inspiration.
N8Dogg5k: I've gotta admit, you got me with Gene Hackman! I'm a big big fan of the film The Poseidon Adventure. I personally think that it is one of the best roles that Mr. Hackman has ever done in his career.
J. P. Lowrie: Oh really?!
N8Dogg5k: Oh yeah! No doubts about it. I watch that movie all the time! Now seeing as how you both do a lot of voice acting in videogames, do you play any of the games you perform in, or do you just kind of like to observe them?
E. McLain: John plays; I watch.
J. P. Lowrie: Oh yeah, I enjoy playing! Now some of them I've played more than others. My first computer game was Myst, and I just absolutely loved it. I would wait years and years for the next Myst installment to come out. I enjoy that kind of game most. Particularly Portal and Portal 2 are a lot of fun for me because the Myst games were all puzzle games and the Portal games are puzzle games. I really do enjoy playing Half-Life 2 -like A LOT. It's one of my favorite games of all-time. But with me being a Mac-guy I couldn't play most of the games I was in because they were all PC games! I would have to wait to go down to my nephew's house to watch him play.
N8Dogg5k: Sorry, but that's put such a great image in my mind! Have you guys ever considered breaking out into other genres? Seeing as you, Mrs. McLain were in Pacific Rim last year, would you like to do more Hollywood movies? Perhaps animation, or live action TV roles?
E. McLain: We will do anything that anyone hires us for. I'll say that once again -We will do anything that anyone hires us for.
J. P. Lowrie: The main impediment is that we really like living up in Seattle. It's a great place to live -and we've made a good life for ourselves there- but no animation goes on up there -like at all.
E. McLain: At this point.
J. P. Lowrie: Right right! But there's lots of animation going on over in states like Texas, in cities like Los Angeles -we don't live anywhere close to those places- and very few opportunities come along to be in larger movies. Ellen though did make a beautifully wonderful independent film that is currently in post production. It's called Winning Dad.
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| Ellen McLain as Fairy Godmother. |
The other thing I got to do is with two young men name Nick Celentano and Ryan Anthony Martin. It's a comedy webseries called Wish It Inc. or Wish It Incorporated, and I'm Fairy Godmother!
E. McLain: I have in my employ a fairy -Yes, think anything you'd like- and I have a genie, and I have a dandelion wish granter, and I have Hannah -the new girl- who grants wishes from coins in a fountain. There's Jo Jo the birthday clown who grants the birthday wishes of children, and of course Yvette -she's a hard nut- but all wishes go through her. Then there is the mail room guy Ben, and he's so sweet.
It's Nick Celentano who is the writer and it is all very cleverly written.
It's Nick Celentano who is the writer and it is all very cleverly written.
J. P. Lowrie: It's pretty hilarious, I've already seen it.
E. McLain: Our first episode is going to air on January 8th 2014! You can go to the Wish It Inc. facebook page and see the trailers! The trailers for it are absolutely hysterical!
J. P. Lowrie: Yeah, just go to youtube and type in Wish It Inc. Then I did a nice short film -that maybe turned into a long film- called The Maury Island Incident. It's about the very first UFO sighting -which wasn't Roswell New Mexico- it actually happened up in Seattle.
N8Dogg5k: Oddly enough, I did not know that actually.
J. P. Lowrie: It's really cool, because the FBI files about it are finally declassified, and they based the script off of all these different files. What's even cooler than that though is that I got to play J. Edgar Hoover.
N8Dogg5k: That is an incredibly fitting role for you I must say. Good casting on their part!
J. P. Lowrie: Yes, because I absolutely love to dress in women's clothing!
He was personally involved in this investigation and he was so wild, weird, and layered that -according to the declassified documents- the government made kind of a big deal about Roswell to deflect attention away from Maury Island -which was the more weirder of the two. Watch the movie when it comes out!
He was personally involved in this investigation and he was so wild, weird, and layered that -according to the declassified documents- the government made kind of a big deal about Roswell to deflect attention away from Maury Island -which was the more weirder of the two. Watch the movie when it comes out!
E. McLain: It's a very cool short film. The events of the UFO sighting were really quite well documented, and it's some pretty scary stuff.
J. P. Lowrie: Yeah. Not just from a UFO standpoint -actually the UFO stuff is not particularly scary- but it's just wow!
E. McLain: Well hot metal falling from the sky is kinda scary!
J. P. Lowrie: But it was more about what the government or other nameless shady organizations did to the people involved in it. It's just really wild, really heavy conspiracy theory stuff. This was actually the first documented use of the term "Man in Black."
N8Dogg5k: Hmmm... I guess we learn something everyday! I didn't know that either!
J. P. Lowrie: It really was kind of quashed. With how much was going on it's impressive they were able to keep it all so quiet for so long.
E. McLain: And that's The Maury Island Incident in a nutshell! It's very fascinating stuff.
J. P. Lowrie: And I do have to say that the writing for J. Edgar Hoover was great fun. I had a lot of fun with that part. So yeah, we've had lots of irons in the fire lately.
N8Dogg5k: Excellent. Are there any particular roles that you both have always wanted to play, but have just never had the opportunity?
E. McLain: Well I would love to do Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest. That's a wonderful part, and I've auditioned for the role! Other actresses have been chosen, but I would love to portray Lady Bracknell.
J. P. Lowrie: I would love to play King Lear. I'm too old for Macbeth now, but I've always wanted to play that role. There are so many good plays out there, and I've gotten to be in some of them, but some of the most fun I've had has been in new works. So it's like, those roles haven't been created yet. So it's hard for me to say "Oh! I'd love to do this classic play, or this classic play!" I mean, I think that I would make a fairly good Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, and I would love to get the chance to do that someday.
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| Contrary to popular belief; The Cake is actually a pie! |
J. P. Lowrie: No I didn't.
E. McLain: Yes you did, for the school shows.
J. P. Lowrie: What was it? Like the cut-down version?
E. McLain: Yes. I was in the play too and I remember!
J. P. Lowrie: Well I don't remember much of anything I've done anymore really... I grew up in the '60s!
E. McLain: Our memories are shot! But John is right about newer works. The film that I worked on -Winning Dad- was a wonderful part. The role I played was Lisa. She is the mother of a gay son, and it's the story about him trying to find a happy and meaningful relationship. It was such a wonderful role. Arthur Allen just did such a phenomenal job on that.
J. P. Lowrie: And I just got to play Ashley in a play called Sugar Daddies by Sir Alan Ayckbourn. It was the American premiere of the play, as well as the world premiere of that particular version. Sir Alan was there and he helped work on it. I was also in a wonderful workshop musical -Bad Apples- which is about Abu Ghraib -a very powerful piece. So when you think about actors that originally played the roles of King Lear, Macbeth, and Romeo those roles were only just written then and were very new to the theater.
N8Dogg5k: And a lot of those roles were written around those specific performers at that time.
J. P. Lowrie: Exactly! To me I'm far more ingrained in vital culture than I am museum culture. I'm all for the revivals of classic plays -they're all fantastic pieces of literature- but I'm more interested in what is going on right now than I am for what's already been done.
N8Dogg5k: Speaking of the here and the now -of the modern roles that you have performed, what are the ones that you're the most proud of? What are your favorites?
J. P. Lowrie: Actually it's another Ayckbourn play -and the only other Ayckbourn play I got to do- called Henceforward. I played Jerome -a composer- and it was pretty fun for me because they also hired me to compose all the music that Jerome composes in the play. So that was a great project -but I mean- it's been a long career, and a lot of fun stuff.
E. McLain: Well I had a great time doing the show The Full Monty. That one is about a bunch of guys who decide that they're gonna put on a male strip show just to make some money since they're unemployed steel workers. The musical version is set in Buffalo New York, and I played the role of Jeanette -who is this old Vegas piano player.
It was so satisfying to play her because it was frankly no different than who I am really -except she's really funny. I loved saying things like "They're here! They're live! And they're going for the full monty!" So y'know lots of times it's also fun to just play something that is really out in left field for you too. Y'know like someone that is totally your polar opposite.
It was so satisfying to play her because it was frankly no different than who I am really -except she's really funny. I loved saying things like "They're here! They're live! And they're going for the full monty!" So y'know lots of times it's also fun to just play something that is really out in left field for you too. Y'know like someone that is totally your polar opposite.
J. P. Lowrie: You mean like you playing a character who can actually play the piano well?
E. McLain: Precisely! I am like the worst piano player ever! I always tell my voice students that if you can sing with me playing the piano for you, you can sing with anybody. Cause I'm the worst.
N8Dogg5k: That's astoundingly odd considering that you come from a fairly strong musical background.
E. McLain: Well I'm a good musician, and as a child I studied piano, but it was not my forte.
J. P. Lowrie: I helped her learn to say that. People always say "It's not my forte'." when that's not accurate. Forte' is Italian and it means: loud. Forte is French and it means: strength.
E. McLain: So playing the piano is not my strength. Although I do still play enough to be maybe somewhat competent.
J. P. Lowrie: Well you see, your problem is that you play the piano like how you text on your phone.
N8Dogg5k: If it makes you feel any better I can only really play the air-guitar, and I'm not even very good at that.
E. McLain: John makes the "one-finger" motion, but I play with all my digits. They're playing the wrong notes, but I do utilize the entire hand.
N8Dogg5k: So would you say that it's kind of like a cat walking across the piano keys then?
E. McLain: Good analogy!
N8Dogg5k: Bringing it back to videogames, are there any new games that you're currently anticipating?
J. P. Lowrie: Well we've been told that we're both going to be in the new Planetary Annihilation -which is a sequel to the Total Annihilation game- and that looks like a lot of fun. It takes all the boring bits out of space travel -and because this is more of a sort of cartoony universe- it only takes a couple of seconds to get to something like the moon. I'm really looking forward to playing that. I am however really enjoying DotA 2 . We did do work on that, and that is a really hard game. It's very challenging to learn, but I'm impressed with how many people play it like it's nothing.
We were at the DotA 2 International in August -in Seattle- where they brought teams from all over the world to play each other in the same room. Not only does the game look pretty dang cool, but we were impressed by the world community that the game creates. That's kind of the thing for all games as we move forward -since we've gained a degree of celebrity- just how much gaming affects the world. People the globe over all have this common language now, and that language is gaming.
N8Dogg5k: It is amazing how videogames can actually touch us on a very deep cultural level, and how prevalent it is now in the zeitgeist.
J. P. Lowrie: Yes! I think that gaming is a very unifying force. I mean, for guys like your age -and younger than you- you're growing up playing with people from all over the planet. I don't think you can overestimate the affect on world peace that this is going to have. People today are just getting to know everyone now, and currently all over the world we're seeing that it's harder to be racist, or xenophobic.
N8Dogg5k: You could say that gaming is bucking trends, breaking long standing cultural barriers, and opening a lot of doors.
J. P. Lowrie: Exactly! Now we don't really keep up with what games are coming out around the corner or anything like that. We mostly just wait around for the call to be hired. We're essentially like every other old person today, we get our nephews and stuff to tell us and show us the latest things.
N8Dogg5k: Well maybe I can turn you onto a new game then. Have you ever heard of a title called The Stanley Parable?
J. P. Lowrie: Nope, but just on the title alone it sounds interesting.
N8Dogg5k: It was a Half-Life 2 mod that was expanded into a full game and released on Steam this past October. It's a game that I feel is somewhat evocative of Portal, but with a distinct style all its own. The goal of the game is to challenge the notion of who is in control when a game is being played. The game or the player? I think you would really like it considering your love for both Portal and the Myst series.
J. P. Lowrie: That does sound pretty awesome! I think the best moments for me in a game is when you as the player are presented with a hard ethical decision. Whether or not you're going to do something that feels right or wrong. I remember in Myst 3 where one ending was you could reunite a man with his family, but if you did it wrong he'd kill you.
N8Dogg5k: Spoilers! Sorry everybody out there who hasn't played yet! Who am I kidding? The statute of limitations is well past on that game. Seriously it's like fifteen years old!
J. P. Lowrie: But seriously, when you manage to pull choices out like that and present them to the player you can make them feel so good, or just outright terrible. I think that those kind of experiences in a gaming environment can be massively useful tools. All games -not just computer games- but things like chess, basket ball, and even something like boxing I think are ways that we can learn to better socialize with one another. Even animals do it to an extent.
N8Dogg5k: I've always had a similar stance when it comes to entertainment in general. A lot of the material out there allows us to indulge our minds in things that can challenge us, educate us, and even help us to grow emotionally while keeping it all in a safe environment. For instance, someone could use horror films and games to perhaps help themselves confront their own fears and come to terms with them.
J. P. Lowrie: Games I think allow us better ways to handle our impulses. Games present rules, codify behavior, and provide an outlet. We're never going to eradicate human impulses, but we can create a safe zone for them.
N8Dogg5k: I do believe that the catharsis that entertainment provides is very important, but now we're getting too social-political. To completely change gears, what were some of your influences going into your novel?
J. P. Lowrie: Well I would think Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison were all majors influences on me. I loved stories like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream when I was younger.
N8Dogg5k: For me that's one of the best Sci-Fi horror stories ever written! Funny bit of trivia, the videogame adaptation of that story features Harlan Ellison himself as the evil super computer A.I. AM.
J. P. Lowrie: That's cool! Actually I would also say Arthur C. Clarke I think influenced my writing most when it came to my novel. I guess I just come from an American comic tradition of which I think really started with Mark Twain. While he was of course influenced himself by writers that were around at the time, he really did set a standard for American literature.
N8Dogg5k: He's considered one of the first true great American authors that helped to define in many eyes the American style of writing.
J. P. Lowrie: I think there are many authors who would consider him to be the great American author! That there hasn't been another voice like his then or since is undisputed.
N8Dogg5k: I can agree to that. It takes a certain somebody to write something like The Mysterious Stranger.
E. McLain: It's truly incredible. You can still read him now and his work just sounds and feels so modern. Even in his descriptions -of course the famous Huckleberry Finn, which is really a social commentary- the way he speaks of his characters could have been a hundred years in the future and it would still feel significant. His work really sees to the crux of human relationships, like "What truly is good?" and "What truly is bad?" and I just find reading him to be so contemporary.
J. P. Lowrie: In an age where English authors were expected to use proper grammar and sentence structure, he was more interested in how and what people actually said. I personally think he used that method as sort of window to get into everyone who read his stories soul.
N8Dogg5k: He was one of the first authors to ever work in colloquialisms and jargon into his writing. Plenty will argue that is what makes a lot of his commentary still relevant even in a modern age.
J. P. Lowrie: And very controversial. He got denigrated by a lot of his peers. Saying things like "He's destroying the language and culture!" and stuff like that. Of course it does make his work somewhat painful to read sometimes, but I think that is what makes his work so endearingly important to writers everywhere. We all could learn a thing or two from Mark Twain!
N8Dogg5k: Now for those who've never heard of your novel Dancing with Eternity, what would you say about it to get them interested? Can you give us a sort of sales pitch if you willl?
J. P. Lowrie: Wow! Right for the throat huh? Well I would say that its setup is like this: What if Odysseus met Captain Ahab? Except that Captain Ahab was a women who owned a starship, and Odysseus was an out of work actor trapped on a back-water moon because he wasn't paying his taxes. What would that be like? It's very much an Odyssey-like tale where the characters travel around the galaxy, but in a very fun extrapolation of modern issues.
It's social satire in that a lot of the conflicts are extrapolated from things that are going on now, and what could happen if those certain trends continued. Imagine if medicine became so good that we could prevent every single human from ever dying under any circumstance. One of the ramifications of that would be that someone who annoys you now is also going to be annoying you in a million years.
N8Dogg5k: That sounds both great and terrifying all at the same time.
J. P. Lowrie: Yeah, but imagine if you couldn't kill your enemies. What happens to things like religions, governments, and war? It tells all of this very much in the framework of a fun adventure, because it is an adventure. The lead character gets hired by this beautiful women to go on a mission that he doesn't want to do, and they go off on this starship to accomplish this mission. I think that it's very profound emotionally. The ending I think opens people up, as lots of people have responded to it very positively, because ultimately it's a very human story.
E. McLain: I find it fascinating in the characters that John has created because all of them are very thought provoking. They all represent opposing ideas in the story, and you hear these characters discuss ideas in a way that it moves you to see from another angle.
That reminds me by the way! John and I just finished recording the audiobook version! It's not all edited, but we had a blast recording it!
J. P. Lowrie: It's still in post-production because there is still a good deal of work to be done on it. But we really wanted to do this because we already do a lot of radio dramas like Sherlock Holmes and the like. So this audiobook is going to be somewhere in between being a conventional audiobook and a radio drama. We're bringing in a lot of ambient sound effects, and since I'm a composer as well, I'm going to be using music that I've written for this too. I think it'll be a much more immersing experience than the average audiobook.
N8Dogg5k: So when can we look forward to seeing it get optioned as an HBO Original show?
J. P. Lowrie: We might want to emphasize that one a good deal more when this goes up online!
E. McLain: It really is an Odyssey because this group of people get formed up and go to different planets, experience different things, and face a plethora of challenges. It really is a riveting tale.
J. P. Lowrie: We are hoping that the audiobook will raise the story's profile a little bit. I didn't know anything about the publishing business when I wrote the book, so the book ended up getting put out by a very small publishing company -Camel Press- in Seattle. They did a great job with it, but they're tiny. We're hoping that with the addition of our voice acting that more people will want to give this story a try.
E. McLain: Yeah. We're both in it, and who doesn't want to hear us do our thing right?
J. P. Lowrie: Who knows, maybe Guillermo Del Toro will give it a listen and will want to turn it into a major motion picture or something.
N8Dogg5k: Well he was willing to give you guys the time of day for a role in Pacific Rim.
J. P. Lowrie: Oh he didn't want me, but he wanted GlaDos in that movie like something fierce.
N8Dogg5k: Well he did good by getting Mrs. McLain involved. When I went to the theater for Pacific Rim, my friends and I roared when we heard "Would you like to try again?" Just thought you should know that.
E. McLain: Thank you! I loved working with Mr. Del Toro. He's a wonderful artist who is just lots of fun whenever he's around.
N8Dogg5k: I had the pleasure of running into him at New York Comic Con in 2012, and he is a very pleasant individual.
J. P. Lowrie: I would say that he's probably one of the best films artists of our time. He brings a really unique vision to the screen every time he makes a movie.
N8Dogg5k: Perhaps it's just me, but what I think makes his work so unique is that he kind of comes off as being sort of like a big kid. I don't mean that in a bad way, in fact I actually mean that in the best way possible. He has that sort of pure imagination that a child has, and he brings that to the forefront of his direction.
J. P. Lowrie: Agreed. I think he has maintained a very strong connection with that child-like wonder. That really speaks to me, as I've been accused of pretty much being a big kid too. I mean after all, how else do we make our living? Look at what we do. But I do think he understands the importance of imagination and mythology on the human experience, and he just totally rolls around in it like a big puppy.
N8Dogg5k: It's funny too when you think about how a film with giant robots punching giant monsters in the face could also tell a very human tale. Talking about things like the loss of a loved one, coming to terms with that loss, and being able to find the strength within to persevere in the face of total adversity.
J. P. Lowrie: Yup, that's our Guillermo! He understands those things like you wouldn't believe. I'd love to see what he could do with my novel!
N8Dogg5k: OK now, last question! Any words of wisdom you think you could provide to the aspiring creatives out there?
E. McLain: I think Joseph Campbell said it best when he said "Follow your bliss." John and I have always done what we wanted to do and what we were interested in. Sure we're not exactly rich, but we've always been true to ourselves and have had a lot of fun all of these years.
My other bit of advice would be to find someone to love and share your goals with that person. If you can do that than you've already been a success in my eyes.
J. P. Lowrie: I'd say in a materialistic culture where we celebrate financial gain it's easy to get drawn off of the target. I mean, if financial gain is your central goal than go do something that will assuredly do that.
E. McLain: Sell insurance!
J. P. Lowrie: I think that the artistic life is kind of a monk's life. I've always said that if you want to have a career in the arts, don't get good at anything else. I mean, who would hire us to do anything other than what we do now? They wouldn't even take us at a McDonalds! So we have to keep doing this and doing it great because we've got no other options! I know it's easy to get discouraged if you don't see yourself on the cover of a magazine, or don't have millions of dollars. But that's not the point of art in the first place.
N8Dogg5k: I'm glad to hear someone with a degree of recognition in the industry say that. It's very reassuring to guys like me!
J. P. Lowrie: Thanks. I didn't write my book because I wanted to get rich and famous from it. I wrote my book because I felt that there were certain truths for me that needed to be told. For me, fiction is a great way to tell the truth of yourself and the world. I act because I'm hear to tell the truth. I've told directors before that they're not paying me to lie to people. I love telling truth, and that's why I love composing and playing. In music it is impossible to lie. I admire people that tell the truth. You don't have to be an artist to tell the truth, but if you are an artist your first job is not to make money; it's to tell the truth.
N8Dogg5k: I will agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. I think that keeping your passion alive is integral as a creative. They say that if you're passionate about what you do, you'll never work a day in your life.
E. McLain: And that's true!
J. P. Lowrie: There is a friend of mine who is a photographer, and when I met him he was 85 years old. He use to tell people this joke that when he looked up the definition for retirement it says that you stop working and pick up a hobby. So when he looked up the definition for hobby in the dictionary the first thing it said right after it was photography!
I would like to thank again both Mrs. Ellen McLain and Mr. John Patrick Lowrie for taking the time out of their busy conventional schedule to sit down and talk with me at length. I wish you both the best of luck on your future projects and I sincerly hope that we can meet up again in the future! You guys blew my mind by giving me this chance. In the words of Mr. Lowrie himself "BOOM! Head-shot!"
J. P. Lowrie: I helped her learn to say that. People always say "It's not my forte'." when that's not accurate. Forte' is Italian and it means: loud. Forte is French and it means: strength.
E. McLain: So playing the piano is not my strength. Although I do still play enough to be maybe somewhat competent.
J. P. Lowrie: Well you see, your problem is that you play the piano like how you text on your phone.
N8Dogg5k: If it makes you feel any better I can only really play the air-guitar, and I'm not even very good at that.
E. McLain: John makes the "one-finger" motion, but I play with all my digits. They're playing the wrong notes, but I do utilize the entire hand.
N8Dogg5k: So would you say that it's kind of like a cat walking across the piano keys then?
E. McLain: Good analogy!
N8Dogg5k: Bringing it back to videogames, are there any new games that you're currently anticipating?
J. P. Lowrie: Well we've been told that we're both going to be in the new Planetary Annihilation -which is a sequel to the Total Annihilation game- and that looks like a lot of fun. It takes all the boring bits out of space travel -and because this is more of a sort of cartoony universe- it only takes a couple of seconds to get to something like the moon. I'm really looking forward to playing that. I am however really enjoying DotA 2 . We did do work on that, and that is a really hard game. It's very challenging to learn, but I'm impressed with how many people play it like it's nothing.
We were at the DotA 2 International in August -in Seattle- where they brought teams from all over the world to play each other in the same room. Not only does the game look pretty dang cool, but we were impressed by the world community that the game creates. That's kind of the thing for all games as we move forward -since we've gained a degree of celebrity- just how much gaming affects the world. People the globe over all have this common language now, and that language is gaming.
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| GAMER! DO YOU SPEAK IT?! |
J. P. Lowrie: Yes! I think that gaming is a very unifying force. I mean, for guys like your age -and younger than you- you're growing up playing with people from all over the planet. I don't think you can overestimate the affect on world peace that this is going to have. People today are just getting to know everyone now, and currently all over the world we're seeing that it's harder to be racist, or xenophobic.
N8Dogg5k: You could say that gaming is bucking trends, breaking long standing cultural barriers, and opening a lot of doors.
J. P. Lowrie: Exactly! Now we don't really keep up with what games are coming out around the corner or anything like that. We mostly just wait around for the call to be hired. We're essentially like every other old person today, we get our nephews and stuff to tell us and show us the latest things.
N8Dogg5k: Well maybe I can turn you onto a new game then. Have you ever heard of a title called The Stanley Parable?
J. P. Lowrie: Nope, but just on the title alone it sounds interesting.
N8Dogg5k: It was a Half-Life 2 mod that was expanded into a full game and released on Steam this past October. It's a game that I feel is somewhat evocative of Portal, but with a distinct style all its own. The goal of the game is to challenge the notion of who is in control when a game is being played. The game or the player? I think you would really like it considering your love for both Portal and the Myst series.
J. P. Lowrie: That does sound pretty awesome! I think the best moments for me in a game is when you as the player are presented with a hard ethical decision. Whether or not you're going to do something that feels right or wrong. I remember in Myst 3 where one ending was you could reunite a man with his family, but if you did it wrong he'd kill you.
N8Dogg5k: Spoilers! Sorry everybody out there who hasn't played yet! Who am I kidding? The statute of limitations is well past on that game. Seriously it's like fifteen years old!
J. P. Lowrie: But seriously, when you manage to pull choices out like that and present them to the player you can make them feel so good, or just outright terrible. I think that those kind of experiences in a gaming environment can be massively useful tools. All games -not just computer games- but things like chess, basket ball, and even something like boxing I think are ways that we can learn to better socialize with one another. Even animals do it to an extent.
N8Dogg5k: I've always had a similar stance when it comes to entertainment in general. A lot of the material out there allows us to indulge our minds in things that can challenge us, educate us, and even help us to grow emotionally while keeping it all in a safe environment. For instance, someone could use horror films and games to perhaps help themselves confront their own fears and come to terms with them.
J. P. Lowrie: Games I think allow us better ways to handle our impulses. Games present rules, codify behavior, and provide an outlet. We're never going to eradicate human impulses, but we can create a safe zone for them.
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| The couple that games together remains together! |
J. P. Lowrie: Well I would think Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison were all majors influences on me. I loved stories like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream when I was younger.
N8Dogg5k: For me that's one of the best Sci-Fi horror stories ever written! Funny bit of trivia, the videogame adaptation of that story features Harlan Ellison himself as the evil super computer A.I. AM.
J. P. Lowrie: That's cool! Actually I would also say Arthur C. Clarke I think influenced my writing most when it came to my novel. I guess I just come from an American comic tradition of which I think really started with Mark Twain. While he was of course influenced himself by writers that were around at the time, he really did set a standard for American literature.
N8Dogg5k: He's considered one of the first true great American authors that helped to define in many eyes the American style of writing.
J. P. Lowrie: I think there are many authors who would consider him to be the great American author! That there hasn't been another voice like his then or since is undisputed.
N8Dogg5k: I can agree to that. It takes a certain somebody to write something like The Mysterious Stranger.
E. McLain: It's truly incredible. You can still read him now and his work just sounds and feels so modern. Even in his descriptions -of course the famous Huckleberry Finn, which is really a social commentary- the way he speaks of his characters could have been a hundred years in the future and it would still feel significant. His work really sees to the crux of human relationships, like "What truly is good?" and "What truly is bad?" and I just find reading him to be so contemporary.
J. P. Lowrie: In an age where English authors were expected to use proper grammar and sentence structure, he was more interested in how and what people actually said. I personally think he used that method as sort of window to get into everyone who read his stories soul.
N8Dogg5k: He was one of the first authors to ever work in colloquialisms and jargon into his writing. Plenty will argue that is what makes a lot of his commentary still relevant even in a modern age.
J. P. Lowrie: And very controversial. He got denigrated by a lot of his peers. Saying things like "He's destroying the language and culture!" and stuff like that. Of course it does make his work somewhat painful to read sometimes, but I think that is what makes his work so endearingly important to writers everywhere. We all could learn a thing or two from Mark Twain!
N8Dogg5k: Now for those who've never heard of your novel Dancing with Eternity, what would you say about it to get them interested? Can you give us a sort of sales pitch if you willl?
J. P. Lowrie: Wow! Right for the throat huh? Well I would say that its setup is like this: What if Odysseus met Captain Ahab? Except that Captain Ahab was a women who owned a starship, and Odysseus was an out of work actor trapped on a back-water moon because he wasn't paying his taxes. What would that be like? It's very much an Odyssey-like tale where the characters travel around the galaxy, but in a very fun extrapolation of modern issues.
It's social satire in that a lot of the conflicts are extrapolated from things that are going on now, and what could happen if those certain trends continued. Imagine if medicine became so good that we could prevent every single human from ever dying under any circumstance. One of the ramifications of that would be that someone who annoys you now is also going to be annoying you in a million years.
N8Dogg5k: That sounds both great and terrifying all at the same time.
J. P. Lowrie: Yeah, but imagine if you couldn't kill your enemies. What happens to things like religions, governments, and war? It tells all of this very much in the framework of a fun adventure, because it is an adventure. The lead character gets hired by this beautiful women to go on a mission that he doesn't want to do, and they go off on this starship to accomplish this mission. I think that it's very profound emotionally. The ending I think opens people up, as lots of people have responded to it very positively, because ultimately it's a very human story.
E. McLain: I find it fascinating in the characters that John has created because all of them are very thought provoking. They all represent opposing ideas in the story, and you hear these characters discuss ideas in a way that it moves you to see from another angle.
That reminds me by the way! John and I just finished recording the audiobook version! It's not all edited, but we had a blast recording it!
J. P. Lowrie: It's still in post-production because there is still a good deal of work to be done on it. But we really wanted to do this because we already do a lot of radio dramas like Sherlock Holmes and the like. So this audiobook is going to be somewhere in between being a conventional audiobook and a radio drama. We're bringing in a lot of ambient sound effects, and since I'm a composer as well, I'm going to be using music that I've written for this too. I think it'll be a much more immersing experience than the average audiobook.
N8Dogg5k: So when can we look forward to seeing it get optioned as an HBO Original show?
J. P. Lowrie: We might want to emphasize that one a good deal more when this goes up online!
E. McLain: It really is an Odyssey because this group of people get formed up and go to different planets, experience different things, and face a plethora of challenges. It really is a riveting tale.
J. P. Lowrie: We are hoping that the audiobook will raise the story's profile a little bit. I didn't know anything about the publishing business when I wrote the book, so the book ended up getting put out by a very small publishing company -Camel Press- in Seattle. They did a great job with it, but they're tiny. We're hoping that with the addition of our voice acting that more people will want to give this story a try.
E. McLain: Yeah. We're both in it, and who doesn't want to hear us do our thing right?
J. P. Lowrie: Who knows, maybe Guillermo Del Toro will give it a listen and will want to turn it into a major motion picture or something.
N8Dogg5k: Well he was willing to give you guys the time of day for a role in Pacific Rim.
J. P. Lowrie: Oh he didn't want me, but he wanted GlaDos in that movie like something fierce.
N8Dogg5k: Well he did good by getting Mrs. McLain involved. When I went to the theater for Pacific Rim, my friends and I roared when we heard "Would you like to try again?" Just thought you should know that.
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| Gypsy Danger is best A.I. |
N8Dogg5k: I had the pleasure of running into him at New York Comic Con in 2012, and he is a very pleasant individual.
J. P. Lowrie: I would say that he's probably one of the best films artists of our time. He brings a really unique vision to the screen every time he makes a movie.
N8Dogg5k: Perhaps it's just me, but what I think makes his work so unique is that he kind of comes off as being sort of like a big kid. I don't mean that in a bad way, in fact I actually mean that in the best way possible. He has that sort of pure imagination that a child has, and he brings that to the forefront of his direction.
J. P. Lowrie: Agreed. I think he has maintained a very strong connection with that child-like wonder. That really speaks to me, as I've been accused of pretty much being a big kid too. I mean after all, how else do we make our living? Look at what we do. But I do think he understands the importance of imagination and mythology on the human experience, and he just totally rolls around in it like a big puppy.
N8Dogg5k: It's funny too when you think about how a film with giant robots punching giant monsters in the face could also tell a very human tale. Talking about things like the loss of a loved one, coming to terms with that loss, and being able to find the strength within to persevere in the face of total adversity.
J. P. Lowrie: Yup, that's our Guillermo! He understands those things like you wouldn't believe. I'd love to see what he could do with my novel!
N8Dogg5k: OK now, last question! Any words of wisdom you think you could provide to the aspiring creatives out there?
E. McLain: I think Joseph Campbell said it best when he said "Follow your bliss." John and I have always done what we wanted to do and what we were interested in. Sure we're not exactly rich, but we've always been true to ourselves and have had a lot of fun all of these years.
My other bit of advice would be to find someone to love and share your goals with that person. If you can do that than you've already been a success in my eyes.
J. P. Lowrie: I'd say in a materialistic culture where we celebrate financial gain it's easy to get drawn off of the target. I mean, if financial gain is your central goal than go do something that will assuredly do that.
E. McLain: Sell insurance!
J. P. Lowrie: I think that the artistic life is kind of a monk's life. I've always said that if you want to have a career in the arts, don't get good at anything else. I mean, who would hire us to do anything other than what we do now? They wouldn't even take us at a McDonalds! So we have to keep doing this and doing it great because we've got no other options! I know it's easy to get discouraged if you don't see yourself on the cover of a magazine, or don't have millions of dollars. But that's not the point of art in the first place.
N8Dogg5k: I'm glad to hear someone with a degree of recognition in the industry say that. It's very reassuring to guys like me!
J. P. Lowrie: Thanks. I didn't write my book because I wanted to get rich and famous from it. I wrote my book because I felt that there were certain truths for me that needed to be told. For me, fiction is a great way to tell the truth of yourself and the world. I act because I'm hear to tell the truth. I've told directors before that they're not paying me to lie to people. I love telling truth, and that's why I love composing and playing. In music it is impossible to lie. I admire people that tell the truth. You don't have to be an artist to tell the truth, but if you are an artist your first job is not to make money; it's to tell the truth.
N8Dogg5k: I will agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. I think that keeping your passion alive is integral as a creative. They say that if you're passionate about what you do, you'll never work a day in your life.
E. McLain: And that's true!
J. P. Lowrie: There is a friend of mine who is a photographer, and when I met him he was 85 years old. He use to tell people this joke that when he looked up the definition for retirement it says that you stop working and pick up a hobby. So when he looked up the definition for hobby in the dictionary the first thing it said right after it was photography!
I would like to thank again both Mrs. Ellen McLain and Mr. John Patrick Lowrie for taking the time out of their busy conventional schedule to sit down and talk with me at length. I wish you both the best of luck on your future projects and I sincerly hope that we can meet up again in the future! You guys blew my mind by giving me this chance. In the words of Mr. Lowrie himself "BOOM! Head-shot!"
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