No seriously, why is John Heder – the screen actor best known for taking the leading role in 90s indie hit Napoleon Dynamite – starring in a documentary about Warhammer 40,000, grimdark media, and art legend John Blanche? The creative team at Trademark Films tells all, revealing the rhyme and reason behind the upcoming documentary ‘The Grim and The Dark’.
At the heart of the project are two friends, Eric Robertson – the current creative director at Trademark – and the film’s producer Cody Taylor. Warhammer 40k fans and model makers may know Taylor better by his online handle MagosBuer: he’s a talented model converter and setting designer who is active in the Inq28 indie scene.
“Eric came to me shortly after accepting the position at Trademark”, Taylor explains, “and just asked me as a friend if there were any ideas stewing around in my mind”. His thoughts immediately turned to his beloved Inq28.
Inq28 is an art movement and a game design scene. It focuses on converted models, original narratives, and a grimdark tone. Today it is producing successful commercial games, like the recent Trench Crusade or slightly older Turnip28, but it grew out of a vibrant online community of makers and gamers. That community, in turn, grew out of a tight kernel of kitbashers and miniature makers: “John Blanche and his friends”, Taylor says.
Blanche, now retired, was a pivotal artist at Games Workshop, acting at various times as a concept artist, illustrator, and head of the design studio. His distinctive aesthetic is found in every Warhammer 40k faction and many more aspects of setting illustration. In the ‘00s and ‘10s, Blanche and friends would often “spend a year or so preparing for a weekend at Warhammer World where they would just play with their small war bands of custom miniatures”, each game using a unique setting and custom rules.
Photographs of those miniatures would then feature in the (now discontinued) Blanchitsu section of White Dwarf, and over the internet, but the stories of the people behind them were otherwise untold. There was a narrow opportunity to capture those stories before they were lost. Although Taylor didn’t expect this idea for a documentary to be taken any further, Robertson was very enthusiastic about “exploring the world of grimdark”, and put the film into production at Trademark.
So, how did Napoleon Dynamite get involved? Director Daniel Lowman says “it became very clear early on that we needed somebody in this documentary who could guide an audience down this rabbit hole with us”. It happened that John Heder was a friend of Robertson’s “from years back”.
“John was just perfect”, Lowman says. “He has the charisma, but he also is so curious”. He really was a total newcomer to the world of grimdark, Taylor says: “he didn’t know a thing about any of this, at least at the outset, didn’t even know what the word grimdark meant”. Lowman adds: “his curiosity carries the audience down that pathway”.
Heder proved to be game for the challenge. “He has a childlike wonder”, Robertson says. He was also great at teasing answers out of the creatives being interviewed for the documentary. “Artists and creatives [can be] protective and unsure, to the outside world… he could come in and just break the walls down and make them feel immediately comfortable”.
In the course of making the documentary, Heder interviewed a wide range of subjects. Taylor rattles off some names: Alexander Winberg, the chief editor at 28 magazine; former Games Workshop designer Tuomas Pirinen, who collaborated closely with John Blanche when designing the skirmish wargame Mordheim; Games Workshop artists Phil Moss and Neil Roberts.
Heder could hardly stare into the grimdark abyss without the grimdark staring back, of course. During production, the whole crew rocked up to a game night hosted by Knucklebones Miniatures. Robertson recalls: “he brought all the boys over and John was there and we played Necropolis28” – a very compact indie skirmish game with Dark Souls vibes – “we also had our own game 1490 Doom going, so we taught John how to play”. He jokes: “If you want to see John Heder’s first-ever tabletop war game experience, you’ve got to watch the documentary”.
But the main draw for most people already familiar with Warhammer 40k will be the interview with John Blanche. “It’s an interview worth the film itself”, Taylor says, “he’s been extremely generous with his insight and with his perspective and with his long career and his world and his thoughts”.
“The things he said about his childhood gave some really in-depth insight into what he creates, why he creates, and it will surprise you”, Robertson says, “not in a scary way, but a beautiful, wrap everything up in a bow type way”.
The scope of the documentary even reaches beyond the wargaming scene. “Grimdark as an aesthetic, as a genre, as a topic is so much bigger” than the Inq28 scene, Taylor says, and there are many “people who owe a small part of their career and their legacy to John Blanche”. “We’ve also been able to talk to writers who write grimdark novels who have nothing to do with Warhammer, we’re speaking with composers…” He mentions “The Queen of Grimdark herself”, the fantasy novelist Anna Smith Spark, as one subject.
Lowman says “we’re still interviewing more people and getting more interviews and getting more perspectives”. An interview with Mike Franchina, the concept artist who collaborated with Pirinen to produce the recent Kickstarter blockbuster skirmish wargame Trench Crusade, is also in the works.
As such, the film’s final run time is still a little bit up in the air. “It could balloon just a little bit”, Lowman admits, as more interview opportunities arise even as they’re editing, “It might change the exact minute amount, but it is going to be a feature-length documentary”, somewhere in the region of 90 to 100 minutes.
There’s a little flex in the launch date, too: March 15 is the current target, but Robertson says that isn’t firm. He wants the production to have leeway to ensure it launches in the best possible state.
Needless to say, Wargamer is incredibly excited. The Inq28 scene is one of the crown jewels of the Warhammer fandom – grungy, aesthetic, incredibly cool, it’s as far away from polished Space Marine power fantasies as sci-fi gets. We’ll be keeping an eye on this.
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Source: Wargamer
