The Official Matthew Reilly Homepage

At last! It's here! Well, at least in the UK. Yes, folks, Scarecrow has been unleashed! God, I feel like I've been sitting on dynamite these past few months.

And so, for those of you who aren't in the UK, accompanying these Thoughts is the first chapter of the new book. Just a bit of a tease for you! Hope you like it! Race over to the Exclusives Section after you've finished reading this column!

In a year of sequels, I was really hanging to see this movie. I wanted to see something different and original, and I certainly got that! It was a satisfying 2.5 hours long. Big budget. Big effects. Swashbuckling. And smart, too!

Like everyone else, I particularly loved Johnny Depp in it. Thought it was utterly refreshing to see an actor being totally flamboyant. Indeed, I've wondered ever since seeing this movie just how Johnny Depp managed to play the role that way (he plays his pirate like a modern rock star; dashing, debonair, a bit drunk, slightly wobbly at times, but clever, too). Was the character written that way? Or did Depp convince the director, Gore Verbinski, that this was the right way to play it? Or did he just convince Jerry Bruckheimer, the uber-producer, that this was the way to go and imposed his will on the director?

In the end, I don't know. Either way, I'm pleased he got his way, because the movie was all the richer for his performance. Oh, and the special effects by ILM were just awesome, literally flawless -- as we've come to expect from ILM.

I think it's interesting to see that this was a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, too. With his commercial instincts and the sheer scale of his projects, I think Bruckheimer is fast becoming the most influential man in Hollywood (from Bad Boys to Pirates to Black Hawk Down to CSI and a whole lot more). You can't go to a cinema or switch on your TV without seeing "A Jerry Bruckheimer Production" somewhere. His instincts are amazing, his projects are perfectly tailored to the modern sophisticated viewer, and he just makes things that you (well, that I) want to see. If he ever approached me to do something, I'd jump. Hell, I'd write his laundry list for him.

Some exciting news has happened since we last met: I am now officially engaged! Went on a short holiday with my long-time girlfriend, Natalie Freer, and during a very romantic dinner, I dropped to one knee and with ring in hand, popped the question. And she said yes!

Those of you who have read my books will have seen Natalie's name mentioned many times in the Acknowledgments pages (Ice Station was actually dedicated to her, as is Scarecrow). She has always been the first person to read my work, in 60-page chunks. In fact, I still remember when she read the first chapter of Contest way back in 1993 on a crowded bus on the way to university, and said to me with great surprise, "This is really good" (it was the scene where the Karanadon kills the security guard!). She is the most lovely and supportive person I know.

The British advertising standards people banned the first two TV ads that Macmillan's ad agency had devised for Scarecrow. One ad featured a Bin-Laden-type individual reading Scarecrow in a cave and sweating in fear (I actually saw the storyboards for this ad and thought that it was edgy without being offensive). I never saw the sketches for the second ad, but am told it featured an American President sitting in the Oval Office wearing cowboy boots and reading Scarecrow!

Oh, well. What can you do. The final ad that was approved is still pretty damn good.

More news. The good people at The Bulletin magazine here in Australia have invited me to write a short story for their annual "Fiction Issue" in December. I've written shorts for The Bulletin for the last two years now and have to say that they are just wonderful people to work with.

As a writer, I love doing shorts. They give you a chance to experiment with techniques (and subject matter) that you don't necessarily want to try out in a new novel. My short story Altitude Rush, for instance, gave me the chance to experiment with some action-writing techniques that I subsequently used in Scarecrow. Hell, last year I wrote a romance for The Bulletin called The Rock Princess and the Thriller Writer, a story that was loosely based on my author tour of the US in early 2002 -- with liberal smatterings of fiction too (namely all the bits with the rock princess)!

Interestingly, both of my previous short stories for The Bulletin featured a young Australian author as the lead character! (In the first one, A Bad Day at Fort Bragg, a young Aussie author is invited to Fort Bragg by some US soldiers, only to find that they are pissed off at being portrayed as the villains in his latest book, so they try to kill him in a training area!).

I'm actually writing this a week or so in advance of October 4, since I'll be in Europe by then. I'm actually about to go and get on the plane for Hong Kong. Which means I'd better go and pack!

Hope you enjoy the opening of Scarecrow! And if I'm coming to your town in the coming weeks, please come by and say hello. Check out the Appearance Dates page to see some of my tour schedule, all the appearance dates that I know of are there, but I'll make sure to put up any more as my schedule becomes more concrete!