The Fifth Beatle's Vivek Tiwary on Comics/Film Differences And Finding a Kindred Spirit For Art

Next weekend, The Fifth Beatle creator Vivek Tiwary will be appearing at the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo in support of his Eisner-nominated graphic novel. Last year at C2E2, we conducted an interview with Tiwary, the recording for which was lost for nearly a year. It surfaced again just a week ago, and we're going to run it ahead of his comics-and-music panel at the convention. Today, though, is Record Store Day, an industry-wide outreach event not unlike Free Comic Book Day, and it seemed as good a time as any to preview our music-themed interview coming up on Friday. So...here's a look at Vivek Tiwary's thoughts on differentiating The Fifth Beatle as a graphic novel versus the in-pre-production film based on his screenplay. The Fifth Beatle is about Brian Epstein, the Beatles's manager (just recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame himself) who Paul McCartney has called "the fifth Beatle." That makes him only one of about a dozen people who have had that title saddled on them over the years, including original drummer Pete Best, keyboard player Billy Preston and others. In the time since we spoke with Tiwary, Yes Man director Peyton Reed has come aboard to direct the film version of the story. How his visual approach will impact the story remains to be seen, but Tiwary told us last year that they hope to give the director a good deal of leeway. You can get a copy of the graphic novel at various online retailers, including Barnes & Noble, where you can get either a physical or digital copy here. ComicBook.com: The first thing that struck me is that you are adapting your own film script – and one that's moving forward, so it's not like you're going to comics since you can't get funding. It's a very different take on things than comics people are used to! Vivek Tiwary: Yeah, the film is going great; we're definitely not having any trouble getting the film off the ground. It took two and a half years but I think I finally got the sign-off from the Beatles on the script, which clears the way to us getting Beatles music for the film, which is a huge thing for us. We're actually the first film about the band to have gotten access to Beatles music. The film is going great but I grew up reading graphic novels and loving movies and I sort of respect each medium as its own art form and if you were to read the graphic novel ands ee the movie you would think they were both based on the same source material but they are very different. There are extended sequences in the graphic novel that don't appear in the film script at all and there are moments in the film that don't appear in the graphic novel at all. To use an obvious example – we have music rights for the film and so the film will be full of music and in the book, obviously it's a static item and you don't have the opportunity to add music. Incidentally, we are working on a digital version that we hope will have the music involved in it but the graphic novel doesn't have musical and audio moments because it's a book. And there are certain things that you can do with images that you can't do on film – there are splash pages that look like movie posters that just wouldn't make sense to have as a moment on screen. I'm thrilled that I'm able to tell the Brian Epstein story across two very different pop culture mediums. The way I've always said is that it's a very important pop culture story and so we're glad to make a graphic novel and a film but the two are very separate entities. The film was not meant to spawn a graphic novel and the graphic novel was not designed to help us make a movie. They're completely separate; we are out to some amazing film directors right now and we're always telling people we're very proud of the graphic novel, it's very beautiful. If they can be inspired by that, then fabulous, but it is not a storyboard for the film. We'd be thrilled to have a director come and take a new visual approach to it. ComicBook.com: How did you land on these particular artists for the project? Tiwary: I was introduced to Andrew Robinson by a man named Mark Irwin. Mark has had a long history in comics doing a number of things -- he's done a lot of work for Dark Horse, he's worked with Upper Deck and he's a really nice guy. When I was first starting this project, Mark was very instrumental in helping get it off the ground. I was a longtime fan of comics and the graphic novel world so I knew the players by name but I've never worked in the States. So it was Mark that introduced me to Andrew. Mark thought that he would have the right style and that he and I would also be very collaborative and be able to get along well together -- and he was right. I met Andrew; Andrew loved the project and loved my thinking and loved the script and in a lot of ways it was a match made in Heaven. It really didn't take convincing.