The Creative Conversation with Nicole Lee

Download The Creative Conversation on iTunes Download the The Creative Conversation #3 - Tony Ayres

Click on the image to download audio for the podcast with John ColleeN: Hello, and welcome to the Creative Conversation with Nicole Lee. My name is Nicole Lee and my very special guest today is novelist, screenwriter and former doctor, John Collee. John is the writer of Hollywood films such as Happy Feet, Master and Commander, Creation and the upcoming Walking with Dinosaurs 3D. His novels include Kingsley’s Touch, A Paper Mask and The Rig. John, thank you for chatting with me today. J: Pleasure. N: I’d like to just starting asking where you’re from. J: Well, I come from Edinburgh. N: Yes. J: Went to school there. I went to university there and yes, have sort of been moving steadily southwards ever since. We ended up - I met my wife in Moscow of all places and we ended up, yeah, living here in Sydney for the last fifteen years. N: Right. J: Yeah. N: And so, how did you develop an interest in writing? J: You I think, those of us who write probably always have that from an early age. I, when I was a medical student used to put on little shows with my friends, we’d put on the end of year revues and finally ended up doing shows at the Edinburgh festival. And reading was something obviously I’d always done a lot as a kid and I always had a secret yen to be a novelist so, yeah, that’s the first kind of writing I did. N: Okay. So and then, so then how did that lead you to medicine? J: Oh, you know, well, that’s a complicated question, I mean, I know you studied medicine as well, and you know, I think a lot of us don’t know exactly what we want to do when we’re young, have sort of a vague idea of it and then life sort of takes strange right angled turns. In my case I went into medicine, got very involved in third world medicine, I really enjoyed travelling and working in the third world and did several jobs all over the place. The downside of that as a medical pracitioner is that you spend a lot of time working in remote places and gradually, gradually lost connection with the mainstream medical kind of career path. And so while my writing was sort of becoming more and more lucrative, my medical career was becoming more and more marginal, and finally, after we got married, Debs and I met in Moscow as I said and my final job as a doctor was in the Solomon Islands where our first daughter, Lauren, was born and after she was born we then, after a year in the Solomons we thought, well, we’d better come back somewhere safer, where there’s not malaria, sharks and crocodiles - N: Strange diseases! J: - and Debs could work, so we came back to work in London, and then I went to work in a first world hospital and I was so kind of rusty, really, compared to the young, newly qualified doctors, I thought, well, I’m more of a bush doctor, I should sort of probably hang up my stethoscope now. N: Right.  J: As I say, writing then was actually making more money than medicine anyway, so economically it was an easy enough decision. N: Well, let’s go back a little bit, back to your medical school days. So you did study medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then practiced in Bath and Bristol and Cambridge. And how was that experience for you back then as a medical student? J: Oh, it was great! I mean, medicine’s a very hierarchical job, you know, one of the reasons that I went off and started working in these slightly out of the way places was that you know, it is a bit of a corporate sort of a life, and that has good and bad dimensions to it. You learn a huge amount, you’re constantly surrounded by fabulously experienced people, but it was a, you know, there was a sort of a sausage machine element necessarily to any national health service. You become a component in this large, huge organisation with kind of career paths and you know, five year plans and the whole thing. So that was the down side, but those years were really happy and creative, you know.