ScreenAnarchy Interviews Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has a resume to die for. As if he hadn't already cemented his place in geek-culture history as the writer of the classic Sandman graphic novels he has also built a loyal following of readers for his fantasy novels and, more recently, children's fiction. And now there is a simply massive buzz building around MirrorMask, the feature film scripted by Gaiman and director by Sandman artist Dave McKean.

Gaiman is riding hard on the PR trail for MirrorMask and we were fortunate enough to land a twenty minute interview slot with him earlier today. Read on for a complete history of MirrorMask and a whole lot more.

T: How long was MirrorMask in development?

NG: In development? Let’s see. Around September 2001, just around the time of 9/11, I got a call from Lisa Henson asking if Dave McKean would be interested in directing something that would be a Henson fantasy film in the same mode that, all those years ago, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were.

T: So this was actually initiated by Henson?

NG: Yes. They wanted a project. They basically phoned me up and I put them in touch with Dave McKean. The offer they made was incredibly simple: if they gave us not too much money to make a really cool fantasy film we would have complete creative control. So, on the one hand we would have four million dollars, which is no money at all to make something like this, but on the other hand nobody was going to … the development process basically wasn’t going to happen. It wouldn’t be about developing, we’d just write a script and, if they liked the script, we’d make it. And that was lovely.

T: So they stayed really hands off with this? When you look at it it’s very obviously McKean’s work.

NG: Yeah, and that’s the point. That was really the only way we could do it for the budget. People look at it and say, “Which CGI house did you go to?” We didn’t go to a CGI house. Dave and Max McMullen – the guy Dave’s done all the CGI stuff on his short films with – went down to Bournemouth College of Art and hired their graduating class. It wasn’t just a guy doing his first movie it was their first job which, as far as Dave was concerned, was great because they didn’t have anything to unlearn. And he just did it. He made the movie.

The time schedule on this would be that we wrote the script in February 2002; did a second draft in April of 2002. Things chugged along in that way they do where everybody’s trying to figure out if this is really happening and what’s going on and stuff and by May of 2003 I was at my first reading with the cast and by June Dave was out there. He was shooting the live action stuff, that was about two weeks, and then he shot the blue screen stuff for four weeks and finished that in July 2003. And then handed in the movie about three weeks ago.

T: When people talk about the two of you – you and Dave – the talk tends to focus more on you than on what Dave brings to the table. I saw on your blog that you were a little upset that his name was left off of the first trailer for the film.

NG: I was a little upset in the same way that the Atlantic Ocean is a little, sort-of, watery. I think it was just some morons in Sony - I shouldn’t describe them as morons - some intellectually challenged people at Sony who were cutting this together and went, “It says here ‘From the mind of Neil Gaiman and the imagination of Dave McKean and the brilliance of the Jim Henson Company’ … well, we don’t need that middle bit.”

T: What is the work relationship with you guys like? It’s always listed as you as the writer and Dave doing the visuals but I imagine that the lines must blur a little after working together for so long.

NG: Oh, yeah. We’ve been working together now for nineteen years. Which is kind of weird when you think about it, or I think it is. We still enjoy it. It’s still fun to hang out for a few days and talk about things like, “Why don’t we do this?”

The previous interviewer asked how much I brought to the design and I said, “Absolutely nothing.” The joy of working with Dave is that he’s quite possibly the best designer in the world. Certainly, at this point in his career, he’s one of the most influential. Quite frequently these days I’ll see posters and images and have to look at them twice to realize that it wasn’t Dave but was someone else who was given an image of Dave’s and told, “Do that.” Which is really kind of weird. But when it comes to imagery Dave does his thing.

On the story of MirrorMask we worked together very, very closely. Dave was there as I wrote the script, which was written at the Henson family house. The reason why we did that is we were making this on an incredibly tight budget and Dave needed to be there at every step of the way to let me know what we could and couldn’t do for the budget. For example, I would write a scene and I would say, “Let’s have a scene in the classroom.” And the writer in me would think that’s absolutely great. It’s lovely to have this girl, to see her. She’s been on tour with the circus and now she’s suddenly thrown into a real classroom and feels weird, it’s uncomfortable for her, blah blah blah. And Dave would say, “We can’t do that. We can’t afford it.” “Well, why not?” “Well, we’ll need a classroom. We’ll need ten to fifteen kids, and they’ll need chaperones, and a teacher – who will probably be Equity and will have to be paid a high rate – and we’ll need an exterior as well. So, we’re looking at a solid day’s shooting to get that.” And then he’d see the disappointment on my face and he’d say, “But, look. If you need a city to fold up like a piece of paper and then re-form into a tulip, we can do that for nothing.” That was very much the joy of having Dave there and creating this with him, learning what we could do.

T: You mentioned earlier how the freedom Henson gave you was a big plus. Is that something that is an issue for you? I mean, you have a lot of stuff in development right now and I know you’re friends with Alan Moore, who has been bitterly disappointed with some of the adaptations of his work.

NG: Well, I don’t think I’d say Alan has been disappointed because Alan, as far as I know, Alan hasn’t seen any of the films. Alan’s attitude, from the beginning, has been “I wash my hands.” I don’t believe Alan has actually seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but he was certainly very disappointed to hear what they had done to develop the League into a script. But at the end of the day Alan hasn’t seen it.

My attitude is that there are only two ways that you can go on this stuff, and I actually do both. I think they’re both valid. One is that you get as involved as you can to make sure someone makes the best thing that they can and the other is to try and find people that you trust and then let them get on with it. I like and respect both methods.

With something like MirrorMask, we made it the best we could and it’s our vision. Would it have been better if we had more money, more time, and more resources? Yeah, probably. Is it frustrating for Dave and for me when you know there are sequences that should have been longer but that we didn’t have the budget to go longer at that point? Yes, of course. But it’s still something where I come out of every screening tremendously proud of what Dave accomplished. Absolutely. Really brilliant. So, from that angle, I think it’s a perfectly valid way to do it.

With Beowulf, which Roger Avery and I are doing with Robert Zemeckis directing using the same technique as Polar Express, part of the deal on that was that we wrote a script that we loved, and they bought, and nobody apart from me, Roger and Bob is allowed to rewrite it, contractually. So they can’t fire us, hire someone else, and tack our names on at the end. The deal is this is our thing. We care and we get a vote.

T: In your novels you have these two themes that come up over and over again: you have the “normal” person who proves to be extraordinary and some alternate world that interconnects with our own, and that looks to be the case with MirrorMask as well.

NG: Yes.

T: Are those themes that you come back to consciously?

NG: No, no. You always start – you start everything – saying, “Let’s do something I’ve never done before. Let’s make something completely different.” But themes are like cockroaches. You think you’re doing something completely new until you look back on what you’ve done. You only see it in hindsight, really, which is in some ways deeply frustrating.

I’m finishing my current novel which I was very proud of as being completely different from everything else. Now I’m entering my second draft and I can see that it fits straight into everything else I’ve done as neatly and as solidly as one block of Lego fits onto another. But I didn’t do it with a plan to address the same themes as I’ve addressed before. You go, “Let’s do something completely different”, and then, when you look back, you go, “Fuck! I only have on thing that I say, don’t I?”

I remember reading somewhere as a kid that some people are foxes and some people are hedgehogs. Foxes know lots and lots of little things and hedgehogs know one big thing. I always thought that I was a fox, that I knew lots and lots of little things. But the trouble is when you start looking at this big, giant work all piled up in one place you see it’s all one big thing.

T: How do you answer people that challenge the idea that darkness is children’s fiction or film is okay? Those people that are boycotting the Harry Potter books because they’re too dark?

NG: I don’t know how to discuss people that would boycott the Harry Potter books because they are too dark and filled with evil and magic because those people are morons.

I mean, you know, it’s like you saying to me, “Neil, there are people who are too scared to get on the bus and they walk everywhere because they are too scared to get on the bus because they know terrible things happen to people who get on the bus.” How would you address those people? Well, they’re mad. How do I address people who feel that the Harry Potter films are too dark and filled with evil and magic and need to be burned? Well, they’re mad, they’re stupid and they’re wrong. You can’t really go much further than that. There’s really no dialectic of discussion there.

I get really pissed off with, right now, the phrase “family film”. I keep trying to explain to people that MirrorMask is a family film. And it’s a family film in the sense that it’s something you should be able to take your kid to and that you should be able to go to and your nineteen year old should be able to go to and your mum and dad should be able to go to it and all get something else out of it. It’s a family film in the sense that it was made for just about everyone. I wouldn’t take a four year old to it because they wouldn’t get very much out of it, but it’s a family film in that sense. But when I started describing it as a family film to people I discovered that the word “family” when put with “film” has exactly the same relationship to what I’m talking about as “adult film” does when trying to describe a film made for adults. The films that come out these days that are called “family films” are as much family films as “adult films” are for adults. “Family” seems to mean “free of content”, free of any content that will make you think or disturb you or give you things that you’d remember.

When I was six I went to see the original Wizard of Oz in the cinema in England because they brought it out on release every ten years, or whatever. And what I really, really remember is the witch. I still remember being six, looking at that screen. The moments that I remember are the arrival in Oz – you’ve just gone through the terror of the cyclone and crashed in Oz, killing somebody, and you’re now in this completely different, colorful land – and I remember the witch coming out and actually hiding behind the seats of the theater, looking at her. The same people who would complain that Harry Potter is too dark or that MirrorMask is too dark are the same people who would go in there and very carefully take out the witch and leave you with nothing at all.

T: I’m curious to see how the religious right in the States reacts when the Narnia films come out because those could be pretty harsh and they’re written by an author idolized in those circles.

NG: No, they don’t. They loathe him. C.S. Lewis … put it this way. The same people who complain about the witchcraft in Harry Potter also hate the Narnia books as having witches in, having magic in. I honestly don’t know how those films will be taken, but I do know that it’s ridiculous. I honestly don’t feel that it’s discussable any more than anyone can discuss people that feel god told them not to take the bus anywhere. There’s no such injunction in the Bible. I don’t remember anywhere in the Bible that says you’re not allowed to read comic books with magic in them or anything like that. I talk to people and they say, “It’s a slippery slope.” And I say, “No. You’re mad.”

T: For MirrorMask, how was the reception at Sundance? I know you just wrapped up there.

NG: It was good. It was very strange. The thing that was really strange was that by the third screening – and it’s pretty hard to get into these screenings – people who had already seen it once would come back again. And in order to come back again and have any guarantee of being there when you came back these people were getting into lines five hours early in order to see MirrorMask more than once. So that was really peculiar. And they would tell us that they got more out of it. Dave and I wrote it knowing that we were in a DVD generation and that it would be seen more than once but we didn’t expect that at Sundance.

T: I saw on your blog today that you’re actually already working on the DVD features.

NG: Yes. We’ve done the commentary, which was enormously fun sitting with Dave and twittering on. And, what else have we done … when we filmed it we filmed lots of interviews and behind the scenes stuff so theoretically all they have to do is cut it all together and we’ll have a cool DVD.

T: Has Sony settled on a firm release date for the film yet, or given any idea of the scope?

NG: I think the plan is to release it in the spring but don’t know how widely. They’re planning on coming out with a DVD in late summer. Beyond that, you know everything that I know.

T: They told me twenty minutes, so before we run out of time I’ve got to ask about some of the other things that are going. Does Coraline have a voice cast yet?

NG: Um … well … what is interesting is that there’s all this stuff that I know from Henry Selick and have been told that I’m not allowed to tell anybody at all, and then I went online yesterday and found an interview with Henry that someone emailed me and Henry briefed the world on all these things that he told me I wasn’t to say. I’m going, “Henry, I thought I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody that They Might Be Giants are doing the music. Why are you telling people this?” So, I don’t think that I can technically answer that, but if you go on Google … [ed. note: I believe this is the interview he's talking about.]

T: Are you still planning on directing Death: The High Cost of Living yourself?

NG: Yes.

T: Any casting done for that or any idea when production will start?

NG: I have absolutely cast it and, no, I cannot tell you anything about it. So, sorry. I can’t say because New Line is still negotiating with managers and agents and things like that. But it’s all looking good.

T: And just because I’m a big Terry Gilliam freak, is there any chance that we’re going to see Good Omens at some point?

NG: I think the odds are, unfortunately, really small. Although I did notice an interview with Terry recently where he seemed to be saying that he was looking at getting back together with Johnny Depp and see if they could have one final try at getting Good Omens working again. You probably know more than I do. Terry’s been off shooting first Brother’s Grimm – which sounds like an incredibly grim experience – and then Tideland, which sounds marvelous.

T: All the images from Tideland look fantastic.

NG: Terry’s a genius, especially when left to himself. He wrote these amazing scripts for Good Omens along with Tony Grisoni and he really wanted to do it and unfortunately the point where we went looking for money and a distributor for the US was immediately after 9/11 and here we are with a funny film about the end of the world and how we’re all going to die. It didn’t go down the way that we expected.