By Christina Radish
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Neil Gaiman at the 2007 San Diego Comic Convention. |
Best-selling author Neil Gaiman has made a name for himself, both as one of the top writers in modern comics, and as a writer of books for readers of all ages. Listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living post-modern writers, the British born Gaiman is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics and drama. He has two films being released by Paramount Pictures this year -- this weekend’s Stardust, and Beowulf, released on November 16th.
In the 3-D animated Beowulf, starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and Robin Wright-Penn, Gaiman and Roger Avary have adapted the classic novel about a mighty warrior (Ray Winstone) who battles the demon Grendel (Crispin Glover) and incurs the hellish wrath of the beast’s ruthlessly seductive mother (Angelina Jolie).
Stardust tells the story of a young man named Tristan (Charlie Cox), who tries to win the heart of Victoria (Sienna Miller), the beautiful but cold object of his desire, by going on a quest to retrieve a fallen star. His journey takes him to a mysterious and forbidden land beyond the walls of his village. Tristan finds the star, which has transformed into a striking girl named Yvaine (Claire Danes), but soon learns that he is not alone in his search. A king’s (Peter O’Toole) four living sons and the ghosts of their three dead brothers need the star as they vie for the throne, and the evil witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) needs the star to make herself young again. As Tristan battles to survive these threats, encountering a pirate named Captain Shakespeare (Robert DeNiro) and a shady trader named Ferdy the Fence (Ricky Gervais) along the way, his quest changes and he set out to win the heart of the star for himself, as he discovers the meaning of true love.
The 46-year-old Gaiman talks to MediaBlvd Magazine about both of those films, along with the animated feature Coraline, due out in 2008.
MediaBlvd Magazine> Do you have a cameo in Stardust?
Neil Gaiman> No. It’s terrible. I’ve got all of these movies coming out and I don’t have a cameo in any of them. I mis-timed my cameo for Stardust. The only scene that I was there for the filming of was actually the one in the Inn. If I’d been sitting in the corner, reading a paper, or something, people would have noticed.
MediaBlvd>Your co-writer, Roger Avary, said he was scanned in for Beowulf. You weren’t interested in doing that?
Neil> It was very important to Roger that he get scanned and put in there. Roger looks like he could be a Viking. He’s huge and hairy. For me, they’d be going, “Why is that man wearing a black leather jacket?” And, if I wasn’t wearing a black leather jacket, nobody would even know it was me. They surely didn’t have black t-shirts in Viking times. English professors would write and complain.
MediaBlvd> You have a big fandom, like graphic novelists Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Do you see yourself like that?
Neil> I come out to something like Comic-Con and I get reminded of things like that because I can’t really escape it. I get people coming up at panels, saying “Oh, my God, you are a God man!,” and I say, “Thank you!” Mostly, I think of myself as somebody who tries to figure out what’s happening on the next page. I don’t get up in the morning and go, “I am great!” I get up in the morning and think, “So what the hell is actually going to happen in chapter 6, anyway? I’ve completely lost the plot here, and I need to get back onto it.”
MediaBlvd> Do you feel like you still have more stories to tell?
Neil> What’s nice is that I probably have too many stories to tell. People keep getting grumpy with me because I don’t like sequels. Mostly, I don’t like sequels because, if given the choice between a sequel and something that I’ve never done, I’ll do something that I’ve never done. And then, the people who want Neverwhere 2, or another Stardust story, or more American Gods, or more Sandman, or more Coraline, are standing there saying, “Well, what about us?,” and I’m going, “Well, your thing wouldn’t exist, if I hadn’t moved on to do something else.”
MediaBlvd> You don’t get attached to the characters you create, or the stories you create, and want to revisit them?
Neil> Oh, yeah. And, sometimes, it’s enormously fun. When I went back and doing The Endless Nights for Sandman, five, six, seven years after I’d done my last Sandman story, I was really worried that it would be one of those awkward things, like when you run into old school friends and you don’t have anything to talk about. But, it wasn’t. It was like running into a bunch of friends that you’d been really close with when you were 15 and, suddenly, you discover you have everything in common and it’s just lovely to see each other.
MediaBlvd> Would you work with Marvel again?Neil> The last thing I did for Marvel was The Eternals, which I enjoyed, enormously. I think that’s the first time, probably since The Books of Magic, that any comic company had ever come to me with a request. The Books of Magic started with DC saying, “Can you do us a four-book Prestige series about our magic characters?” And, for this one, Marvel came to me and said, “We’ve got The Eternals. Jack Kirby created them, but people have [screwed] them up so badly now that they’re useless. Can you somehow clean them up and make them interesting and put them back into play, in the Marvel universe?”
MediaBlvd> Was it weird to deal with characters that already existed?
Neil> You cope. The joy and the tragedy of shared universes is that you’re dealing with shared universes. I remember, with Sandman, in Sandman 22 he was meant to go to hell, except that there was still stuff happening in hell in the rest of the DC universe and they said, “No, you’re going to have to put it off a month,” and I got really grumpy. Now, I think the timing is terrific. It probably wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well, otherwise. I got to plant a bunch of stuff that became very useful later.
MediaBlvd> With people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller getting mad at Hollywood, how do you define your relationship with Hollywood?
Neil> Alan and Frank have very different relationships with Hollywood than I do. Alan’s relationship was very simple. He started out saying, “It has nothing to do with me. You can give me the money and go and make a film, but I’ve made the comic, and that’s great.” And then, he got hurt. Films that were not faithful, and films that were wrong, got made. At the point that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen got made, it was a bad thing. Frank went through the traditional Hollywood experience with Robocop 2 and Robocop 3. He wasn’t happy with the films, and he wasn’t happy with what had happened, so he went off and did not come back until Robert Rodriguez sold him on doing Sin City that way. That was Frank’s return, not that he hadn’t written some scripts and stuff, in the meantime. For me, watching what happened to Alan taught me that I was not going to walk off and leave my babies. I sold Stardust to Miramax, at one point, and it nearly went wrong and bad. When I got the rights back, I thought, “I’m not doing that again.” So, for many years after that, my agent would call me up and say, “Such and such young, beautiful star wants Stardust as a starring vehicle for herself,” and I would say, “No.” Or, they would call me and say, “Such and such director wants it,” and I’d go and look at their stuff, and I would say, “No.”
MediaBlvd> What changed your mind?
Neil> Matthew Vaughn. I trusted him and we’d worked together on a film where he’d produced me, and he’d actually stuck to his word, which is really weird. Recently, I was approached by a producer, so I asked a scriptwriter friend of mine, who had actually worked with this producer, “Is he trustworthy?” And, he wrote back and said, “Asking if a Hollywood producer is trustworthy is kind of like asking if this lion is vegetarian.” But, I did trust Matthew. Matthew, more or less, became a director by accident, with Layer Cake. He prepared the script for Guy Ritchie, but Guy wasn’t interested. Matthew looked for a director and then said, “Fuck it,” and did it himself, and did it beautifully. Then, when Matthew walked off X-Men 3 because he just was not happy with the script or the budget or what he was being asked to do, he basically called me up, about a week later, and said, “I want to do Stardust, and I want to work with you on it. I want you to produce it with me. If you want to write it, you can write it, but I want to do it with you.” And, I said, “Sure.” Actually, I didn’t want to write it. I went and found him Jane Goldman, as a writer, because I thought they would work really well together. And, I got to oversee it, I got to help, I got to advise, I got to argue and I got to check out the casting process. I got to feel it was my thing.
MediaBlvd> Do you prefer working with somebody who’s adapting your work, or adapting it yourself?
Neil> It depends, honestly. Mostly, I think I prefer not adapting my work. I like adapting other people’s work, or doing something new in film, because otherwise you end up running through the thought patterns that created the thing, in the first place. For example, it was much easier for me, for Coraline, to let Henry Selick do it, and then advise and say, “I wouldn’t do that.” And, Henry has been incredibly receptive.
